"The usual justification for rehashing Diana’s story is that she — a barely educated aristocrat who married a future king — is just like us..."

"... whoever we might be: feminists, gay people, Jews, Asians, Americans. White is very aware of this and rounds up some of the dafter examples of such deluded narcissism. The journalist Julie Burchill once claimed that Diana ticked off all the classic traits of a Jewish woman: 'Profoundly maternal, disliking horses, strong-nosed, comely, needing too much and giving too much.'"

From "Britain was obsessed with Princess Diana — not any longer/The barely educated aristo was a blank screen on to which we projected our dreams and delusions. Edward White’s biography delves into this strange 'Dianaworld'" (London Times).

Meanwhile, also in the London Times: "Prince Harry: I want reconciliation but the King won’t speak to me/The Duke of Sussex, who opened up in an interview with the BBC, earlier lost his appeal for the right to taxpayer-funded police security" (“So, you know, I miss the UK. I miss parts of the UK. Of course I do. And I think that it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show, you know, my children my homeland.... Of course, some members of my family will never forgive me for writing a book...')."

Men. Always trying to "solve" the "problem."

Charlie Kirk is all "White college indoctrinated women will ruin America if we let them. They are brainwashed. They are completely indoctrinated. The worldview that is being uploaded to young women on a daily basis is hyper-narcissistic, hyper-selfish. I am the only one that matters. Who are you to tell me how I should act? And it makes them miserable. I do not know how to solve this problem. I am open to suggestions."

 

Charlie Kirk “I do not know how to solve this problem. I am open to suggestion”

“White college indoctrinated women will ruin America if we let them. They are brainwashed. They are completely indoctrinated. The worldview that is being uploaded to young women on a daily basis is… pic.twitter.com/OaHPpuffKq

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 3, 2025

I'll give you a suggestion, Charlie. Women are not a "problem" to be "solved." Framing things as problems and going right for the solution is, stereotypically, male. Let your male stereotypicality be the problem you can solve, Charlie, and open the door to a clearer view of the female mind. Step through that door and there is no longer a problem to be solved. Problem solved.

Just a suggestion!

I heard Dana Bash say it at 1:15 a.m. on CNN: “We’re all living in the manosphere now.”

I can't find anyone else quoting that — I quoted it here, in real time. And I want it preserved.

And let's see who else was talking about the election in terms of the "manosphere." 1. November 5, 6:15 AM, in The Washington Post: "Into the nervy climax of the 2024 elections/Our columnists are trying to keep calm as this year’s immensely consequential vote wraps up." The columnist James Hohmann speaks of the "manosphere"... disparagingly:

The party’s coalitions are changing. We’re going through this realignment that Trump has hastened. And Republicans are now much more dependent than they really ever have been in our lifetimes on low-propensity voters. They’re counting on the "Manosphere," the Joe Rogan listener, the crypto bro, “the guy who vapes.” And these are not high-propensity voters.

2. November 5, 8:09 AM: "Joe Rogan Reminded of His Own Brutal Words After Trump Endorsement/Joe Rogan just endorsed Donald Trump. Here’s what he once had to say about the former president":

The king of the manosphere has spoken. Celebrity podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump in a lengthy post Monday evening on X. Receipts immediately followed... Fans were quick to point to the many times Rogan has criticized Trump....

3. November 1, at NPR: "America's Next Top Scapegoat; plus, Inside the Black Manosphere":

Then, Brittany is joined by Code Switch's Gene Demby to explore the roots of a corner of the conservative internet that may have surprising effects on the election: The Black Manosphere.

ADDED: There's also, from September in Atlantic: "How Joe Rogan Remade Austin/The podcaster and comedian has turned the city into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other 'free thinkers' who happen to all think alike" (previously blogged here).

And, to go back to August 2016, something from The New Yorker — previously blogged here — there's "WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DECIDE EVERYONE ELSE IS A NARCISSIST," a New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino, who quoted "An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism" by Kristin Dombek:

"'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...."

