You’re So Vain, I Bet You Think this Writing Is About You
The 1972 Carly Simon song that the subtitle of this writing references talks about a strutting dandy, eyeing his “apricot scarf” in the mirror as he watches himself “gavotte.” Over forty years after this song was written, this Warren-Beatty-esque man isn’t exactly the narcissist we’ve become so obsessed with diagnosing and analyzing on social media. You know what I’m talking about—if you haven’t seen the content of some thougtfluencer listing the ten ways to tell if you’re dating a narcissist, someone you know has mouthed off the tell-tale characteristics: gaslighting, lacking empathy, manipulation, victim reversal, tone policing, and martyrdom, to name a few.
These characteristics don’t exactly fit the man Simon sings about, whom she portrays as a philanderer whose lighthearted romps don’t get disrupted with a sexual-assault allegation. In her sympathetic portrayal, he is a lucky jet-setter, winning at the horse races and shacking up with the beautiful women he pretends to love during his James-Bond-like escapades. His worst crime, vaguely alluded to, is spending time with “the wife of a close friend.”
An implied cheater and manipulator, Simon’s vain man isn’t caught red-handed. Additionally, the speaker in the song, left mentally distraught by this man’s abuse, dismisses it as “clouds in my coffee”—she is at fault for being foolish enough to dream that she could secure a stable relationship with such a man.
Lacking condemnation, Simon’s song isn’t trying to cancel anyone. Instead, she prompts nostalgia for a pre-cancel-culture era, and so, any arrogant man would be happy to think Simon’s song is about him.
In the end, Simon’s narcissistic man gets away with behaving badly, and his mask never slips off to show the dangerous monster underneath.
For the sake of keeping your identity concealed, we will simply label you as someone overly prideful about his astrological sign, as if the typical characteristics associated with it—hypersensitivity, moodiness, possessiveness, and vindictiveness—are anything to brag about.
The few people you keep close only stay close if they condone your bad attitude. Otherwise, especially if they openly criticize you, you cut them off or confront them with the brutal self-protectiveness of someone who believes himself to be victimized by others and the unfair circumstances of life.
You are one part martyr, two parts bully, and three parts ghost, as in, an emptiness; a blank; a vacuous hole where some trace of an authentic self should reside.
Before I have gained any momentum, I know you are already planning your defense: Maybe, in response to this writing, you will plead that the women accusing you of psychological or emotional harm are lying. Maybe you will say that you were in a casual or open relationship with them, and so, you were never cheating. Maybe you will divert attention by countering with how fucked up these women were to you.
Whatever you come back at them with, even if you maintain the cold shoulder, your reaction involves complicated mental gymnastics to preserve your self-image as the good guy.
We could give you an excuse, too, noting that your behavior results from your past trauma. However, trauma gives no one license to be an asshole.
We have all heard the myth of Narcissus—he is often invoked in tales of narcissism to the point of cliché. He is the one who, seeing his reflection in a pool of water, leans into it and drowns.
In my interpretation of this myth, it is about not knowing how to be a person or have a self. It is about a person who mistakes the image of one’s self for the self—for the man in the mirror, gavotting with an apricot scarf. It is also about a person who sees himself reflected back to him in other people. So, when others do things different from him, he no longer comprehends the situation and relationship. He lives in a separate reality, one in which his perception of himself is the only truth.
In this sense, every person around Narcissus is a still pool of water, acting as a mirror. When others move, he seems to move with them, imitating their behavior. For this reason, Narcissus is never accountable for his actions, he was simply mimicking someone else. When he does something wrong—no he didn’t, you did.
I bet Narcissus had a lot of water in his astrological chart.
Maybe none of us have a stable, authentic self—maybe a self doesn’t exist and it is the ghostly part that we seem to give flesh to. Nevertheless, most of us strive to shape, improve, and present a self despite the rumors of its impossibility.
I think there is a key difference between people’s grappling with this philosophical conundrum, which plagues us all subconsciously: While some are open to the unmaking of the self in order to deepen their intimacies with others and adapt to life’s conditions, other people, whose self-presentation is too cultivated and precious, refuse the vulnerability it takes to be unmade, fiercely fighting back when someone or something upends the idea that their self is coherent and immutable.
