Gender study brave, intriguing

SELF-MADE MAN: ONE WOMAN'S JOURNEY INTO MANHOOD AND BACK AGAIN, by Norah Vincent, Viking, 290 pages, $24.95.

Using the prototypes practiced by John Howard Griffin in "Black Like Me" and Barbara Ehrenreich in "Nickel and Dimed," Norah Vincent changed her name to Ned and her appearance cosmetically to try to "pass" as a man for 18 months. The result is the book "Self-Made Man."

Remarkably successful most of the time, she concluded that it is very hard to be a man — even in "a man's world."

It was also remarkably hard for her to play the role of a man and keep her emotional balance in check. She felt constantly on display, always afraid of making a mistake and being revealed as a woman and wreaking havoc upon whatever setting and group of men she inhabited at the time.

But it never happened — at least publicly.

Sometimes she could detect that a man with whom she was friendly had suspicions about her, so she revealed herself, and the results were never traumatic. Each man took the news surprisingly well and usually even continued their friendship.

When Ned was dating women who would learn after about three dates that he was really a woman — some of them were angry about it.

Another experience with even greater impact was going to strip clubs and finding it deeply troubling to witness the ways in which men clearly viewed women as objects under those circumstances.

One factor generally unexpected by the men whose camaraderie Vincent sought is that she is gay. And when some of her feminine qualities were exposed, the result was even more surprising for the men. Vincent suggests in the book that her sexual preference did not play a major role in her own play acting.

Although Vincent describes some very interesting encounters with groups of men in bowling alleys, monasteries and the sales world, she fails to secure a convincing representative sampling. For the most part, she was enjoying the camaraderie of a lower class of men, on the whole failing to get inside the life of professional men.

On the other hand, attempting it would have made the experiment much more difficult, and she may not have been able to pull it off. But her limited immersion in the world of men shows itself to be somewhat suspect, because virtually all the men she encounters indicate their near obsessive behavior about women and sex, and both Vincent and the men with whom she interacts use profane language as a matter of course.