My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
Many narcissists, especially cerebral narcissists, tend to frustrate women who are discernibly attracted to them. These narcissists refrain from having sex with these women, or they tease them and then leave them. They resist flirtatious and seductive behaviors, and so on.
Often, these narcissists invoke the existence of a girlfriend, a fiance, a spout, as the reason why they cannot have sex or develop a relationship, or even casually interact with other women.
But this is not out of loyalty and fidelity in the unpathic and loving sense. This is because these narcissists wish, and often succeed, to sadistically frustrate the feminine, interested party.
This tendency to inflict hurt and pain on women is owing to the fact that narcissists are misogynists. Narcissists hold women in contempt. They loathe and fear women. They seek to torment and frustrate women, either by debasing them sexually or by withholding sex from them.
Narcissists harbor ambiguous feelings towards the sexual act and, of course, intimacy. In the narcissist's mind, there is a clear separation between the honest women of his life, really, the saints. We're talking about his mother, his spouse, his daughters, and the whores, the prostitutes that he is having sex with.
The narcissist divides all women to saints and whores. He finds it difficult to have sex, which is dirty, forbidden, punishable, and degrading, with feminine, significant daughters, with his spouse, with his intimate girlfriend.
To the narcissist, sex and intimacy are mutually exclusive rather than mutually expressive or mutually enhancing propositions. With the exception of the meaningful women in his life, the narcissist tends to view all females in a bad light.
The narcissist's frustrating behavior thus achieves a dual purpose, to secure a narcissistic supply of belonging by being courted, by being admired, by being pursued, and to reenact old unresolved conflicts and traumas with his mother.
The cerebral narcissist also does not enjoy sex, and by far prefers masturbation or objective emotionless sex. He is the kind who would go, for instance, to prostitutes on a regular basis.
Actually, the cerebral narcissist uses his mate or spouse as an alibi, as shielded against the attentions of other women, an insurance policy which preserves his virility, his virile image, while making it socially and morally commendable for him to avoid any intimate sexual contact with other women.
Ostentatiously ignoring women other than his life, which is a form of aggression, the narcissist feels righteous in saying, I'm a faithful husband.
At the same time, he feels hostility towards his spouse for ostensibly preventing him from freely expressing his sexuality, for isolating him from carnal pleasures, for burying him alive, so to speak.
The cerebral narcissist's thwarted logic and deficient cognition goes something like this. I'm married. I'm attached to this woman. Therefore, I'm not allowed to be in any form of contact with other women, which might be interpreted as more than casual or business life. This is why I refrain from having anything to do with women. This is why.
Because I'm being faithful, as opposed to most other amoral, immoral men.
But, continuously in a dialogue, I do not like this situation. I envy my three peers. They can have as much sex and romance as they want to, while I am confined to this marriage, ashamed by my wife, my freedom curbed. I migrate her and I will punish her by abstaining from having sex with her altogether.
Thus frustrated, the narcissist minimizes all manner of intercourse with his close circle. Spouse, children, parents, siblings, very intimate friends. Sexual intercourse, of course, but also verbal or emotional. The narcissist limits himself to the rawest, most basic exchanges of information, and isolates himself socially, completely.
The narcissist's reclusion ensues against a future hurt, and avoids the intimacy that he so dreads.
But again, this way, by staying at home, by refusing all social contact, he also secures in the replay of old unresolved conflicts. It's a catch-22.
Finally, the narcissist is really left alone by everyone, with no secondary sources of narcissistic supply whatsoever.
To reiterate, the narcissist hates women virulently, passionately and uncompromisingly. His hate is primal, irrational, the progeny of mortal fear and sustained abuse.
Granted, most narcissists learn how to disguise, camouflage, even repress these untoward feelings. But their hatred towards women does swing out of control and erupt from time to time.
Sex, in the narcissist's mind, is reserved to whores all other women in the world.
This division results the narcissist constant cognitive dissonance. I want her, but I don't need anyone, but there is always this, but.
It also, this attribution of bad morality to women who have sex, also legitimizes the narcissist's sadistic urges. Staining from sex is a major and recurrent narcissistic penalty, inflicted on these feminine female transgressors.
The perception that women are whores also collies well with the frequent idealization devaluation cycles that the narcissist goes through.
The idealized females, those who would later become espousal, they are sexless. They are asexual in the narcissist's mind. They don't need sex. They don't want sex. They would never engage in sex, this dirty act.
The divided ones, the ones he desires, or he sometimes does have sex with, they are deserving of the degradation sex and the contempt that inevitably follows thereafter.
The narcissist believes firmly that women are out to hunt men by genetic disposition. As a result, he feels threatened as any prey would.
This, of course, is an intellectualization of the real state of affairs. The narcissist feels threatened by women and tries to justify this irrational fear by imbuing them with objective menacing qualities.
I'm afraid of women, but I am, my fear is justified. They really are huntresses, you know, dangerous.
And this is a small victim in a larger compass.
The narcissist pathologizes others in order to control them, so he also pathologizes women.
The narcissist believes that once their prey is secured, women assume the role of bodice lectures.
Having counted the men down, they abscond with a male's sperm. They generate an endless stream of demanding and nose-drinking children, financially bleed the men in their lives to cater to their needs and to the needs of their dependents and so on and so forth.
The men becomes a kind of slave, beaten by a woman vampire.
Put differently, the narcissist regards women as parasites, leeches, whose sole function is to suck dry every man they find in tarantula-like decapitate the men once no longer useful.
Thisof courseis exactly what the narcissist himself is doing to people. It's what we call projection.
His view, the narcissist view of women is actually a projection.
Women threaten this quest for uniqueness and narcissistic supply. Women are sex, women are intimacy, and sex is best true. It's common. There's nothing special or unique about sex.
Women's sexual needs threaten to reduce the narcissist to the lowest common denominator.
Intimacy, sex, human emotions are so widespread that if the narcissist were to have them, it would prove that is not special. Everybody and anybody can feel. Everybody and anybody copulates and breathes. There's nothing in these activities to set the narcissist apart or above others.
And yet, women seem to be interested in exactly these very things.
Thus, the narcissist emotionally believes that women are the continuation of his mother by other means and in different guises.
Heterosexual narcissists desire women as does any other red-blooded male, or even more so, owing to their special symbolic nature of women in the narcissist psyche.
Humbling a woman in acts of faintly sad or masochistic sex is a way of getting back at mother.
But the narcissist is frustrated by his inability to meaningfully interact with women, by women's apparent emotional depth and powers of psychological penetration. Whether it's real or imagined is another story.
And of course, by women's sexuality.
Women's incessant demands for intimacy are perceived by the narcissist as a threat. He recoils instead of getting closer.
The cerebral narcissist also despises and derides sex itself, as we said before. And thus, caught in a seemingly intractable repetition complex in approach avoidance cycles, the narcissist becomes furious at the source of his frustration.
Some narcissists set out to do some frustrating of their own. They tease women passively or actively. They pretend to be asexual, or in any case, they turn down rather cruelly any feminine attempt to court them and to get closer. Sadistically, these kind of narcissists tremendously enjoy their ability to frustrate the desires, passions and sexual wishes of women. Or their wish for intimacy.
This kind of frustration inflicted upon women makes them feel omnipotent and self-righteous.
Nastasists regularly frustrate all women sexually and significant women in their lives, both sexually and emotionally.