Handsome men and beautiful women make more money in their lifetimes than people who are average-looking. Tall men get more job offers than shorter men. Blonde women end up inheriting and receiving more money in divorce settlements. These are all facts, well substantiated in multiple studies.
Beauty is an asset. It is often leveraged to good use throughout the lifespan of the beautiful or handsome person.
Today we're going to discuss why do beautiful women hate, just hate, cerebral narcissists? My favorite topic.
My name is Sam Vaknin. Not so handsome. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, which is a very handsome book. And the first one to describe narcissistic abuse. I'm also a professor of clinical psychology in multiple universities around this globe of ours.
Let's delve right into beautiful women and handsome men. Pardon the pun.
In both genders, male and female, men and women, beauty and sex are weaponized. They're weaponized, they're leveraged, within survival strategies.
Beauty, sexuality, the ability to attract people, attractiveness, and even irresistibility. These are all assets, and we all make use of whatever it is that the great lottery of nature had allotted to us.
So beauty and sex are part and parcel an integral element in survival strategies. They are also very conducive to Machiavellian tactics.
In other words, beauty and sexuality are leveraged to manipulate people to obtain favorable outcomes from the environment and from others.
And this is why I call them Machiavellian, because beautiful women and handsome men are fully aware of their beauty or handsomeness. They fully consider themselves attractive. They know their power over others.
Aesthetic power often translates into emotional power.
Indeed, the very word empathy was first coined in Germany, Einfühlung, and it was used to describe the reaction to aesthetic objects such as paintings.
So beauty in nature, beauty in people, beauty in general, this aesthetic of symmetry has a profound impact on us.
And people who are possessed of these gifts make good and profligate use of them throughout their lives.
So what happens when a beautiful woman comes across a cerebral narcissist?
Now before I proceed and before you jump up and down on your seats and before you post an endless stream of inane comments, of course half of all narcissists are women. And so the gender pronouns in this video are totally interchangeable. When I say he, you can imagine a she. And when I say she, you can try to imagine a he.
This video I'm going to focus on beautiful women, that means females, and cerebral narcissists. And I'm going to use he. I'm going to use the male gender pronoun when I talk about cerebral narcissists. Okay, got it? Interchangeable.
Next.
What happens when a beautiful woman comes across a cerebral narcissist?
She feels invisible. She's invalidated. She is erased.
The cerebral narcissist looks through her as if she were transparent.
Beautiful women are not used to this kind of experience. It takes away their femininity. It disempowers them.
Beautiful women instinctively and automatically, and even I would say in many cases unconsciously, use their beauty and their sexuality, their oozing sexuality in some cases, to manipulate men around them.
But it doesn't work with the cerebral narcissist.
The cerebral narcissist is asexual. He has zero response to sexuality or beauty. He may be able to make judgments on aesthetics and symmetry and art and the beauty of art, but this would be cognitive, not emotional.
These reactions would not be visceral or instinctual or intuitive. They would be mediated via analysis and cognition. They would be, in other words, cold.
This cold calculus of aesthetics and beauty in the mind of the cerebral narcissist renders aesthetic objects inanimate. The cerebral narcissist deanimates beautiful objects, including, and perhaps especially so, beautiful people.
As far as the cerebral narcissist is concerned, beautiful people are mere objects to be observed and perhaps appreciated for their beauty. In a way one appreciates a beautiful sculpture or a beautiful painting.
There's no sex in it. There's no reactivity, there's no arousal, there's no desire, there's no passion, there's no attraction, there's no irresistibility.
And so the beautiful woman who comes across the cerebral narcissist feels instantly annulled, instantly defeminized.
Her femininity is taken away, and her main asset is vitiated and negated by the lack of reactance or lack of reaction on the part of the cerebral narcissist.
It is a highly disempowering experience. The woman feels helpless. She feels vulnerable.
The beauty, her beauty and her sexuality are defenses. And so these defenses are gone. They have zero impact on the cerebral narcissist.
She feels naked in the metaphorical sense, exposed.
And so there's a hint of criticism in this.
The fact that the cerebral narcissist ignores the woman's beauty and sexuality is as if the cerebral narcissist were saying you are superficial. You think you can manipulate me, but you can't. You are not as intelligent as you think you are.
So this kind of behavior, the cerebral narcissist ignores the woman. A cerebral narcissist sees through her, renders her transparent, and this causes extreme frustration, narcissistic injuries, and sometimes narcissisticmortification if the beautiful woman experiences the cerebral narcissist as rejecting, as criticizing.
I call it bad object resonance.
The beautiful woman or the hypersexual woman or the hyper-emotional woman or the histrionic woman deep inside has an internalized bad object.
The beauty and the sexuality are used to compensate for this bad object, to somehow acquire power over the world and cater to the woman's latent grandiosity or not so latent.
