Book review: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent

The woman who found it hard to be a man

In going undercover as a man the New York-based journalist Norah Vincent attempted to gain an insight into the life of the straight white male. Published in 2006, her book documents 18 months spent immersed in various male cultural settings while disguised as the opposite sex.

With the help of a makeup artist friend, Vincent, a lesbian and self-described tomboy, undergoes a convincing transformation. She creates a beard made out of wool crepe hair. She bulks up at the gym, flattens her breasts with a tight-fitting sports bra and fills a jock strap with a “packable softie” - a flaccid prosthetic member. She adds rectangular framed glasses to masculinise her face, gets her hair cut into a flattop and employs the services of a vocal coach to deepen her voice. The result is Ned, an alter-ego that Vincent skilfully uses to penetrate various unglamorous male milieus.

‘Ned’ joins a blue-collar bowling league, goes door-to-door selling coupon books, joins a monastery and a mythopoetic men’s retreat. “Leisure, play and friendship are the salient themes,” Vincent writes. As part of the immersive experience Ned spends time in seedy strip clubs with bowling pals and goes on romantic dates with several women. (Ned reveals the truth about his identity early on in the courtships and, as Norah, even goes onto sleep with some of the women).

Vincent subsequently develops a profound sympathy for the biological men she fraternises with during her time undercover as Ned. She discovers that men are in pain and that the “straightjacket of the male role” is enforced by other men but also by women: nobody respects an effeminate straight man (he is presumed weak) and many people assume that Ned is gay. Vincent describes the male social role as “no less constrictive than its female counterpart” and “more like joining a subculture than a country club”.

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Nowadays men who grumble about their dating lives with laments about ‘women’ risk being placed in one of two pitiable categories: misogynist or mens’ rights activist. (To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, only by being terrible do the latter avoid being comic.) As a biological women, Vincent has the freedom to be more candid about her liaisons with women while undercover as Ned. Vincent notices that a large proportion of the mid-thirties women Ned takes out on dates are psychologically jaundiced and “incapable of seeing any new man as an individual”.

These women prattle on endlessly about the inborn evils of the opposite sex and project onto Ned the malignancy they expect from men. “For them, as for many of us, romantic hurt equaled romantic blame… and romantic blame was assigned more often to the sex, not the morals, of the person inflicting the pain.” Some of the women had indeed had negative experiences with men in the past. But they remained single largely because they were solipsistic (this is Manhattan after all) and boring. “I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and coworkers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember, yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam.” Men are supposed to be the ones who won’t stop talking about themselves. I’ll take women’s word for that. Yet this shortcoming has never struck me as particularly gendered. I too have been on my fair share of dates with women where [as Vincent puts it] “listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy”.

Ned frequently finds himself in a different quandary when it comes to women’s expectations. Vincent, a student of radical feminism, had assumed going into the project that Ned would be a catch romantically: essentially a woman in a man’s body. But it wasn’t that simple. “Women’s desires were stubbornly kaleidoscopic and their more subtle proclivities even more uncategorizable,” writes Vincent. Ned discovers that men must put themselves out there and risk rejection, which Vincent describes as “a lesson in female power”. Moreover, the experience of being a man on the receiving end of unforgiving female scrutiny turns the woman furtively lurking under Ned’s woollen beard into a self-confessed “momentary misogynist”.

One might criticise Vincent here for a failing common to those of her political persuasion. (Vincent describes herself as a “libertarian conservative”). That is, she fails to locate the genuine source of power in male and female relations and focuses instead on the surface level stuff. However Vincent is an astute enough observer of the human condition to recognise the way in which thwarted male desire can quickly turn violent. There is, as Vincent writes, a deep connection between women and sex and masculine self-worth and violence. “Want me, it all seems to say. Love me. Desire me. Choose me. I need you. You ignore me. You distain me. You destroy me. I hate you.”

It was feminist literature that alerted a younger Vincent to the fact that female gender roles can be restrictive and oppressive. But while living as Ned, Vincent gains an insight into how sexuality can in turn shape gendered behaviour. Men and women who conform to the desires of the opposite sex are at a distinct reproductive advantage. Gender is partly a social construct; however it is also downstream from sexual desire. “You get to be what’s expected of you,” Vincent writes. Thus as a male caught in the female gaze you are “a coached jumble of stoic poses.” The women Ned goes out with want a world-bestriding colossus who can pin them to the bed (“Ned was too willowy for that”); and they want someone who is “supportive of feminism in all its particulars”; and they want a man who is still willing to pick up the check. Good luck with that.

Eventually, while spending time at an Iron John retreat, the facade of Ned begins to crack. Vincent writes that she found it “increasingly difficult and then impossible to keep my male and female personae intact simultaneously”. She describes the effort as “like trying to sustain two mutually exclusive ideas in my mind at the same time”. Vincent discovers that gender identity is not something one can simply slough off smoothly like a snake shedding its skin. Gender is, she concludes, “in the genes as surely as sex and sexuality are”. She finishes the book by writing that she is “glad in every way to be a woman”, before committing herself to hospital for depression. And here we find the beginnings of her next feat of immersive journalism, a book that would be published in 2008 as Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin.

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Self-Made Man was an instant best seller when it was published in 2006. Yet it had its critics. Vincent’s politics were too much for some people and overrode any lived experience she might otherwise have as a lesbian. Her contrarian and right-leaning political beliefs - expressed in columns for publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice and The Advocate - precluded Vincent (in the eyes of some) from writing about oppression at all. Indeed, it is not certain that Self-Made Man would be published today in our age of ‘sensitivity readers’ and social media heresy hunts. Empathy today is celebrated only insofar as it is useful politically - i.e. if it is directed at an appropriately subjugated recipient. Straight white men are the butt of the joke, whereas Vincent’s transformation into one left her with “an inescapable empathy” for them.

It is this type of empathy that has given way to ‘sensitivity’ in the modern age. Different societal groups are said to have their own sacrosanct ‘truths’ - the latter being a by-product of ‘lived experience’. Seeking to understand the perspective of another now comes with a significant degree of risk attached. The greatest faux pas one can make in progressive circles is to try (inadvertently or otherwise) to speak on behalf of a group or subdivision to which one does not belong; or, pace Vincent, to ‘cosplay’ as something one is not. Even crossdressing itself has become passé; in order not to be rendered persona non grata one must be channelling the inner soul of the sex one is performing as. Vincent is clear that her book is an immersive journalistic project and that she is neither a transsexual nor going through a sexual identity crisis. Nowadays one imagines she would be firmly told to stay in her lane.

But Vincent got away with it in 2006 because she was a woman and a lesbian, both of which accrued her some slack with the people who policed the demarcations of acceptable discourse back then. They have since been dethroned, and nearly two decades on one can almost hear the sound of tumbrels when Vincent’s name is mentioned. Members of the second sex have today been shoved aside to make way for the third sex, and white-skinned lesbian tomboys like Norah Vincent have been recast as potentially transphobic ‘Karens’.

Norah Vincent died at a clinic in Switzerland in the summer of 2022 by assisted suicide. She was 53 and had a history of depression. Denunciations of her book continue to reverberate around websites such as Goodreads where she is accused of being “elitist” and “classist” and of writing a “transphobic tirade”. I read a few of these ‘reviews’ while researching this article. It was a depressing experience - commissar brain makes for a depressing spectacle. Norah Vincent may no longer be with us but Self-Made Man is an excellent read and will I suspect remain a popular book for many years to come. Hopefully her doctrinaire critics are ‘literally shaking’ at the prospect.