Many men are lonely. Many don’t like the work they do. Many are unhappily married. They struggle with an at-times overwhelming sex drive. Their encounters with women, romantic or otherwise, often involve rejection and contradictory tests of their masculinity. They are the objects of blame and bigotry in their societies, yet are expected to remain stoic and put women’s needs first.

It’s a strange world in which the above observations—by a woman—are seen as outstanding insights, but it’s the one we’re in.

In 2006, American journalist Norah Vincent published Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man, an under-cover adventure in which the author, a mannish lesbian with big feet, spent close to 18 months periodically disguised as a man named Ned, notching up about 150 episodes in drag.

With breasts flattened, fake stubble on her chin, and a stuffed jock strap in her pants, having hired a tutor to teach her how to pitch her voice low and move like a man, she set out to “infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets” (p. 18). She joined a bowling league, went on dates, did sales calls, spent some weeks at a monastery, and attended a Robert Bly-influenced men’s wilderness retreat.

Expecting to learn something about male power, she found instead “the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it” (p. 254). The planned exposé became a feminist mea culpa.

**

I must have heard of Vincent’s book in the past, but I had forgotten about it until recently when some of my readers discussed it in a comments section. Intrigued, I ordered it.

Perhaps inevitably, the book’s reach exceeded its grasp. I’m not sure why Vincent assumed that merely dressing up as a man and hanging out with men for short periods of time would confer access to masculine experience. She might have read Warren Farrell and arrived at better conclusions. Only a university-educated lesbian feminist, perhaps, could have thought that a buzz cut and a fake dick would truly enlighten.

And although she acknowledged at the book’s beginning that her observations were “full of my own prejudices and preconceptions” (p. 17), she often spoke in her account as if she had come to know men better than they knew themselves.

At times, the feminist platitudes were staggering. One chapter took Ned to various strip clubs, where Vincent gave free rein to standard put-downs of men’s “base proclivities” (p. 67), “dehumanizing” gaze (p. 70), and tendency to turn the stripping woman into a “sex object” (p. 78). Vincent was repelled by the heavily made-up, bottle-bleached, shaved and depilated, slimmed-down, toned-up, and surgically-enhanced female bodies on display.

Lamenting men’s alleged inability to appreciate “real women,” she fell back on anti-male clichés: “Was it misogyny, a kind of collective repressed homosexuality,” she wondered predictably, “or perhaps pedophilia that really wanted a body type that more resembled a man’s or a child’s, fatless and smooth?” (p. 78). One might have thought the super-enhanced boobs would put paid to such notions, but Vincent couldn’t seem to throw off her women’s studies training in heterosexuality as charade. The presumption was impressive.

But there was much more to the book than disdain for heterosexuality. Vincent also extolled “the beauty of male friendships” (p. 46) and came to appreciate men’s sincere “drive” “to save and protect women” (p. 258). Women’s demands of men, she recognized in turn, were relentless and impossible. “They [women] wanted someone to lean on and hold on to, to look up to and collapse beside, but someone who knew his reduced place in the postfeminist world nonetheless” (p. 277). Strutting in trousers brought her “an inescapable empathy for men” and an awareness “of the blows and prejudices the world inflicts on them” (p. 283).

For the genuineness of her sympathy, Vincent became a hero to thousands.

**

When Self-Made Man was first coming out, in 2006, ABC News did a substantial feature on it, interviewing Vincent and showing the preparations she had undergone to pass as Ned. Complete with jaunty music and a titillated interviewer, the feature provided an appealing introduction to the author and her project.

As she described her experiences, Vincent focused on the compassion she had gained, how surprised she had been by the kindness of her bowling companions, and her newfound appreciation for men’s difficult lives. “Men are suffering,” she told the reporter. “They have different problems than women have, but they don’t have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else.”

The comments section overflows with male gratitude, some of the comments quite recent.

“I love this brave, honest woman.”

“Thanks Norah, for trying to understand us instead of perpetuating the gender division, wish I could have met you and thanked you for this.”

“The least I can say for all dudes is that we’re grateful that Mrs. Vincent did this because this really cleared misunderstandings.”

“I now truly understand why men like kind women.”

Many more reflected similar admiration and thankfulness. Very few responses were critical.

