Self-Made Man (14 page)

 

If the most disgruntled women I met and dated as Ned had ever been attuned to men's signals, by the time I met them, they were long past receiving outside information of any kind. Moreover, if the way they discussed their pasts and the way they approached me was anything to go by, they seemed incapable of seeing any new man as an individual. Worse still, they seemed to transform each new man, benign or otherwise, into the malignancy they were expecting him to be. They tended to see a wolf in every man they met, and so they made every man they met into a wolf—even when that man was a woman.

Not surprising really. The women who were hostile to me made me mad, and that made me want to be hostile to them. I can't imagine men in the same position not reacting the same way. And so the self-perpetuating cycle of unkindness and discontent would go on and on, feeding on itself. These women were mostly hostile in the first place because they felt that men's bad behavior had made them so, and the men they met behaved badly because hostility breeds contempt.

It wasn't a good recipe for finding a lasting relationship, but I could remember feeling exactly the way it seemed these women did when I was a young woman in and just out of college. I found plenty of ammunition for hating men in Women's Studies 101, much of it, like the subjugation and abuse of women historically (and even currently), undeniable. What's more, I found plenty of reinforcement for my fledgling misandry in the crass undergraduates I encountered everywhere on campus. I'd read the textbooks of radical feminism, and following their lead, I thought all males were tainted by the patriarchy. For years thereafter, every guy I met was on probation.

But there's nothing like a few years in the trenches of lesbian romance to give a girl a little perspective on the supposed inborn evils of the opposite sex. As time went on I learned that girls don't behave any better than boys under relational duress, and that centuries of subjugation haven't made women morally superior.

 

Sasha and I struck up an e-mail relationship after our first lousy date. Indeed, e-mail is now central to dating. I made contact with almost all the women I dated via the Internet, and we usually exchanged a number of e-mails before we met. Often the process of measuring me against previous hurts began then, as did the expectation that I prove myself to be better than the rest.

Correspondence was mandatory in most cases, even with the women I met at speed-dating events and followed up with later by e-mail. (Speed dating, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice, is a process by which singles can meet and have minidates with ten or more members of the opposite sex in the space of an hour. One group, usually the women, sits at tables. The men then rotate from one table to the next, spending a timed five minutes with each woman. Everyone is given a sheet of paper on which they mark a yes or a no next to the name of each person they meet, indicating whether or not they have any interest in seeing that person again. The organizers then match the yeses and provide e-mail addresses to the interested parties.)

These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren't going to waste a meal or even a cup of coffee on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. The seductive effect of a well-written letter or, better yet, a well-chosen poem, on a strange woman's mind was often strong and sometimes hilariously so, even to the women involved, who were quite aware and ready to laugh about the effect distracting missives could have on them. One date told me, long after she'd dated Ned and learned his secret, that a coworker, reading one of Ned's e-mails over her shoulder, had said: “Shit. He's sending you poems? You'd better fuck this man.”

Ned made an impression not just because he gave these women at least a pale version of the reading material they seemed to crave, but because he did it so willingly. It was rare, most of them told me, for a man to write at such length, much less to write with consideration and investment.

I found this to be true in my own experience as a woman. For a little contrast, I went on a few dates with men as a woman during the course of my time as Ned. The men I met on the Internet, and then subsequently in person, didn't require this epistolary preamble, nor did they offer it. They were eager to meet as soon as possible, usually, I found, because they wanted to see what I looked like. Their feelings or fantasies would be based on that far more than, or perhaps to the exclusion of, anything I might write to them. On dates with men I felt physically appraised in a way that I never did by women, and while this made me more sympathetic to the suspicion that women were bringing to their dates with Ned, it had the opposite effect, too. Somehow men's seeming imposition of a superficial standard of beauty felt less intrusive, less harsh, than the character appraisals of women. Sure, women noticed how Ned looked, or perhaps noted is more accurate, but it was the conversation they were after, the interaction, the proof of intangible worth beyond apishness. Writing well was the prerequisite, and that was where I saw the first pattern of judgment taking shape.

Sometimes I was surprised at how early in the correspondence this process began. By way of describing my personality to one woman, I wrote that I liked to try to dodge the mundane by shaking up the world around me, making purposeful but harmless faux pas just to see what would happen, things like breaking into a silly dance in the middle of the supermarket or saying the unexpected, vaguely socially unacceptable thing at a dinner party just to poke a hole in the chatter. To this she responded that her last boyfriend had enjoyed doing things like that and one or two times it had ended up really hurting her. She said my propensities in this regard had given her serious pause. That was the end of that correspondence.

Another woman told me in her first e-mail that she needed a confident man, but she felt there had to be a fine line drawn between being secure in himself and being arrogant. She said she drew that line with every man she met. This was a double bind I encountered often as Ned, and something that made me wonder about how reasonable women's supposed unmet emotional needs actually were.

They wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he's just coming of age, and he's suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football. And some women did find Ned too small physically to be attractive. They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, “someone who can drive the bus.” Ned was too willowy for that, and came up wanting.

