H M. (anchovy) reviewed on 12/2/2007 + 296 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 13

While I loved the concept of this book, I thought that Norah Vincent came across as incredibly naive in her presentation of her experiences as Ned. Maybe she lived a very sheltered life as an out lesbian in the 2000s, but it was as if she'd not read any sociology or feminist or gender studies books in the last 20 years, even though she quotes from some. She takes many of her specific experiences and overgeneralizes them to apply universally, and she doesn't come up with much that I didn't know about the other sex by my teen years (without going undercover). Yes, not all men are unmitigated jerks, and many men are not allowed by society to be intimate and emotional (except for anger), and some sex workers are unhappy, and some monks aren't well socially adjusted, and door-to-door salesmen are often sleazy, and dating between genders is just fraught with perils...

Given all that, she writes well, and she traveled through some interesting places. I also hope that many of the issues she thought might be universal and hardwired are actually products of societal conditioning, not genetics, and we can try to open up our range of possibilities and make the differences between us all less painful in the future.

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