"So where Freud once wrote that 'the type of female most frequently met with' tended to love narcissistically, we are now more likely to apply that characterization to men."

"'If there’s one thing a girl with a bad boyfriend has,' Dombek notes,' it’s the moral upper hand in the religion of mental health.' Here, she turns to the corner of the Internet she calls the 'narcisphere,' a collection of blogs and forums in which women, mostly, solidify a sense of their superior powers of empathy and raise their collective consciousness about surviving narcissism and about narcissism-induced P.T.S.D. 'If you are an especially giving person, warns the Internet, you are a prime target for narcissists,' Dombek writes. The narcisphere has a gendered inverse, which some call the manosphere and which is dedicated to teaching men how to dominate women by feigning self-confidence. This is the realm of pickup artistry. It is much worse than the narcisphere.... The story of the narcissist is, in part, a story of the people around him pleading for empathy, insisting that we should all care more about one another. And yet somehow this account of the world has become 'a story that divides us, by defining empathy as something we have and others lack,' Dombek writes. Perhaps in pathologizing narcissism, we have forgotten how perilous it is to constantly diagnose other people. In the end, what 'The Selfishness of Others' lays out most clearly is not the danger of narcissism but, rather, the danger of any particular world view that requires, for the sake of consistency, its owner to believe that she is good."

From "WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DECIDE EVERYONE ELSE IS A NARCISSIST," a New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino about "An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism" by Kristin Dombek (in the book "The Selfishness of Others").