Simon was right to show and not tell her Narcissus’s annoying gallivanting behavior. She’s clearly a better poet than me, reining in her desire for revenge and to proliferate conflict in order to write a banger we can all sing along to.
Still, I think that what I am writing might spark some mass head-nodding. The people reading this who do not know you, they at least know someone like you, and they are thinking, “Yes, he is just like that.”
You travel around the country a lot, for work and fun. You’ve always been itinerant.
Travel is a good thing for you. It allows you to constantly reinvent yourself and your community. In every zip code you find yourself in, you get to be the man you want to be, receiving the kind of attention you think you deserve.
It’s hard to say how many women think you are in love with them and imagine having a future with you. It’s also hard to say how many women have already been disabused of this fantasy.
The first warning sign that you were not the person you tried to convince us you were, should have been your eagerness to colonize the moral high ground. You were the first to condemn any white supremacist and misogynist offenders, and you overstated your support for the LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities. [1]
In other words, you wanted a pat on the back for paying lip service to the bare minimum required to be a decent human. More than that, you wanted the women whose company you claimed to prefer to see you as safe.
Unfortunately, it worked. Like Carly Simon, we—those of us who associated with you as friends or lovers—had some dreams and they were clouds in our coffee. We were left feeling and looking stupid because you fooled us, proving us naive for believing you were authentic and sincere.
I feel equal parts bad for you and infuriated by you. I wish I felt nothing for you—the truest form of disdain or whatever the opposite of love is. But maybe this niggling need to write about you also has something to do with finding compassion for you—and the compassion I need to show myself, letting go of the shame I feel for falling for the ruse of your friendship.
I’d argue that we might have started re-examining the vain man and positioning him as the more dangerous narcissist in the 2010s, working up to Trump’s first presidential win, the arrest of Jeffery Epstein for sex trafficking, and the rise of #MeToo, in which women publicly disclosed details about their harassers and abusers, creating an activist community while underlining the pervasiveness of violence against women in the US and beyond.
Trump’s manosphere-validating politics have emboldened insurrectionary hooligans who would never be caught dead gavotting in apricot ascots. Unabashedly touting hateful ideologies, these men have been given carte blanche by the US government to defend what they see as their individualistic liberties, including maintaining their position at the top of the social hierarchy. And they look the part: unkempt, libertarian-hermit beards; red MAGA hats; and torn, sun-faded “We the People” T-shirts with other paraphernalia that supports police and a police state while ironically rallying under the desire for unregulated freedom.
In some ways, the Trump administration made it easier for us to identify these thugs, who frantically wave the flag of their xenophobia. Loud and seemingly ubiquitous, they no longer seem like a fringe part of society that we don’t have to worry about. And yet, they are—they are a marginalized group with little popular backing. It’s important to remember this fact and not let it get drowned out by all of their screaming.
Not all assholes are as loud and obvious as men’s rights activists, though. There’s also a quieter—and arguably more disturbing—clout of narcissistic men I want to alert us to: These men make fun of the Proud Boys, ostentatiously oppose sexism, flaunt their LGBTQ+ connections (or claim to be queer themselves as poly, pansexual, or bi), and are the first to cancel and shame others. They need attention and praise for their moral uprightness even though they don’t hold themselves up to the same moral standards that they impose on others.
A fitting buzzword for this group of narcissists might be the covert, introverted, or closeted narcissist. He reads as the withdrawn, sensitive type, suffering from depression or an anxiety disorder. Yet, while depression and anxiety might be excuses he leans on, he really suffers from the malady of believing that he is better than everyone else.
Men like him won’t shy away from pastel-colored scarves, mimicking the glam-rock, Mick-Jagger-like misogyny Simon sang about—and it’s easier to fall prey to them. Because they seem so attuned to current social-political ailments, we find ourselves wanting to soften our criticism of them, letting them off easy with the label of the philanderer with a heart of gold.
“You can’t blame yourself,” one woman says to another. “They are predators. This is what they do. It’s like a bunny blaming itself for being a bunny because it gets eaten by a coyote.”
The other woman wrinkles her nose. “I’m not a bunny,” she says.
