Norah Vincent learned what it means to be a man because of a dare. A friend of hers, a drag king, goaded Vincent to dress up as a man. No shy soul, Vincent accepted the challenge. The evening became one of pure enlightenment. Suddenly, the subtle, yet rigidly imposed world of male-male communication — the refusal to lock eyes, to show disrespect — opened before her. That experience lay within her, a dormant seed.

Germination took place seven years later, when Vincent began to wonder how she would experience the world if she were a man: not a transsexual, as her interest was anthropological, not biological, but a person who would be perceived and treated like a male wherever he went. So Vincent, a freelance journalist and former writer for the Village Voice and Salon.com, swaddled herself in men’s attire and demeanor, to get a sense of how the other half lives, thinks, and plays. Over the course of 18 months, she dressed up as her male alter ego, Ned, hundreds of times, joining an all-male bowling league, going to strip clubs, even sequestering herself in a seminary. What she saw and experienced changed the way she viewed men and women and the chasm of misunderstanding that often resides betwixt the two.

She chronicled these events in Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back, (Penguin, $15), a rollicking good read that takes nearly every stereotype you can think of about gender and steamrolls it flat. On tour to promote the paperback, Vincent sat down for a little chat. Fresh from the gym, her glowing face shape-shifting between masculine and feminine beauty every few minutes, she spoke freely about raunchy strip clubs, the date that went too far, and her newfound empathy for the heterosexual male.

What was it like to first see women dressed up as men?

Well, it’s funny. I always thought they weren’t very authentic looking. I always think men do it better. The drag queens, you know, they’re much more authentic, especially performers. The first time I did it, I was interested in perfecting the technique or getting it so that you could actually pass in the daylight. I didn’t know that it would then blossom into this project years later.

But I think it was being in the everyday world and realizing that there are always signals we have about gender — how we’re supposed to behave and what the rules are — that we’ve all internalized, that I thought, “Wow, [dressing as a man] is like changing the channel on the T.V. Suddenly, all the signals are different, all the expectations are different. It struck me if I did it for a much longer period of time, I could really pursue that, to find out more. I thought of it sort of as an anthropology project, whereas most people that do it, I think they think of it as self-expression.

So you have a make-up artist help you create stubble. You deepen your voice. You work out. Then you put on your outfit. Now, they say clothes make the man, but there’s gotta be more than clothes that do it. So what was it about yourself that allowed you to portray a man in such a way that people perceived you as a man?

To begin with, I’m a masculine woman. I’m a dyke. I have an advantage in all those respects — being tall, big feet, low-ish voice. But the real answer is that I think so much of it is psychological. People believe what you’re selling to them if you sell it convincingly enough and, certainly, I began to buy it, too, which is part of what happened over the course of the experiment. It invaded my psyche.

It’s like I took this slice of pie out of my brain and said, “OK, this is the gender piece.” And I pulled it out and put in this new one that’s Ned, and then reprogrammed the whole system. I thought I could do it with impunity, that nothing would happen. I found out that’s not the case, that gender identity isn’t just a question of what you wear, but what you wear as a reflection of who you are very deep inside. I really think it’s so deeply embedded in who we are, that when you mess around with that, you mess around with your sense of self. That’s why I had breakdowns, because I didn’t realize that other parts of the mechanism really were being thrown off.

When you were a young girl, did you ever have this idea that there was something like a gender continuum?

Absolutely. I always felt like an alien. I knew I wasn’t a boy and I didn’t want to be a boy— I mean, I did in the sense that their interests were closer to mine and I felt a certain affinity in that way, but I never felt what transsexuals report feeling, that I was in the wrong body. But I was always an outsider and I think that’s why gender identity became a big piece of my life. I was really fascinated by, “What does it mean to be an insider?”

Are there benefits to being the outsider?

Mmm-hmm. Growing up overseas, it’s a very similar thing: You are never part of the in-group, but you are also never part of the place that you left. As painful as that is, it lends you a certain insight into what it means to be a part of the group because you’re looking from the outside in and you see the signals. For me, on my first night out in drag, how men made eye contact or didn’t was really fascinating to me. I thought, “God, this is just something I don’t even think about as a woman.”

So you’re Ned. You go to strip clubs. Had you ever been to a strip club before?

