Review: Self-Made Man

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

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The premise of Self-Made Man is one that ought to grab your attention and be good for some entertainment value, even if the book were horribly mangled in its execution. Fortunately for me, Vincent did an excellent job in the balancing act, keeping her tale delightfully salacious while also sharing a new perspective on a question which has become monotonously tiresome in its everyday ordinariness.



What is it that often makes men and women seem like such different species? To tackle this question Vincent, a self proclaimed dyke, goes undercover in realistic drag, living large swaths of her life as a man for a couple of years. This immersion style leads her to question a great many of her own assumptions along the way (a fact that seems to alarm many who have also reviewed this book), but which seems to me to provide a great deal more insight onto the question than other works that seem to throw up their hands and take a "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" outlook.



Along the way, Vincent takes joins an all-male bowling league, takes jobs in several "testosterone-driven" careers, dates countless women and ends up going to an all male therapy retreat. If there was one major complaint I would take with this book, it would be that it seemed front-loaded. The earlier experiences were frequently ones that I could relate to more, whereas later experiences like the therapy group seemed to be dealing with some fairly damaged individuals. It got especially difficult at the end, trying to take away any serious message from people who just didn't seem to represent the larger population - either male or female.



In deciding what to write about this book, I did some reading of the reactions of others. Many have blasted Vincent for being overly sympathetic of the men in her tale and for lampooning women. While I can certainly understand why this is felt, I take some exception to the criticism. In many cases, I felt the author was merely putting herself in the mindset, attempting to play the role as best as she could. Often when she claimed to better understand a certain behavior, I didn't always feel that she was endorsing it. Nor did she equate her negative experiences with some women as being entirely representative of womankind.



I personally felt vindicated by some of the points that she elaborated in her book - often things that I have questioned myself, but never had a second opinion for. For example, her attention to the importance of eye-contact among men and the signals it conveys struck me as entirely true - something I've known instinctively, but never seen written down in black and white. Ditto for the male equivalent of the Madonna/whore paradox, which she chooses to call the warrior/minstrel complex. This being the idea that men are trained to act as hardened individuals, yet should somehow be equally capable of being attentive to and expressive of a large range of internal emotions.



A great deal of her anxiety as her alter ego, Ned, was not so much that she wouldn't 'pass' as a man, but would end up passing as less than a man (i.e. an effeminate/gay man). This is obviously something I can relate to strongly as a gay man myself, and perhaps this biased me. But it was still refreshing to see a voice that straddled the line between the sexes, pointing out the ridiculous nature of the chatter we frequently hear of about men and women being worlds apart.


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