A covert narcissist might say:
“I have never treated you the way you treat me,” condemning a woman for being suspicious of his relationships with other women, while he was indeed cheating.
“I only work in collaboration with decentralized groups,” after he quit a group in which a woman, not his boss, showed too much leadership.
“You’re too young and immature to understand,” to his girlfriend, who is fifteen years younger than him.
“Of course I was joking,” after he wasn’t joking.
“You always have a need to be right.”
“You’re making me your scapegoat.”
“You always blame others when you’re the one to blame.”
All of it, projection; gaslighting.
This quote, which I lifted from an email you wrote to me, astonishes me: “I just hope that you look in the mirror and marinate on your how your actions impact others before trying to blame everyone else for shit not going the way you want.”
I’m not going to fix the typos; you really are this careless and allergic to the self-reflection you think everyone else needs to perform.
A woman you verbally abused reached out to me. She shared a screen shot of a text exchange you had with her. In this exchange you told her she needed to “take some time for self-reflection,” and that she needed to “marinate” on the “lies” she was insisting were true.
“He’s feeding us the same lines,” she said.
“He thinks we’re interchangeable,” I said.
“I don’t believe he sees us as real humans,” she said. “I’m still having a hard time with it. He will probably never experience any shame or remorse for doing this to us.”
The phrase “marinate on your how your actions impact others” is echoing in my head.
With the backlash that inevitably came with #MeToo, we were reminded that today’s vain men have fragile egos, defensively and violently lashing out when a finger seems to be pointed in their direction. #MeToo exposed and provided evidence for abuse, but it couldn’t make the perpetrators take accountability. If anything, it spurred these men to go to further, diabolical lengths to justify their actions and confirm their innocence, often by slapping women with defamation cases or, ironically, by doubling-down on their harassment by doxxing them.
Perhaps the most bitter disappointment in these post-#MeToo times is that we have to confront how there will be no justice delivered to the men who we found the courage to confront, if not take to court. Even when formally found guilty and convicted of crimes, they still believe themselves to be innocent and wrongfully charged (*cough* Harvey Weinstein).
The narcissist never apologizes or tells the truth because he lives in a different reality, in which the truth is exclusively about his victimhood.
When women start sharing the stories about the men they know who act like you, it triggers an avalanche.
In a discussion among some women during their shared shift at work, one shares a story about a friend whose boyfriend cheated on her. He was in the military, and so, a lot of their relationship was long distance. During a couple’s therapy session, the therapist asked him why he had cheated on his girlfriend while he had been away. He said, “I forgot about her.”
Another recalls how a man she was in a band with started vilifying her after he asked her out and she said no. He spread a rumor around their friend group that she was “crazy” and should be avoided.
A third woman opens her mouth, but as she does, the door jingles, signaling that she has a customer to attend to.
“Oh hi!” she says, cloyingly raising the pitch of her voice. “I haven’t seen you in so long! How can I help you?”
She serves this man who seems agitated with her, watching her hop around, doing his bidding. He seems to want more than her subservience, which she is being paid to provide.
When he leaves, this woman explains that this man came into the business to bully her with his presence. He wanted a scene to transpire; to capture some evidence of slander being spread about him, making him unsafe or unwanted in public places—proof that the woman he harassed is ruining his life.
Sometimes, performative cordiality is the most biting form of ostracism.
Women are often punished for their optimism about men.
We want so badly to believe that not all men succumb to sexism, and yet, when they do, we get blamed for failing to attend to the obvious signs. It’s our fault we chose an asshole to associate with.
We’ve all done this: Someone tells us the story about a cheating man and we frown and nod. We say, “What a piece of shit.” But we are also thinking: How could she not see this coming?
Our relationship deteriorated when I could no longer condone your aggressive behavior to others. You bragged to me about a hostile confrontation you had with someone smaller and more vulnerable than you—let’s call them Geo. Smugly, you recounted how you told Geo how shitty they are while threatening to have them beaten up. I see you, jeering in Geo’s face; puffing out your chest and pounding on it, like an ape.
The worst part is that Geo has always been the unfair target of your anger with someone else—a woman who once held a position of authority over you. After you got up in Geo’s face, this woman heard about it and texted you, telling you that if you wanted to confront anyone, it should be her.
