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 emotionall
y 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.
We met for dinner at her house. During dinner I told her right out, in the blurted way our conversations tended to go, that there was something I wasn’t telling her about myself, and that I couldn’t tell her what it was. I told her that if we were going to go to bed together she would have to be willing to accept the untold thing and the physical constraints it required. She took this well. She was curious. Not frightened. She didn’t need to know, she said.
We talked about other things over dessert, and circled back to the topic of going to bed together, or whatever approximated version of that I could do without divulging my secret. We talked about our letters and the subject of lesbianism came up again.
“Your response was pretty vehement,” I said. “You might have just said you weren’t interested. Why heroin?”
“Let me put it this way, then. I think of lesbianism like India. It’s enough for me to see the special on PBS. I don’t feel the need to go there.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed.
The conversation moved on to something else and then back again to the prospect of sex, and my visible discomfort with skirting the edge of full disclosure. I had told her as much as I would. She had asked if my secret was something physical and I had told her it was. She reached her hands across the table and took my hands in hers. Would she see that my hands were small for a man’s? I wondered. If she did, she said nothing.
We decided to go into the bedroom. Once there, she lit several candles by the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed, which was low to the ground, and asked her to sit with her back to me on the floor. She did so, leaning against the mattress between my legs. I gathered her long hair in my hands and draped it over one shoulder, exposing one side of her neck. I eased down the V-neck of her sweater, exposing the shoulder, and traced her skin with my fingertips, behind the ear, along the hairline, the collarbone. I leaned down to kiss the places I’d touched. She moved in response, lolling her head to the side. She reached up behind her and placed her palm on my cheek. She would feel the stubble now for sure and know that it didn’t feel like stubble should. The jig was probably up.
“Do you feel it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How does it feel?”
“Soft,” she said.
She didn’t seem alarmed or surprised.
This was about as far as I was willing or able to take it—the makeup was smeared now for sure—so I took her hand away then and got up from the bed to move around in front of her, to face her on the floor.
“Do you want me to show you or tell you?” I said.
“Whichever you prefer.”
It took me longer than I’d thought it would to spit it out. I was holding her hands when I finally did.
“I’m a woman.”
She didn’t pull her hands away.
I went on immediately to fill the space. I told her about the book project and why I was doing it. Then I waited.
She was still quiet. Then she said, “You’re going to have to give me a few minutes to get used to this.”
We sat in silence. Clearly, whatever physical deformity she’d been expecting hadn’t been femaleness.
“I’m not a transsexual,” I added by way of help. “This is makeup and my tits are strapped down. I don’t actually wear glasses either.” I took them off. My glasses usually had a kind of reverse Clark Kent effect. Without them people always felt I looked more like myself, whereas with them, Ned stepped out of the phone booth. The tortoiseshell plastic frames I’d chosen helped to square my face and hid my eyes, which everyone found too soft for a man’s. This, and the knowledge that I was a woman, helped shift the look enough for her to see the woman underneath.
“Yes. I can see it now,” she said.
She took up one of my hands, which she was still holding, and examined it.
“These aren’t a man’s wrists,” she said, caressing them, “or a man’s hands, or a man’s skin.”
She looked me over for a few minutes in the dim light, making out the feminine parts and nodding.
“I always thought you weren’t very hairy for a man,” she said. She laughed a little and said, “Well, now I can tell you that my nickname for you in the past few weeks has been My Gay Boyfriend. You set off my gaydar the first time I saw you. Your hair was too groomed and your shirt too pressed, and your shoes too nice.”
A lot of women had noticed and complimented me on my hair and my shoes. For Ned’s dates I groomed my hair to the last strand. The women I dated seemed to appreciate the effort quite a lot, and seemed unduly glad to find a man with a manageable bush on his head.
My shoes were just basic black leather loafers, but I wore them with black socks and jeans and a black button-down dress shirt, like some slob made over by the Fab Five on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The trendy term metrosexual came up a lot in my company during my dating career as Ned. But it was on this point that I was sorely disabused of one of my preconceptions about heterosexual women and what they were really looking for in men. When I started the project, I had suspected that I would find hordes of women for whom Ned would be the ideal man, the ideal man being essentially a woman, or a woman in a man’s body. But I was wrong about this. It wasn’t that simple. Women’s desires were stubbornly kaleidoscopic and their more subtle proclivities even more uncategorizable.
Sure, you could make generalizations about men and women, what they tended to do and want, buy and consume, but all of that was really just frosting, and it wasn’t until you got down deep inside the individual that you began to see the contradictions emerge and announce themselves. The concept of either/or isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to understand men and women, because every time you try to boil them down to their tidy habits, their anomalies poke through and leave you with a mess you can’t write up very neatly in a conclusion, except to say that both are true and neither.
Ned wasn’t everybody’s type by a long shot. Sure, some women—like Sasha, as it turned out—still wanted to go to bed with him once they knew he wasn’t a guy. But plenty of others didn’t. They were just flat out heterosexuals, tried and true. As one date, Anna, explained it to me once I’d told her I was a woman: “I was not immediately sexually attracted to Ned. I thought him good-looking and likable and the date was so very enjoyable and commanded a repeat performance, and the writing, God, the writing, was what got me off. But in the end, Ned himself did
not elicit an immediate visceral sexual response from me. Ned was too slight for me, too metrosexual. I would never have guessed in a million years that you were not a boy, but I like boys that weigh two hundred pounds. And yes, I find them emotionally disappointing, especially in bed, but the physical strength, the roughness I find erotic and I do not prefer sex otherwise.”
Sasha and I spent hours that night talking about the book, why I was doing it, and how fascinated she was by what she’d learned about herself. Sasha was very interested in the implications of the experiment. She was curious about her lesbian tendencies or lack thereof. She wasn’t in the least frightened or threatened by the switch or her attraction to Ned and her ongoing attraction to me. She was extremely pleased to have happened upon an experience that had shaken up the norm.
Sasha and I went to bed together, and obviously Sasha had to thereby revise her hard ideas about lesbianism and her desire to “go there.” Yet she did so with stunning alacrity for someone who, I’m fairly certain, was not a closeted lesbian all along, or even a genuine bisexual. In our weird stilted exchanges, we had connected mentally in some way. Maybe I’d come to admire the adventurer and even the oddball in her. Maybe she just desperately needed a good friend. There could be a thousand reasons good or bad, but I think none of them had much of anything to do with sex. And this, I’ll maintain in an entirely unscientific manner, is a stubbornly female tendency.
For most women sex is an epiphenomenon, the steam that issues from the engine. And the coal is mental. It’s: “Do you make me laugh? Do you make me think? Do you talk to me?” It’s not: “Are you handsome? Are you rich and accomplished and well hung?” I suppose, more often than you might think, it’s not even: “Are you male or female?” It’s really just: “Are you there and do you get me?”
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