Norah Vincent, a lesbian journalist, decided that the only way to discover the truth about the lives and experiences of men was to live as a man. She did so for eighteen months, and it led to one of the most remarkable journalistic feats since the white reporter John Griffin darkened his skin and lived as a black man in the South. Griffin’s 1961 book Black Like Me became an instant classic and was made into a movie in 1964 and he faced threats and harassment from many whites and was forced to move to Mexico for a year. Vincent, who charged her name to Ned when she crossed over to live as a man, did not face this type of hostility, but then again she did not alter her skin color and actually moved from being in one of the more oppressed groups to a position of relative power and privilege. Although she almost hand a nervous breakdown as a result of the tensions of living a double life, Vincent's experiment was worth it because of the insights she gained about the differences in how men and women lived their lives and perceived the world. For Vincent, by far the worst effect of her experiment was that she felt guilt over being a fraud with the people she met, and finally checked into a psychiatric facility when she began to have suicidal thoughts.
Vincent learned from the inside how social class, power and status created a profound system of hierarchy among men, and that many of them were insecure about the meaning of masculinity. Although she discovered that she had more opportunities for dating women as a male, few of them wished to continue in any kind of intimate relationship when they found out her true gender. During her year as a man, Vincent certainly learned about the masculine view of work, sex, friendship and self-concept, and how these differed greatly by status and social class. She went out of her way to encounter men from a wide variety of backgrounds, and observed them both at work and at play. Her story is told in a humorous, even sardonic and ironic style, although in the end many men and women were quite surprised to discover that Ned was really Norah. Overall, she found being a man rather difficult and depressing, particularly in matters of the heart and the difficulties of dating, love and sexuality without real emotional closeness and intimacy. She learned ultimately that while men have more power and status than most women, they have also lost a great deal in the bargain. Even though it was certainly not a happy experience for Vincent, few persons of either gender have ever learned as much about the other from the inside-out.
Vincent, a self-confessed tomboy for as long as she could remember, believed that gender and sexual orientation were at least partially generic rather than a result only of environment and socialization. She had always considered herself to be a very masculine female from an early age, but also appeared to be a somewhat effeminate man. Even in childhood, she had sometimes dressed up in her father’s clothes for Halloween, and also experimented with this when she lived in Greenwich Village in New York. Since she had sometimes been called ‘Ned’ as a child, this was also the name she chose for her excursion into the universe of masculinity. To become a man for a lengthy period, though, rather than a quick walk down the street, required her to put on fake facial hair, an artificial penis, a sports bra and also hire a voice coach. She of course had to learn to shake hands in a firm, masculine way, and that this was one of the very important occasions when men were absolutely expected to look each other in the eye. This is what they had invariably learned from their fathers, that a man who fails to do this instantly conveys a sense of evasiveness, insincerity or dishonesty. From previous experiences she had already learned that it was better to avoid prolonged eye contact with other men, which was “to invite conflictor a homosexual encounter” (Vincent 3). Heterosexual men felt no such restraint when staring at women, however, either in a sexual or perhaps even a potentially menacing way, but as a man she noticed immediately that she was free from this kind of unwanted attention.
Vincent had felt oppressed both as a woman and a lesbian, but now she also experienced the effects of social class, status and hierarchy among men. She spent eight months as part of a bowling team with working class white men, and was consistently the poorest bowler among them. From this group of ‘regular guys’, she learned “to see and appreciate the beauty of male friendship from the inside out” (Vincent 42). Although they did not talk to each other about feelings or deep personal matters the way that women friends did, there was a certain level of frank camaraderie that seemed more sincere and direct to Vincent. She found them more sympathetic than she had imagined, particularly the man who was caring for his terminally ill wife, and also less racist than ‘rednecks’ are commonly portrayed. They respected those who worked hard, kept their word and played by the rules, and in general thought that the common people were being badly shafted in contemporary American society. In addition, they did not condemn Ned for his lack of bowling skills but instead were always trying to help him improve his game. Obviously she was unable to experience family and home life as these ordinary men did, the general feeling of duty to the wives and children and the sense that they are expected to make many sacrifices for them. This was one of the main limits that Vincent ran up against during her undercover life as a man, since her imitation could only carry her so far.
