Norah Vincent is dead.
Who is Norah Vincent? A better question is "Who wasn't Noah Vincent?"
Think John Howard Griffin. Think Ralph Ellison.
Please leave your arguments about gender constructs at the door. How you choose to identify yourself is not my business. I do not want it to be my business. Please do not make it my business.
Argue the idea behind this blog if you like. Cut loose! I like it.
TO READ OR NOT READ
To read or not to read. That is the question. Whether tis more idiotic to remain unread and look down upon those who cannot read, while being exactly same, or read and by reading realize one's own shortcomings and by realizing, end them. Yeah. Shakespeare is gonna have Words for me when I get to the next realm of existence.
Ennyhoo.
I have not read Mr. Griffin's work. I probably should. I did read Mr. Ellison's work at the prompting of a HS English teacher. She said I would really like the book.
I read it. The only reason I read it is because she suggested it. Were it a class assignment or even an individual assignment from her to me, the book would remain forever unread. It's how I roll.
I told her I did not like it. And yet, it has stuck with me. I vividly remember passages. With 40+ years of experience now behind me I can still say I did not like the book. Today, I appreciate the book. Like, well ... maybe. Need? Without question. That book was a shot of verbal nutrients to an embryonic philosophy that continues to grow today.
Mebbe I do like it after all.
LEARN MORE
Until this day - 10 March 2025 Gregorian - I had no idea the person Norah Vincent existed. Now I do. Now, I must learn more. Why?
Read this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/18/gender.bookextracts
Norah's literary work is the experience men have.
Someone is going to insist this is a hasty generalization, perhaps a bandwagon fallacy or some other kind of flawed logic. G'head.
Norah said her 18-month experience living as a man so transformed her, that her only release was the final option. Sad, sad, sad. It is also reflected the reality of being a male Homo sapiens. Men account for 80% of suicides. Men also commit somewhere around 90% of violent crimes.
Causation is not correlation? Then you explain it. We'll get to a statement on reality in a moment.
What Norah reports in her book is what heterosexual male Homo sapiens in the United States and likely the modern world experiences. Is that experience universal? It is for every heterosexual male Homo sapiens I've come across. It is in the anthropological studies and books I've read.
(Unless you are an anthropologist or sociologist, I'm willing to bet I've read more of the studies than you have.)
If you are that person who says this is so much fertilizer, I'm willing to bet you are not a heterosexual male Homo sapiens.
Remember, reality is under no obligation to conform itself to your expectations. Nor does it have to be warped to my preconceived notions. Arg. Complicated. Lemme simplify.
Mebbe this kinda thing does not happen in places like Afghanistan where women are considered propetty. I don't care enough to research it.
If the truth hurts, yer living wrong.
Can't make it any clearer than that.
IT'S TOUGH
Norah said that time she lived as a man, it was tough. Ellison wrote the same thing. Griffin wrote the same thing. Quibble semantics if you wish, the base premise is the same; live as someone else to experience what they have to go through. It is fucking HARD.
The difference? Norah died by assisted suicide in Switzerland in 2022.
It is tough being a man. Women have a hard go of it too, but in today's modern societies - Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Iran and other places ain't modern as defined for this blog - they can have it easier than men. Not always.
You ain't gotta believe me. Norah did not want to believe it. Rather than stand on a belief without empirical evidence, she lived it. Well, she lived it for as long as she could and then she quit living altogether.
Do you have the kind of stamina to prove me wrong? Are you willing to risk the kind of breakdown she had to prove me wrong? Reality is, a lot of men don't have what it takes to live as a man in today's world. Some men are so shredded by it they resort to violence. Norah writes about that too.
Norah was also a lesbian and a feminist.
Ooooo. I just heard the wind go out of a LOT of sails. Truth and pain, truth and pain.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Men have to live up to a higher level of expectations than women. We are expected to earn more. We are not supposed to cry or show reactions to pain. So many things are required that are not required of women.
If a woman defeats us at anything, we are ridiculed. If we defeat a woman, we get, "Ooo. So you beat a woman" with as much sarcasm as can be packed into that small statement. A tie? "What, you ain't man enough?"
A woman defeats a man? "She got lucky." A woman loses to a man. "Yep. That's what happens."
We have to be macho!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ1glxX1BiQ
The standards are not the same. As evidenced by suicides, violence and etc, so many male standards are harder than those for women.
VIOLENCE
I've written about men and the penchant for violence and how that has been transformed into socially acceptable outlets - sports for instance. Been roundly ridiculed for it. Eh. Prove me wrong, then I will change my opinion. Pick a sport women and men play with the same set of rules. The male version is more violent.
Sports trace their roots back to the hunting, fishing and war, all being violent activities, traditionally men's activities.
TRADITIONALLY! Not exclusive. Lots of women do these same things, but it is more common for men. Stone-age societies mostly leave the hunting & fishing to men while women gather and care for babies.
Why are men this way? The Animal Kingdom has a clue.
https://www.prodiveinternational.com/top-10-least-known-bull-shark-facts/
Bull sharks are the most aggressive sharks around. If they walked on land, lions, tigers and bears would not be safe.
Causation is not correlation?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3693622/
Why are men this way? Evolution maybe?
As Norah saw it, being a man is tough. Women do have a hard time of it, but in a different way and in a way that is just simply less difficult, she said. SHE SAID.
I concur.
Don't like what she said? Argue with her and refer to the above statement on truth.
You do not have to agree. Prove me wrong. I will change to fit the truth. Will you?