And here's something I blogged in November 2018:

"What I was surprised to find was the extent to which [the 'manosphere' is] using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity," said Donna Zuckerberg, interviewed in "Donna Zuckerberg: ‘Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence’/When the academic, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, began exploring online antifeminism, she discovered far-right men’s groups were using classical antiquity to support their views" (The Guardian).

"The concern of gay men with how our bodies look often gets labeled a fixation, an obsession or, most glibly, an expression of narcissism."

"What’s less frequently acknowledged are the forces of insecurity and anxiety driving that obsession. For gay men of all ages, types, statuses and lifestyles, body image remains such a fraught, weird, private, painful subject that, even among friends who talk about everything, it’s often off limits for discussion. Officially, we’re all supposed to look fantastic while not caring. Get caught peering in the mirror too closely and you’ll be called vain; fail to look closely enough and you risk an even harsher judgment.... For decades, the body image that gay men craved, although it morphed as tastes evolved, was predicated on monitoring straight male culture, identifying whatever the heterosexual world had decided was masculine or sexy at that moment and then tailoring, editing and selectively italicizing it.... Turning your appearance into a calculatedly self-aware physical performance of straight masculinity, with a flourish or two of ironic detailing, gave gay men some autonomy and subverted straight culture by reinventing it as something gay, a look one could wear as a costume that might be visible only to the like-minded...."

Writes Mark Harris, in "Gay Men Have Long Been Obsessed With Their Muscles. Now Everyone Is. In Hollywood, on Instagram and beyond, the male-on-male gaze still decides what’s hot and what’s not" (NYT)(full access link, because this is a long and surprisingly substantial article (with a nice "a collection of gay-coded photographs of male physiques over the years")).

"Flares of unprompted anger. Glimpses of the politician’s inner monologue... spoken aloud... in all its narcissism and vulnerability."

Sounds like the way they talk about Trump, but it's David Frum, talking about Biden, in "Biden’s Heartbreaking Press Conference/His pathos should not become America’s tragedy" (The Atlantic).

The headline doesn't sound like the way they talk about Trump. No one's heart breaks for Trump. No one speaks of "pathos" and "tragedy" when describing his unusual, emotive speech.

"I really wonder where the normal people are. Maybe someone should write up an article on what normal behavior is because it is getting hard to remember."

An apt comment on the WaPo article "'Narcissistic abuse' has gone mainstream. But what is it? Skeptics say it’s just a trendy hashtag. Survivors say it describes the unimaginably manipulative relationships they’ve escaped."

Skepticism-inducing lines in the article: "Experts aren’t sure how common NPD is. The disorder is underdiagnosed, partly because symptoms can be confused with other personality disorders and partly because most narcissists aren’t rushing into therapy."

Here's the popular YouTube doctor who calls herself the "#1 source of guidance about healing from narcissistic relationships."

"Richard Hofstadter identified a paranoid style of American politics in the 1960s. His student, Christopher Lasch..."

"... called out the narcissism of American society in the 1970s and ’80s that we now know metastasized into Trump. As a card-carrying historian (who studied under Lasch), I am going to give it shot. The contemporary Republican Party acts as if it has a histrionic personality disorder. Their election playbook speaks directly to type: create a straw man/woman of your opponent, throw corrupt corporate and big PAC money to attack it, and then lie, fearmonger and, well, be histrionic to win votes. Nothing about the truth matters. If the opponent has nothing to distort or take out of context, make something up. Act on rash decisions. Rationalize your choices, no matter how mistaken. Above all, play the victim and win at all costs."

Wrote Tracy Mitrano, last July, in "The Republican Party Has a Histrionic Personality Disorder/And the impact on national security is serious" (Inside Higher Ed). Here's Mitrano's Ballotpedia page. She's a Democrat, so she's not explicitly making the larger point like Hofstadter and her mentor Lasch. But it seems obvious to me: We see histrionics across the board in American politics.

