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Self Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man
Norah Vincent
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Self Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man
Norah Vincent
"Self-Made Man is by Norah Vincent, and it was her decision to live life about a year to year and a-half as a man. Not every day, but most days, she would go out into public dressed as a man. She would try and infiltrate different parts of male society as a man to kind of gain the insight of living as a man.
What I like best about the book is it was not just perhaps like other books where it's a man telling you about a man or a woman's theories on a man. It's actually a woman who had lived as a man, and after lengths of time forming friendships with them, she's grown to understand more about their psyche, more about their own background, more about their fears and the things that they've had to suppress, being men, that women are allowed to do. Like we're allowed to freely emote, and men aren't; they're taught to squash that pretty young. So it's really interesting to see her actually really get that, and just by reading her words I felt like I was able to understand that and sometimes I have to sit back and think, "Okay, men are different, this is why; it doesn't mean they don't have feelings." I think something that was a unique twist to this was generally people always say like When Harry Met Sally, sex is always in the way. She's a woman living as a man, but she's gay; so living as the man for a year, she never had any issues where attraction came into play or any sort of romance that would distract from her mission.
It's not so much that I learned anything profound that I never would have thought of, but I think women as a whole feel we are more emotionally in tune to ourselves and more sensitive, and the book kind of shows men are somewhat, too. They just, they've been taught to sort of ignore that, and so they have to come up with this strong defensive persona to compensate for the fact that they have all of these inferiority complexes that we have, too. It's just kind of a reminder that men are people, too.
I think that any women should read this book; I think the younger the better. As you're older, it's okay; at that point, it's a neat little story, but I think the younger the better."
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