I rarely enjoyed and never felt in any way fulfilled personally by being perceived and treated as a man... On the contrary, I identify deeply with both my femaleness and my femininity, such as it is, more so after [my alter ego], in fact, than ever before."

Guardian Book Extracts "Double Agent" ". Book Extracts. London: The Guardian. March 18, 2006. Archived from the original on January 20, 2008 . Retrieved September 27, 2014. Vincent died via assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland on July 6, 2022, aged 53. Her death was not reported until August 2022. [3] Publications [ edit ] a b Franklin, Benjamin, Benjamin Franklin, his autobiography, The Harvard classics. 1909–14, New York: P.F. Collier & Son , retrieved 5 July 2006– via bartleby.com Vincent later wrote two novels: Thy Neighbor (2012), described by The New York Times as "a dark, comic thriller", and Adeline (2015), which imagines the life of Virginia Woolf from when she wrote To the Lighthouse until her suicide in 1941. [3] Personal life, views, and death [ edit ] We passed, as far as I could tell, but I was too afraid to really interact with anyone, except to give one guy brief directions on the street. He thanked me as "dude" and walked on.Perhaps the most telling part (and least explored by Vincent) was her desire at the culmination of the men's retreat to be cut by one of the men she'd befriended. She wanted to be physically hurt, to be punished for her deceptions. I couldn't help but wonder if she'd set up all of her investigations as a way to get herself bashed, either as a gay man who couldn't behave appropriately in the homophobic situations she enabled or as a transvestite woman breaching communities which have consciously and intentionally withdrawn from women. Was her depression at the end of the experiment simply the suffering she felt she deserved and couldn't find at anyone else's hands? Voluntary Madness' Details Life In 'Loony Bin' ". NPR. January 5, 2009. Archived from the original on August 19, 2022 . Retrieved August 19, 2022. 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. What influence do you think the media have on sexual roles? Do you see any trends that alarm or encourage you? Can you describe the process of your readjustment to life as a woman? How long did it take? Were there any surprises involved? What, if anything, do you miss about living as a man?

The most valuable insights I gained from this book are what she herself expressed as the two biggest surprises she encountered: Are there any public figures whom you admire for expanding social definitions of gender? Do you have any heroes—personal, political, or literary? 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.urn:lcp:selfmademan00nora:epub:d49b782f-d41d-4ccb-b82a-499cfc07045d Extramarc UCLA Voyager Foldoutcount 0 Identifier selfmademan00nora Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7mp69b6k Isbn 9780143038702 Cawelti, John G. (1988) [1965]. Apostles of the self-made man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.279. ISBN 9780226098708. 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.

Miller, Zeke (September 21, 2011). "Here's The Viral Video Of Elizabeth Warren Going After GOP On 'Class Warfare' Charge". Business Insider . Retrieved November 12, 2017. a b c "The World Ultra Wealth Report 2017". World Ultra Wealth Report (5ed.). Wealth-X. June 27, 2017 . Retrieved November 12, 2017. I know that a lot of my discomfort came precisely from being a woman all along, remaining one even in my disguise. But I also know that another respectable portion of my distress came, as it did to the men I met in group and elsewhere, from the way the world greeted me in that disguise, a disguise that was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball." Kogan, Kira (2010). The Self-Made Man: Myth and Reality of an American Phenomenon. University of Erlangen–Nuremberg: GRIN Verlag. p.28. ISBN 9783656476580 . Retrieved 29 January 2023.

Media Reviews

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? I don’t miss anything about being Ned. The few social advantages I discovered in manhood—the swagger, the self-confidence, the entitlement—I’ve learned to incorporate into my life as a woman. Everything else I was happy to discard. In regard to Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, let's begin by saying: girlfriend has issues. While she was ostensibly going undercover as a man to research how men (read: white heterosexual lower middle-class men) really are, a whole lot of the book is concerned with the Big Reveal -- telling the people she's duped that she's really a woman and that she intends to write about their misguided attempts to relate to her as a man. This is barely justified as a postmortem of how well she passed and how she might do better at it. Mostly it just seems mean.