I found that year-old piece after wondering why people diagnose Trump with narcissism, when his personality seems much more like what the DSM calls "histrionic personality disorder." 

Here's what the NIH has to say about HPD:

"Most hair-raising of all, is the boymom a nightmare of toxic narcissism and internalized misogyny who sees her son as a crypto-romantic interest..."

"... and other girls and women—even her own daughters—as her nemeses?... [O]ne wrote of the moment that 'you realize [you’re] gonna have to share the love of your life (my baby boy) with another female one day'..."

Writes Jessica Winter, in "The Trials and Tribulations of the Boymom/A new book encapsulates the zero-sum thinking that affects much of contemporary parenting discourse" (The New Yorker).

About that book — 'BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity' [commission earned]... we're told the author Ruth Whippman "gave birth to her youngest in 2017, the year that Donald Trump took office and the first avalanche of #MeToo revelations broke":

"As the sky darkens, light-sensitive cells in human eyes become more sensitive to blue and green hues than to reds and oranges."

"This shift in color perception is known as the Purkinje effect, after a 19th-century Czech scientist, and is typically seen at twilight. To take advantage of the Purkinje effect, wear green clothes or a contrasting combination of greens and reds. Blue-green colors (shorter wavelengths) will appear brighter, while red colors (longer wavelengths) will appear to recede into the darkness."

From a NYT article about the solar eclipse, coming to a city near you on April 8th.

Do you have plans to locate yourself appropriately? Had you thought about what to wear? The pleasing coordination with the Purkinje effect is to wear red and to go dark along with the sun, but the NYT is prompting you to steal focus from the sun by wearing green. I hope I'm nowhere near anyone attempting to take photos to be captioned, "Me and the solar eclipse."

"At least Hanlon's razor... has something witty and memorable and real-life-applicable about it..."

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword, where the 18-across clue is "'Never attribute to ___ that which is adequately explained by stupidity' (Hanlon's razor)."

The answer to on that clue is... spoiler alert...

"Always get a kick out of fellow boomers declaring how much younger they look. Many even assign flattering ages: I'm 80 but look 65. Doubtful."

"My experience is yes, there can be considerable differences in how people age. But most people do look their age, it's just that you can look good or not so good at any given age over 50. Try to take care of yourself, stay current and lose the 'I look so much younger' bit."

That's a comment at the NYT article, "What’s Your ‘Biological Age’? New tests promise to tell you if you have the cells of a 30-year-old or a 60-year-old. Here’s what to know about them."

For some reason — vanity — the comments are sidetracked into the question how young you look. The article is about "tests for around $300 that [purport to] calculate your biological age by analyzing your blood or saliva and comparing changes in your epigenome to population averages."

Anyway... there's a difference between declaring how young you look and simply quietly admiring what you subjectively perceive as your relatively youthful appearance.

"Satirizing the attention-seeking culture wrought by social media is almost as difficult as impersonating Donald Trump..."

"... the source material is already so cartoonish and despicable that most attempts to mock it seem obvious to the point of being dull. Perhaps no screenwriter could have imagined a character as controversial as Jameela Jamil, the British actress who’s been vocal about her various afflictions, which have included shellfish allergies, celiac disease, mercury poisoning, partial deafness, and a history of run-ins with bees. And perhaps no performance artist could have staged a hoax as elaborate and culturally radioactive as Jussie Smollett’s...."

Writes Carrie Battan, in "Desperate to Be Micro-Famous/The satirical film 'Sick of Myself; shows the warping effects of social media by way of a character who gives herself a hideous rash" (The New Yorker).

Speaking of social media and the difficulty impersonating Donald Trump (because he's already so funny in the original version), here's a woman on TikTok who — like Sarah Cooper to Donald Trump — lip-syncs to the voice of Joe Biden:

"Ever since Trump perfected the template (grandiose, manipulative, easily wounded, unable to tolerate even minor scenarios in which he isn’t deemed central or special)..."

