Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man

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Although a few of Vincent's realizations are meaningful—like that some men may feel just as oppressed by patriarchal ideas about gender roles as the women they are supposed to be oppressing—most of her revelations amount to something like "Not all men are complete pigs all the time, and some of them even have feelings!" While I thought the book was an interesting social experiment, it wasn't meaningful to me. It's clear to me that Vincent's ultimate conclusions likely would have been closer to the starting point for many of the women I know. If you want to read the short version of the book, read this chapter. This is where Vincent puts all of her experiences together and analyses her life as a man. I'm happy that Norah's dating life has been so much more hunky-dory than Ned's. (In fact I now imagine it being something like this .) But her horrible dating experience as Ned is so far from my experience that I feel very sorry for her that's her lasting impression of the heterosexual dating world. I surmised all of this the night it happened, but in the weeks and months that followed I asked most of the men I knew whether I was right, and they agreed, adding usually that it wasn't something they thought about anymore, if they ever had. It was just something you learned or absorbed as a boy, and by the time you were a man, you did it without thinking.

Lastly the description of Ned's transformed sense of manliness when he puts on his suit is great. People see the suit, not the person. She writes about the suit as a signifier of maleness, and compares it to a certain type of woman: Perhaps I'm being overly academic with a book that is not, but I had two main problems with the introduction: That is not to say her accounts arn't revealing though! But more intresting I found was her discoveries about what and why her gender was important to her. Self confessed tomboy and butch lesbian, she expected to have no trouble being an average joe, but found when passing as a male she came across as effeminate and frequently stumbled into male culture faux-pas's. Being a man she found meant far more than just appearing to be so, she found she was being resocialised into her male persona, and as a female, the stress of this was eventually to great. Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man is a 2006 book by journalist Norah Vincent, recounting an 18-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and then integrated into traditionally male-only venues, such as a bowling league and a monastery. She described this as "a human project" about learning. She states at the beginning that she is a lesbian but not transgender. This was a difficult, even dangerous experiment that consumed a year and a half of your life. What’s next?After the whole incident had blown over, I started thinking that if in such a short time in drag I had learned such an important secret about the way males and females communicate with each other, and about the unspoken codes of male experience, then couldn't I potentially observe much more about the social differences between the sexes if I passed as a man for a much longer period of time? It seemed true, but I wasn't intrepid enough yet to do something that extreme. Besides it seemed impossible, both psychologically and practically, to pull it off. So I filed the information away in my mind for a few more years and got on with other things. a b c d "A self-made man. Woman goes undercover to experience life as a man". 20/20. ABC news. January 20, 2006. Archived from the original on October 8, 2007 . Retrieved November 7, 2007. Debs, Eugene V. (April 1893). "self-made+men"+is+seemingly+paradoxical&pg=RA5-PA267 "Self-Made Men". Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine. Unsigned editorial. Vol.17, no.4 . Retrieved November 14, 2017. The term "self-made men" is seemingly paradoxical — since men who rise from obscurity to eminence in any of the walks of life, must have been assisted by agencies quite independent of themselves This book is good in the sense that Norah Vincent shattered some of her assumptions and that's always a good thing to do. Yet there are of course a certain element of manliness in the close identification between success and your role as a man. People constantly tell Ned to 'man up' when he's doing poorly as a salesman. He also discovers that when he changes his attitude from asking and apologising for things (as (s)he would do as Norah), to taking things without apologising, people respect him more as a man.

We passed, as far as I could tell, but I was too afraid to really interact with anyone, except to give one guy brief directions on the street. He thanked me as "dude" and walked on.Vincent also stated that she had gained more sympathy and understanding for men and the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together." [5] Voluntary Madness [ edit ] It is a pity that Ned can never enter a Wall-street boardroom or CIA, though I guess we already have memoirs and confessionals from those places, and perhaps from women as well. Are there any public figures whom you admire for expanding social definitions of gender? Do you have any heroes—personal, political, or literary? She did her thing-which was more willowy and soft, more like a young hippie guy who couldn't really grow much of a beard-and we went out like that for a few hours.