Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back (2006)

This is a great book. I absolutely adored it. Her writing voice is frank and thoughtful, and she does a fantastic job of exploring the gender divide. I want to own this book. It's the type of book that you just want to grab a pen or pencil and notate throughout the thing, marking all those awesome passages or thought-provoking ideas.

For instance, she brings up the observation that we tend to have 5 or 6 gender-specific set responses, and when people aren't certain of your gender (as happened later in her experiment, when she would go out dressed as Norah, but accidentally projecting the masculine confidence of Ned), they don't know how to respond to you.

At one point, she gets a sales job as Ned. Her account of this experience is fascinating -- the way that she lost sales when she tried to make them the way that was natural to her, as a woman. If she was polite, deferential and flirtatious (in the female manner), she was perceived by both men and women as weak and off-putting. But if she acted as a male -- polite, but confident, firm in voice and convictions -- she made more sales. However, she also worked with women who made sales just fine being polite, deferential and flirtatious. It was entirely the gender presented that worked against her.

The entire book is a great, fascinating and eye-opening observation of how deep and subconscious the gender divide really is.

I didn't come away from the book thinking, "Ugh, men are pigs, women are awesome." Nor did I think the inverse: "Women are horrid, I wish I was a guy."

Instead, I came away from it thinking, "Wow, it's a hell of a lot more difficult to be a man in our society than I thought."

Obviously, both men and women have gender-specific abilities and strengths that help them get ahead, socially. And I'm not talking about anything as obvious as physical characteristics. I'm talking about the ways we relate to each other, talk to each other and interact in society. This book really highlights how even the most gender-neutral, pro-gender-equality people still play to their gender's strengths, and still expect the opposite gender to act in certain ways. It really highlights how we, as a society, encourage certain behaviors in each gender, only to bemoan and complain when those behaviors come with a price.

This book is promoted, a little, as a "secret inside glimpse at male behaviors." But it's so much more than that. She really gets into the meat of the matter, discussing why each gender presents as the way they do. She talks about how as a child, she was raised in a liberal, feminist family. She's often told (when female), that she has a masculine aspect, and she'd thought that going in drag would highlight that aspect -- only to find that when she was in drag, her feminine qualities stood glaringly and off-puttingly obvious. So her background is one of a tomboy girl, a child who was encouraged to play with "boy" toys and "girl" toys, as were her brothers. Yet even as pro-feminist, lesbian woman, she still fell back on typical "female" behaviors, without even realizing that she'd internalized them so thoroughly until she did this experiment.

Because of this realization, she often touches on how women relate to each other and how women relate to men, as well as how men relate to each other and to women.

Seriously, everyone needs to read this book. It's incredibly fascinating. ( )

Interesting sociological adventure and engaging first-person account

- Tiresome gender stereotypes, use of deceptive techniques

In the tradition of John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Norah Vincent disguised herself as a man and, for a year and a half, attempted to learn how men behave in their own company. While this is an intersting pursuit, and Vincent is not a bad writer, I was nonetheless disappointed by the fundamental triviality of her conclusions. Vincent seems to like neither men nor women as a group, and this antipathy is wearing after a while. Yes, she has something of a feminist outlook, but it is neither mature nor complex. Her observations about masculinity and femininity are not particularly nuanced and seem surprisingly naive for an adult. Her reported experiences with men prior to this experiment are scant, and those with women are stereotypical and suggest that women are mean and not to be trusted. Vincent fails to challenge this highly gendered world view; she masquerades as Ned in environments at the extremes of the distribution of stereotypical masculine behavior--a bowling league, an Iron John-inspired men's support group and retreat, a door-to-door commission sales job, and a Catholic monastery. I wish that she had included a wider range of settings where men congregate, alone or with women, such as an office job or bookstore. At that, why no gay men's group? Vincent compounds her stereotypes by dating women through web-based services; this is fine, but why not try to meet women through a mutual interest (books, birdwatching, sports, etc.) for a more balanced experience? I can't think much of Vincent's observations about women's neediness when she is overgeneralizing from a very small and specific pool. Disturbingly, she has sex with one of these women. No word on what her girlfriend has to say about this.

I was troubled by Vincent's deceptive techniques, but more troubled in some ways by her urge (and in some cases, she acted on this urge) to reveal herself. She sees it as confessional and perhaps as a way to seek forgiveness for the deception; I experience it as a form of taunting or narcissism disguised as confession.

Be sure to check out both the hardback and paperback covers for several views of Norah and Ned. ( )

I was hoping for an insightful analysis of the way men's and women's treatment differs in the world. I got a lot of sexism, unchallenged assumptions, and unpleasantness. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed.

Vincent falls prey to one of the classic failure modes of ethnography: she hated doing the research, so the whole book is tinged with that unhappiness. I appreciate the fact that she mentioned that she hated her time spent as a man and found it largely stifling and unpleasant, because that gives me a better angle from which I can understand her observations. It still doesn't save the book.

Part of the failure, I think, was in Vincent's choice of venues. While I understand her desire to poke around in "men's only" spaces, are a strip club, a bowling alley, and a monastery really representative of most men's experiences? There's also a lot of non-gender-based culture shock going on; a middle-class lesbian journalist going into a working-class bowling club is going to find herself in an alien world anyway, without adding gender into the mix.

Self-Made Man was never dire enough for me to give up on it - which I often do when I'm reading something particularly clueless - but it never really ascends to the level of enlightening, either. I didn't feel like I learned anything from this book, only got some general stereotypes reinforced, and mostly unpleasant ones at that. While I suppose it's possible that all the unpleasant stereotypes about men are true, I find myself unwilling to trust a book that asserts pretty much just that. ( )

I didn't particularly like this book for a few different reasons.
My first reaction was, "Huh. None of these things had ever occurred to her before? Has she ever had a male friend? A real conversation with a man? How is this groundbreaking or surprising to her?" and my second reaction was paradoxically, "What a load of crap."

Basically, she reinforces, in a certain sense, the idea that gender is inbuilt, that we are programmed to have a certain "language" of gender from birth, while simultaneously also proposing that we are socially constructing these roles and constricting ourselves emotionally and socially. Again, a paradox. I think, however, this paradox is the most truthful part about this book, but only in what it implies: that gender isn't the binary distinction that honestly, I'm really surprised she really seemed to cling to throughout.

By attempting to infiltrate only the most stereotypically male atmospheres and situations, she didn't allow herself to really experience a spectrum of masculinity--or femininity, for that matter: I found myself on several occasions relating to characteristic she gave a definingly male (or not relating to the ones she gave as female).

I think it was an interesting experiment that plenty of people will find fascinating and eye-opening. However, for anyone who has spent any time pondering questions of gender idendity, this is old hat. ( )

Great premise, but executed by the wrong person. Observations were not in depth, study was not ethical and there was no research to give any foundation. ( )