I felt this especially keenly on one of my earliest dates, waiting for a woman at a fancy restaurant I'd chosen. I was sitting alone in one of those cavernous red leather booths that you see at old-world steak houses, and I was holding the menu, which also happened to be red and enormous, and I felt absolutely ridiculous, like the painful geek in a teen movie who's trying to score with an older woman. I felt tiny and insignificant when held up against what I imagined to be this sophisticated woman's (she was a diplomat) expectations for a Cary Grant type who would know exactly what to do and say, and whose coat would be big enough to cover her. I suddenly understood from the inside why R. Crumb draws his women so big, and his diminutive self begging at their heels or riding them around the room. I was so embarrassed I almost got up and left rather than face the look of amused disappointment on that woman's face, a look that mercifully never materialized. We had a very pleasant, uneventful meal. Still, I'd never felt so inadequate on a date as I did sometimes as miniature Ned.

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it, but feeling the pressure to be that other world-bestriding colossus at the same time made me feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men, not only because living up to Caesar is an immensely heavy burden to bear, but because trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What's more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check.

Expectation, expectation, expectation. That was the leitmotif of Ned's dating life, taking on the desirable manly persona or shrugging off its dreaded antithesis. Finding the right balance was maddening, and operating under the constant weight of so much political guilt was simply exhausting. Though, in the parlance of liberal politics, I had operated in my real life under the burden of being a doubly oppressed minority—a woman and a lesbian—and I had encountered the deprivations of that status, as a man, I operated under what I felt in these times to be the equally heavy burden of being a double majority, a white man.

One woman, whom I never did meet, but with whom I had an intense weeklong correspondence as Ned, threw Ned into the male rogue basket as soon as I tried to warn her away from getting too emotionally involved. She assumed that my problem was fear of intimacy, but in my case it was something else altogether. After only a week's worth of letters I could see that this woman was making an emotional investment in Ned, and I began to feel uncomfortable with the deception. I, too, perhaps in an all-too-girly fashion, had become emotionally involved. I had grown to like this person and wanted to know her. Still, at first, I wasn't sure that I wanted to reveal my deception to her, so I was hopelessly vague, mostly indicating that she shouldn't become emotionally invested in something romantic developing between us. In response, she promptly accused me of being a married man who was lying just to get sex on the side, something she'd encountered before. She could tell, she said, by the characteristically devious quality of my prose, that I was trying to pull the other-woman scenario over on her. At that she broke off our correspondence.

Not that I blamed her for wanting to ditch—it was a healthy response—but I was struck once again by the immediate impulse to lump me in with male cheaters, a breed whose scurvy ways are, apparently, immediately recognizable on paper even in a lesbian.

 

Sasha and I had our series of query-filled, confessional e-mail exchanges as well. I wasn't playing a role on the page, or even in person, except in how I dressed and in my efforts to keep my voice in the lower portions of my register. I was just me. That was the point, after all, to be a real person, myself in all possible ways, culturally a woman, but in disguise as a man. I didn't try to write or say the things I thought a man would write or say. I responded to her genuinely in every way, except about my sex.

Our time together lasted the longest, three weeks or so in all. We had only three dates during that time, but we wrote several times a day, sharing our thoughts about each other and our ideas about whatever came up. Naturally, during the course of all this, we talked about her past relationships with men, which, as she indicated at some length, had been less than satisfactory. I suggested that perhaps if men were so unsatisfying to her emotionally, she should consider dating a woman. Then, I ventured, she might find out that the fault was not in the sex. To this she sent an unnecessarily sharp reply, something on the order of having about as much interest in lesbianism as in shooting heroin.

She had, by this time (about two dates and a week and a half into our correspondence) told me that she found Ned attractive, though she also made it clear that she was emotionally engaged elsewhere and was likely to remain so for a long time. This was the reason I had allowed our exchanges to go as far as they had. On the first date she had made it clear that she was still in love with the married man, and that whatever she and I could share would be circumscribed by that entanglement. She was looking for company, maybe a little male attention on the side to shore her up through a bad time, but she wasn't really single to speak of.

Still, something had grown up between us in a short time, and I decided that it shouldn't go any further. I would tell her the truth on the third date, which we were scheduled to have at the end of that week. I was curious to see what would happen to her supposed attraction for Ned when she learned that he was a woman. Would it evaporate? And if so, would that negate in her mind, or even in reality, the fact that it had ever been there in the first place? Is an attraction real if it is attached to something illusory or something that doesn't exist? Many would and have argued that that is all love ever is, an attachment to something illusory. Lacan wrote that love is giving something you don't possess to someone who doesn't exist. Perhaps Ned was an object lesson in that principle, or at least in lust, if not love.

But what if her attraction continued? And if it did, how would she deal with the knowledge that this thing she had so eschewed, lesbianism, was happening to her? Would she lash out in disgust, or would she realize that perhaps those feelings that most of us are raised to reject and despise are not as alien and perverted as she had always deemed them to be, and that, in fact, they could come as naturally as other appetites when unfettered by convention.