Journal Entry #4 March 23, 2009

Through the weeks of reading Self Made Man, our group has learned a lot about the male culture. Self Made Man has opened our minds to even more stereotypes about the male culture that we never thought about in the first place. One of these stereotypes was the feeling of rejection and the extent to which it actually affects a man. Women tend to brush it off and are accustomed to rejecting men, and have no idea that it actually affects them in a negative way. Through Vincent’s experiences as Ned, we also learned that men are constantly under a microscope. Their manhood is always in question and they are unable to open up and show emotions. This is where women get the idea that men are callous and numb to any sort of feeling. In reality, they have all of these feelings and they want to express them to others but they feel as though their manhood and masculinity is at risk. We also learned through Ned’s experience in a male support group that there are a lot of men who have severe hatred toward their mother’s, as well as their father-son relationships being broken and sometimes nonexistent. There are many other secrets that have be unveiled throughout this book. These secrets were intriguing and made the book interesting from the very first page.
Although Vincent does a pretty good job of making sure her research is conducted ethically, our group feels that there were some areas where she could have improved. For one, during her dating time as Ned she came out to three different women and told them that she actually was a woman. Each of them has a different reaction, but most of them still wanted to sleep with Vincent even after she revealed her secret. Our group feels that Vincent was unprofessional in the sense that pursing these women was for her personal enjoyment and not for the book itself. This behavior does not seem ethical to her research about the male culture, and it is really not helping her get inside the mind of a man in order to get the proper research for her book.
At the end of the book Vincent comes to many different conclusions about male culture. The first one was the fact that somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Everyone has high expectations for men and if they fail they fall hard. Vincent also learned that a man’s world is not as open and approachable as she first speculated. The men are always concerned with sex and hazing the weak guy. However, Vincent grew to understand these types of behaviors because of how difficult their lives truly were. The dialogue and words they chose with each other were far from attractive and extremely vulgar and this put Vincent in a very uncomfortable situation. All of this information Vincent found was very relevant to this subculture and she went about finding the information in a very different way than other researchers. She actually lived as a man and retrieved the information that way. However there are many other ways this information could have been found. It would be extremely difficult for Vincent to find her information by simply asking men because they will not come out and tell her the same things she learned as Ned. They may tell her a few things about what it is like to live in a man’s world, but she would not have the same access to it as Ned did. A survey could also have been used, but again the results would not be as good or beneficial to her research.
In the end, Vincent’s ethnography was successful in our minds. She set her mind on a goal and achieved it in every way possible. She even admits that she’ll never truly understand what it like to be a man. In reality it takes a true ethnographer to admit this and own up to the reality of their work. All in all her ethnography about male culture is effective and teaches its readers the true emotions and experiences of a man’s and how hard it can be at times for women to live in it.