Showing me her text, you called her a “bitch,” expecting me to agree. Instead, I told you that you should take her up on her offer. A conversation between the two of you has been long overdue.
Then the punishment began. It started with a false accusation, saying that I leveraged you to get something you thought I wanted at your expense. In this way, you tried to divert attention away from yourself as the focus of any misconduct.
Next, you started gaslighting me, in an increasingly insulting manner, using vague consensus to show how everyone agreed about my shortcomings.
We both know that you will never reach out to this woman who you hold a grudge against. If you did, you would have to confront your culpability and end this bitterness.
A large chunk of your identity is tied up in this dispute—to the woman and the way she supposedly wronged you. Who would you be without this woman, and all of the women, who have persecuted you? Who will you be when all the people like me, who supported your anger for a while, decide they no longer want anything to do with the ugliness your misery proliferates?
Perhaps the only woman men like you can genuinely love and care for is their mother. Maybe if women acted more self-sacrificing, men like you could love them back. Unsurprisingly, that kind of one-sided love tends to elude them.
I didn’t listen to the people who warned me about you. The things they were saying struck me as slanderous because there was no proof to back up how bullying and abusive they made you out to be.
On the one hand, I am angry with myself for needing hard evidence—to be burned myself—to finally reckon with who you are without your mask. On the other hand, if I stopped giving everyone, particularly men, the benefit of the doubt, I’d view everyone too suspiciously to cultivate real and deep relationships with others.
Despite missing the signs of the danger you pose, I refuse to let my experience with you taint the relationships I pursue in the future.
What an unfortunate thing—to cross paths with you. And that is how I will continue to frame our star-crossed tracks: an intersection of very bad luck.
As pop-cultural buzzwords, “narcissist” and “narcissism” are certainly overused by people like me, who have no background in clinical psychology and no business diagnosing others. Even the DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is rife with pseudo-scientific classifications of disorders that are based on what a set of experts identify as consistent, “abnormal” patterns of behavior—and it changes all of the time. Let’s not forget that the DSM once listed homosexuality as a mental disorder.
So, “narcissism” might not be the best word for what I want to talk about. Yet, “vanity” doesn’t cut it either; calling someone vain doesn’t address the underlying threat of extreme self-absorption and lack of empathy, which can lead to psychological abuse.
Maybe I need to consult a bestiary.
A woman who was foolish enough to love you notices the abundance of female contacts you scroll through on your phone.
Explaining yourself, you say, “I’ve always preferred the company of women—I just get along with them better.”
When you flamboyantly take the moral high ground, we could call that Freudian overcompensation, in which your over-the-top condemnation of other men and preference for women conceals your misogyny.
Since Freud wore phallus-colored glasses, he might also add that you are overcompensating for having a small dick, or, if not literally a small dick, then “small dick energy,” a fragile male ego that is easily decapacitated after a hard kick to its balls.
I’ve been establishing a genealogy of contemporary male vanity in order to identify the right target for my anger. As I boldly berate the men living up to these stereotypes, though, I need to clarify that I, too, am afraid to write an open letter to the male narcissist. I know, even while staying abstract and vague, I risk suffering his retribution.
And yet, I also feel compelled to write about it, to address him directly, because it feels unbearable to let him disempower his victims as he moves through the world with infuriatingly beguiling guiltlessness, attracting more people into his web.
If I could lower myself to his level, I would dox him. I’d start a smear campaign, putting his face on fliers all over town, seeking vengeance by publicly humiliating and shaming him, directly and unambiguously.
I would write emails to his colleagues. I would let them know that he is an empty husk of a person; a pretense. He uses academic language as moral camouflage, calling out privileged positionalities and neoliberalist individualism as evidence of others’ colonial-settler mentalities, never his own.
Yet, it is only a matter of time until he shows his true colors to others, too. All I really have to do is be patient.
After the first time you lashed out at me, I remember being surprised to see you at an event you knew I would be at. I expected that you showed up to be provocative, but you were docile and meek, acting as if nothing had happened. This was my first experience of the whiplash you liked to give me: After tearing me down, you would instantly go back to being friends. I started calling you Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Seeing you at this event, I expected my rage to swell, threatening to burst in a grisly mess all over you. Yet, while you sat there, hunched over, stripped of the customary, intimidating stance you take when you puff yourself up as the bully, I felt bad for you. I realized then that you are a very unhappy, lonely person, and you always will be.
A woman says to another woman: “We were in love with a ghost, a person who didn’t exist.”
The other woman starts crying.
“Narcissists are black holes.”
Empathy, Elon Musk said on the Joe Rogan podcast, has been “weaponized.” Musk was talking about the US government and its “civilizational suicidal empathy”—the belief that individual empathy somehow burdens the collective and destroys society, such as when we give free health care to illegal immigrants and drain state resources. It’s a disgusting argument from a disgusting man who wants to make sure the US state cares even less about its citizens, legalized or not, than it already does.
This manipulative and provocative wordplay is meant to distract us from the fact that influential men like Musk—and his cohort of Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Sam Altman, Curtis Yarvin, and JD Vance—don’t care that civilization is in rapid decline. They hoard the natural resources needed to expand executive power, build data centers, make electric car batteries, surveil the public, and launch rockets and bombs, saying that it is for the good of humanity. Meanwhile, the trillions of dollars they also hoard could put an end to global poverty and world hunger.
These men want the world to end so narcissistic elitists can inherit it. To this end, when they tell us that we need to have more children because the birth rate is declining, what they really mean is that they fear the rising birth rates across Africa. One day, the global majority of the Earth’s population, increasingly identifying as ethnically hybrid, will dethrone these men. Then, who, they want us to marinate on, will lead the world into a better and brighter future?
I am not putting your narcissism and lack of empathy on the level of these nefarious billionaires. The antisocial behavior that working-man narcissists like you possess doesn’t come with plans to demolish and take over the world—your hate has no power to do things on a global scale. Working on a more humble level of destruction, you are satisfied with derailing the lives of a few in order to protect your self-image. Under this logic, the handful of women who you emotionally and verbally abuse in order to satiate your ego is a small sacrifice.
Your vanity is small-time but nevertheless catastrophically noxious to those who offend it. And you can bet that the widespread validation of systemic harm done by rich, influential men who prioritize themselves and the identity group they think they represent has everything to do with how you act and your lack of self-reproach.
The last time I saw you in a public place, you ran away. I was on my way out, headed to the exit. Looking around, I tried to spot you again, to make sure I hadn’t imagined you, but you had vanished.
I’d like to flatter myself and say that I intimidate you, but you didn’t run away from me. You needed to avoid a situation in which there was no way you would come out of it looking innocent.
When I found out that, after a few years of cultivating a friendship with you, I never really knew you, I couldn’t stop mining my memories, going back in my mental archive and revising context and emotions.
Every place in the city that you hate and are reluctant to show your face in has me wondering: Who are you trying to avoid? Who else have you wronged, and would they have revealed who you really are if we had run into them?
Moreover, every time you claimed you were “introverting” or “too depressed” to go out—was that because a woman you were dating from another city was in town, and you couldn’t risk that I would expose you, knowing you were dating someone else?
It must be very hard and exhausting to be you. Do you have some diagram or spreadsheet you maintain, reminding you about who will be where when, so you don’t have to risk uncomfortable confrontations? Surely owning up to whatever it is you have done would be a lot easier and make you a lot happier than continuing to exist as a cankerous shadow, slinking around, opening your Notes app to remind yourself that X prefers this while Y prefers that?
X accuses Y of flirting with Narcissus. Y, happily married, finds the accusation ludicrous. When it turns out that Narcissus was cheating on X, Y concedes that X had rightfully intuited something, even if she unfairly took out her suspicions on her friend instead of confronting Narcissus about her insecure feelings.
Before the revelation about Narcissus’s disloyalty to X, Y and Narcissus discussed this situation. Narcissus asked Y, “You aren’t in an open marriage are you?”
The question, at the time, didn’t strike Y as odd. She thought Narcissus was saying that of course she wouldn’t openly flirt with other men—she was in a monogamous relationship, as he had correctly assumed.
