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

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Self-Made Man not only exposes the truth about contemporary manhood but is quite intimate in its discussion of your personal history, sexual identity, and emotions. How do you feel having so much of yourself in the book? How did you decide what to reveal and what to keep private? 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.

Double agent". The Guardian. London. March 18, 2006. Archived from the original on August 30, 2013 . Retrieved May 20, 2010. Ward, Kate (December 10, 2008). "Voluntary Madness". EW.com. Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on November 24, 2020 . Retrieved August 19, 2022. a b c "The World Ultra Wealth Report 2017". World Ultra Wealth Report (5ed.). Wealth-X. June 27, 2017 . Retrieved November 12, 2017. a b c Pendergast, Tom (2000). Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950. Columbia, Missouri and London, UK: University of Missouri Press. pp. 289. ISBN 9780826212801. self-made man. Discuss the two quotations at the beginning of the book. What does each one mean? What is their combined effect?

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I once dragged a a very embarrassed male friend into a shady strip club with the hope of seeing some striptease, but seeing as we had arrived before any shows had started, we left without having seen anything. I don't think pole dancing or strip shows in themselves have to be bad. There is a great scene in How to Be a Woman where Caitlin Moran goes to a strip club in Berlin with Lady Gaga and has a blast. The difference between this experience and Vincent's is of course the standard of the place. The club (clubs?) Ned visits are all shady and with more focus, it would seem, on selling the jerking-of-lap-dance than presenting the striptease dance titillation. No one in Ned's type of club were enjoying themselves. The men were there to get away from their normal lives and the women because they had to. Both the men and women involved seem humiliated and let down by the experience. Once again, the conclusion could be that this is more a class than a gender issue. Debs, Eugene V. (April 1893). "self-made+men"+is+seemingly+paradoxical&pg=RA5-PA267 "Self-Made Men". Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine. Unsigned editorial. Vol.17, no.4 . Retrieved November 14, 2017. The term "self-made men" is seemingly paradoxical — since men who rise from obscurity to eminence in any of the walks of life, must have been assisted by agencies quite independent of themselves

What influence do you think the media have on sexual roles? Do you see any trends that alarm or encourage you? 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.

Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9694 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000593 Openlibrary_edition Along the way, Vincent takes joins an all-male bowling league, takes jobs in several "testosterone-driven" careers, dates countless women and ends up going to an all male therapy retreat. If there was one major complaint I would take with this book, it would be that it seemed front-loaded. The earlier experiences were frequently ones that I could relate to more, whereas later experiences like the therapy group seemed to be dealing with some fairly damaged individuals. It got especially difficult at the end, trying to take away any serious message from people who just didn't seem to represent the larger population - either male or female. The premise of Self-Made Man is one that ought to grab your attention and be good for some entertainment value, even if the book were horribly mangled in its execution. Fortunately for me, Vincent did an excellent job in the balancing act, keeping her tale delightfully salacious while also sharing a new perspective on a question which has become monotonously tiresome in its everyday ordinariness. 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. This makes me think I would not want that. The book also makes me think that I wish I had a man with a mixture of male/female traits. With long hair and a deep voice who can be himself around me and he'll let me be myself.

If you want to read the short version of the book, read this chapter. This is where Vincent puts all of her experiences together and analyses her life as a man. Vincent wrote that the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man. Her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions. Features which had been perceived as butch when she presented as a woman were perceived as oddly effeminate when she presented as a man. Vincent asserted that, since the experiment, she had more fully realized the benefits of being female and the disadvantages of being male, stating, "I really like being a woman. ... I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege." [5]

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Having no children myself, I’m hardly in a position to judge, but if I had to say, I suppose I would suggest leniency when it comes to children’s self-discovery. Too often parenting is a kind of narcissism. Parents see their children as little more than extensions of themselves, or potential re-enactors of their lost youths and missed chances. This is toxic to any child’s self-actualization, especially when it comes to matters as intimate as sexuality and gender identity. If a child shows a proclivity for a particular style of dress or hobby or pursuit that the parent may not deem gender appropriate, or does not himself like, I think it is the parent’s duty to resist showing disapproval, or, worse, distaste, and to encourage the child to be most authentically himself or herself in every way possible. God knows, the child will find enough disapproval in the outside world. Our parents are the first and foremost people whose job it is to love us entirely for who and what we are, and that means, when it comes to the expression of our individuality, letting us be.

Miller, Bryan (April 6, 1988). "Oh, to Dine in Saugus, Mass". The New York Times . Retrieved November 12, 2017. That is not to say her accounts arn't revealing though! But more intresting I found was her discoveries about what and why her gender was important to her. Self confessed tomboy and butch lesbian, she expected to have no trouble being an average joe, but found when passing as a male she came across as effeminate and frequently stumbled into male culture faux-pas's. Being a man she found meant far more than just appearing to be so, she found she was being resocialised into her male persona, and as a female, the stress of this was eventually to great. The sociological aspects of gender in lap dance clubs and door to door sales have been covered from so many angles that while Vincent's stories are interesting to read, there are no breakthroughs. Who wouldn't be surprised to find sad males, self-hating dancers or attention to the bottom line by dancers and management at lap dance clubs? One doesn't need an elaborate disguise to learn about macho ways to psych-up a sales force, how guys talk on the beat, or the how gender is manipulated to get ahead. These chapters are interesting for the slices of life that they are. a b c d e f g h i j k l Green, Penelope (August 18, 2022). "Norah Vincent, Who Chronicled Passing as a Man, Is Dead at 53". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on August 18, 2022 . Retrieved August 18, 2022. Are there any public figures whom you admire for expanding social definitions of gender? Do you have any heroes—personal, political, or literary?urn:lcp:selfmademan00nora:epub:d49b782f-d41d-4ccb-b82a-499cfc07045d Extramarc UCLA Voyager Foldoutcount 0 Identifier selfmademan00nora Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7mp69b6k Isbn 9780143038702 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 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.