And here comes the cerebral narcissist and says, your beauty means nothing to me. Your sexuality is undetectable. All your power is gone. There's nothing you have that I want. I'm in control. I'm in charge of the situation because I don't need what you have to offer.
There's an inversion of the power matrix, the power relationships become inverted. It's all a power play, of course, and there's narcissistic injury, and sometimes mortification, if this is done in public.
This sensation, this deep set reaction, he is frustrating me. He is rejecting me. He is ignoring me. He thinks I'm stupid. He thinks I'm superficial. All this causes aggression, initially internalized aggression.
The reaction to frustration is always aggression. The reaction to rejection and criticism in many cases is anxiety, panic even, a sense of disorientation.
It's not working anymore. My beauty is not working anymore. My sexuality is not working anymore. I'm out of tools. I'm out of weapons. I'm exposed. I'm naked. I'm vulnerable. I'm in danger.
The whole situation is perceived as highly threatening, highly menacing, because the cerebral narcissist's gaze is an annihilating gaze.
It's a gaze that vitiates the woman, negates her. It's a gaze that says you don't exist in the most important ways as a woman.
You exist as an instrument, you exist as a service provider, you exist as a tool, you exist as a source of narcissistic supply.
I don't know, but you definitely don't exist as a woman and because womanhood and masculinity are critical parts of self-identity and self-concept the cerebral narcissist negates, undermines, challenges and very often vaporizes the beautiful woman's sense of identity.
She feels adrift. There's an identity disturbance or identity diffusion, which are triggered by the cerebral narcissist's objectifying gaze.
The cerebral narcissist treats a beautiful woman or a sexy woman the way he would treat his smartphone or the way he would treat a 70-year-old man.
The cerebral narcissist is non-discriminating when it comes to sexuality and beauty and attractiveness and arousal and so.
And so the very essence of femininity is taken away. The very core identity is shattered.
And for a brief period of time, having encountered the cerebral narcissists, the woman goes through what is known in psychology as identity diffusion or identity disturbance.
What can she do about it?
The first reaction is a classical one, to devalue the source of the frustration.
This kind of woman would say this guy is a freak, this guy is creepy, I've never been attracted to him. And so on.
So even when this is not true, even when a beautiful woman, a sexy woman had approached the cerebral narcissists with the express intent of having sex and proposing herself, even then she would deny it.
She would reframe the whole situation and she would cast the cerebral narcissist as someone who is devoid of attractiveness, is sexless and in this sense is a pathological person. She would pathologize the cerebral narcissist.
She would say something is wrong with this guy. He is mentally ill. He is a freak. He's a creep. And so on so forth.
So this is devaluing the source of frustration.
At the same time, the woman of beauty or the sexy woman would need to reassert herself, to reestablish and restore her grandiosity, to put together the fragments, the shattered fragments of her core identity.
It's a bit of a mini-traumatic experience being ignored this way.
And so she becomes highly competitive and envious.
She begins to verbally abuse the cerebral narcissists, devalue the cerebral narcissists explicitly and expressly, position herself as superior to the cerebral narcissists in every possible way.
I'm more intelligent than you, I'm more knowledgeable than you, I'm more experienced than you, and of course, I'm more beautiful than you, I'm more sexy than you, I'm more healthy than you. You are mentally ill, I'm mentally healthy.
Competitiveness and envy are the instruments with which the slighted partner, slighted party in this interaction tries to reconstitute and reconstruct her grandiose defenses, the cognitive distortions that have shielded her, hitherto.
This is a common reaction, by the way.
When you have a lifelong strategy that worked very well for you, for example, when you're constantly helpless, and because you're helpless, you're able to elicit favorable outcomes from the environment. When you're constantly sexy, when you're constantly a genius, these are all strategies.
When you have a lifelong strategy that has worked wonderfully for you, that has proven to be self-efficacious and suddenly it's not working, you panic and when you panic one of the ways to restore inner peace and calmness is grandiosity.
You say there's no need to panic. I am superior.
And this is true for healthy people, for mentally ill people, it's a universal reaction whenever your tactics and your strategies and your behaviors no longer work, you're no longer able to guarantee the favorable outcomes that you seek and are no longer you're no longer capable of manipulating people around you.
And then you are faced with a conundrum.
You have used your beauty and your sexuality throughout life. And throughout life it worked.
Throughout life, your beauty and your sexuality got you everything you wanted. Just by being beautiful, just by being sexy, you were able to guarantee favorable outcomes. These were the two pillars on which your self-efficacy has rested and suddenly they don't work.
You're trying hard, you know you exaggerate your beauty. Perhaps you apply makeup or dress provocatively or you communicate sexuality and hyper-emotionality. And yet, none of this seems to have any impact or any effect on the person facing you.
It's a terrifying experience as if the world is off-kilter. Something has gone seriously wrong and awry. What to do?
