Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again

I first heard about Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man by Norah Vincent via the xckd blag, and finding the concept intriguing I had to pick up a copy when I saw it available at CyberRead.

Norah Vincent decides to live as a man for more than a year. As Ned, she partakes in various male experiences like bonding with a bowling team, visiting strip clubs, going on dates, joining a men’s group, taking a sales job in a Glengarry Glen Ross-esque environment, and even joins a monastery for several weeks.

The book is a well-written and extremely engrossing account of her search for what it means to be a man. Though I don’t think Vincent could in any way truly become a man, I do think certain gender differences became more show more acutely visible to her, precisely because she isn’t male. A man couldn’t write Self-Made Man any more than a woman could write a book called Self-Made Woman.

Something that struck me about the book is how very brave Vincent was to do some of the things she did. She put herself in a wide variety of situations where she was completely out of her depth and which could have turned ugly fast had she been unlucky. Not only did she have the guts to get into those situations, and the skill to navigate them successfully, she also has the ability of eloquently describing how she felt at the time.

After reading Self-Made Man I realised just how tough life can be when you’re male, and was left with a profound sense of empathy towards men. If you are at all interested in how men and women think and interact with each other I suggest reading Self-Made Man, hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. I just wish Norah Vincent had more/better pictures of Ned available on her website. After reading so much about him I would have appreciated seeing him properly. show less

This is a fascinating book, but I was shocked by how depressing it is (in fact, the author ended up checking herself into a mental hospital by the end of the book).

Norah Vincent spent a year or so as Ned Vincent - she disguised herself as a man, and explored how differently she was treated as a man, and tried to explore the male psyche as much as she could. She makes some really fascinating observations, although clearly these are just one person's observations, and Norah's past and personality play a huge role in her perceptions.

In some ways, I think gender ends up being a straw man in the book. As much as her insights about gender are fascinating, I think that Norah/Ned is often reacting just as strongly to other factors that are show more independent of gender. For instance, in the first chapter, she joins a bowling league and spends a bunch of time with white trash blue collar guys. She is surprised at their intelligence and sensitivity, and as an intellectual writer, finds her own supposed superiority knocked down a few notches. It seems to me that she is responding to their culture as much as to their gender. Something similar happens when Ned gets a job as a door-to-door salesman - the job is so life-sucking and depressing that the employers have to keep everyone really pumped up all the time, and they use sex to do it. I (a female) actually worked for a PIRG for a few days, which is also basically door-to-door salesmanship, and my experience there very closely mirrored Ned's experience - that kind of work requires a certain culture. I would have been far more interested in Ned's treatment in a boardroom than as a salesman.

Having said that, Norah's/Ned's insights into gender are fascinating. She essentially concludes that the two genders come from such totally different starting places that getting them to understand each other is nearly impossible. She compares genders to religious sects - there's just no way to get them to connect meaningfully.

Norah's/Ned's personal crisis at the end of the book is ultimately about identity: she says that conforming to any gender role is basically a denial of your own identity, and her year pretending to be someone else was really devastating to her.

This is an interesting read, with lots of food for thought, and has certainly changed my perception of men. show less

Author Norah Vincent does something pretty daring and potentially dangerous: she pretends to be a man to see how the other half lives. She joins a men's bowling league, hangs out at seedy strip clubs, works at a mostly male company, lives at a monastery, and infiltrates an Iron John men's group. I can't agree with her revealing herself to some of the men she befriended; there's just something emotionally unethical about lowering the boom like that. But as a woman reading this book, I found some of her insights about men revealing and sad. I was also surprised she suffered a bit of a breakdown afterwards, but considering the mental and emotional stress of passing as a man, it makes sense. An intriguing and different take on gender show more differences. show less

Reading Self-Made Man was an unexpected pleasure, although perhaps not always for the reasons I expected. As a rule, Vincent's approach and writing style is superbly balanced between sensation and analysis, accessibility and intelligence. As the book unfolds, Vincent plunges into the world of male sociability. She creates her own male persona, Ned, joins a bowling league, goes to strip clubs, dates and has sex with women, explores the world of work while in character, and even briefly infiltrates an all-male religious society.

What impressed me about Vincent was her deep capacity for empathy, a trait that was reflected in the incisiveness with which she pulled apart her experiences and the emotions they triggered. I was especially moved, show more perhaps surprisingly, not by her insights into the male mind - which I found a bit simplistic and, in particular, overly concerned with sex - but by the insights she gained into the mind of heterosexual women (Vincent herself is gay). The rather ugly, somewhat taboo side of female sexual power is revealed when Vincent starts dating, and it disrupts many of her easy assumptions about male privilege:

"Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no."

I was especially startled by a further revelation, in a passage a little further on, of the widesprea prejudice that only women are desirable, so that even heterosexual women must surely be looking for a man who, inside, resembles a woman. Vincent writes: "I was most surprised to find nestled inside the confines of female heterosexuality a deep love and genuine attraction for real men. Not for women in men’s bodies, as the prejudicial me had thought." Passages like these abound in the book, surprising to me because they reveal, in my view, just how anti-male modern society really is. Vincent also repeatedly takes the tools of feminist criticism, applies them to men, and is startled to find that they face many similar problems, from emotional repression to physical objectification.

