How to Find Ways to Acknowledge the Experience of an “Other”
Note on the text: Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year as a Man by Norah Vincent as published by Penguin Books in 2007
Everyone has probably wondered at some time or another what it would feel like to be a member of the opposite sex. That’s what pushed Norah to create the character of Ned, and for a whole year she got a taste of what it feels like to be a man in the modern world. Now as someone who is a man, none of her revelations really surprised me. What did surprise me was her humility, specifically her ability to admit that even after a year of going through the world as a male that she still did not fully understand what the male experience is.
Let me try to be more specific. We live in a world full of people who are struggling to understand and empathize with each other. It seems like a lot of people’s knee jerk reaction these days is to simply discount and/or ignore what they cannot understand. So if one person comes forward and talks about his or her experience of the world, and that experience does not line up with another person’s experience of it, that second person is liable to do whatever they can to discredit the experience of the first. To call them crazy, or say that they are somehow mistaken, or that there is a another, easier explanation for what happened to that person that does not involve radically one’s word view.
It’s not had to see real world examples of this. In 2017 when the #MeToo movement took it really exposed the dark underbelly of American society. Everyone, especially men, were deeply disturbed at the amount of sexism faced by women every day. More than the acts themselves however, these stories revealed just how different a woman’s experience of the world is from a man’s. How their perception of the world, as a result of those experiences, differs greatly from ours. For too long, men have found ways to ignore the women who were brave enough to come forward and tell their stories. The stories they were telling did not match up with our experiences of men, and who we thought men were, and rather than try to adapt ourselves in such a way that we could account for their world view we just ignored it. It was easier that way. It was easier to ignore what the women were saying than it was to admit that there was a possibility that we were wrong, or that at least our perception of what men were was somehow incomplete. So we said that they were exaggerating, or that they needed to dress more conservatively, or that they were somehow “asking for it”. We even sought to blame them for men’s lustful thoughts. Which is just terrible. We thought that because we live in the same world as women, and encounter the same men that they do, that we knew what their experience of the world was, and that therefore we had the authority to simply discount any account of the world that did not line up with ours. Which, in case it wasn’t obvious, we don’t. Every person has a unique perception of the world because of the way in which they experience it, and that perception of the world is neither better nor worse than anyone else’s. Everyone’s experience of the world is equally valid, and to simply ignore another person’s account of the world because it does not line up with our own is extremely unjust.
A similar thing happened more recently in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement. Although many people, including white people, were horrified when they saw the video of George Floyd, a defenseless black man, being murdered by a white cop, there were plenty of white people who struggled with who to incorporate what they saw on that video screen, and what other black people were telling them about their experiences with cops, with what they had experiences with cops were and what they “knew” cops to be. But again, rather than adapt their world view in such a way that they could incorporate what black people were saying about cops into their worldview regarding said cops, it was easier for those white people (again it was not all white people) to simply ignore the information that was being presented to them. They started saying things like “He must have done something to provoke those cops”, or “Racism? That’s not a thing anymore. We had a black president”. Again, any experience or worldview that does not line up with our own simply gets thrown out. Again, we assume that because we walk in the same world as black people physically, and even have experiences with the same cops that they do, that our experience with those cops must be the same as theirs and if it isn’t than it means that they are somehow wrong.
As a side note, before diving into the book itself, I’ve never understood how people can be so arrogant as to believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Such an extreme level of arrogance is both extremely infuriating and a more than a little confusing to me. I was in a record store once and stumbled upon a compilation album entitled “50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong”. Clearly there are people out there who disagree. But I’ve never understood how someone can be so confident in what they think they know that they are willing to completely discredit, and outright ignore, what is being told to them by tens of thousands of others. Do they really think that every black person, every woman etc in the world has gotten together and conspired to them all the same lie? Isn’t easier to assume instead that there must be some truth to what they are saying even if you cannot understand it? Doesn’t Occam’s razor apply as much here as it does anywhere else? I simply don’t understand. . . .
Regardless, I doubt anyone has gone through the same amount of trouble to put themselves in the shoes of another person as Norah did. For her to spend a year living as a male in order that she might be understand the male experience is extraordinary. So it surprise me to see the level of humility that she showed when describing what she experienced as Ned. She knew that her experiences were her own, that her perception of what it means to be a man were her own, and she didn’t use her own experience to discredit the experience of other people, especially other men:
Nothing I say here will have any value other except as one person’s observations about her own experience. What follows is just my view of things, myopic, and certain inapplicable to something [as] grand as a pronouncement of gender in American society. My observations are full of my own prejudice and preconceptions though I have tried as much as possible to qualify them accordingly. This book is a travelogue. . . a woman’s eye view of one guy’s approximated life, not an authoritative guide to the vast and variegated terrain of manhood in America (17).
In other words she knows and is willing to admit that, despite her intense amount of research and the way that she completely submerged herself in this research project, that she does not have the right to discount the experiences of others, especially other males, even if those experiences directly contradict her own. This is surprising especially when you consider the fact that there are a lot of people out there that are not willing to make the same concession despite the fact that they have never even tried to actually walk in the shoes of another person. Those people who discount the experiences of black people, women, members of the LGBT community etc, have never tried as hard to walk around in their world as Norah did to try and walk around in the world of men. To some extent, it would have made sense if she wanted to pound her chest and declare that she had learned something absolute about the world of men and that anyone who disagreed with her was wrong. The fact that she didn’t is extremely impressive.
It is high time to stop discrediting the experiences of those who are different to us. It’s hard sometimes to incorporate those worldviews and merge them with our own, but that does not mean that they should be ignored. No one person’s worldview is inherently better than another’s. They’re just different. There’s a story about a bunch of men who enter into a cave that is pitch black to touch an elephant. Every man touches a different part, one touches the tusks, another the ears, another the elephant’s feet etc, and when they get out they all have contradictory opinions of what an elephant is based on the part of the elephant that they touched. They all had a distinctly different experience of the elephant, but none of them were really wrong. They were just limited by the amount of information given to them through their experience, just as we all are. We are all limited in the number of things that we can experience about the world, and therefore are limited in what we can directly learn about it. That is why it is so important than we listen to each other and not simply ignore what the other person says. They might simply be touching a different part of the elephant called life