One of the solutions, even in healthy people, is to devalue the other person.
Say something's wrong with him, not with me. Everyone is reacting to mybeauty. Everyone is reacting to my sexuality. He's the only exception. So he's a freak. Or maybe he's mentally ill. Or maybe he's a creep. Or maybe he's a psychopath. Maybe he's, you know, God knows, God knows. Anyhow I'm superior to him in every possible way, that's the envy and the competition.
So when confronted with the cerebral narcissist, typically a beautiful woman, an attractive woman, a sexy woman who is aware of her beauty, attractiveness, and sexuality, and has used them repeatedly throughout her life, when she's confronted with the cerebral narcissist, she goes through four stages.
Stage number one. She becomes highly self-conscious, highly uncomfortable, ill at ease, discomfited.
The cerebral narcissists' indifference, the cerebral narcissists objectifying gaze, the cerebral narcissists evident lack of responsiveness and lack of arousal challenge the beautiful woman. And she becomes highly self-conscious.
Is anything wrong with me? Can I do something to improve or restore my power?
And so she develops an instant body image problem.
She changes her posture. She applies makeup repeatedly. She tries to become even more provocative, more suggestive, more insinuating, more of everything. Her reactions become exaggerated, and she enters a state known in psychology as hyperkinesis.
Hyperkinesis, she becomes essentially kind of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She begins to fidget. She has ticks, she begins to move on her seat restlessly.
This restlessness is an indicator of disorientation, of incipient anxiety and panic, and of an increase, a dramatic increase in self-critical self-consciousness.
My beauty and sexuality are not working because something is wrong with me.
I haven't applied makeup correctly. I haven't dressed rightly. I haven't, something is wrong with me. I haven't applied makeup correctly. I haven't dressed rightly. I haven't, something is wrong. Maybe I'm too fat. Maybe I gained weight.
So initially, there's an attempt to rectify body self-image and to change posture in a compulsive manner, this is known as hyperkinesis.
In stage two the woman becomes histrionic, highly seductive, tempting, in your face, sexy. She is hell-bent on chasing the cerebral narcissist and conquering him. This sexual conquest is intended to restore the beautiful woman's self-perception and self-concept, which is essentially grandiose, fantastic and inflated. It's also intended to restore her power.
She would likely discard, get rid of the cerebral narcissists, having slept with him once.
The whole idea is to prove, proof of concept, to prove that to herself, that she is still irresistible, that she can still conquer anyone.
So this histrionic seductiveness, this highly inappropriate behavior is coupled with hyper-emotionality, or actually a simulation of exaggerated emotions.
Attention seeking is critical in this phase.
The beautiful woman tries to attract the attention of the cerebral narcissists in the right way, by redirecting his cognitive processes from goal orientation to sex orientation.
In short, the beautiful woman is trying to convert the cerebral narcissists into a somatic narcissist, to reawaken in the cerebral narcissists, his dormant sex drive, and his ability to interact with the opposite sex, in this particular case, in this particular example, to interact in a way which is more typical of the average male.
Of course, everything I say applies to same-sex couples.
This is stage two.
Stage two invariably fails, because cerebral narcissism is not a choice, it's a state of mind. The sex drive in the cerebral narcissist is deactivated, is atrophied, is nearly dead. The asexuality of the cerebral narcissist is not a pose, is not posing, is not pretension, is not a form of acting. That's who it truly is. He is not into sex. He is not into beauty. He's not into aesthetics.
And the woman who is beautiful and sexy and seductive and so on has no power over the cerebral narcissists because he sees right through her manipulativeness and stratagems.
Cerebral narcissists detest histrionic women because they perceive the antics and the stratagems of histrionic women to be highly manipulative and an underestimate of the cerebral narcissists power, intellectual power.
So it's like the cerebral narcissist is saying, you think I'm stupid? You think you're trying to seduce me and you think I'm going to fall for it? You really assume that I'm that weak?
It's a narcissistic injury.
The histrionic woman or the seductive woman or the beautiful woman's manipulative attempts to attract the cerebral narcissists and to make him conform to typical male behavior is very injurious to the cerebral narcissists.
He says, you see me as an average stupid man. You think I'm a typical man, but I'm not typical. I'm a genius. I'm unique.
So the cerebral narcissists perceives this kind of behavior as an attempt to render him non-unique, common, average, and this is of course inexcusable.
Stage three is therefore failure, usually aggressive failure.
The cerebral narcissists aggresses against this kind of woman. He aggresses verbally, usually, and this only means that he rejects her. He rejects her volubly, vociferously, unequivocally, unambiguously, and humiliatingly. He humiliates her. He shames her by rejecting her, if possible in public, so as to engender narcissistic mortification.
