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of things, myopic and certainly inapplicable to anything so grand as a pronouncement on gender in American society. My observations are full of my own prejudices and preconceptions, though I have tried as much as possible to qualify them accordingly. This book is a travelogue as much as anything else, and a circumscribed one at that, a six-city tour of an entire continent, a woman’s-eye view of one guy’s approximated life, not an authoritative guide to the whole vast and variegated terrain of manhood in America.
    I wanted to taste portions of male experience and I wanted the people I met, the characters, their stories and our shared encounters to play as large a role as possible in my reportage. Yet I knew I had to impose some organizing principle on the final product.
    I found that simply walking down the street as a man, while fruitful the first time or two I did it, didn’t give me enough substantive material to work with in the long term. I needed, I realized, to create discrete experiences for Ned in which he would make friends, socialize, work, date and be himself around people who didn’t know him, but whom he would get to know and sketch as more than acquaintances. True immersion was required, as were sustainable characters in manageable settings. I felt it would be too unwieldy to throw dozens of people at the reader in one long, confusing march of scattered themes and impressions, so instead, I chose to confine each setting and cast of characters to one chapter, and let the significant themes emerge from there.
    Chapter two, for example, is about my eight-month stint on a men’s bowling team. Leisure, play and friendship are the salient themes, though others do present themselves and recur in later chapters. Chapter three is about strip club culture. Sex drive and fantasy are its prevailing themes. Chapters four and six cover the more normative experiences of dating and working as a man, while chapters five and seven—which take place in a monastery and a men’s movement group, respectively—represent my attempts to use the advantage of my male trappings to do what I could never do as a woman: infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets.
    I had each of these experiences in the order in which they appear—that is, I finished the season on the men’s bowling team before I went to the monastery, or to work, or to the men’s group meetings—so the general timeline is preserved, as well, I hope, as the sense of Ned’s accumulated growth and knowledge about masculine experience.
    In order to disguise the identities of those involved, I have changed the names of every character, place of business and institution, and purposely omitted all specific references to location. So while I conducted my experiment in five separate states, in three different regions of the United States, I have avoided naming those states or regions.
    Finally, a word on method. It will become clear to you if it is not already that I deceived a lot of people in order to write this book. I can make only one excuse for this. Deception is part and parcel of imposture, and imposture was necessary in this experiment. It could not have been otherwise. In order to see how people would treat me as a man, I had to make them believe that I was a man, and accordingly I had to hide from them the fact that I am a woman. Doing so entailed various breaches of trust, some more serious than others. This may not sit well with some or perhaps most of you. In certain ways it did not sit well with me either, and was, as you will see, a source of considerable strain as time wore on.
    I began my journey with a fairly naive idea about what to expect. I thought that passing was going to be the hardest part. But it wasn’t at all. I did that far more easily than I thought I would. The difficulty lay in the consequences of passing, and that I had not even considered. As I lived snippets