"... the label ['narcissist'] has been steadily spreading to celebrities, shitty boyfriends, and sometimes mothers. #narctokadvice is flooded with pictures of terrible exes whose faces are rubbed out and replaced with Johnny Depp’s. Infinite listicles describe life with a narcissist as a psychological war zone and explain how to spot the signs and fight back: 'How to Argue With a Narcissist' or '5 Ways to Weaken a Narcissist' or 'The 7 Lies We Learn From Our Narcissistic Parents.' On #narctok, the final stage of enlightenment is 'no contact,' meaning forever cutting the narcissist out of your life. Elon Musk is a 'narcissist' or sometimes a 'narcissistic sociopath' or a 'toddler.'... When sociologist Jean Twenge wrote in The Narcissism Epidemic about the epidemic of misery among post-millenials [sic], she mostly blamed cell phones, social media, and the 'culture of selfies' for the shift. Fifteen years later, the teens are still drowning in hopelessness. But calling them narcissists is about as helpful as calling them obese."

Writes Hanna Rosin, in "Narcissist and Proud" (NY Magazine).

"In today’s therapy-saturated culture, you hear countless messages about what therapy is and what it is for...."

"Back in 1979, the historian and critic Christopher Lasch wrote that the New Left had retreated from politics and turned inward, focusing on personal psychological well-being instead of external collective struggles. These days that is funnily reversed: Psychology is often used, especially online, as a way to collectively press others. In some corners therapy has become a kind of social imperative, something anyone can urge strangers to engage in — not so they can explore their own experiences, but so their psychic toxicity can be contained before it spills onto others. Social media is filled with memes and jokes in which people 'beg' men to get therapy, or deploy variations of the formula that 'men will literally do anything but go to therapy.'..."

From "Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?/It has become a social credential to be in therapy. It’s also incredibly difficult to access" by Zachary Siegel (NYT). 

The link on Lasch goes to a 2010 essay — by Lee Siegel — about Lasch's 1979 book, "The Culture of Narcissism":

Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. Ohio's new slogan.

2. Confronted by bears, this worked.

3. The hellbender.

4. The self-aware narcissist.

"But nobody tops Joy Behar for... making the whole thing — the destruction of property, the loss of life and of hope — all about her."

"'The View' co-host said on her show Thursday that she was 'scared' about how the strife in Ukraine might affect Western Europe, specifically Italy, where she planned to take a vacation this summer, long-delayed by things including the COVID-19 pandemic. 'You know, you plan a trip. You want to go there. I want to go to Italy for four years and I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic,' she said."

From "Clueless, narcissistic celebs need to shut up about Ukraine" by Andrea Peyser (NY Post), where I also found out about this monstrosity:

 

Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin… pic.twitter.com/LbDFBHVWJf

— AnnaLynne McCord (@IAMannalynnemcc) February 24, 2022

"Some senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it."

"Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming. Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological. Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy."

Writes Robert Reich in "Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts" (The Guardian). 

Is it "whacky" or "wacky"? The author of "Common Errors in English Usage" says:

"It may seem sweet that your new mate wants to spend all of their time with you. But more often, it’s a red flag..."

"The person may be a narcissist trying to isolate you from the other connections in your life as a way of exerting control....  [I]n cases of love bombing, attention flows in a single direction: One person tries to become the other’s whole world. Dr. Raghavan said that people who have been love bombed often feel as though they’ve lost their sense of self, which can take a long time to rebuild. 'You lose the sense of who you are because little things are being managed for you and these little things can be anything from how you dress to how you present yourself... But it can also be the kind of jokes you’re allowed to tell in public or the kind of woman that he wants you to be.'"

From "What Is ‘Love Bombing’? Grand romantic gestures in the early days of a relationship could be sweet — or a sign you’re dating a narcissist. Here’s how to tell the difference, according to experts" (NYT). 