This is her punishment for daring to assume that she has power over the cerebral narcissists, for daring to think that the cerebral narcissists is like all other men. These are inexcusable offenses and transgressions for which the cerebral narcissists punishes the woman by abandoning her, rejecting her, shaming her, and humiliating her in not uncertain terms.
And this leads to stage four, hatred, hatred, rage, vindictiveness on the part of the rejected woman.
People generally react to rejection in a variety of ways, but a rejection leaves a residue behind, even in totally healthy people.
Everyone has narcissistic defenses, by the way. Narcissistic defenses are not unique to narcissists. Healthy people have narcissistic defenses and healthy people are capable of being narcissistically injured and narcissistically mortified.
It is a myth, a misconception propagated by self-styled experts online that only narcissists can be narcissistically injured. Not true.
And so when you're rejected, even if you are the epitome and the quintessence of mental health, when you're rejected, your narcissistic heckles, your narcissistic defenses rise to the surface. You react temporarily as if you were a narcissist. Momentarily you become a narcissist.
And so when such a woman is rejected, even if she's totally mentally healthy, she would develop narcissistic reactions. Her narcissistic defenses would be triggered. She would become hateful. She would become very angry, rageful, full of rage, narcissistic rage.
And in the long run, she would become vindictive.
All this is part and parcel of a compensatory grandiosity.
The only way to survive such a rejection, which is total and shaming and humiliating and resonates with the internal bad object, the only way to survive this is to somehow eliminate, destroy, ruin, kill the cerebral narcissists.
By damaging and hurting and punishing the cerebral narcissists, the grandiosity of the scorned and spurned and rejected woman is somehow restored.
You see, I'm omnipotent, I'm Godlike, everything is fine, I can move on to the next men where the results are likely to be very different.
Coming across the cerebral narcissists for any woman, beautiful or not, is a highly wounding experience. It's traumatic. It's because it takes away critical elements of the core identity of the woman.
And again, this applies to same-sex couples as well.
Coming across a cerebral narcissus, when you are heavily invested in your sexuality, in your beauty, in your body, in your power over men, coming across cerebral narcissists is severely damaging, it's terrifying. It undermines everything you knew, everything you believed. It takes away your main weapons. It renders you defenseless and vulnerable.
So this is an experience that requires a lot of healing and recovery and restoration.
And initially, the initial phase involves narcissistic defenses.
The cerebral narcissist creates an inordinate amount of female enemies, unusual amount of female enemies. Typically a female, a woman who comes across a cerebral narcissist would grow to hate the cerebral narcissist within minutes.
The reaction is within minutes, maybe an hour or two.
The cerebral narcissist converts women into enemies within minutes because the emanation, the broadcast, the message is, you are nothing to me as a woman.
All your wiles, all your power, all your sexuality, all your seductiveness, all your strategies, they mean nothing to me. When you're next to me, you're powerless. I see right through you. I understand how manipulative you are. And I'm not going to give you any power over me.
And this, of course, triggers anger, frustration, anger, and then hatred. Hatred is just another name for fear. When you're afraid, you hate. Hatred is the way we cope with fear by pretending that we have power.
When we're afraid of something, we say, I hate him, so I have power over him. I can hurt, I can damage the other person.
And vindictiveness, vengefulness is just about justice. It's an attempt to restore justice. It is not just to be ignored when you are beautiful, sexy woman. It's not the way of the world. It challenges the very foundations of the cosmic order.
So there's vengefulness here.
The cerebral narcissist is perceived as if he on purpose, intentionally, meaningfully wanted to hurt the woman.
It's as if the woman is saying he is attracted to me. He does want me, but he pretends not to want me. He fakes not being attracted to me. And he is doing this in order to cause me pain and humiliation and shame. That's why he deserves to be punished. That's why I will take revenge on him.
It's a defense, of course. The woman is telling herself, no man is immune to my charge. No man can withstand my offer of myself. No man can resist my sexuality and attractiveness. No man alive can do this.
And so if someone does, if someone displays resistance, if someone rejects me, he's doing it on purpose. He's doing it to hurt me. He's evil. He wants to cause me pain. And so I will punish him. I'll repay him in kind this is payback and this is the cause the underlying narrative of the vindictiveness it restores the woman's trust in the myth that no men can resist her.
And so men are divided to those who are open to the propositions of the woman, are aroused by her, desire her, want her, and those who are equally aroused equally desirous equally passionate about her but they're hiding it they're lying about it they pretend that they're not aroused they fake it and they're doing this to hurt the woman they're doing this to cause her painthey're doing this because they're malevolent. It's a malicious act. And so they deserve to be punished.
This is the last stage in the interaction.
The cerebral narcissist keeps making enemies of women wherever he goes, wherever he goes. And he ends up having a whole universe of women who are out to get him, are raging and hateful simply because they have been rejected and they have been rejected not because the cerebral narcissist is sadistic but because they have nothing to offer to the cerebral narcissist that is of their slightest interest to him.