Books: Self-Made Man

How the Other Half Lives

Journalist Norah Vincent was online Monday, Feb. 13, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss her book, "Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again." Vincent became "Ned" for eighteen months and chronicles her experiences of impersonating and "passing" as a man.

Read the Review (Post, Book World, Feb. 5)

A transcript follows.

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Norah Vincent: Hi everyone. Glad to be here today. Looking forward to a great discussion. This is the best part of the process for me, the discussions this book is provoking. So let's have at it.

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New York. N.Y.: As a man, were you primarily accepted as a heterosexual man, or did your feminine features make many believe you were homosexual? If so, what did you learn about being thought of as a homosexual man?

Norah Vincent: Many people did think Ned was gay, and that was very difficult, more difficult really than being perceived as a lesbian. Gay men threaten masculinity and men far more than gay women threaten femininity and women. I think in part this has to do with the differences between male and female sexuality, but in part it has to do with the culture's remaining emphasis on the importance of the traditional male role. Gay men threaten that role to such an extent that men are always on the look out for it, as if they were defending the very pillars of our culture, which in a way I suppose they are.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: Did you ever read "Black Like Me", and if so, did you read it before you wrote your book? Did the book have any impact on your thoughts?

Norah Vincent: I did read BLACK LIKE ME before I started the project. I enjoyed it and was moved by it, but I also felt that it had only limited bearing on what I was attempting to do. Griffin didn't have to work very hard to experience the stark differences between the way blacks and whites were treated. He was, after all, doing it in the deep south during segregation. All he had to do was ride the bus to feel the difference. He couldn't even eat in the same restaurants. Seeing the differences was easier in that respect, whereas for me I found that I had to work harder to get at the meat of the experience, to discover the differences. If you just walk down the street as a man or a woman in this day and age the differences in how you are treated aren't nearly so stark. You have to do a lot more interpreting of subtle differences. That's part of why I chose to join a bowling league and a men's group. I needed settings with characters and scenarios built in, and ways of contextualizing my experiences so as to draw meaningful conclusions from them.

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Rockville, Md.: Do you think you were treated more or less deferentially in male drag. What did you notice about your own self-concept and persona during and after your change?

Norah Vincent: At times I was treated more deferentially as a man. I found this to be especially true in the workplace and when I was wearing a jacket and tie. I felt a kind of license to brag about myself and take control, and an expectation of competence coming from other people that made me feel and behave more confidently. But at other times, especially on dates and in the singles scene, I was often treated with a fair amount of disrespect or at least suspicion. In that setting I felt very small and judged in way that I didn't in my suit at work.

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Washington, D.C.: As a man I was very confused by the reviews I read of your book. What the reviewers said you learned appeared to be no different than topics and discussions I would bring up when involved with hardcore feminists in the early 1990s. Don't you think you could have gotten the same information from talking to men who were gender or feminist theorists?

Norah Vincent: While it's true that I discovered things that gender theorists and researchers have discovered, there is a great deal of difference between reading about someone else's experience or mulling the conclusions they've reached by gathering data, and actually experiencing the so-called "gender gap" for yourself. A crucial difference I would argue.

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Rockville, Md.: What did you hear from women that surprised you the most?

Norah Vincent: I suppose it was several women's willingness to keep seeing me even after they knew that I wasn't a man. These were heterosexual women, and I guess I didn't expect them to be so sexually flexible.

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Washington, D.C.: Any plans for a follow up book or are you planning on going in a completely different direction?

Norah Vincent: I'm going to pick up where this book left off, but not in the way you might expect. It won't be about gender, but it will be about culture and human nature and it will be another immersion project.

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Eastern Market, Washington, D.C.: Norah,

I've heard you interviewed a couple of times and then read a Washington Post review of your book. My conclusion: congratulations on a great gimmick, but I really don't think there's anything in the book that goes beyond the received wisdom on the topic of how it looks from the other side of the gender divide. Maybe I should do the flip-side and dress up like a really ugly woman (unlike you, ugly would be my only option) of a "certain age" (I'm 55, so that also would be preordained) and do a book on it. I'll bet I'd find out that it's better to be young and pretty.

Norah Vincent: Well, you might say something similar about a lot of the books that have been written in this immersion style. John Howard Griffin found that it was hard to be a black man in the rural south during segregation. Barbara Ehrenreich found that working for minimum wage is really hard and tiring, and George Orwell found out that being homeless is a drag. But I don't think you'd say that any of those books isn't worth reading, or that their insights on their experiences didn't far outstrip their fairly obvious conclusions. Yes, I didn't find much that would blow your head off or contradict what we've always heard about men and women, but if you take the journey with me, I think you'll find that it was worth it, and that it makes you think in a new way about your own sex and mine.