The illustration is a whole bunch of hearts, so it's safe to say the season of Valentine's Day articles is upon us. Like Thanksgiving — with its articles about the difficulties of sitting through a dinner with your family — Valentine's Day articles these days are probably going to be negative. You think that's love? Think again. You think you want love? No, you don't.

"I mean, Season 2 should be the easiest and best of anything..."

"... because usually when you write something, you do the best job and you cast it, and you try and find the people that are right for it. But then with Season 2, you know who you’re writing for, you bring in their physicality, you know what their strengths are, you know [who's] good at ad-libbing and who isn’t. You hit the ground running. That was the case with this but it didn’t apply so much, because I asked people it before I wrote it. I’ve been around for a while, so I was casting all the people I knew that were right for it. It’s always an easy shoot with my stuff because I’ve already lived with it for a year. I use the same crew. I use the same ensemble of actors or I find someone new that fit in. If someone handed me Mission: Impossible 8 and said we’re filming this next week, I’d panic, but with this show, it’s like with boxers: the hard bit is the training, the rest is easy."

Said Ricky Gervais, in an interview at Deadline, as the third season of his show "After Life" begins on Netflix. 

1. I wrote "[who's]" instead of "whose [sic]" because it's an interview. He was talking. It's no fun snarking at the transcriber.

2. "It’s like with boxers: the hard bit is the training, the rest is easy" — I have no idea if he's talking about the dogs or the humans with gloves, the men in shorts.

3. We watched the first episode of Season 3 last night. It's only about 25 minutes, but there's lots of detail, even though you can also get the sense that nothing happens and nothing can change, this is a random collection of bumbling, sad people. Obviously, that's why you shouldn't binge watch, shouldn't take the bait when Netflix starts its little timer down in the lower right corner, ready to fling you into the next episode. 

4. Resisting, we switched over to the 2010 Coen brothers movie "True Grit," which we'd paused halfway through the other day. We stuck with that to the end. I've never watched the John Wayne "True Grit," so I had no basis for comparison with the old film, whether Wayne shambled and mumbled better than Jeff Bridges. Nor can I compare the young actresses selected from obscurity to play the 14-year-old girl who somehow begins with true grit and teaches each man she encounters something about it. I wondered what happened to this actress in the next dozen years, and I was dismayed to run smack into "EXCLUSIVE: Pink-haired Hailee Steinfeld goes braless in a chainmail mini while posing in the shower before rocking a red wig and flashing her abs in latex in sizzling new shoot" (Daily Mail).

 

5. RICKY: "I’m fascinated with ego and narcissism and vanity and fame. The last 10 years we’ve seen the rise of the narcissism; I think all the bad things in the world are about narcissists, usually men, wanting to rule the world. Now we’ve got Instagram where it’s people standing next to a boat with their shirt off. It’s not even their boat, sometimes it’s not their abs. You see it mostly in entertainment, acting and modeling and so on. But what is the worst job to be a narcissist? When you should be listening to someone else. I thought I’d make [the therapist character] a narcissist, mixed in with toxic masculinity. I remember telling Paul Kaye about all the lines and I said, 'Do it like a football hooligan who works in the city.'"

6. If you read that whole interview, you'll see something that might make you think that sounds like something Althouse said about aging the day after her birthday — here. So you should know that I was influenced by re-listening to an old Ricky Gervais podcast where he made that point — that as you age each day is a larger percentage of the number of days you have left to live. He's repeating himself in this interview, but I offered an observation without saying I heard something like that in his podcast somewhere, that has no transcript to search. I do prefer to link!

"Thirst trap."

You might have noticed the phrase "thirst trap" in the previous post. I have to start a new post because I don't want to sidetrack my own post, but there's a great and long Wikipedia article, "Thirst trap."

This is a slang term of recent origin — it's only about 10 years old — but somehow it has an entry as long as what you'd expect to find for a modestly significant historical character. I'm also recommending that you click through to see the one photograph, captioned "A woman taking a selfie." That's just perfect. 

To the text: