She comes to the conclusion that "Manhood is a leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man." She notes, "It was hard being a guy. In the end, Vincent is more Ned than Norah as she utterly ignores the female side of the equation. The ritualists are angrily resentful and deeply hurt by their maleness and its demands. The women selling sex and the men buying are hardened and pathetic. The women seeking love are differently desperate. The bowlers are leading dead-end lives of quiet desperation. Piquant though Self-Made Man is, the book has a pulsing undercurrent of bleakness that threatens to overwhelm it. She exposes the lack of trust women feel about men and the vulnerability men have about women: Everybody hurts.
Vincent's most insightful moments are about male-female relationships. (She doesn't tell everyone the retreat guys - with their knives and bared souls - only knew Ned.) Which is perhaps the most surprising element of the book it would seem that such an astonishing deception and its rationale (she tells them about the book) would enrage most people. The women she reveals herself to before bedding them are also accepting. And, redneck politics aside, they even embrace her lesbianism.
No one takes her to the woodshed for deceiving them. Midway through her time on the team, Ned tells the bowlers she's really Norah. And many men may question just how fair a portrait this is of men, since it doesn't include family life at all but focuses on the more empty rituals of dating, sex for money and escape from family life. It will still seem to most women harder to be the meat in the strip club than the customer. Readers of both genders might be less convinced. She's no lesbian separatist or hater of the patriarchy Vincent had male friends (as well as two beloved brothers) prior to the project and at book's end likes men even more as she embraces the victim status she learns they endure.
Vincent manages to come to her experiment virtually devoid of preconceptions about men. Self-Made Man will inevitably be compared to Black Like Me, but its similarity lies only in the premise of disguise.
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