There is a difference between Narcissism and
Egocentrism. Egocentrism is a cognitive error while Narcissism is an emotional
one. It is crucial that we recognize this distinction because both of them are
similar but at the same time Narcissism is more complex because it is the natural
progression of Egocentrism. We have learned from part one of this series that Egocentrism
can manifests in adolescence in 3 ways; Imaginary Audience, Personal Fable and
Apparent Hypocrisy. When a teenager feels that everyone is constantly observing
and judging her (Imaginary Audience), and then believes that she is special
because she thinks everyone is interested in her (Personal Fable) then she
believes that she is indeed special and should be given preferential treatment
(Apparent Hypocrisy). Using this example, we can see how adolescent egocentrism
would evolve into Narcissism which can then be termed as self-aggrandizement.
I Want It All (And I Want It Now)
The core of the Narcissistic drive is the
emotion of shame. Unlike guilt, shame is the most unbearable emotion to
narcissists because it is pervasive personal flaw and not a misdeed. It is so unbearable
to them that they create means to not experience it at all and in the process
they are hypersensitive to shame; if they ever experience even the slightest
humiliation they will go into a disproportional frenzied reaction. Narcissism
develops from being unable to confront and cope with shame constructively
(Nathanson 1987). To the Narcissist, it is never their fault because admitting
fault means being ashamed and they cannot handle it.
To avoid feeling defective and insignificant, the
narcissist develops seven traits that are common among them which are
Shamelessness, Magical Thinking, Entitlement, Envy, Arrogance, Bad Boundaries
and Exploitation (Hotchkiss 2003: 3-27). Shamelessness is a typical trait and
manifests as being unconscientious, amoral, in self-denial, constant blaming
and furious outbursts. They appear cold but they have no self-control and erupt
by the smallest of affronts. Below is an example in Malaysia where two girls
went berserk just because they could not get the beer they wanted.
FunnyMalaysia.net (2013)
Magical Thinking is a way for the narcissist to
distort reality and create the fantasy of grandiosity and omnipotence either
within themselves or within others they control. Margot Medhurt founder of
Yours Sincerely with 30 years’ experience in the dating industry noted the rise
of women with a wide discrepancy between how they perceive themselves and how
others see them (Taylor 2009). She stated that these women were often very
plain but see themselves as fabulous and exceptional people. She commented that
“these women, however, are unable to get their heads around the fact that
the rest of the world might not share their distorted, inflated view they have
of themselves.” Magical Thinking
also manifests whereby the narcissists transfer the shameful feelings of
themselves to others in what is termed as ‘projection’ or shame-dumping.
Indeed, slut-shaming which is a primarily a girl-on-girl behavior is the
projection of ones own shameful feelings of inadequacies.
Because they view themselves as special,
Narcissists also have an unreasonable sense of Entitlement, believing they are
always deserving of preferential treatment and automatic compliance. Noncompliance
and defiance is seen as a threat on the narcissists’ perceived authority and is
met with anger at the person who is viewed as being difficult and awkward.
Medhurt elaborated about her clients, “they invariably reject every guy’s
profile but if a guy rejects their profile, there is all hell to pay,” and
then went on further to say, “they often become indignant and angry towards
me, demanding to know why a guy dared to turn them down.” Below is a good
commentary on the delusion of self-entitlement.
The Critical G (hey, it’s a good video.)
For those who did not notice, I clue you in to
the 3 narcissistic traits of Shamelessness, Magical Thinking and Entitlement as
the progression of Imaginary Audience (Magical Thinking), Personal Fable
(Entitlement) and Apparent Hypocrisy (Shamelessness).
Imaginary
Audience à Magical Thinking
(Everyone is looking at me) à (Of
course they’d look at me!)
Personal
Fable à Entitlement
(I’m special) à
(I’m Worth It!)
Apparent
Hypocrisy à
Shamelessness
(I’m a winner so I don’t need to try)
à (I’m a winner so I do whatever I want)
We can see the transference from mental to
emotional, how egocentrism evolves into narcissism. It is worth point out that
the person does not lose her egocentrism even though it has mutated; she still
retains her it because it is a cognitive feature whilst narcissism is an
emotional feature. Hence a person can be both egocentric and narcissistic at
the same time and they usually are.
