Vincent, Norah: Self-Made Man

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Norah Vincent spent 18 months pretending to be a man. She adopted the persona of "Ned" to see what life was like on the other side of the gender line, becoming a man to gain entree into male-only establishments--a monastery, a men's bowling league. But even in environments that aren't exclusively male--strips clubs and a sales office, for example--being a man allowed Jones to experience interactions very differently from what she was used to as a woman. She came away from the experience with a lot of guilt--because she'd spent a year and a half deceiving people, including women she dated in her guise as Ned--and in fact the whole business ended with her suffering a nervous breakdown. But she also gleaned some insight into the male condition. In short, men struggle with their sexual urges and their masculine identities. Whether they're truck drivers or monks, they are enormously burdened by the responsibilities and expectations imposed on them by society, and at the same time they are unable to express their feelings about all of this because they are emotionally stifled. Maybe nothing very new here, but Jones wound up feeling a great deal of empathy for men, and I gather that is not what she expected to feel going into the experiment. I came away from the book thinking that I might understand men a little more than I did before. On the other hand, I'm not sure that Vincent's experiences can really amount to a representative cross-section of the male experience. If a man similarly went undercover and set out to experience life as a female, I very much doubt that his forays into, say, beauty shops and modeling agencies and a convent would give him a taste of what my life is like. Still, an interesting read, and I'm certainly impressed with Vincent's courage in going undercover as she did.

Comments

[sonia]

1.

how is it possible it was originally published 5 years ago and it isn't available in my coutry still :(