Reflecting on it now, she thinks that Narcissus had wanted to know if she had, in fact, been flirting with him. Did it flatter his ego to think that she harbored a secret crush on him? Was he happy that she was the red herring, standing in for the adulterer, but also disappointed that she wasn’t actually adulterous enough to be available? Had he wanted this accusation to be true and untrue at the same time? Was he trying to see himself in her, another Narcissus, behaving abominably but innocently?
A man makes out with his bandmate’s girlfriend because he knows the girlfriend and the bandmate are in an open relationship. Outraged, the bandmate quits the band and ends the friendship with this man, who thinks of himself as the victim in this incident.
“He’s very intelligent—narcissists are known to be smart,” someone says.
I don’t find narcissists smart or compelling. They often use academics like armor, so they can assert their authority and dismiss others as ignorant. Moreover, their education gives them the language they need to spotlight society’s problems without admitting complicity. Worst of all, the things they say and the topics they study allow them to position themselves as trustworthy and harmless to the very people they are prejudiced against.
“Weaponizing” is the buzzword people use when someone uses phrases they hear in therapy or academic studies to gaslight and manipulate.
This use of intelligence, to me, is the sign of a very weak mind and an even weaker sense of self. No matter how much higher education you pursue, you will never escape yourself and the darker aspects of your personality, which you refuse to reckon with.
A man decorates his house like a set for a film, making sure it looks one way when one person stays with him and a different way for everyone else. How is it that he can hold a framed picture in his hands—showing himself lovingly holding a woman—putting it up and taking it down depending on who will be in his home, and not experience a sharp twinge, alerting him that what he is doing is wrong? How can he so intentionally, determinedly play with others’ perceptions of their shared reality, as if the lives and feelings of everyone but him do not matter?
Is this behavior really a result of a lack of empathy? Or is it just too easy to feel like you aren’t doing anything wrong as long as there are no witnesses to question and shame you? Maybe you lie to yourself, too, watching yourself as if someone else is acting this part, so that you stay numb.
I went to a gallery opening hoping you wouldn’t show up, and you didn’t. You had claimed to be friends with some of the people running the space, but when I asked them about you, they shrugged, saying they barely knew you. When you hung around, they said, you would stick to yourself and drink too much.
During this conversation, an old man in a pickup truck drove up, honking. He pulled up behind a row of parked cars in front of the warehouse he rented. “Move these, now,” he commanded.
The cars were moved.
Then, this man’s wife appeared with the cops. She pointed a finger at one of the owners of the gallery space, saying, “You are a narcissist prick, and I will not stop giving you hell until you stop!” She meant that she wouldn’t stop bothering him until he stopped allowing people to park in her spot.
When the crowd gawked and snickered at her, she called us all narcissist pricks. She repeated this insult, mostly singling out the same gallery owner, calling him, in one inspired reiteration, a “magnanimous narcissist prick.”
“What does magnanimous mean again?” someone asked.
I looked it up on Merriam-Webster online: “showing or suggesting a generous and kind nature.”
During the COVID quarantine, I watched the four-part Netflix documentary, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. It showed footage from a civil deposition, in which an attorney, Spencer Kuvin, asked Epstein about a witness’s claims that Epstein had an oddly-shaped penis. Kuvin wanted to imply that Epstein showed signs of narcissistic personality disorder, and so, he antagonized Epstein, hoping to get him to explode with rage as his self-image came under attack. A similar tactic, to jab at the narcissist, was used by Kamala Harris in her presidential debate with Donald Trump, an accused rapist, adulterer, and former close friend of Epstein’s.
I’ve never seen your penis, nor have I heard accounts of it. Still, I am rattling a cage that is too small to contain the importance you attribute to yourself.
I am poking a bear to see how it reacts.
Will you seek retaliation? Or will you remain silent?
Either way, there is no way you come out of this looking clean.
Luckily for me, when I found out that I was one in a large group of people stung by you, the spell you had over me was broken.
Others are not so lucky, and I think the worst thing you did to other people was to convince them that you really loved them.
It bothers me that while these women are having a hard time—distracted and distraught while moving through their daily routines, doubting themselves, feeling shame, and watching clouds in their coffee—you get to strut around, unbothered.
