It’s not so much respect, I should think, as basically not caring.

As a guy I walk around and basically treat other pedestrians as slow moving street furniture unless they have something that recommends them for further attention: Erratic behaviour, eccentric clothing, carrying a bloody chainsaw, etc… otherwise a quick appraisal glance is all you’ll get. Problem/Not Problem.

I even walk right by friends because I my mind is not on people, per se. Then again, I find New Yorkers are deadly slow walkers, so I’m probably not typical.

Read the book. She gets a lot right. Especially provocative is her conclusion that men and women may be irremediably different. I’m paraphrasing, but she describes it as being on different planes, almost separate realities. My old man used to tell me that women were really a different species–wonderful, irreplaceable, but definitely the other.

In the big city, if you do not to some degree use your body language to project a barrier, you will find yourself frequently bothered by unpleasant people who perceive you as a vulnerable target.

“Vincent reveals herself as particularly clueless in that she seems to have no awareness of a fact for which one does not need to be male to understand. “

Vincent isn’t clueless. The review is poorly written. If you read the Salon.com interview which is much better, she mentions the whole “invitation to fight” issue regarding meeting someone’s gaze. It’s just a crap review.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/01/20/vincent/index_np.html

The situation makes a difference. On a city street, the glance and look away is described correctly.

Walking on a country road, a vehicle comes by, you make eye contact and wave or nod. Both driver and walker do.

You do not ignore another walker. You look and greet.

Far-fetched theory: When isolated in the country, the instinct is that threats are non-human and the first step to making up a team is normal. In a crowded situation, there are no sabre-tooth cats, no giant baboons. Just other people and other people are the most likely threat. Ignore, do not engage, and by ignoring, be ignored.

I can’t write as well as Vincent nor do I have the book in front of me. She basically comes to the same conclusions that Shannon described about “anonymous hell.” Vincent probably fit into that category as a man, which probably helped her in passing off as one.

Vincent wrote about the physical steps she took for her transformation, from the fake 5-o’clock shadow, voice coaching lessons, and adding 15 pounds of upper body bulk through weight training. She’s not a voluptuous woman so hiding her breasts was not a problem. She layered her clothing to hide her figure. Think of a girl wearing baggy jeans and a sweat shirt. Their figure basically becomes rectangular.

Personally, I don’t think she looks any more effeminate as a man than Tucker Carlson or George Stephanopolous when he was younger. At any rate, she passed her first test as a man bowling in a men’s league for nine months. None of the guys guessed on their own.

Vincent was on 20/20 last Friday. I tivoed the show but haven’t watched it yet.

Yo, Nash. We are making inferences from limited data here. If you think we’re off the mark, why don’t you share some of what you learned from the book that you think is relevant? Dismissing our arguments isn’t very helpful. I enjoy this discussion and find it useful because I want more information but am not yet ready to spend the time needed to read the book. I hope that you or someone else who has read the book can contribute.

Well, actually we don’t know if she was falling short or not, based on that brief description. Everybody seems to be reading a great deal into her comment that can’t really be taken out of it, since we weren’t the ones walking by those stoops. You say men ignoring one another is more often an expression of contempt, and insist she must therefore be wrong about what was going on. Could be, but how do you know that was the case here? Other readers insist that she’s a moron for not recognizing that this sample of “ignoring” is acknowlegement, and avoidance, of threat. As I tried to point out, they’re blanking out on a pretty basic aspect of animal behavior – that threat and respect are heavily overlapping categories – and that their explanations don’t really undercut her interpretation at all.

On a related point it’s one thing to say that there are differences “between how men express respect for women and how they express respect to one another” and quite another to say they’re mutually exclusive behaviors without any overlap. Sometimes they are quite distinct, but sometimes, as in the case of the lady and the louts vis a vis the averted gazes of the two men, the dynamics of threat and appeasement arise from the same behavioral repertoire. Most of the time we have to be there to pick up the “vibes” of an interaction. So I’m not sure why everyone is so adamant that Vincent is full of it on this point. For all I know she butches up as one scary mofo. I kinda doubt that, but actually have to read the book to come to an informed conclusion about her experiences.

You could all be right about the meaning of the behaviors in question, depending on the cirucmstances, just as Ginny may very well be correct in suggesting that the reaction she got was really all about “Man, that’s one homely chick. I’ll politely refrain from staring.”

Just noticed nash’s comment when I previewed thus. Read the book before commenting? Feh. That’s like reading the instructions before operating new toys. Killjoy.

