Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent

Infiltrating a man's world by crossing the gender divide

A decade ago I put on a 'tache and stuffed a sock down my trousers at a drag king workshop to write about my experience for this newspaper. Since I was the author of a book on historical cases of women who had swapped skirts for trousers to enter male occupations, I felt uniquely qualified. But until I had to walk down the streets as a nerdy guy, I hadn't appreciated the terror of discovery when you're passing and the thrill of inventing an alternate life.

Norah Vincent, a New York journalist and lesbian who spent a year in male-only enclaves that included a monastery, a strip club and a men's group, is the latest incarnation of a woman playing the "breeches part". Thanks to technology, she had a more sophisticated five-o'clock shadow, but her experience of being accepted as a man named Ned was remarkably similar to the women who had gone before her.

Like them, she found it remarkably easy to be accepted. Vincent began by joining a bowling team where, a "liberal intellectual", she crossed gender and class boundaries. She laughs along to the dyke jokes with her blue-collar mates and drinks with them at "titty" bars. But the sexual bravado, she discovers, is all just a cover for the men's sense of powerlessness in a world where they feel disenfranchised by their lack of education and earning power.

Even in the monastery, there was disquiet. Since the monks fear effeminate Ned may be gay, he becomes the butt of their jokes and they gently rebuff his overtures at friendship. The monks, like Vincent's bowling buddies, find it hard to talk.

Despite her often intriguing observations, there is a messy confusion here that Vincent never really resolves. She understands that society has constructed gender as "an act, a performance" and points to parents doling out dolls to girls and trucks to boys as examples of social conditioning. But she writes that "through Ned I learned the hard way that my gender has roots in my brain, possibly biochemical ones, living very close to the core of my self-image".

Vincent may be woolly on the theory, but she is relieved to be restored to her feminine self. Her experience taught her a new sympathy for the opposite sex and left her wondering how men will ever overcome "the territorial reflex, the blocked emotional responses and the all-consuming rage". Sadly, Ned as Norah has no answers.