Read Online Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent - Free Book Online

quite know I was a woman, his brain seemed somehow to have sniffed me out and responded accordingly. The thing was, in this context, of all places, the way he treated me made me feel like a woman—a girl actually, very young and cared for—and I wondered how that could have been possible if some part of him hadn’t recognized me as such. It was unmistakable, and I never felt it with any other man I came into contact with as a man.
    I felt something entirely different coming from the other men who thought I was a young man. They took me under their wings. Another older bowler had done this. Taking me aside between rounds, he tried to teach me a few things to improve my game. This was male mentor stuff all the way. He treated me like a son, guiding me with firm encouragement and solid advice, an older man lending a younger man his expertise.
    This was commonplace. During the course of the bowling season, which lasted nine months, a lot of men from the other teams tried to give me tips on my game. My own teammates were constantly doing this, increasingly so as the season wore on. There was a tension in the air that grew up around me as I failed to excel, a tension that I felt keenly, but that seemed unrecognizable to the guys themselves. I had good frames, sometimes even good whole games, but I still had a lot of bad ones, too, and that frustrated us all.
    At about the five-month mark, Jim began giving me pained looks when I came back to the table after a bad turn.
    I’d say, “Okay, I’m sorry. I know I suck.”
    â€œLook, man,” he’d say, “I’ve told you what I think you’re doing wrong, and you don’t listen or you get pissed off.”
    â€œNo, no,” I’d protest, “I’m really trying to do what you’re saying. It just isn’t coming out right. What can I do?”
    I threw like a girl and it bugged me as much as it bugged them. If I told them the truth at the end of the season I didn’t want them to have the satisfaction of saying, “Oh, that explains everything. You bowl like a girl because you are a girl.”
    But their motivation seemed comically atavistic, as if it was just painful to watch a fellow male fail repeatedly at something as adaptive as throwing a boulder. Time was, the tribe’s survival depended on it. This just seemed mandatory to them in some absurdly primal way.
    As men they felt compelled to fix my ineptitude rather than be secretly happy about it and try to abet it under the table, which is what a lot of female athletes of my acquaintance would have done. I remember this from playing sports with and against women all my life. No fellow female athlete ever tried to help me with my game or give me tips. It was every woman for herself. It wasn’t enough that you were successful. You wanted to see your sister fail.
    Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know where to hit where it’ll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise. One summer when I was a maladjusted teenager, I went to a tennis camp in New Jersey that catered largely to rich princesses and their male counterparts. Most of them couldn’t really play tennis on more than a country-club level. Their parents had sent them there to get rid of them. They just stood around most of the time posing for one another, showing off their tans. But I’d had a lot of private coaching in tennis by that time, and my strokes were fairly impressive for my age. I took the tennis pretty seriously.
    As for posing, I looked like I’d been raised by wolverines.
    The instructors used to videotape each of us playing, so that they could go over the tapes with us and evaluate our techniques. One day, my particular class of about twenty girls was standing around the television watching the tape, and the instructor was deconstructing my serve. He’d had a lot of negative things to say