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Arlington, Va.: I saw you on the Colbert Report. Your story is a great one.

Has anyone optioned your book for a screenplay yet?

Norah Vincent: Working on it. I have an agent in Hollywood who's very excited about it, but nothing firm yet.

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Washington, D.C.: Are men and women really that different? What about women's perceptions of you when you were dressed as a man surprised you most?

Norah Vincent: Yes. Emphatically yes. We are unbelievably different. What surprised me most about women's perceptions of me was their prejudice. Most women either greeted me with suspicion, or an assumption of superiority, or at the very least a sense that I was the one who would be expected to do most of the work in the conversation. I often felt as if I was having to make up ground, prove myself to them in some way. I didn't expect this and I found it irritating to say the least.

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Falls Church, Va.: Did you go on any dates as a man?

Norah Vincent: Yes. I went on about thirty or more dates with women as a man. And no, nobody ever knew that I wasn't a man. Everyone I told was surprised.

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Washington, D.C.: Norah, I have to hand it to you... this took some serious you-know-whats. Were you just scared out of your mind the first time you appeared as a dude?

Norah Vincent: Yes I was scared. I really didn't know whether it would work, and I was foolish enough to make my first big attempt in a bowling alley on men's league night. Picture it. A room full of burly, working class, no nonsense guys, and me, the total stranger, geek boy walking in big as you please, pretending to be just one of the guys. That first hour was nerve wracking I can tell you.

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Washington, D.C.: So, is life harder as a man or a woman?

Norah Vincent: I found life to be much harder as a man. Now maybe that's because I'm a socialized woman and I found the transition especially hard because of that, but I really didn't like the limitations I felt imposed on me, especially the emotional limitations, when I went from female to male. I felt some sense of expansiveness, too, in that I sometimes found myself walking taller with more confidence as a man, but I've been able to incorporate that benefit of manhood into my life as a woman in a way that I was never able to incorporate the good parts of my life as a woman into my life as a man.

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Fairfax, Va.: Do you feel your personal attractiveness gained you access to the role reversal's "success"?

Norah Vincent: I don't think of myself as being a particularly attractive person, so I don't know if it helped or not. I do think that I have one of those faces--big features, squarish jaw--that allowed me to pull off the illusion more easily than many women could. Also it helps that I'm tall--5 feet 10--and that I have a fairly deep voice.

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Washington, D.C.: Why do you like "immersion projects"?

Norah Vincent: For me it's like getting the best of fiction and non-fiction all rolled into one. You get to write it like fiction, with dialogue and character sketches and scenes, but you don't have to make it all up from scratch. Plus, I like watching people and taking notes, figuring out what makes them tick, and then figuring out what makes them function the way they do in the world at large. Truth is much, much stranger and more fascinating than fiction, and I find that the best way to learn the unvarnished truth about what it's really like to be a particular person, or live a particular life, is to do it for yourself. As they say, there's no substitute for experience.

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McLean, Va.: Do you yourself wish to be a man? If so, would you consider transgender surgery?

Norah Vincent: I've never wanted to be a man. After being one for a year and a half I can say even more emphatically that I'm really, really glad to be a woman.

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Rockville, Md.: "Most women either greeted me with suspicion, or an assumption of superiority ..."

This is one reason why I limit my contacts to those I see at work or in my profession. I have my Ph.D., and was a member of Mensa so I consider myself qualifed, but not up to the challlenge. Of course a happy marriage makes it easier to say the grapes are sour. But I really don't need that sort of attitude.

Norah Vincent: I hear you. Dating and finding a mate are hard enough without someone jumping down your throat at every word, or treating you like some kind of inferior ape. I can't say that women showed themselves at their best in that regard.

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Alexandria, Va.: What would you have done if you had been found out? Did you have a backup plan? Did you anticipate any angry encounters, dangerous encounters? How did you justify the ruse to yourself? In the name of what?

Norah Vincent: I knew that if I got caught, then getting caught would have to become part of the story. If I had been beaten up, I would have written about what that felt like and why I thought it happened, what drove that particular person to react in that way. I knew that the risk was always there, but this type of journalism entails a certain amount of risk. That's what makes it interesting both to write and to read. I justified my deception in the name of what I learned, and I balanced what I learned against the pain I might cause other people. Whether I can truly justify it, I guess you'll have to judge for yourself. But I can say with relative certainty that I got far more hurt in the process than anyone I deceived.

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Washington, D.C.: Are you a wannabe actor?

Norah Vincent: I grew up in the theatre, and I've always been fascinated by the ways in which art and life overlap, but no, I don't think I'd make a good actor or really like it much.

