Self-Made Man
Not too long ago, I bought a copy of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, because I thought that Kathleen ought to know how ordinary men behave when there aren't any women around. I ended up reading the book first, and in one captivated day (I did nothing else). I expected a book about the adventures of passing as a man, but that's not what Ms Vincent wrote. As she herself says, passing was the easy part. The hard part was learning how tough life is for most guys. The alleged power and privilege of belonging to the dominant gender seems to be nothing more than smoke; in actuality, men are crippled by stoic homophobia on the one hand and the unrealistic expectations of women on the other. Ms Vincent was very surprised to find where her sympathies lay, and, when she recovered from the experiment, she was very happy to be a woman.