I wish you didn’t have that much of an impact on us, but you do. And so, instead of ending this writing by puncturing your ego so it can start to deflate, I’ve made you feel bigger and more significant by letting you know that you have effectively disrupted others’ lives and are free to go on to disrupt the lives of more people.
What did I expect to achieve by writing this? Did I think I could finally penetrate into your consciousness and force remorse on you? Did I think that by probing into the topic of narcissism that I could understand you better—or even, more impossibly, make you confront the brute you really are?
This writing accomplished nothing as far as you are concerned because, whether the term “narcissist” fits or not, you are indeed a black hole, “a dark and seemingly inescapable state or situation.”
As a sort of post-script, I need to address the seven men from the now-defunct Chi Phi fraternity chapter at Cornell University who are accused of gang raping a woman in 2024. I will not vaguely allude to these men, I will remind us of their names: Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar. These were seven of the over fifty men active in a group chat when one of them announced that they had access to “free pussy” from their victim—a woman under twenty-one who they had filled with alcohol and ketamine.
My online social bubble, where the algorithm dictates the news bites and opinions I see, has been framing my view of this story about the woman filing a lawsuit against these men. From what I can tell, and hope to be true, she is prompting a nationwide discussion about why her case was initially dismissed and never properly investigated—and why the men at fault were let off with some shallow essay-writing. We believe her, and we do not believe the defense team that has or will claim that she is filing this lawsuit for the money.
Someone who identifies as @OmogeDami on X writes: “ALL men benefit from the actions of violent men. It keeps women in check. It allows men perform the barest minimum and still feel good about themselves. The existence of violent men grants ‘good’ men awards for basic decency.” I like to think that takes like this one represent general consensus. We are all so awesomely pissed off about this situation, right? Because, we need to agree that men need to be humiliated, shamed, convicted, and persecuted for dehumanizing women if we ever expect things to change.
I know that, if you, the narcissist, are paying attention to this news at all, you are not zeroing in on the idea that “the existence of violent men grants ‘good’ men awards for basic decency” like I am. Or maybe you are because this is an idea that you like to ventriloquize to women as you lure them in with promises of security and respect.
I’d add to @OmogeDami’s observation by arguing that the existence of men like these former Cornell fraternity brothers, whose crimes are not taken seriously by academic and legal institutions, allows us to overlook a whole spectrum of indecent male behavior. So while you could argue that your behavior is nowhere near comparable to that of rapists, and you would be correct in that assertion, I would counter that the systemic minimizing of violence against women not only rewards you for your bare-minimum decency, it also lets you get away with a myriad of indecencies, dismissed as peccadillos, because, hey, at least you aren’t gang raping anyone.
It is extreme male vanity to see one’s self in cute portrayals of the feminist ally or the lady’s man, as depicted in Carly Simon’s song, and not in any of the reports about the worst examples of men abusing women.
[1] Coincidentally, I just finished reading Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and am pondering how the cultural discourse I use about dating, cheating, narcissism, buzzwords, and identity politics intersects with some of Tulathimutte’s satirical stories. In this novel, Tulathimutte depicts millennials trying to navigate a social-political landscape that seems to strip them of freely choosing and finding satisfaction in their sexual identities and sexual partners. The opening story, “The Feminist,” follows a misogynist who has a chip on his shoulder after being repeatedly rejected by women despite identifying as a feminist. In the second story, “Pics,” a self-hating woman, who struggles with rejection from a friend who she hoped to be lovers with, lashes out at her group-chat girl posse as she witnesses them progressing into their romantic lives with partners, children, and dating drama, leaving her behind. None of these characters hold up a perfect mirror to you or me or anyone you’re associated with—the chips on our shoulders are not exactly the same. Yet, the stories deal with the nuance of abuse, victimhood, abhorrent personality flaws, and the inability to see ourselves as others see us in a smart and interesting way.
For this reason, I thought about leaving a copy of this book on your doorstep. Then I thought: Fuck spending any money on you. Second, you’re closer to being a boomer than a millennial. Third, you’d over-simplify things and never grasp what I want you to understand by sharing this text with you—which, if I had to over-simplify it, would look something like a Venn diagram, with “woke” in one circle, “anti-woke” in another, and “narcissistic personality disorder” in the space where they overlap.
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