…the louts wouldn’t be behaving as they do if they “respected” the woman.

Yes, but there is a big difference between how one men express respect for women and how they express respect to one another and it is here that Vincent falls short. She interprets men ignoring another man as a token of respect because men ignoring or at least being circumspect in their attentions towards a women can be sign of respect. She doesn’t seem to realize that when men ignore each other it is more likely an expression of contempt.

In short, she appears to think (according to review at least) that she has discovered something about the male perspective when in fact she has revealed something about the limitations of own.

You can usually tell the marital status of a woman by how she dresses when she’s out without a male companion. Women know how to dress to attract the attention of the men around them. This is not to be confused with how a woman will dress when she IS with her boyfriend/husband. If she’s dressed sexily then, it’s for him and him alone.

I remember being twelve-ish and and one of my father’s younger brothers stopping by our house with his then-girlfriend (soon to be wife). She was in her early twenties, with long brown hair, nice build, pretty face. I had met her once before briefly. While my father and uncle talked she ended up standing and waiting in front of the chair I was sitting in.

“Why are you dressed up?” I asked. “We’re going out tonight.” she said. I was staring at her and didn’t quite understand why I found this, to me, much older woman so alluring. She looked at me knowingly, smiling. I wasn’t used to that look from older women.

“Like it?” she asked, looking down at herself and her clothes. “I dunno.” I said, “Turn around for me, let me see it.”

Why I said that I’ll never know. I must’ve seen it in a movie. Seemed like the right thing to say at the time. She was delighted by the remark. I didn’t understand why she seemed to think it was so funny. She spun around slowly, her arms up, hair sliding through air, a little pirrouette in my living room just for me.

I thought she was beautiful. I flushed. I clearly remember feeling hot, like I was going to start sweating, and wondering why. I felt nailed to my chair, like I couldn’t move, like I could barely breathe. She stopped, facing me. She looked straight into my eyes and smiled. She gave me that knowing look again.

My uncle came back in then and they got ready to leave. On the way out the door she looked at me sweetly and said, “Byyyyeeee.” She put her hand out and stroked the side of my face softly as she left, her eyes twinkling.

My father saw this and watched me watch her leave. He broke into a smile. “Like her?” he asked when they’d left. “Yes.” I said. “A lot!” He thought that was funny. Why does everyone find me so amusing tonight?, I remember wondering.

I also think Ginny’s on to something with her instinctual-level analysis idea. Women walk differently than men. My mother told me as a child she could always tell the drag queens who came into the women’s clothes store where she worked. At the time, being 10 or so, I didn’t understand how she could do this. Being in my 40′s now, it’s obvious to me. As humans, we tune into cues that we’re not even aware of. The “style” of walking, how the hips move, is just one.

I find it very revealing that Norah Vincent interprets being ignored as a token of respect.

I agree. As a lesbian, she doesn’t want the attention of males and feels relieved when she doesn’t get it. She wants to be accepted as a male, to be among them in a sense, and wants the attention of women instead.

Well, uh, yeah. And to acknowledge that someone is a threat is the primordial basis of…respect. Vincent is doubtless interpreting behavior through the filter of her own experience as a woman, but I think y’all are off the mark in attributing a complete cluelessness here. The supposition is that Vincent’s experience as a woman in getting attention on the street consisted merely of innocuous responses to her sexuality. But any young woman who’s had to navigate city streets knows perfectly well that there’s often a great deal more going on than gallant, if sometimes annoying, admiration of her sex appeal. There’s also hostility, aggression, and threat. A woman on the street being harrassed by louts doesn’t avert her eyes and “ignore” them for an entirely different set of basic, instinctual reasons than a man declining to make eye contact. To do otherwise is to invite trouble. And the louts wouldn’t be behaving as they do if they “respected” the woman – that is, if she were capable of posing a threat.

I think Ginny has a good point in suggestng that Vincent’s interpretation may be suspect to the extent that people were reacting, conciously or not, to an ambiguous “maleness”. It’s interesting to note, however, that men who have gone the other way – in drag or as male-to-female transsexuals – have been known to lament that the biggest downside to having gone female is the “loss of public respect”. And since “respect” at its primitive roots does rest on “I can hurt you if you mess with me”, I can’t discredit Vincent’s take on the face of it.

“You lookin’ at me?”

Still, for the reasons that others have mentioned, her analysis is hard to accept at face value.