Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man – Norah Vincent

In politically charged times, one must tread carefully with politically charged subjects. Topics such as feminism and male and female societal roles and circumstances tend to raise a whole lot of problems with people. Fair enough. It is hard to know where to go and find honest reflection and consideration about these topics, as much of what you get on the internet seems to smell of, for lack of a better word, bullshit.

Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man has a pretty great promise in light of this. Finding that she can relatively easily and convincingly pass for a man (with the right preparations), Vincent disguised herself as a man and ‘infiltrated’ men’s spaces and social circles for a year, this book being a journalistic recounting of her findings. She confesses to some biases on the outset, that she had been led to believe that men lived a life of relative ease, being buttressed by (to use the modern parlance that I did not encounter in the book) a per-established patriarchy. That was not at all what she found, and she actually finishes the book by confessing that after having lived as and in the company of men as long as she did, she is now greatly relieved that she was born a woman, and all illusions that were she only born a man her life would be so much easier were happily gone. I did find that she had some presuppositions left, but honestly I thought it was good enough.

If the book has not been picked up the horrific internet manosphere (or whatever the fuck the right-wing goons call themselves), it is precisely because Vincent does a very good, very journalistic job of what is going on. There is not much in the way of gendered finger pointing, but a calm reporting of incidents as they happen. If you have had the misfortune of having a conversation about feminism in either direction since the ‘culture war’ started, you know that this is all that it often distills to. Perhaps I am jaded by so many of the conversations I have had over the years, but it was a relief to see something written by the opposite gender that seemed to speak of sympathy and compassion for the team they were not on.