Reading the many accolades, I felt sadness, tenderness, and amazement. Wasn’t this a bit much? Was it really so remarkable that a woman could develop sympathy for the opposite sex?

Most men are so unaccustomed to any empathy from a woman, even when it’s mixed with patronizing descriptions and questionable conclusions, that they respond as if to heroism. The woman who cares, even within circumscribed limits, is catapulted into the company of the saints.

Imagine the reaction if a man had masqueraded as a woman for a year or more, and then pretended to understand women (even sympathetically) using a shop-worn ideological framework? Imagine a white person putting on blackface in order to become an expert, even a well-intentioned one, on the need for black self-improvement? There would be howls of outrage and indignant rebuttals, especially by members of the impersonated group.

Not in Vincent’s case. So rare is a woman’s attempt to understand male experiences that she doesn’t need to be consistently sympathetic or accurate.

**

It’s not clear if there ever was a time in history when empathy for men was high. Today, it is unapologetically low. Men had their long moment in the sun, so the thinking goes, and now it is time, at last, for women to be at the center of everything.

That was Andrea Dworkin’s message in her famous peroration to men (“I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape”) when she announced that men’s days of being tended to, affirmed, and looked after by women were over, and that too was men’s fault.

“We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your humanity. We cannot do it anymore,” she told a large 1983 gathering of feminist men in St. Paul, Minnesota at a Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men. “We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You are going to have to do this yourselves from now on and you know it” (Letters From a War Zone, p. 170).

Dworkin’s certainty of women’s superior compassion—even as she berated, scorned, and heaped collective guilt on listening men in one of many defamatory speeches—is an object lesson in the obliterating narcissism created by victim ideology. Our societies proclaim women’s greater empathy, yet when it comes to men, one looks for it in vain.

Was empathy ever consistently directed towards men as men? As Roy Baumeister argued in his cautiously non-feminist Is There Anything Good About Men (2010), successful cultures have always flourished by exploiting men, relying on them to build complex systems, to sacrifice their bodies in difficult work and, if necessary, to give their very lives in war and other high-risk endeavors. Exemplary men have been at times rewarded for their success, and may have been individually respected, but feelings of pain, fear, or unmet longing could not be and were not generally cared about.

Men’s self-sacrifice when the Titanic sank in 1912 was expected and enforced at gunpoint. Though women in the lifeboats were undoubtedly horrified by it, no one questioned the chivalric justice that left 4 out of 5 male passengers (including many in First Class) dead. In the aftermath of the disaster, the Women’s Titanic Memorial Fund was organized by some American women to build a tribute to manhood, but some feminists refused gratitude. Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of the Woman’s Journal of the North American Woman Suffrage Association, blamed men for the accident and used the occasion to champion female political power, claiming “There will be far fewer lives lost by preventable accidents, either on land or sea, when the mothers of men have the right to vote” (qtd in Steven Biel, Down With the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster, p. 105).

Today, of course, there is still always a reason to look away from men’s pain. Feminist-inclined men and women routinely “bathe in male tears.” They claim that discussing men’s issues is misogynistic, and ask “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” No wonder it seems that the only time men can be heard is when women speak for them.

Notably, women who “transition” to male through hormone treatments and surgery are often shocked by the indifference and unkindness they encounter in public, where men are not eager to help and women expect deference. Zander Keig wrote as a trans man in “Crossing the Divide” of a pronounced sense of aloneness: “No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.”

The only reason Keig was able to articulate his impressions was because he had transitioned. The Washington Post would not have been interested in the complaints of a so-called cis man. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Keig has chosen trans advocacy rather than men’s advocacy in his work as a podcaster and public speaker.

**

Vincent’s sanctification was given added impetus by her decision, years after publishing Self-Made Man, to end her life through medically-assisted suicide in Switzerland, for which she came to be seen as a gender martyr. Some supporters alleged she was so dismayed by her treatment as Ned that she was plunged into a depression from which she never recovered. “All men should know her name,” ran one of the comments under the ABC News story: “She gave her life to bridge the gap.” Another wrote, “The FACT that women need this level of example, AND it cost a life, AND, it is still covered up, is disgusting. I just wish she was still here.” Many others figured her death as a sacrifice.

