As the subtitle implies, Norah Vincent’s book is less of an exposé of secret male lives than a complex awakening, not exactly the expected antithesis of Chopin’s character but more the complement of it, in a weird, gender-bending kind of way. It would be safe to say that Vincent has strong feminist roots, strong enough that she has reflected on the movement’s various transitions, successes, and limitations. Vincent had already explored the nuances of feminism, the proverbial personal and political subjugation of women that mainstream America has somewhat accepted, albeit often grudgingly, as real, even though it can’t seem to agree on how serious the problem is or what should be done about it. With her latest project, Self-Made Man, Vincent was eager to explore the construct of the privileged sex. What and how did men become something women needed to react to so strongly, she seemed to be asking. She admits she was frighteningly naïve at the outset.

First, the qualifiers: Vincent is a lesbian, not a speculative transgender person. She has no inherent dislike of men, her father, ex-boyfriends—or of women for that matter. She passes as a straight man, for the most part infiltrating straight male society. Her interest in gender roles and communication, as well as curiosity, were the driving forces behind the book. With that in mind, understand that Vincent herself claims no objectivity or scientific value to her experiences. She, even now (or more now than ever) simply hoped the experiment might facilitate some interesting and empathetic conversation on the topic. What was most interesting to me as a reader was not only what Vincent learned about male society but how the process of learning required her to break down her identity as a woman. For the month or two following the end of the eighteen-month passing of Norah as Ned, she was left cleaning up the pieces of her shattered psyche. Vincent documents this change within herself at the book’s end, but the phases she went through are evident throughout the book, the structure of which is simultaneously chronological and categorized by what she sought to learn about men‘s thinking, including friendship, love, and work.

As Ned, Vincent enters a wide range of arenas in American society: a working-class bowling league, seedy strip clubs, a reclusive monastery, and a middle-class men’s movement’s retreat. Ned goes through an accelerated adolescence in the beginning, with Vincent spending much of her interactive time scrambling to pick up on subtle cues on how to act and talk as well as what Ned could say from the men as a means of survival. Upon reflection, Vincent conveys embarrassment for Ned but marvels at the unspoken language that men must key into or risk humiliation or worse. At the same time, she realized the power of those cues. Once she assimilated enough, Ned was more of a psychological construct than the assemblage of flaccid plastic, artfully-placed shaving crumbs, and a sports bra.

At her first "placement" as Ned, the bowling alley where she passed for a few months before revealing herself to her teammates, Vincent describes what she learns about the way men interact with their male friends in an exclusively male environment. Once her fears subside, she glimpses the controlled affection these men are able to show each other, the way they support and interact with each other that is so very different from the way women interact. She writes, "So much of what happens emotionally between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there. But it is there, and when you’re inside it, it’s as if you’re suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear." But, as she finds later in the book, that structure of communication demands that men speak or act in over-simplified codes that sometimes fail to demonstrate what they actually feel. Often, men seem to display the expected code simply to survive. As she learns to accept this, Norah, via Ned, feels her first blow to her own identity.

Reading about Vincent’s early experiences as Ned made me feel angry and uncomfortable, much the way it seemed to affect her. Even as she attempted to remove herself from the emotional qualities of her encounters, she validates (to what was, for me in my naiveté, a discomforting degree) much of what women, particularly feminists, think men say and act like. Her visits to strip clubs gave her a raw, depressing look at the mutual shame that both the strippers and the customers seems to feel about sex, leaving her with some circular arguments about objectivity and pornography.

Vincent left what she termed the "gritty subconscious" of the strip clubs in favor of the straight dating scene, but instead of relishing the cocky control men seemed to have when she was on the receiving end of their advances, she found her advances awkward, embarrassing, and unwanted, even under the tutelage of male friends. It was her next revelation as a woman: the expectations of women in the dating world are filled with mixed messages. Later in the book, this idea is expanded as a result of her emotional journey with the men’s group, and it includes the pressures men feel to be both provider and partner, emotional yet strong, and their confusion to fill that void.

As Ned ventured into the working world, however, Vincent gets yet another taste of the cheap veneer that men attempt to function under, whether they like it or not. Ned is sucked into the exploitative and superficial world of sales, where she discovers a direct link between success, image, and genitalia. She notes that her passing as a man had its safety in the physical and psychological mask Ned wore, but that men must feel both the safety and the oppressiveness of that mask as much as she did, or as women do in their masks: "A suit is an impenetrable signifier of maleness every bit as blinding as the current signifiers of attractiveness in women: blond hair, heavy makeup, emaciated bodies and big tits. A woman can be downright ugly on close inspection, and every desirable part of her can be fake, the product of bleach, silicone and surgery, but if she’s sporting the right signifiers, she’s hot. She is her disguise, not a person but a type. A suit, I’ve found, does very much the same thing for a man. You see it, not him, and you bow to it." Ned’s revelations in the business world deflate Vincent even more.

There is so much that Vincent’s writing evokes, so many ideas, controversies, and challenges to current ways of thinking about the relationships between men and women that I can’t begin to summarize it. I’ve barely touched the surface of her own journey, let alone what Ned had yet to teach her about the significance of these findings on other areas, such as gay men. Her insights seem at first to be reactionary, too reflective of a woman’s interests, not a man‘s experiences. As the book continues however, her thought-provoking words do much to inspire conversation, which was, after all, her goal.