So women used to hate men. Now, after the publication of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, they just pity us. Why? Because the aforementioned lesbian columnist for the Los Angeles Times dressed up as a man for 18 months — in defiance of the stereotype that we journalists are a bunch of dysfunctional attention-seekers — and discovered that penis-ownership is not as easy as it looks.

Vincent’s drag-king act involved stuffing a “packable softie” (prosthetic penis) down her Y-fronts. This transformation, along with her stick-on stubble, breast-eliminating sports bra, voice coaching lessons, rectangular glasses and chunky hairdo, gave her undercover access to the Secret World of Men. Her identity for the mission? Ned — a name once used against her as a taunt (for having “ned ass and no tits”).

Thanks to her book, I can understand and pity my maleness. After all, it’s not easy being a bloke. There’s all that bowling we do (for total-immersion maleness, Vincent joined a bowling league), and all that hand-shaking when what we really want is a sweaty man-hug. Not to mention the strip joints we’re always patronising — so ungratifying! — and the pressure of winning bread and starting fights and sniffing each other’s bottoms and, well, you get the idea.

Yes, we men are quite tragic, rendered obsolete by feminism and enslaved by our willies. Give us your sympathy, womankind, not your rage. We’re weaker than you. Or so Vincent seems to think.

There is something both satisfying and infuriating about Self-Made Man. Satisfying because we’re finally beginning to accept that men and women are beautifully, wonderfully different, and that the world is a much better place for it; infuriating because this should have been bleedin’ obvious all along, and because Vincent spends a good deal of her book revealing the obvious with the awe of a physicist who has just invented a teleportation device.

Men, we learn, enjoy looking at strippers but also love their wives. In civilised society, Vincent tells us, men are generally nice to each other, but not emotionally close. Like any trading-places conceit — from White Chicks to Tootsie — Self-Made Man works best when the reader believes that the transformation is plausible. But is it? During the chapter on love, Vincent purports to show us what it is like for a man to search for a sexual partner, when what she is really doing is showing us what it is like for a lesbian dressed as a man to meet woman via internet dating services (for obvious reasons, she can’t actually go through with the sex, otherwise she would have had to include a Crying Game moment, but the intent is part of the stunt).

Hence, when she is on a date with “Sasha”, we gasp at the divorcée’s frostiness. Instead of immediately engaging Ned in conversation, she shows him photographs that she has just picked up from the chemist’s. “This was a hostile act,” Vincent writes. “Everyone knows that photographic displays are one of the most boring parts of getting to know anyone.”

Really? Perhaps poor Sasha was trying to calm her nerves after finding herself on a date in Starbucks with a lesbian dressed as a man who is trying to meet woman online for sex. Sasha might not have known that Ned was a Norah, but I’d bet a dozen skinny Frappuccinos that she knew something was up. Just look at the book jacket — Ned looks a tad freaky.

I’m being a bit unfair, of course. Vincent tries annoyingly hard to point out the pitfalls of her own experiment, and there are enough qualifiers in Self-Made Man to fill a UN treaty. It also took a lot of bravery to undergo such an immersion experiment — and for that, I extend a sweaty man-shake of respect.

Self-Made Man is nicely written and thoughtful in an educational video kind of way. But ultimately I didn’t buy into the gimmick. I’m no biologist, but maybe there’s some kind of physical or hormonal chasm between the sexes that even a lesbian with a packable softie cannot cross.

I also find the obsession with sexual identity troubling: to write about people while concentrating only on what hangs between their legs is surely to demean us all.

For women who really want to understand men, why not read something written by a man? Hemingway would be a start.

• Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent is published by Atlantic Books on April 4