Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut- wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men’s therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded—and exhausted—by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn’t an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent’s surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.

Praise for Norah Vincent:
“Norah Vincent is a true freethinker and independent journalist in the European manner, challenging prevailing assumptions in academe, politics, and media. Her work has always had a bold skepticism and energy. She is a model of pragmatic, enlightened feminism.”
—Camille Paglia

Average Customer Rating:

Insightful. Men are a fascinating species.

Customer Rating:

Very insightful! I now know more about the male psych and why they behave they way they do. Terrific story idea. It was not entertaining or engrossing and was actually quite dull and tedious at times, but I learned a lot from it. It could have been cut in half, as the author tends to drone sometimes. I thought it was very helpful in understanding the difference between the sexes. At one point, I actually felt bad because I recognized pattern behavior in myself in my attitude and treatment towards men in general. Norah points out that women judge men too harshly based on what men in the past have done to them. I also learned that men behave the way they do, as coldly and unemotionally as they do, simply because that is what is expected of them and until mainstream society says it is ok for men to have feelings, they will continue to behave they way they do. Kudos to Norah for "having the balls" to undertake this project. Very helpful book. I now know that men are not necessarily jerks because they want to be, but because they have to be. (Or one thinks they are gay.) LOL. Note: there were some big words in here. Have a dictionary on hand.

A workshop in curiousity of the other side

Customer Rating:

I found this book fascinating and humorous. But though this experiment gave valuable insight into the club of male bonding I found it to be skewed by the fact that the experimenter was a woman. As a woman, whatever information is gleaned from the experience is going to be biased in some fashion, but interesting nonetheless. I did find the book to focus a bit much on sex. Ned spent a lot of time at nudie bars, trying to convince the monks that he wasn't gay, and dating. The other aspects of his existence were minor in comparison to this preoccupation. The men that I have encountered in my life, though were normal healthy men, also had other interests. Although, Ned may have come across a bit feminine, and what metro sexual doesn't these days, he did allow for one important insight to this mother of boys. Boys need men to show them how to be men regardless of what kind of man that is. Only men know how to read the cues that other men transmit and fathers/father-figures relay this information to the boys in their charge whether its conscious or not. This is a vital part of the make-up of our society and must not be looked down upon as something that isn't necessary. Read this book for what it's worth.: a workshop in curiosity of the other side. You might find something that can be taken from the experience.

Very thought-provoking and surprising	Customer Rating:
I greatly enjoyed this book, although parts of it (specifically the strip-club chapter) were hard for me to get through. Every chapter had some surprising insight into what life is like for men in western culture. Norah is one brave person, and she's a terrific writer.

Very revealing and informative

Customer Rating:

Norah Vincent had a not very unusual desire, a desire to know what it was really like to be a man - they have it made, right? Being a lesbian, and having been considered rather tomboy-ish since childhood, she figured that she was the perfect woman to actually penetrate the male world. And so, with the help of a great makeup artist and a voice coach, she transformed herself from Norah to Ned, complete with crew cut, facial stubble, and size 11-1/2 shoes! So disguised, she set out into the male world, went to strip clubs and a monetary, went bowling with the guys, and even dated some heterosexual women. And what she found...well, you'll just have to read the book! Overall, I found this to be a very interesting book. The author showed herself to be remarkably free from ax-grinding, simply learning from the people around her, and seeing the world from a man's point of view without trying to force it to fit her preconceived notions. Indeed, what Norah learned about men surprised her, as did what she learned about herself. I have read many books about men over the years (Iron John, The Hazards of Being Male, Naked Nomads, and many more), and found this one to be very revealing and informative. If you are a woman and want to get a real inside-look at men, then I highly recommend that you get this book. Indeed, if you are a man, and want to see an outsider's compassionate yet frank look at men, then I highly recommend that you get this book as well.

Good Experiment

Customer Rating:

Norah Vincent wants to learn more about the opposite sex; that is, what it's like to think, feel, act, and be treated like a man. In order to do this, she does what any cultural anthropologist would do - she embedded herself within the culture and subjected herself to several "guy" activities and experiences. She realizes that, yes, there are culturally defined differences between men and women. It is not a judgmental book; it doesn't bash men - it seeks understanding of what is considered "male" in our society. This is a wonderful experiment. My key drawback is how she tends to make a point and overly "beat it to death".