VAW
Violence against women (VAW) is bad. Violence against men is more common. This too is bad, but it reinforces my point. Men attack men far more often than they attack women.
https://noviolence.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Whataboutmen.pdf
Domestic violence is different. Women are the primary victims.
Historically, VAW was also institutionalized by men. Extreme surgeries, denial of basic human rights, etc etc etc. Granted.
Today is different, in modern societies at least.
Someone is gonna point out attempts to continue to regulate women, especially when it comes to reproductive rights. Granted. Politicians are only interested in maintaining power, not protecting anyone's rights, except their own to get back into office.
Someone else is gonna point out that women are massively more likely to be sexually harassed or assaulted than men. Granted.
Someone is gonna point out men earn more than women, in a lot of cases. Granted.
Lemme cut these off right here.
A wonderfully brilliant, kind and intelligent friend of mine has Hodges' Rule of Thumb: Do not expect rational behavior from beings with an opposable thumb.
Quit expecting 100% logical and rational behavior. Ain't none of us a Vulcan. Homo sapiens runs on emotions, hormones and what we think we can get away with and then, if there is any brain left over, compassion, empathy and reasoning.
H. sapiens has no problem whatsoever working against its own interests.
Women verbally snipe at each other. They snub, ignore, put down, etc. It is psyche attacks. Women intentionally go for the emotional heart.
Men have no problem slinging the insults, but the words are more direct and blunt. Sometimes it is meant as and attack. Many times it is not, it is just manly banter. Also, men, as noted above, are also far more likely to take things physical when things get hot.
The difference is men are encouraged to hide their feelings. Those feelings are gonna come out one way or another. For men, keeping that bottle capped until it cannot hold the pressure leads to bad results. Women are encouraged to have emotional reactions.
Eh. Digest this -
https://www.heartfeltcounselingmn.com/blog/2020/12/28/are-men-more-logical-and-women-more-emotional
And Norah Vincent said it is harder to be a man than a woman.
ALL THUMBS
Let's run this VAW idea from another direction. Assume Hodges is correct. Might as well say H. sapiens is all thumbs when it comes to reason. Even the much-vaunted Stoics admit emotion is a ruling force their life. It is a force that sometimes needs to be subdued, sometimes let free to run wild but is always a force that must be reckoned and considered.
Watch what you do, where you do it and how you do it. H. sapiens is territory-defending predator with this instinct (yes, instinct) being more violent in males than females. Disagree? Visit your community's hood, a hood where you stand out and are clearly an outsider. Lemme know how it goes.
'Nother example. Someone breaks into your house. What are you going to do?
ASKING FOR IT
How does this apply to ladies? Ever heard the expression, "She was asking for it?"
You do not have to like that statement. In fact, if that statement is an accurate reflection of your belief structure, pray thee and I never meet, especially if you intend to act upon that belief. Juuuuust for the record, I once put 5 shots into a 6&3/8ths inch group at 1,000 yards. My worst group for the whole tournament was 5 shots in about 2 feet.
My daughter can do the same thing.
Regardless of our thoughts on "asking for it," this is a false wrong distorted unfortunate misguided idiotic reality mental mindset many men live. Yes. Ladies are in danger.
Ladies can also do something about that. Don't behave in a way that would invited such attention. Is that fair? No. Is it reality? Yes. Wear your rose-colored glasses if you wish. Remember this, corpses do not get to testify.
Lemme put this another way.
I am NOT going to wade into the ocean wearing a Lady Gaga meat dress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_dress_of_Lady_Gaga
Apply some common sense, except it is not common.
REPRODUCTIVE URGES
Here's another one for you to chew on. The sex industry is mostly aimed at men. Reproductive urges dominate. Evolution & biology again, I think. Women are biologically limited in the number of kids they can generate in a year. Men? Men are only limited by the number of ladies willing to say, "O happy dagger! This is thy sheath! There rust and let me die." Until she gets pregnant.
As the late Norah Vincent almost states —Women need a reason. Men need a place. She may have said it exactly that way in her book. I want to find out.
I'm saying it.
Sex is a major driver for most men.
It is true. Sure, there are exceptions. By and large, that's the way it works.
Pull 100 men from anywhere. More than 90 of 'em are going to have sex, plain simple sex, as a major driving force in how they live their lives.
Women? The number is gonna be a LOT lower.
You don't have to believe me. Try this experiment.
Have a guy enter a bar and loudly announce "I need to get laid, now!"
What do you think is gonna happen?
Have a woman enter a bar and loudly announce "I need to get laid, now!"
What do you think is gonna happen?
Incels sometimes use their lack of lady companionship as a reason for violence. Is it justified? Hell no. Is it their reality? Yes. Is their reality distorted? Not to them. We (including me in that statement) believe their reality is distorted. Because of that distortion, they are, well, whatever you wanna call 'em.
My point here is, many men use lack of sex as an excuse to get violent. Now, how many women use lack of sex as an excuse to get violent?
Here's other gelled-sand monkey wrench for your gears. How many women use withholding sex to try to control men? How many men use withholding sex to try to control women?
Ahhhhhhhh.
Norah, dammitall, I never met you, but I miss you.
I may never make this post public. I have plenty of haters coming after me these days and see no need to give them something else, especially when -
No. What I started to write is a lie.
Truth is, what I write here is important, one of the most important things I could ever communicate. I still have to deal with enough hate from presenting other truths, a few more important and many a bit less important.
Yeah. Folks have plenty to hate me about right now. Don't think Imma let them have more.
