I really like being a woman. I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege. - Norah Vincent
Is this level of athletic competition the ultimate distraction from real life? Or is it a form of prayer? - Norah Vincent
People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out. - Norah Vincent
There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone. - Norah Vincent
There's a big difference between tolerance and approval, and I have no right to expect or demand the latter from anyone. - Norah Vincent
Think of what’s scary in a movie. The unseen, the imagined, is always more frightening than what’s graphically portrayed. The same holds true in your head. Face your fear, step into it, look at it head-on and it will diminish in stature, lose its hold on your imagination. But run, and it’ll grow wings, breather fire, and fly after you. - Norah Vincent
When we're in the presence of another person, there is always a mask, even if that mask is our face. There is no escaping it. And so the vast majority of what we say to each other, whether it is to our spouses, our family, our confessor, or perfect strangers, amounts to chitchat all the same. Or at best, a crack audition for that juiciest of all parts were literally dying to play: ourselves. But alone, fuckin' a-lone we're genius. - Norah Vincent
A lot of men's bluster is really indicating how much the esteem of women means to them, and not how little. I was surprised, too, to find that men care as much as they do. - Norah Vincent
Being Ned was often an uncomfortable and alienating experience, and far from finding myself in him, I usually felt kept from myself in some elemental way. - Norah Vincent
Dating women was the hardest thing I had to to as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenseless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armor. But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't see. - Norah Vincent
Ditto for the stereotype about men monopolizing conversations. Many of my dates — even the more passive ones — did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and coworkers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember, yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy. I sat there stunned by the social ineptitude of people to whom it never seemed to occur that no one, much less a first date, would have any interest in enduring this ordeal. - Norah Vincent
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. - Norah Vincent
It was the woman’s job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy’s job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all. - Norah Vincent
It’s hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can’t exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fathers’ love. These, it would seem, are matters for the therapist’s couch. Private matters. - Norah Vincent
Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are — here is the dreaded word — victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been co-determiners in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role. - Norah Vincent
Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech. - Norah Vincent
Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. - Norah Vincent
There is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the human condition that we are not ready for. - Norah Vincent