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

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Again, as with the bowling chapter, this is very much a description of a certain socio-economic strata, rather than of male life. You have the 18 year old pregnant girl in tight clothes and the 20-something Bulgarian ex-pro tennis-player, both scrambling to make a living in the harsh realities of non-college-graduate employment world.

Vincent also stated that she had gained more sympathy and understanding for men and 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." [5] Voluntary Madness [ edit ]

Beyond the Book

Double agent". The Guardian. London. March 18, 2006. Archived from the original on August 30, 2013 . Retrieved May 20, 2010. a b c "The World Ultra Wealth Report 2017". World Ultra Wealth Report (5ed.). Wealth-X. June 27, 2017 . Retrieved November 12, 2017. I don’t miss anything about being Ned. The few social advantages I discovered in manhood—the swagger, the self-confidence, the entitlement—I’ve learned to incorporate into my life as a woman. Everything else I was happy to discard. This is an intresting sociological study of manhood from a woman's point of view. It's certainly a provocotive book, which offers a lot of food for thought, although Norah's own journey is not paticularly in depth or comphrehensive.

I'm happy that Norah's dating life has been so much more hunky-dory than Ned's. (In fact I now imagine it being something like this .) But her horrible dating experience as Ned is so far from my experience that I feel very sorry for her that's her lasting impression of the heterosexual dating world. Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man is a 2006 book by journalist Norah Vincent, recounting an 18-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and then integrated into traditionally male-only venues, such as a bowling league and a monastery. She described this as "a human project" about learning. She states at the beginning that she is a lesbian but not transgender. The idea for this book came to me then, when I went out for the first time in drag. I was living in the East Village at the time, undergoing a significantly delayed adolescence, drinking and drugging a little too much, and indulging in all the sidewalk freak show opportunities that New York City has to offer. Going into this book, I thought it'd be all about how awesome it is to be a man. Vincent makes it clear early on that this would not be the case, which was a surprise to her as well. A tomboy in childhood and a lesbian, she writes: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. This book is good in the sense that Norah Vincent shattered some of her assumptions and that's always a good thing to do. Vincent (a "conservative lesbian" according to answers.com) is a skilled narrator with a seductively casual style which she, unfortunately, uses to thread her tale with dubious normative and essentialistic asides. It is a pity that Ned can never enter a Wall-street boardroom or CIA, though I guess we already have memoirs and confessionals from those places, and perhaps from women as well. Vincent, Norah (2008). Voluntary madness: my year lost and found in the loony bin. New York: Viking. p.14. ISBN 978-1-440-64103-9.

Coming from a woman who has only ever had meaningful relationships with other women, it's clear throughout the book that Vincent's preconceived ideas of what men are like is that all men (or at least straight men) are violent, brutish, and sex-crazed. I know plenty of women—including a handful of lesbians—who I feel have realistic and healthy ideas about what men are like—the good and the bad; but Vincent's concept of men throughout the book feels like the kind of ideas I and my friends had about women when we were inexperienced thirteen-year-olds who thought we already thought we had the world figured out. Vincent died via assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland on July 6, 2022, aged 53. Her death was not reported until August 2022. [3] Publications [ edit ] Through this research, Vincent becomes very sympathetic to men. She sees the stresses they have and the limited emotional range society permits them to have. These pressures may be similar to the ones bearing on her as she, like them, tries to act the male part. The most amazing thing about this book is how totally balanced and fair it is. She discovered many ways that men feel powerless in this society and presented them without sacrificing any of her feminist values. She seamlessly showed respect for both men and women simultaneously with a disrespect for both men and women. It never felt like a contradiction, but a well articulated understanding of the complexities of gender roles, and how they can hurt or help both men and women. Norah Vincent is an incredible writer.In his 1954 book The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches, Irvin G. Wyllie described how on February 2, 1832 Henry Clay had "coined the phrase 'self-made men'" during his speech to the United States Senate. [4] :344–345 [5] [6] Clay used the classic phrase to describe the "autonomy of our manufacturers ... in behalf of a paternalistic tariff" and the "irony has persisted throughout the history of the idea of self-help". [5] [7] :100 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. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, has been described as "undoubtedly the original self-made man." [1] and the greatest exemplar of the "self-made man". [2] Both the American Dream and the self-made man concepts are inextricably linked and are rooted in American history. Franklin's autobiography was described by the editor of the 1916 edition, as the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men". [2] His autobiography, which was dedicated to his son William Franklin, with the first chapter based on a 1771 letter to William, [3] was used as illustrative of the journey of the self-made man in the eighteenth century in Colonial United States. Franklin's introduced the archetypal self-made man through his own life story in which in spite of all odds he overcame his low and humble origins and inherited social position—his father was a candle-maker—to re-invent himself through self-improvement based on a set of strong moral values such as "industry, economy, and perseverance" [2] :143 thereby attaining "eminence" in the classic rags to riches narrative. Franklin's maxims as published in his Autobiography provide others, specifically his own son, with strategies for attaining status in the United States, described as a "land of unequaled opportunity" in the last quarter of the 18th century. [3] [2] :143 As a writer friend of mine told me when I embarked on this project, “When you write this intimately about real people, you are an assassin.” And he’s right. Almost invariably people object to something you’ve written about them. Either they say you got them wrong, or it didn’t happen that way, or that’s not how they remember it. I expect some of the Rashomon effect: The story of the same event will be told ten different ways by ten different observers. All the versions will be true and none of them will. The people in the book will recognize themselves. They’ll agree with the compliments and they’ll object to the disparagements, and that is to be expected.