Name Norah Vincent | ||
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Books Self‑Made Man: One Woman's, Adeline, The instant intellectual, Thy Neighbor: A Novel, How to Sound Smart Born 20 September 1968 (age 52), Detroit, Michigan, United States Similar George Eliot, J K Rowling, Charlotte Brontë | ||
2006 self made man norah vincent chooses female privilege over male privilege
Norah Vincent is an American writer. She went on to attend Williams College, where she graduated with a BA in philosophy in 1990. Vincent was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a quarterly columnist on politics and culture for the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate. She has also been a columnist for The Village Voice and Salon.com. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, the New York Post, The Washington Post and many more periodicals around the country.
Contents
- 2006 self made man norah vincent chooses female privilege over male privilege
- Review of self made man by norah vincent
- Publications
- Self Made Man
- Voluntary Madness
- References
Review of self made man by norah vincent
Publications
Self-Made Man
Vincent's book Self-Made Man retells an eighteen-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man. This follows in the tradition of undercover journalism such as Black Like Me. Vincent talked about the experience in HARDtalk extra on BBC on April 21, 2006, and described her experiences in male-male and male-female relationships. She joined an all-male bowling club, joined a men's therapy group, went to a strip club, dated women, and used her knowledge as a lapsed Catholic to visit monks in a cloister. Vincent writes about how the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man: her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions, and features which in her as a woman had been seen as "butch" became oddly effeminate when seen in a man. Vincent asserts that, since the experiment, she has never been more glad to be female, stating, "I really like being a woman. ... I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege. She's also stated that she has gained more sympathy for and understanding of men and the male condition.
"Men are suffering. 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. They need to be together."
Voluntary Madness
Vincent's book Voluntary Madness is about her experiences as an inpatient in three different mental hospitals. Suffering from depression after her eighteen months living disguised as a man, she felt she was a danger to herself. On the advice of her psychologist she committed herself to a mental institution. Vincent spent time in three different institutions – one urban, public and ill-funded; one small-town; and one private and expensive. She found some parts of the mental health care system beset by arrogant doctors and over-reliance on drugs as therapy, while others addressed merely the symptoms instead of their underlying causes.
Although Vincent did not gain access to the hospital by means of deception, her exposé can be compared to Ten Days in a Mad-House by undercover reporter Nellie Bly, written more than a century previously (1887). The Rosenhan experiment in the 1970s also provides a comparison of life inside several mental hospitals.
