Norah Vincent

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Norah Vincent is an American lesbian journalist and author.

Vincent was a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies from its 2001 inception^[1] to 2003^{[citation needed]}. She has also had columns at Salon.com^[2], The Advocate^[3], the Los Angeles Times^[4], and the Village Voice^[5].

Vincent's most recent book, Self-Made Man, retells an eighteen-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a male. She talked about it 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 strip clubs and visited Catholic monks in a cloister. She dated women and describes how inferior she felt, when judged by women during flirting: the harsh way in which many women pre-judged her, assuming all men to be essentially the same, turned her, albeit briefly, into a "temporary misogynist", seeing as most women can never see the failings of their own sex from the other side^[6]. 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.^[7]

[edit] References

^ Independent gay forum: Norah Vincent. Independent gay forum. Retrieved on 2007-11-07.
^ Norah Vincent - Salon.com. Retrieved on 2006-02-20. (requires allowing cookies)
^ "Last Word", The Advocate. Issue 903.
^ Vincent, Norah. "Getting a grip is all we can do", Los Angeles Times, 2001-10-25.
^ Vincent, Norah. "Higher ed", Village Voice, 2001-02-06. Retrieved on 2006-02-20.
^ "Guardian Book Extracts "Double Agent"", Book Extracts, The Guardian Quote: If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no. Unquote, Saturday March 18, 2006. Retrieved on 2008-March- 5th.
^ "A self-made man. Woman goes undercover to experience life as a man", 20/20, ABC news, 2006-01-20. Retrieved on 2007-11-07.