Fans’ mourning for Vincent is poignant, but the statements exaggerate. Vincent ended her life in 2022, more than 15 years after she finished her book, and she had been on medication for depression long before writing it. She had written autobiographically about self-extermination here, shortly after finishing a novel about feminist author Virginia Woolf, who herself suffered depressive episodes and ultimately drowned herself. It’s possible that dysphoria and a desire not to be herself had been prompts for Vincent’s gender project, not its tragic result.

The gender masquerade almost certainly did take a psychological toll, but not because Vincent was its sacrificial lamb. In pursuit of her story, Vincent lied for months to the men she interacted with, counterfeiting friendships and intimacies. She elicited comments and confessions from these men—about racial minorities, homosexuality, their satisfaction in their marriages, their infidelities—so that she could report on the results, often unflatteringly (“Like every other guy in the Red Bull companies, Ivan saw his job as an extension of his dick” [p. 197]).

She justified the months-long betrayal of trust by saying it was necessary, and that she herself suffered at least as much as those she deceived, as if that evened the score. “I can say with relative surety,” she hedged, “that in the end I paid a higher emotional price for my circumstantial deceptions than any of my subjects did. And that is, I think, penalty enough for meddling” (p. 19). Here and elsewhere, she couldn’t seem to resist the temptation to turn a story about “the straitjacket of the male role” (p. 276) into a story about her own suffering.

**

The book launched a frontal assault on feminist claims of male privilege, and most feminists simply looked the other way. The Literary Omnivore measured the book by the approved yardstick, finding it “problematic in its gender essentialism” (i.e. Vincent’s common-sense assumption that gender is grounded in biology) though “still an interesting look at how the patriarchy hurts men as well as women.” Other feminist reviewers criticized Vincent for writing about straight white men rather than an appropriately “intersectional” (black, gay, disabled) cohort. “Feminist Fridays” was word-perfect in enumerating the reasons why Vincent’s call for empathy could safely be ignored:

“While the anecdotes she shares of her experiences seductively draw you in to the story, the conclusions that Vincent draws based on her own observations and interactions are painted with far too broad of brushstrokes. Dangerously essentialist, she writes about masculinity as if it were a solid, eternal, and universal thing, rather than fluid and personal. She shoves aside the way it intersects with race, class, and other axes of identity. Bowling leagues, strip clubs, and first dates are interesting places to explore versions of masculinity, but it’s not as if these can hold the truth about what it means to be a man across time and space.”

Of course, all the nit-picking was beside the point. Vincent’s book made no claim to be a sociological or ethnographic study. It did not set out to test a hypothesis or make replicable findings. It was the story of a woman who was interested enough, and compassionate enough, to confront her own assumptions about sex differences and power. One suspects that the alleged essentialism and over-generalizing would not have mattered if Vincent hadn’t named male disadvantage so clearly: “People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out” (p. 213). Vincent was also adamant that “centuries of subjugation haven’t made women morally superior” (p. 108).

But there it was, the limit beyond which Vincent did not go, the founding myth she never questioned: the “centuries of subjugation” that excused women for all time. Vincent remained firm in her conviction that if men were suffering, it was largely because they were doing it to themselves and had only to stop doing it. She harped continually on men’s alleged inability to express their feelings, often making arrogant assumptions about male psychology. She assumed, and never investigated, that sexual violence and domestic abuse were a one-way street of male perpetration.

Having taken it upon herself to write about men from the inside out, she nonetheless didn’t educate herself about men’s issues or feminist distortions. She met divorced men and maternal abuse survivors in her men’s group, yet ended her sojourn no wiser about women’s violence or family court bias. She said not a word about men’s over-representation as homicide victims, workplace fatalities, suicides, drug overdoses, the wrongfully incarcerated, or the homeless. And despite some frank criticisms of women’s attitudes, she never called on women to stop behaviors that harm men, perhaps because she didn’t consider them systemic (that favorite feminist word) or because she lacked faith that most women would be willing to change.

Ultimately, Vincent did not grasp the root of men’s struggles, and her feminist framework absolved women of responsibility. Yet in a culture so consistently hostile to men, eager to denounce and degrade, hector and humiliate, Vincent’s emotional generosity was, and remains, dazzling—even if it was only a first step.