Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man

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a b c "Nora Vincent". Lyceum Agency. Archived from the original on April 10, 2015 . Retrieved July 19, 2021. A " self-made man" is a person whose success is of their own making. In the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, the idea of the self-made man as an archetype or cultural ideal looms large, but has been criticized by some as a myth or cult. In regard to Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, let's begin by saying: girlfriend has issues. While she was ostensibly going undercover as a man to research how men (read: white heterosexual lower middle-class men) really are, a whole lot of the book is concerned with the Big Reveal -- telling the people she's duped that she's really a woman and that she intends to write about their misguided attempts to relate to her as a man. This is barely justified as a postmortem of how well she passed and how she might do better at it. Mostly it just seems mean. Have you ever relied on sexual stereotypes for your own benefit? Have you ever challenged sexual convention? What prompted these behaviors? How were they received? Perhaps the situation was made worse by the fact that many of the guys I fancied were slim indie guys. Perhaps it would have been easier with more 'manly' men. Or perhaps not. The point is that I don't know. Mainly because I never tried all the different type

She wrote about how the only time she had ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man: her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions. Features of herself that had before been seen as butch were seen as oddly effeminate. Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together." [2] [3] Audiobook [ edit ]

Media Reviews

Debs, Eugene V. (April 1893). "self-made+men"+is+seemingly+paradoxical&pg=RA5-PA267 "Self-Made Men". Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine. Unsigned editorial. Vol.17, no.4 . Retrieved November 14, 2017. The term "self-made men" is seemingly paradoxical — since men who rise from obscurity to eminence in any of the walks of life, must have been assisted by agencies quite independent of themselves a b c d e Pine, Frank Woodworth, ed. (1916). "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin". Illustrated by E. Boyd Smith. Henry Holt and Company via Gutenberg Press. Among the people you met as Ned, what range of reactions do you expect the book will receive? Do you think they will recognize themselves? In his 2000 book Creating the Modern Man, cultural historian Tom Pendergast traced the way in which the concept of the self-made man was referenced in men's magazines from 1900 through 1950. [39] :10 Pendergast divided masculinity into only two periods: Victorian, which was "based on property-ownership and family", and "post-Victorian", which was "based on a cult of personality, self-improvement, and narcissism". [40] He described the "ideal Victorian man" as a "property owning man of character who believed in honesty, integrity, self-restraint, and duty to God, country, and family". [39] :10 The post-Victorian image of the self-made man was crucial to Pendergast's study. He revealed how through magazines men "were encouraged to form their identities around an ideology of hard work." [39] :10 Criticism of concept [ edit ] I once dragged a a very embarrassed male friend into a shady strip club with the hope of seeing some striptease, but seeing as we had arrived before any shows had started, we left without having seen anything. I don't think pole dancing or strip shows in themselves have to be bad. There is a great scene in How to Be a Woman where Caitlin Moran goes to a strip club in Berlin with Lady Gaga and has a blast. The difference between this experience and Vincent's is of course the standard of the place. The club (clubs?) Ned visits are all shady and with more focus, it would seem, on selling the jerking-of-lap-dance than presenting the striptease dance titillation. No one in Ned's type of club were enjoying themselves. The men were there to get away from their normal lives and the women because they had to. Both the men and women involved seem humiliated and let down by the experience. Once again, the conclusion could be that this is more a class than a gender issue.

A woman can be downright ugly on close inspection, and every desirable aspect of her fake, the product of bleach, silicon and surgery, but if she's sporting the right signifiers, she's hot. She is her disguise, not a person but a type. A suit, I found, does very much the same thing for a man. You see it, not him, and you bow to it.” She had developed her own technique for creating a beard whereby you cut half inch chunks of hair from unobtrusive parts of your own head, cut them into smaller pieces, and then more or less glopped them onto your face with spirit gum. Using a small round freestanding mirror on her desk, she showed me how to do it in the dim, greenish light of her cramped studio apartment. It wasn't at all precise and it wouldn't have passed muster in the daylight, but it was good enough for the stage, and it would work well enough for our purposes in dark bars at night. I made myself a goatee and mustache, and a pair of baroque sideburns. I put on a baseball cap, loose-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt. In the full-length mirror I looked like a frat boy-sort of. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-07-27 21:11:58 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA159001 Boxid_2 CH115101 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor Norah Mary Vincent was born in Detroit, and grew up both there and in London where her father was employed as a lawyer for the Ford Motor Company. [3] She attended Williams College, where she graduated with a BA in philosophy in 1990, before undertaking graduate studies at Boston College. [2] [3] She also worked as an editor for Free Press. [3] Career [ edit ] Self-Made Man [ edit ]These two insights were alone worth the price of the book, although there was much else that was eye-opening. The crappy way she was treated by the straight women she tried to date was amusing in a macabre sort of way. (And yes, that too resonated. Unlike some of the other reviewers here, I deeply regret to say that I AM acquainted with many women who fit these descriptions.) In addition, the moment-to-moment harassment of men to keep them in their "masculine" roles was news to me. Yet, once more, it rang completely true as I examined it. That is not to say her accounts arn't revealing though! But more intresting I found was her discoveries about what and why her gender was important to her. Self confessed tomboy and butch lesbian, she expected to have no trouble being an average joe, but found when passing as a male she came across as effeminate and frequently stumbled into male culture faux-pas's. Being a man she found meant far more than just appearing to be so, she found she was being resocialised into her male persona, and as a female, the stress of this was eventually to great. a b c d Swansburg, John (September 29, 2014). "The Self-Made Man: The story of America's most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth". Slate . Retrieved November 12, 2017.

She joined a men's bowling team, where she says, "[the men] just took me in ... no questions asked." She eventually became friends with them, even coming along to strip clubs and dating women who had no idea of her true sex. She later revealed that she was actually female to the men, who "took it well". [4] Ned is going to be an extremely hard act to follow. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what to do next, and I haven’t hit on anything definitive yet. I’m trying very hard to resist the Hollywood temptation to find a formula that works and work it to death. I’d like to follow my imagination and have an adventure and that’s all I know right now. In the restaurant business Frank Giuffrida, the owner and manager of the Hilltop Steak House which opened in Saugus 1961 and became the biggest restaurant in the United States by the 1980s, is described as self-made man in the Slate article. [1] [28]

Perhaps the most telling part (and least explored by Vincent) was her desire at the culmination of the men's retreat to be cut by one of the men she'd befriended. She wanted to be physically hurt, to be punished for her deceptions. I couldn't help but wonder if she'd set up all of her investigations as a way to get herself bashed, either as a gay man who couldn't behave appropriately in the homophobic situations she enabled or as a transvestite woman breaching communities which have consciously and intentionally withdrawn from women. Was her depression at the end of the experiment simply the suffering she felt she deserved and couldn't find at anyone else's hands? Can you describe the process of your readjustment to life as a woman? How long did it take? Were there any surprises involved? What, if anything, do you miss about living as a man?