The only disappointment for me, and the reason why I can't quite bring myself to give this book five stars, is the ending. Norah Vincent learns so many valuable lessons and shows such deep empathy for the plight of both men and women throughout the book, and yet her final response to this adventure/experiment felt to me like she had turned her back on all that she struggled so hard to learn in this course of its unfolding. That was kind of depressing - that someone could come so far, gain so much insight, and then decide that really, it was all just an intellectual exercise after all. show less

this is an interesting character study on gender, but also on the author. i wasn't quite as excited with the ending of this book as i was with the beginning, but there is so much of interest in here, and it's well written, so that i'd recommend it to anyone who wants to think more about gender, masculinity in general, and how both fit into our culture.

the deception that takes place in this book (and, for me, the coming clean) can be really uncomfortable. however, it allows her to discuss not just her perceptions but others' as well, and to see the difference in how she's received when viewed as male or female. it made me think a lot about how misgendering someone regularly can make someone feel, and what being forced to assume the show more bodily persona of someone else must feel like for transgendered people, and how that must fuck with their heads.

this grabbed me pretty much right away, and covers a lot of territory (although i still wanted to hear more of the everyday issues she went through - how many hours a day was she ned; how did her girlfriend feel about this; when she lived as ned, was it all the time or did she go back and forth between ned and norah; how long did it take to become ned? some of this is vaguely touched upon, but i'd like more of that to be woven in (ideally), or (at the very least) put in a separate chapter.). she does make a couple of surprising statements in the beginning (implying that all lesbians are more butch than straight women or lumping lesbians together in general) and used the word "gypped" once. but this is obviously her viewpoint and observations, and many of them are not just interesting but useful.

this was a fast, intriguing read. show less

An enlightening account of what it really means to be a man in our society—the good and the bad. This book goes on my list of books everyone over 16 should read. I expected Vincent to be surprised by how not-green it is on the other side, but I was the one whose eyes were most opened. She passed as a man for 18 months and learned that trying to change something as ingrained as gender is dangerous to one’s mental health—she had a breakdown and checked into a hospital to recover. Her methodology was to break down the different aspects of daily life—friendship, dating, sex, work, etc and then found ways to most fully experience those aspects. My personal favourite section was when she spent three weeks at a monastery. One of the show more most fascinating things was that when Vincent stopped wearing her drag (beard, binding) people still saw her as a man proving that people will accept you for what you present yourself to be. show less

I'm not super pleased about it being an abridgement, but since the author is reading it, I'll have to assume she had a hand in how it was trimmed.

Review:
I'm really glad I read (listened) to this book. Vincent is thorough and honest about getting to the core of her observations. This is what I appreciated the most about the story. Throughout it, she makes it clear that she is drawing conclusions based on her observations and the observations themselves take primacy over the conclusions based on them.

She is open about her preconceptions and biases as much as possible. She doesn't disclose her political leanings except is an an aside about abortion politics on first dates (Vincent is a conservative) but I found it somehow easier to show more empathize with conservative values coming from a lesbian woman trying to pass as a man.

Throughout the book, I did not see my own experience of masculinity mirrored in what Ned/Norah saw. I recognize it as true, but I think she was looking for a stereotypical version of masculinity that has not been my experience. That doesn't make her story invalid, I just want to be clear that being a dude is a richer, broader, and more varied experience than shown by the range of sad-sacks she sought out. For example, she bases work experiences on a door-to-door sales job. Dating is based on trying to pick up strangers at bars or internet dating sites. And group identity is based on a "men's movement" retreat. There is a lot more to masculinity than these brief glimpses. However, these brief glimpses are revealing and I think she's done fantastic work reporting them.

I used the term "sad-sack" before to describe the men Ned and Norah spent time with. I meant it to be casually insulting, but it is worth pointing out that she did not spend a lot of time with successful males. There aren't any stories of pride in work well done, the weird locker-room euphoria that comes from winning a sporting event, pride in providing for one's family or filling a set role society lays out for us. The men Ned interacts with all seem to be pride-deficient. I think pride is overdone, but it does seem to be a massive part of the social construct of masculinity I've experienced. She spent her time with Barney Fife and Fred Mertz visions of maleness, she didn't seem interested in finding Andy Griffins or Ricky Ricardos to spend time with. It could be that these stronger, better adjusted men are relatively rare or it could be that she has a set image of maleness that she was looking for.

In any case, this is an interesting and valuable book. The quest for empathy and insight is to be applauded. Vincent herself is explicit that she's just reporting her own experiences, but readers should be aware that this is just one woman's journey into manhood and not manhood in its entirety.

For a different vision of masculinity, I recommend reading Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. His treats male-ness with less kindness or gentleness than Vincent does, but it is a literary genius covering aspects of masculinity that Vincent does not. show less