A Self-Made-Man girl discovers that life as a man is harder

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Take that, deniers!


This is a precious, a very precious experiment, I wonder if they did a filmed documentary about it.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Entertainmen ... id=1526982

Anyone up for an international WP L&D cross-dressed dating competition meetup thing?

Precious truths.

“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”
— Norah Vincent


“People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out.”
— Norah Vincent, Self-made Man

Her comment about dating women as a man, a small man:


“
They wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space, and at times it made me feel quite small in my costume, like a young man must feel when he’s just coming of age, and he’s suddenly expected to carry the world under his arm like a football. And some women did find Ned too small physically to be attractive. They wanted someone, they said, who could pin them to the bed or, as one woman put it, “someone who can drive the bus.” Ned was too willowy for that, and came up wanting.

[…]

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it, but feeling the pressure to be that other world-bestriding colossus at the same time made me feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men, not only because living up to Caesar is an immensely heavy burden to bear, but because trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What’s more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up he check.

Expectation, expectation, expectation. That was the leitmotif of Ned’s dating life, taking on the desirable manly persona or shrugging off its dreaded antithesis. Finding the right balance was maddening, and operating under the constant weight of so much political guilt was simply exhausting. Though, in the parlance of liberal politics, I had operated in my real life under the burden of being a doubly oppressed minority – a woman and a lesbian – and I had encountered the deprivations of that status, as a man, I operated under what I felt in these times to be the equally heavy burden of being a double majority, a white man.”
— Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent

"“Living as a man taught me a lot about the things I most enjoyed about being a woman in the world, things I consider to be the privileges of womanhood—the emotional freedom, the range of expression, the sexual and social power we can exercise over men. Returning to my life as a woman was about reclaiming those privileges and taking greater satisfaction in them. Here’s one small example, which may sound hopelessly old-fashioned and silly, but it made me smile so warmly: The other day a clerk in a store turned to me and apologized for having to refer to pornography in front of me during a discussion he was having with a male customer. I found it very thoughtful and sweet. When a man does something like this now, I connect again with all the vulnerability that I felt as a man in front of women, and I remember all the conversations I had with the men in my men’s group about their need to take care of and protect women. Not all men behave the way this clerk did, of course, but nonetheless I feel a deep sense of the respect that men like him have for women and I feel grateful for it. It’s nice to feel that someone is looking out for you, or trying to, and worries about offending or debasing you even in speech, and this is something I never felt as a man.

It took me months. Probably a good six months to really get back into being a woman. And this is partly because I had some unpacking to do. It wasn’t just a matter of returning to myself, because I am a different person now than I was before I embarked on this project. I feel more womanly now, more in touch with my femininity, than I ever did before I lived as Ned, and that has taken some getting used to, though it has been very pleasant.

I don’t miss anything about being Ned. The few social advantages I discovered in manhood—the swagger, the self-confidence, the entitlement—I’ve learned to incorporate into my life as a woman. Everything else I was happy to discard.”

-Norah Vincent on being Ned for 1.5 year"

"We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."

It's good to finally see confirmation coming from someone living in the opposite camp.

OP just opened a can of worms.

(And yes, both genders have struggles that need to be acknowledged.)

Image of Norah and "Ned" Vincent, circa 2006:

Ned looks....like me .

I will buy her book.

What I find fascinating that she could manage to get 30 dates from online dating in 1.5 year, not a small number; but I wonder out of how many attempts - Her being a woman with a woman mind is certainly an advantage in how to communicate with other women online.

But apparently, her feminine mind (and also her small not-so-manly physique), failed her miserably on the first dates.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, men have to initiate relationships which isn't easy under normal circumstances let alone for those on the spectrum. Being pursued while maybe annoying and somewhat burdensome at times is still a position of power and privilege.

It's all summed up in the old maxim that goes, "Men Chase; Women Choose".

You know you suck when ... someone of the opposite sex, who was raised and has always lived as the opposite gender, performs orders of magnitude better as your own gender than you ever will.