IN A MAN'S WORLD

"Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again" by Norah Vincent (Viking, $24.95)
By CLAUDIA SMITH BRINSON
THE STATE (COLUMBIA, S.C)
Norah Vincent becomes a man -- in appearance. She ventures into a bowling league, a monastery, sex clubs. She goes on dates, attends a men's gathering, all disguised as a man.
Afterward, sometimes, she confesses.
People see what they expect to see, and Vincent works hard at her disguise. So she fools the men and women she works with, pals around with and, ultimately, surprises.
As Ned, she wears her short hair in a flat top. She creates a chin stubble with wool crepe hair and an adhesive. She wears rectangular glasses. She binds her breasts. She lifts weights to add muscle and broaden her shoulders, drinks protein to put on 15 pounds. She wears a prosthetic penis. She pitches her low voice lower.
Why? Vincent, a lesbian, had experimented once with a drag-king friend, passing as a man on the street. That experience intrigued her anew when she watched an A & amp;E network show on passing as someone of the opposite sex.
Perhaps more important, Vincent had been a "hard-core tomboy" who suffered through puberty. Constantly teased by her brothers, she was nicknamed "Ned."
So the New York journalist tries out life as Ned, spending 18 months in five states experiencing life as a man.
The burdens of maleness
It's a mistake to compare this book to John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me," a truly terrifying excursion in 1959. Griffin, a white journalist, darkened his skin and experienced firsthand the poverty, racism and violence of black life in the South.
Vincent often is uncomfortable being an impostor, unceasingly anxious about being discovered, even commits herself briefly to a psychiatric ward afterward, but she is never in the danger Griffin was.
What she gleans and offers us are deeply sympathetic insights into the burden of maleness. She does seem determined to be fair and reliable in her tales: A male friend said he teared up, listening to her empathetic observations during a radio interview.
Of her blue-collar bowling league, she writes, "I was a stranger and a nerd, but they cut me all the slack in the world, and they did it for no other reason that I could discern than that I was a good-seeming guy who deserved a chance, something life and circumstance had denied most of them."
When she confesses, her bowling pals keep her secret. Jim tells her, "And you were my coolest guy friend, too," and "No wonder you listen so good."
Ned's forays into strip clubs are both revolting and depressing, but far worse are the bouts with entry-level sales jobs.
The salesmen "Go door-to-door in the hot sun, the pouring rain or drifts of snow, hour after hour, making the same pitch at least 50 times a day to people who were mostly hostile to solicitors. If you didn't sell, you didn't eat." That's a 12-hour day, six days a week; no paid vacation, no health insurance.
Vincent describes a co-worker, like most, without a car: "We dropped him in his black suit with nothing but his bag of merchandise ... on an 85-degree humid sunny day at the corner of the highway and a dirt road. ... He'd eaten a convenience store Danish for breakfast and that was the only food he was going to see for the next seven hours."
She describes the desperate gearing up each day, the manager-as-coach cheering session: "There are top guys, middle guys, new guys and losers. ... You want to be that top guy, because that's what's going to get you the house, the cars and the wife."
When Ned catches on, accepting the slyness, duplicity and aggressiveness required, another salesman says, "Dude, you're the man," and Vincent thinks, "I guess I was, God help me."
She reflects later that the sales edict to "take control" works and reminds her that "perhaps the strongest male advantage is purely mental. Thinking makes it so."
Imposter exposed
Certainly, there's a voyeuristic aspect to Vincent's adventures and our reading about them. Vincent pays a price in her depression afterward. She agonizes about being an impostor: the cost in energy, in watching yourself constantly, the cognitive dissonance, the betrayal of others.
But she also offers herself and the rest of us the chance to reflect on the high cost of narrow, binding sex roles. Any role that rubs eventually wounds.