Moving on, the next narcissistic trait is Envy
which I could write an entire article altogether, but I won’t. Envy is an
emotion transformation experienced when the self-worth is compared against
another and arriving at a conclusion motivated by the effects of shame (Lamia
2013). To put it another way, you’re not ‘all that’ compare to that
person and it makes you feel insecure and worthless. Unlike jealousy, envy is
directed towards others; either wanting their attributes, success and
possessions, or wanting the other person to lose it all – ‘if I don’t have
it, you can’t either’. This explains why women always claim the victim of supposed male
privileges because they want the wealth and influence that powerful figures have.
Next, Arrogance is the belief that the
narcissist is always better than others or she is worthless. If she is feeling
deflated, she will vitiate, denigrate and discredit others to inflate herself
again. This is the reason narcissists are domineering, judgmental and despotic,
which is to secure their status that will guard them from their dysfunctions
and shame. Narcissist will only compete when the outcome is favorable, they
fight in fields where they can shine without risk or effort and in areas where
they are less skilled they resort to petty one-upmanship to sustain a sense of
superiority. This could explain why women shy away from competition especially
in the workplace and resort to gender discrimination when they get passed over
for promotion.
Narcissists are also bad at with Boundaries, in
the sense that they do not recognize personal space and often intrude upon
them. Anita Sarkeesian’s war against the male spaces of Gaming Industry is a
good example of this. To the narcissist, you exist for them or you don’t at
all. Now Shamelessness, Entitlement and Magical Thinking are traits that the
narcissist feels about herself. Arrogance, Envy and Boundaries are traits that
the narcissist feel and project onto others. Here is how it looks;
Imaginary Audience -- Everyone is looking at me
|
Magical Thinking -- Of course they’re looking at me!
|
Envy -- They shouldn’t be looking at her! She’s such a slut!
Personal Fable -- I’m special
|
Entitlement -- I’m Worth It!
|
Arrogance -- How dare you reject me!
Apparent Hypocrisy -- I’m a winner so I don’t have to try
|
Shamelessness – I’m a winner so I do whatever I want
|
Bad Boundaries -- I can do whatever, to whomever I want
So in essence, Narcissists believes that everything
is ‘Mine.’
Here is a video of a narcissistic girlfriend
from Malaysia. Please ignore the emasculated boyfriend; he is after all a Blue
pill beta male. Note that the girl exhibits Arrogance by speaking down to the
boyfriend as if she’s superior, her envy of others with money by bringing-up her
boyfriend’s financial inadequacies as well as her Bad Boundaries by having this
argument in public without shame.
Jazz Wei (2014)
The culmination of all of this intricate
details is the last and most dangerous of all Narcissistic traits; Exploitation
which is the manipulation and utilization of others without concern for their
interests or wellbeing. This is it folks, the coup de grace of
Narcissism;
Imaginary Audience -- Everyone is looking at me
|
Magical Thinking -- Of course they’re looking at me!
|
Envy -- They shouldn’t be looking at her! She’s such a slut!
|
Exploit -- Slut-Shaming and“I’ll fuck her boyfriend!”
Personal Fable -- I’m special
|
Entitlement -- I’m Worth It!
|
Arrogance -- How dare you reject me!
|
Exploit -- I’ll fuck random men then cry rape in the morning.
Apparent Hypocrisy --
I’m a winner so I don’t have to try
|
Shamelessness – I’m a winner so I do whatever I want
|
Bad Boundaries -- I can do whatever, to whomever I want
|
Exploit – I’ll marry you, have your kids then divorce you for alimony
Booyah.
And we know women frequently do this because we
always hear stories like how “I slept with my friend’s husband” (Hensley
2014). In this day and age of consent, no woman can blame the man for seducing
her unless she wanted him to. It is simply women on a power-trip to prove that
she can steal another woman’s lover. We can also observe the number of false-rape
accusations; Rumney puts the number of false-rape accusations at 10-50% (Frost
2013) while Kanin estimated it at 40% (1994: 81). And of course the most
damning statistics of all and the nail in coffin as it were, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (2013)
found that divorce rate in the United States is 50% in 2011 and we know that
women initiated divorce 68.9% for all cases (Saad 2013). The common denominator
in all three instances above is women, not men.
You’re So Vain
But how do we know that women have always been
this Narcissistic? Consider the history of the Women’s Suffragette Movement of
1906. In England, voting rights were historically linked to land ownership
established by King Henry VI in 1432; you could only vote if you owned enough
property. In the late 19th century to early 20th century,
women were only concern about the women’s rights to vote, citing that it is
discrimination against women. But before the voting reform 1918, only 4 out of
10 men could vote and after the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 equal rights to
vote was established. Voting rights were never about gender discrimination; it
was about class discrimination.