During her time as a man, working as a door-to-door salesman for company that sold discount coupon books, Vincent found that she could actually be successful in this cruel and competitive business. This involved making the same sales pitch fifty times a day without sounding like a robot, and the ability to deal with rudeness and rejection most of the time. Such ‘entry-level’ jobs are easy for men to get, but also involve a great deal of stress, burnout and high levels of turnover. Those who remained in this work became arrogant and cynical over time, and generally seemed to live vacuous lives of heavy drinking, lap dances and empty slogans like JUICE or Join Us in Creating Excitement (Vincent 194). Overall, though, they were not nearly as likeable a group as the more traditional working class men on the bowling team, and it was ironic the Ned-Norah received praise from the boss as a hard-charging salesman. Ironically, her only real friend in this environment turned out to be a gay man who had at first thought she was a male homosexual, and they remained friends after she revealed her true gender.
In the last chapter of the book, Vincent discussed the difficult area of masculine identity and self-concept, including the difficulty of expressing emotion and forming intimate bonds with other men. Jerome, a self-hating gay man who was about to take final vows at a Catholic monastery, lectured Ned-Norah from the Bible about the sins of homosexuality after she blurted out a remark about how cute another monk was. Even though he despised gays and gay sexuality, he also seemed fascinated by them, and Vincent realized that he liked the order and discipline of monastic life as a way of controlling and avoiding his own desires. At the same time, Jerome also commented that “hugging some of his fellow monkswas like hugging a board” (Vincent 127). Vincent commented that the American monks, in spite of their vows of celibacy, were still very much American males and hence had difficulty expressing intimate or tender emotions. This was also a common complaint that she heard at one of Robert Bly’s men’s groups, where the participants said that they had never been able to express love for their fathers, cry when they felt sad or reveal their true feelings, particularly to other men. In these sense, women were far freer to show ‘softer’ feelings or appear to be vulnerable and sentimental, rather than tough, competitive and in control at all times. While males do indeed have more power, privilege and status in society, they also pay a terrible price for it.
On the negative side, even though Vincent learned a great deal about me, she often felt like a fraud and a deceiver, and finally had to give up the experiment because she was close to a nervous breakdown. She often felt like a fake man, a Potemkin man just playing a part, and even a “treacherous female, nosing her way in where she didn’t belong, listening to their secrets and invading their sacred space” (Vincent 246). As she reports in the final chapter of Self-Made Man, after the end of her life as Ned, she was having suicidal thoughts and voluntary checked into a psychiatric facility. She believed that the real cause of her depression was that “when I plucked out, one by one, my set of gendered characteristics, and slotted in Ned’s, unknowingly I drove the slim end of a wedge into my sense of self” (Vincent 276). From this she concluded that gender identity really was genetic and biochemical, and could not be easily altered by simply putting on an act as a male. Although she definitely did not mean that traditional gender roles were hereditary, the stress and strain of attempting to ‘pass’ as a man for over a year took more of a psychic toll that she would ever have imagined at the outset. Vincent’s experience in the psychiatric ward later inspired her to spend even more time as a patient, which to another undercover book called Voluntary Madness.
Vincent is an experienced journalist who was able to immerse herself into the world of men in ways that few women will ever experience, and it generally left her exhausted and depressed. Although the strain of maintain a façade for over a year would have taken a great toll on anyone, she managed to keep her sense of humor almost to the bitter end. Her impersonation was so successful that few of the people she encountered could even believe that she was a woman, though quite a few had suspected that Ned was gay. She was obviously unable to experience home, family and children as a man, while her attempts to date women could only be carried so far without giving away her true gender. That so many women were bitter about men and distrusted most of those they met came as a surprise to her, but she did not join in the general condemnation of the entire breed. As a man of uncertain background and education, unable to fake all the important contacts, degrees and credentials that would have allowed Ned into a less marginal occupation, Vincent’s experience at work was also limited to the lowest-level kinds of sales and service jobs that had a very high turnover. Just about anyone could be hired for jobs like that and just as quickly fired, and the security and pay were minimal. This was unavoidable since Ned was basically a guy off the street with limited career and employment prospects, but Vincent might have met very different types of men in more middle-class or professional jobs. They may not have been better or worse than the men on the bowling team or the creepy types that worked as door-to-door salesmen, but just different. Perhaps the most important lesson she learned was in the section of the book that seems to be the most criticized, the men who attended Robert Bly’s workshops in hopes of improving their ability to express emotions and share intimacy with others in a non-sexual way. The masculine world was indeed one of toughness, self-control, rigid roles and masks that concealed real feelings and identities, and ultimately this was the aspect of the male universe that Vincent found the most difficult.
WORKS CITED
Vincent, Norah. Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. Penguin Group, 2006.
