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

Lily Burana

While the side effects of Vincent's experiment are fascinating (including what happens when she reveals herself to be female and the negative impact on her psyche), it is her field reporting from Planet Guy that holds the most novelty. Self-Made Man will make many women think twice about coveting male "privilege" and make any man feel grateful that his gender burden is better understood.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

The disguise that former Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Vincent employed to trick dozens of people into believing her a man was carefully thought out: a new, shorter haircut; a pair of rectangular eyeglasses; a fake five o'clock shadow; a prosthetic penis; some preppy clothes. It was more than she needed. "[A]s I became more confident in my disguise... the props I had used... became less and less important, until sometimes I didn't need them at all," Vincent writes. Gender marking, she found, is more about attitude than appearance. Vincent's account of the year and a half she spent posing as a man is peppered with such predictable observations. To readers of gender studies literature, none of them will be especially illuminating, but Vincent's descriptions of how she learned, and tested, such chestnuts firsthand make them awfully fun to read. As "Ned," Vincent joined an all-male bowling league, dated women, worked for a door-to-door sales force, spent three weeks in a monastery, hung out in strip clubs and, most dangerous of all, went on a Robert Bly-style men's retreat. She creates rich portraits of the men she met in these places and the ways they behaved-as a lesbian, she's particularly good at separating the issues of sexuality from those of gender. But the most fascinating part of the story lies within Vincent herself-and the way that censoring her emotions to pass as a man provoked a psychological breakdown. For fans of Nickel and Dimed-style immersion reporting, this book is a sure bet. (Jan. 23) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Vincent, formerly a Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist, has written a spellbinding, eyeopening personal narrative of 18 months spent "passing" as a man. She assumed the identity of "Ned," hiding her body within male clothing. Ned joined a men's bowling league, accompanied male acquaintances to strip joints, dated women, worked in a high-pressure male-dominated sales job, and participated in a ritual-laden men's sensitivity group. Late in the experiment, Ned moved to a monastery to experience a male environment without women. With intelligence and sensitivity, Vincent relates her experiences and surprising discoveries about the secrets and rites of male society and the daily fears and desires of individual men. She analyzes the dating scene from the male perspective, emphasizing the need for males to be able to deal with rejection 90 percent of the time and describing the toll this takes on the male ego. She highlights over and over again the communication disconnect between men and women and how their preconceived notions affect how they act toward one another. One of the big surprises of Vincent's account is that, after she revealed her identity to the men she had fraternized with and the women she had "dated," the people readily accepted her. An often humorous, incisive, and fascinating account that validates the conclusions of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; for most public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/05.]-Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A fascinating, truly weird account of a female journalist who dresses in drag for 18 months in order to feel men's pain. What prompted Vincent, who notes that she is not a transsexual or a transvestite, to undertake a cross-dressing experiment as the 35-year-old nerdy Ned, who stinks at sports, is attractive to women, frequents strip clubs with new blue-collar buddies, brings a refreshing "emotional awareness" to a Catholic monastery and excels as a high-testosterone door-to-door salesman? Fascinated by the "unspoken codes of male experience," Vincent bets that becoming a man will allow her to "observe much more about the social differences between the sexes." With great seriousness she undertakes the creation of Ned's persona: Consulting a makeup artist, she fashions a credible five o'clock shadow (it gets a little nasty when she sweats); cuts her hair into a fade to emphasize a squarer jaw and dons rectangular glasses; wears a binding sports bra and pumps weights to bulk up her shoulders; and learns to modulate her already deep voice (men, she learns, don't talk in torrential prattle, but "lean back and pronounce with terse authority"). As Ned, she joins a working-class bowling team, who offer touching fatherly tips, and while she genuinely likes the men, revealing her identity to them after months of friendship seems a violent and traitorous blow. In chapters entitled "Friendship," "Sex," "Love," "Life," "Work" and "Self," Ned undergoes the rigors of male conditioning, though it is finally while participating in a men's-movement group that Vincent recognizes that most men in fact live in disguise-hiding rage, pain and shame. One of the curiouser books to appear of late-sure to attractattention.