This is stupid. Not every male has a protruding Adam’s apple. Heck, a lot people are overweight now, and even if their voicebox is quite large, it can be hidden.
And not every original female doesn’t.
I think she looks somewhat effeminate as a male, but not more than a metrosexual. There’s some weird bias where people these days assume that femme = gay. I find it odd because a lot of gay people don’t act that way, and a lot of straight people I know do.
The big thing for me is that she admits to wearing makeup as a guy. There is no such thing as completely undetectable makeup.
Also, at least half the women I know go after pretty boys, and she fits the bill. I don’t think that would have a substantial effect on her ability to pick up women, as most of the femme guys I know have women to spare. In my experience, gay guys are more flirtatious in general than straight guys, and that many of them spread this to women. And these women constantly go around saying that they wish he was straight so they could marry him.
Well, if she was just wearing foundation, that might be undetectable.
Isn’t Norah Vincent a conservative and somewhat of an antifeminist? I seem to remember her paling around with Andrew Sullivan and representing the “conservative” side of gender politics and championing the male point of view over the women. The book being described would seem to confirm the views she has always promoted.
It’s all just speculation based on the cover of the book. If you’d actually read the book and thought her story seemed fishy then that would be one thing, but it strikes me as just a teensy bit unreasonable that you’ve concluded that the whole thing was a hoax based on nothing more than (literally) judging a book by its cover.
While I don’t think it was a hoax, I think a lot more people knew than she’s letting on. You’d expect the cover, of all things, would be designed to really bring out the selling point of the book: she became a man. Yet, her “man transformation” seems pretty poor.
It’s then easy to make the leap that people figured out the truth but didn’t say anything because, and this is key, men don’t discuss those things. We’re not 12 years old. If you bring up the subject, OK, but no man is going to walk up to another man and say “So you used to be a chick right?”
Still going by the cover, but she looks like a very feminine “man” to me in the bottom picture.
Beyond just her facial appearance, her hair is too made up. Most guys don’t take such care with their hair. The other thing that jumps out at me is the tie. The knot is much too wide and loose.
If I saw her, I would assume she was a metrosexual or gay guy. If her voice was not within the norm for a guy, I would assume she was a FtM TV.
Not to mention, and this doesn’t come across very well in that low resolution image, on the actual cover, her stubble is very clearly painted on.
I don’t think we can assume that the cover was intended to show Vincent at her manliest. Perhaps it was, but since the point of the book is that a WOMAN passed as a man a cover where Vincent looks like a woman dressed as a man is arguably better than one where Vincent looks like just some regular guy. If it wasn’t obvious from the cover that Vincent-as-Ned and Vincent-as-Norah were the same person then the book might have been mistaken for one about men who made their own fortunes or something.
*I agree it’s possible that some people suspected more than they let on, but that’s different from Blake’s suggestion that Vincent was being dishonest in representing what had happened. If no one ever told her they knew she was really a woman all along then she could hardly include that in the book. And unless she was outright lying, a number of people were fooled by her performance as a man.
In the book, Vincent explicitly describes experimenting with painted stubble, being dissatisfied with the results, and developing a method that involved attaching tiny pieces of wool crepe (theatrical hair) to her face with an adhesive. So unless she was lying about that too, the cover photo differs from how she looked when she was passing as Ned.
There are more photos than just the book cover. Different covers, as well as different angles and poses.
FWIW, all those photos appear to have been taken for purposes of promoting the book and not during the time when Vincent was passing as a man on a regular basis. In the book she describes cutting her hair into a short flattop style, while all the promotional photos show her with what looks like a flattop that’s been growing out for several months.
I think Vincent-in-drag looks somewhat more convincingly masculine on the cover of the paperback (reminds me of the Ted character on How I Met Your Mother) than on the hardcover, although still with longer hair than she describes herself as having in the book.
Good lord, a sports coat over a hoodie? Please don’t tell me that that’s an acceptable fashion.
I’ve seen that look “in the wild” (college campuses), but I don’t know how widely accepted it is.
Well let’s see. She has made millions of dollars out of this charade based entirely on the premise that it fooled every single person she met. Because if it didn’t fool essentially everybody then she wasn’t actually getting any insights into how straight men interact with straight men.
So doesn’t that give her a huge incentive to lie?
Why is it that people on this board are so willing to accept these sorts of claims at face value despite the massive financial incentive to lie? What actual evidence do we have that this occurred beyond the word of someone who is getting paid millions to say that it occurred?
I really can not think of any claim that deserves to be treated with more skepticism than this one. Show me some corroborating evidence and I’ll change my mind. But asking me to believe someone who we all know is getting paid millions to tell the story is requires far more gullibility than I keep in stock.
I would like a cite that she was paid millions for one book. If that’s so, I’m busting out my guy jeans and Word.
She reminds me of Raul Esparza in that photo.
I just finished reading the book a couple weeks ago. I thought it was interesting, but I got a bit tired with how she would read So. Much. Meaning. into every glance some guy would give her. Plus she goes to a skeezy strip club to learn about men & their sex drives and is a bit disgusted with what she finds. But all she did was find out about the type of men who would patronize a skeezy strip club! I’m not sure what she really expected to find there.
If you’d read the book, or even this thread, you’d know that she was repeatedly taken for a gay man. Whatever success she’s had (and I very much doubt it’s brought her millions of dollars) obviously didn’t depend on the public believing that Vincent successfully convinced everyone she met that she was a straight man.
*She wouldn’t be the first author to invent a supposedly non-fiction book, but since she had no way of knowing whether the book would be a success then no, she did not have a “huge incentive” to lie. If she invented the whole thing then she’d be lying in hopes that a fraudulent book would become a bestseller, something that happens to very few books, not to mention staking her already successful career as a journalist on no one ever finding out the truth. It’s been six years since Self Made Man was published, and despite the fact that millions of people have seen exactly the same cover photo that aroused your suspicions no one has come forward with any evidence that the book was faked.
If you ever bother to read this book that you’re dismissing as a hoax, you are welcome to start a thread about it. There are certainly valid criticisms to be made. But your criticisms of Self Made Man have little to do with this thread and even less to do with reality.
I’ve thought about reading it, but I was worried this is exactly how it would come off. So thanks for that, I believe I’ll be skipping it for sure now.
I’m not sure that that’s a fair characterization re giving the complete picture. While she (as a woman) was repelled by the context, she said that women do not understand how strong the animal sexual urge is in men and that the stripper interaction was repellent not because the men were “skeevy” so much as the the interaction had little to no true emotional/personal content. It was a physical urge thing like eating.