I’ve seen a few pole dancers in lesbian bars, but nothing like this, and I went to some pretty raunchy places. But one of the reasons I chose to go was partly because almost every guy — straight guy — they said, “Well, it’s a rite of passage to go.” Part of what I wanted to do was use my disguise as a way to be a fly on the wall. I really did want to learn about male sexuality, because if you think about gender, not enough has been discussed about male sexuality and the fact that women are always talking about how men don’t understand female sexuality. But women do not fucking understand male sexuality, and they don’t even think they need to. I feel like it’s important to start jumpstarting that part of the conversation.

Of course, the reception I’m getting about that is a lot of women who feel, “Why should I care?” The other night at a reading, somebody said, “Well, I feel like you gave my husband a Get-out-of-Jail-Free card.” But I feel like, “Why are you so invested in having your husband in jail?” It reminded me in some ways of being gay: Men are born with a biological drive that women don’t have, don’t understand, so we make up all kinds of jokes, but we are also sort of angry about it. It’s the same sort of thing with gay people. It’s , “Why can’t you just change who you are?”

Why do you think, if you’re a woman, you would have disdain for male sexuality?

Partly because we don’t share the hormonal drive. Sex is fairly elective for us, so we just don’t understand what it means to have that experience — especially at puberty, but then thereafter — of that very strong drive. We tend to think that we’re just sort of evolutionarily superior. I also think the feminist movement is deeply fed the idea that we’re the ones who have the complaint. That was something I went into in some ways thinking, too. But this book definitely disabuses the notion that guys have it better in every way.

How do you think men perceive women?

With an incredible reverence that I don’t think women quite understand. For a lot of heterosexual men, being desired by women is a rite 0 of passage: It’s part of what makes you a man. There’s a lot of rejection that goes into the whole system of [the man being] the person who has to go up and importune the woman: You’re the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and they kind of decide are you good enough. There’s a lot of anger that goes into that. So you put that sort of anger together with sort of a deep, intense sex drive, and a sense of really wanting women’s approval, and you get kind of a combustible mix.

Often, when I was in private with men, there would be what you would expect: that certain misogynistic locker-room talk. But what I interpreted was that they’re not allowed to express weakness, especially around male buddies, [even though] rejection is part and parcel of your life with women. You put those things together, and the only thing you’re allowed to do is say, “Oh, she was worth a blowjob,” because you can’t say, “Gee, that rejection really hurt.”

How was it to be so close to female strippers who were revealing the most intimate, physical parts of themselves to you?

I’m attracted to women, so, theoretically, I should have enjoyed it as much as men. But what you see in those kinds of places is that they are custom designed for male sexuality. For me, it was a deeply alienating experience to have even a woman I might have found physically attractive in other circumstances gyrating on me in this very depersonalized kind of way. The women really do treat you as though you’re less than human: You really are just a wallet and a barbarian in their eyes, and they’re just going to get you off as fast as possible.

You also dated women as Ned. How was that for your partner, to have you go out as this man, with one date resulting in a sexual act with another woman?

That was something that neither of us had expected going in. We knew I’d be going on dates, but they weren’t going to be serious dates. And I had a three-date limit. But, yeah, there’s one particular case that went past the bounds of what [both my partner and I] had been expecting. It’s difficult, there’s no question about it, but we got through it. What can I say? Mea culpa. I kind of overstepped the journalistic bounds, so. . .

But in that moment, the other woman had the perception that you were a man, and then you admitted you were a female, and yet she still went through with it. Was that surprising?

Now it wouldn’t be. I didn’t put it in the book, but I did go on three dates with a gay man as a gay man. When I told him at the end of the time [I was a woman], he wasn’t angry, but he said, right away, “Well, I don’t have any interest because you just don’t have the equipment.” I do think that male sexuality is much more categorical in that way, but I think that female sexuality is much more fluid, and I do think it is much less about the plumbing than it is about the spiritual, emotional, intellectual surroundings of the act itself. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t know very many gay men who have gone to bed with straight men. Part of that is because homophobia is so much stronger among men than among women. I was just astounded by how much homophobia there was against me as an effeminate male.

In the book, you have so much empathy for the males you meet. Were you surprised by that?

Yeah. When I was just out of college, sort of cementing my lesbian personality, I had a lot of anger towards men. And I had all sorts of feminist ideas in my mind, that there are reasons to dislike men. Part of what this book, for me, was a way of saying, “Okay, we’ve had that conversation. Can we get to another place now where we admit that we can’t just go on saying that men are to blame for everything?” We have to admit that in this so-called patriarchy, there were two roles: male and female. And the male role is really as much a straightjacket as the female.