The suffragettes had made it all about women at
a time when even men could not vote (manwomanmyth, 2010). These shameless,
entitled and self-deluded women could only see their own wants, envied only
those that had it and exploited men by claiming male privileges to get it. And
this was also during the time of the First World War where men who could not
vote were sent to die by the hundreds of thousands. If suffragettes were really concerned with equal rights, why did they not fight for the rights to vote for these men? Instead, feminists such as
Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel shamed men into going to war by
giving them ‘white feathers’ (Donald, 1998). Feminists did not want equal
voting rights for all men and women; feminists wanted voting rights for only
women and for the men to just die.
Feminism causes Narcissism.
As Karen Straughan (2013) would say, “the
idea of male privilege is so fucking bogus. Privileges are entitlements; what
men have had through history wasn’t entitlements because it was a necessary
element of performing their obligations. A tool handed to them because it was
needed by men in order to fulfill their legally, economically and socially
forced obligation to women and children; Not Because Penis!” If men were
going to die for their country, then they should have at least the right to
vote in their country because along with duty comes the rights to facilitate
that duty. The British Women’s Suffragettes do not have obligations or duties to
anyone; all they have done for England is being baby factories in the comfort
of their husbands who provided and died for them. To think that women were
oppressed only highlights their apparent grandiose narcissistic fantasy.
Love Me Tender
Right about now, the women will be screaming “but
men are narcissist too.” Yes, obviously any gender can be narcissistic and
there are degrees to how narcissistic a person can be. What I’m pointing out is
the prevalence of female narcissism which is even more endemic due to one
reason; Narcissistic Supply which is the narcissistic need for attention whether
it be celebrity or notoriety (Vaknin n.d.). It explains why women are cam
whores, loves to gossip and wanting to reveal and publicize their promiscuity. We
can see numerous examples of this on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. It is also
the reason women have friend-zones with friends who functions as emotional
tampons. These people serve as mere appliances that exist for the gratification
of the narcissists (Kreger 2011). In fact, women have a vast abundance of Narcissistic
Supply not only from men, but also their sisterhood where they supply each
other that craving for attention.
Men do not have a large pool of Narcissistic
Supply and we need to work to get attention. Men compete for recognition and we
often shoot down other men whether we realize it or not. And when we do come
across narcissistic men; whether it is our employer, father, brother, politician,
religious figures, celebrities or whatnot; we often criticize them, fight them
and defy those in positions of power. Men do not simply give other men flagrant
attention. We reward other men when they are deserving of it; that is the
nature of competition and women do not understand this because they constantly
get the Pussy Pass on their dysfunctions such as their inherent narcissism.
Hence, we can say with good conscience that there
are not many men who can be narcissists but there are sure a lot of women who
are.
Okay, now I have to address the issue of
self-love and healthy narcissism. There are psychiatrists and psychologists who
believe that moderate narcissism is healthy (Whitbourne 2012). They state that
narcissism could be positive and that people with a healthy narcissism lead a
healthier lifestyle. This is the kind of quote-mining that you find in women’s
magazine articles that perpetuates a woman’s unreasonable sense of entitlement.
Why? Because women would only read the headline and say to themselves “Oh,
it’s okay to be narcissistic!” Completely taking things out of context and
seeing only what they want to see. What psychiatrists and psychologists are
referring to here is Self-Confidence and Self-Image and this leads back to how
we deal with our naturally occurring egocentrism.
It is how we deal with our perception of our
surroundings in terms of Imaginary Audience, Personal Fable and Apparent
Hypocrisy. A person with good Self-Confidence and Self-Image correctly gauges
his own perception of himself against that of the public; in other words men do
not give a shit what other people think of him as long as he enjoys doing his
thing and doing it well. Men attach our confidence and image to the work that we
do and not the perception people have of us. Women on the other hand, do care
very much not what people think but that people are thinking of
them. Women attach their confidence and image to their belief of how many
people perceive them.
And we know this is true because women use
communication to enhance social connections and relationships (Merchant, K.
2012: 18). Women use communication to get to know more people with the purpose
of adding them to their own pool of Narcissistic Supply. The woman does not
care who these people are as long as they notice her; and this is why you see
women having 1,000 friends, followers and subscribers on Facebook, Twitter and
Youtube; this is why women gossip and tell secrets about their BFF’s; this is
why women can simply believe and spread lies about other people because it is
not about others; it is always about their narcissistic need, it is always
about them.
So yes, most if not all women are narcissists
whether if it is a little bit or full blown.
Continued in The Female Psychosis part 3:
Solipsism.
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