What Men Say About Women When They Think You've Never Been One

[MadrasT]

12. As promised in post #11

"Self Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back" by Norah Vincent is a fascinating book.

Amazon link to 'Self-Made Man'

She disguised herself as a man and lived as a man for 18 months to try to understand what life was like for men.

Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Norah Vincent absorbed a cultural experience and reported back on what she observed incognito. For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o’clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 111/2 shoes—a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that’s destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention.

With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut- wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men’s therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded—and exhausted—by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn’t an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent’s surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.

There is also an interview with her about this book on NPR: Norah Vincent: The Woman Behind 'Self-Made' Man

I read the book about a year ago and was captivated. The biggest thing I remember from reading the book was that she came away from the experience with a lot of compassion about the extraordinarily rigid gender role that society imposes on men. I especially remember her talking about how the only emotion men were "allowed" to express is anger -- how other types of emotion are trained out of them at a young age, and how that limits the ways that men are able to relate to each other and to women in the world.

She ended up feeling a lot of compassion toward men from the experience. She also experienced firsthand what male privilege feels like and I believe she was rather surprised about that.

It is also interesting to me that she commented that as a butch lesbian, she is frequently perceived as being a "masculine" woman... and as a man, she was perceived as being an rather effeminate man.

Just wanted to toss in a different perspective, and also link to a good gender-related read.

Personally, I wish we could get away altogether from the rigid binary view of gender. It is so much more complex and nuanced than just male vs. female. People lose a lot of self when they feel forced by society to fit neatly into the Male Box or the Female Box.

She identifies as a woman (she is not transgender) and ended up having a nervous breakdown at the end of the 18 months because it was so much of a mindfuck to have to present to the world as a gender that does not match her brain. I believe in the NPR interview she also mentioned the compassion she developed toward transgender folks who haven't transitioned (their external presentation) to their brain-gender, because living with that gender-disconnect is their reality all the time.