Nora Vincent

NORA VINCENT left her job to research Self-Made Man. In 2003 she took a leave from writing her nationally syndicated political opinion columns in order to write her book Self-Made Man, the story of a woman living, working and dating in drag as a man

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Post, The Village Voice and The Washington Post, among other journals, and she has appeared on numerous radio and television talk shows. She lives in New York City.

SELF-MADE MAN

A journalist's provocative, spellbinding account of her eighteen months spent undercover will transform the way we think about what it means to be a man.
Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Norah Vincent immersed herself in a cultural experience and reported back on what she observed incognito. For over a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rimmed glasses and her own size 11 1/2 shoes, a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as one among them. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention.

In the first chapter of SELF-MADE MAN she tells us how she had the idea of this book:

“Seven years ago, I had my first tutorial in becoming a man.

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.

Back then I was hanging around a lot with a drag king whom I had met through friends. She used to like to dress up and have me take pictures of her in costume. One night she dared me to dress up with her and go out on the town. I'd always wanted to try passing as a man in public, just to see if I could do it, so I agreed enthusiastically.”

Her experience was amazing and surprising. She tells:

“I had lived in that neighbourhood for years, walking its streets where men lurk outside of bodegas, on stoops and in doorways much of the day. As a woman, you couldn't walk down those streets invisibly. You were an object of desire or at least semiprurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren't pretty-that, or you were just another piece of pussy to be put in its place. Either way, their eyes followed you all the way up and down the street, never wavering, asserting their dominance as a matter of course. If you were female and you lived there, you got used to being stared down, because it happened every day and there wasn't anything you could do about it. But that night in drag, we walked by those same stoops and doorways and bodegas. We walked right by those same groups of men. Only this time they didn't stare. On the contrary, when they met my eyes they looked away immediately and concertedly and never looked back. It was astounding, the difference, the respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposely not staring.”

After that experience, she was thinking how she could research more, and she tells:

“After the whole incident had blown over, I started thinking that if in such a short time in drag I had learned such an important secret about the way males and females communicate with each other, and about the unspoken codes of male experience, then couldn't I potentially observe much more about the social differences between the sexes if I passed as a man for a much longer period of time? It seemed true, but I wasn't intrepid enough yet to do something that extreme. Besides it seemed impossible, both psychologically and practically, to pull it off. So I filed the information away in my mind for a few more years and got on with other things.”

Then, in the winter of 2003, while she was watching a reality television show on the A& E network, the idea came back to her. In the show, two male and two female contestants set out to transform themselves into the opposite sex-not with hormones or surgeries, but purely by costume and design. While she was watching the tv she remembered her experience in drag. And she tells:

“But for me, watching the show brought my former experience in drag to the forefront of my mind again and made me realize that passing in costume in the daylight could be possible with the right help. I knew that writing a book about passing in the world as a man would give me the chance to explore some of the unexplored territory that the show had left out, and that I had barely broached in my brief foray in drag years before
I was determined to give the idea a try.”

What do you think about her experience?
Is it positive or it doesn't matter?