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

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For me, the bowling episode illustrated the fault lines in class more than gender. Vincent is fully unaware. She compares the men's mix of coaching and competitiveness to that her peers at a tennis camp. The men's retreat was interesting in that I haven't read much about these and that they rarely appear in the media. 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. urn:lcp:selfmademan00nora:epub:d49b782f-d41d-4ccb-b82a-499cfc07045d Extramarc UCLA Voyager Foldoutcount 0 Identifier selfmademan00nora Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7mp69b6k Isbn 9780143038702 Note: I noticed that the review got really long so I've added spoiler tags for each chapter to give a overview. All the chapter titles that are within the parethesis are mine, added as guidance for future readers and in jest since I thought Vincent's titles were a bit too... aggrandising.

Conan, Neal (January 25, 2006). "Norah Vincent: The Woman Behind 'Self-Made Man' " (Radio Broadcast Transcript). NPR . Retrieved December 26, 2022. Hahn, Steven (May 13, 2016). " 'A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1849,' by Sidney Blumenthal". The New York Times . Retrieved November 13, 2017. 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. Norah Vincent made it happen, with the idea of studying men among their own, their interaction with females and both sexes' place in society. What I personally expected: sociological insights, remarkable - and worrisome - stories, eye openers and a good dash of amusement.In John G. Cawelti's 1965 book Apostles of the self-made man, he listed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, and John Dewey as individuals "who either played a major role in shaping the success ideal or were associate with it in the public mind." [26] :1209 [27] Other reviewers have written about Norah Vincent's entitlement as a middle-class white woman and I completely agree. As a Swede I can't help but add that she has a purely American perspective. She never puts any of her experiences in a larger perspective, and especially not an international one. A lot of what she writes about in this book feels foreign to me not only since I'm a woman, but also since I'm a Swede. Cawelti, John G. (1988) [1965]. Apostles of the self-made man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.279. ISBN 9780226098708. 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.

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. I enjoyed the analysis of how even in this supposedly intellectual and spiritual environment the macho manliness was still important in some ways and instilled in its members. As Vincent concludes the fear of homosexuality has a strong link to this mechanism. Ironically a least two of the monks that Ned meets are confirmed to be gay, but they both supress it.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 I had lived in that neighborhood 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. A transphobic tirade masquerading as feminist adventure story? That was my first thought of what to say about this book (to highlight its most serious problems), but of course there's more to it than just that. 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. 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?