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Washington, D.C,: What is the point of doing what you did? Was it just to assume the role and then write a book? Then what? What does it all prove? And is this all just to cash in on the current Brokeback Mountain and TransAmerica movie thing?

Norah Vincent: The point is to live someone else's life for a while and learn from the inside out what that life is like, how it differs from your own, and how you might better understand the other half of the species. The experience has been invaluable to me. It proves nothing. Proof is very hard to come by even in science. But this was never meant to prove anything. It was meant to spark conversation, to get us talking about something that fascinates and is deeply meaningful to us all. I doubt that I'll cash in much. I certainly haven't yet.

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College Park, Md.: How did you avoid things getting "intimate" on all of the dates you went out on?

Norah Vincent: Most of the time it wasn't hard, especially if I only went on one date. But increasingly I found myself saying rather distant goodbyes to people so as to avoid a goodnight kiss and such. Of course in one case I didn't avoid sexual contact, but very quickly after it began to happen I stopped and told her the truth. I guess you'll have to read the book to find out what happened next.

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Washington, D.C.: Which was harder? Writing the book or getting it published? Would it make a different if you're a man or a woman?

Norah Vincent: Writing the book was DEFINITELY harder. I find writing very laborious, not to mention the research. In this case, given the nature of the project, the research was exhausting. Publishing was a breeze by comparison.

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Springfield, Va.: Are you getting any flack from people at all concerning misleading the women you "dated?" I am an aspiring writer and that's a great idea for a book; however, at any point did you feel guilty for playing with people's emotions so you could write the book?

Norah Vincent: I did feel guilty. A lot. In fact that's part of what drove me into a deep depression at the end. But overall I'd say that I deceived people romantically for a very short period of time, and most of them were far more interested in the project than they were hurt by the experience.

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Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.: Norah,

I'm not trying to be prurient here, but I've got to wonder about some of those dates you had while "under cover." Didn't you ever get the idea that perhaps your date was at least potentially interested in sex early on in the relationship? Did you ever find yourself sort of steering clear of that kind of vibe if you sensed that kind of interest?

Norah Vincent: I did have to steer clear sometimes, especially in one case where it was clear from the moment we met that she was attracted to Ned. We only had two dates, the second of which was quite short. Then I told her that I was not a man. We were never physically intimate. I tried to be as careful as I could with her feelings, but she wasn't very pleased with my disclosure.

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Rockville, Md.: Wow, what's with all the hostility in some of the questions? Why do they care enough about your book or why you wrote it to be angry? There's this undercurrent of, "How dare you?"

Norah Vincent: I suppose that's true. Interestingly, the most hostility seems to be coming from people who haven't actually bothered to read the book. People who have usually see its value and appreciate it.

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Washington, D.C.: The hostility you're getting in this forum is pretty interesting -- whether you're interested in the book or not, it's just a book, and the fact that the mere existence of a book on this seems to be upsetting some people is justification enough for your having written it, I think. So thank you.

And the question -- what beyond hostility did you get from women? As a male, it's nice to hear someone else say this, because I think it's very true. But I'd like to hear more description of those relationships. On the flip-side, I'd love to hear how you enjoyed male conversation -- personally, I go to women for conversation even though I'm a man, so I can't imagine you found it very fulfilling.

Norah Vincent: Some women were wonderful to Ned. A joy. One in particular who was just charming. Yet, interestingly, she told me as things progressed that though she enjoyed Ned's company a lot, she didn't find Ned physically imposing enough to be attractive. The animal attraction thing got in the way.

As for male conversation, it's true that I found it frustrating on one level. But on another I was always trying to think about why it was so limited and how that might change, so it kept me interested to a degree I might otherwise not have been. I agree with you, though, that men's stilted exchanges can be hard for someone as blabby as me.

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Bethesda, Md.: So you felt someone falling for you?

Norah Vincent: I don't know about falling for me, but attracted. I had to be careful with that and with her feelings, though as I said, some embarrassment was unavoidable.

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Virginia: Do women prefer to marry-up? I noticed women want to marry the geeks, nerds and dorks so they can have a financial future. I don't see any jocks in my neighborhood with those pretty wives.

Norah Vincent: It does seem that a lot of women are more concerned with what a man can provide than what he looks like, whereas the opposite is usually true with men. They seem to be far more interested in how old a woman is--i.e. they want them young--and how attractive they find her. Thus, you rarely see older women with younger guys. But when it comes down to it, both are fairly superficial standards of judgment and not particularly predictive of a good, lasting relationship.

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Norah Vincent: Thanks everyone for your questions. I enjoyed the exchange very much. For those of you out there who remain skeptical I can only say, give it a chance. Read the book and see what you think. For the rest of you, thank you for your insightful comments and thoughts.

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