Warning: This may degenerate into a rant.
Melissa and Eastsidekate have done an excellent job so far of lampooning the ridiculousness that is David Brooks' column in the New York Times. Rather than waiting for Liss to blast this latest one out of the water, I thought it would be much more fun to do it myself (I won't even address the comments on the column, since they too are [mostly] full of fail).
Brooks begins his column with the following statement:
Let us enter, you and I, into the moral universe of the modern narcissist.
Oh goody, I was in the mood for a good mansplaining tonight.
The narcissistic person is marked by a grandiose self-image, a constant need for admiration, and a general lack of empathy for others. He is the keeper of a sacred flame, which is the flame he holds to celebrate himself.
There used to be theories that deep down narcissists feel unworthy, but recent research doesn’t support this. Instead, it seems, the narcissist’s self-directed passion is deep and sincere.
Sure, I get that, if by "sacred flame" you mean white cismale heterosexual Christian privilege, and by "celebrate himself", you mean "go on bigoted tirades and beat your girlfriend". Furthermore, I don't think "self-directed passion" is exactly right, since Gibson has directed his passion at tons of marginalized peoples.
His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage.
And because he plays by different rules, and because so much is at stake, he can be uninhibited in response. Everyone gets angry when they feel their self-worth is threatened, but for the narcissist, revenge is a holy cause and a moral obligation, demanding overwhelming force.
This is absurd. Absolutely absurd. Seriously, NYT, get it together. How on earth could Oksana, someone whom I had never heard of until this incident, seriously present any kind of threat to Gibson's body, work, talent, or reputation? Oh wait, she did that by REVEALING HIS ABUSE OF HER. And this, my friends, is a prime example of victim-blaming.
Mel Gibson seems to fit the narcissist model to an eerie degree. The recordings that purport to show him unloading on his ex-lover, Oksana Grigorieva, make for painful listening, and are only worthy of attention because these days it pays to be a student of excessive self-esteem, if only to understand the world around.
Narcissist model? Possibly, but only a psychologist or psychiatrist can make that diagnosis. Abuser model? Definitely. By explaining Gibson's behavior away with mental illness, Brooks is also absolving him of responsibility for his words and actions. He was not "unloading", he was verbally abusing his girlfriend. This is unacceptable.
The story line seems to be pretty simple. Gibson was the great Hollywood celebrity who left his wife to link with the beautiful young acolyte. Her beauty would not only reflect well on his virility, but he would also work to mold her, Pygmalion-like, into a pop star.
After a time, she apparently grew tired of being a supporting actor in the drama of his self-magnification and tried to go her own way. This act of separation was perceived as an assault on his status and thus a venal betrayal of the true faith.
How can anyone possibly know if this is true? In these two paragraphs, Brooks is sticking his head into the narcissism sand and ignoring the much more likely, much more common explanation: Gibson is an abuser.
It is fruitless to analyze her end of the phone conversations because she knows she is taping them. But the voice on the other end is primal and searing.
That man is like a boxer unleashing one verbal barrage after another. His breathing is heavy. His vocal muscles are clenched. His guttural sounds burst out like hammer blows.
He pummels her honor, her intelligence, her womanhood, her maternal skills and everything else. Imagine every crude and derogatory word you’ve ever heard. They come out in waves. He’s not really arguing with her, just trying to pulverize her into nothingness, like some corruption that has intertwined itself into his being and now must be expunged.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...its verbal abuse. Period.
It is striking how morally righteous he is, without ever bothering to explain what exactly she has done wrong. It is striking how quickly he reverts to the vocabulary of purity and disgust. It is striking how much he believes he deserves. It is striking how much he seems to derive satisfaction from his own righteous indignation.
Rage was the original subject of Western literature. It was the opening theme of Homer’s “Iliad.” Back then, anger was perceived as a source of pleasure. “Sweeter wrath is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetener,” Homer declared. And the man on the other end of Grigorieva’s phone seems to derive some vengeful satisfaction from asserting his power and from purging his frustration — from the sheer act of domination.
She hasn't DONE anything wrong. That's why we call it abuse. Furthermore, the language of purity and disgust, the belief of deservingness, the righteous indignation, the assertion of power...these are symptoms of male privilege gone amok, not NPD.
And the sad fact is that Gibson is not alone. There can’t be many people at once who live in a celebrity environment so perfectly designed to inflate self-love. Even so, a surprising number of people share the trait. A study conducted at the National Institutes of Health suggested that 6.2 percent of Americans had suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, along with 9.4 percent of people in their 20s.
In their book, “The Narcissism Epidemic,” Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. They cite my favorite piece of sociological data: In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.
As I stated above, only a psychiatrist or psychologist is qualified to diagnose NPD. Brooks is neither of these, and so has no business lumping Gibson in with what are probably pretty legitimate statistics on the prevalence of NPD. Furthermore, diagnosing a psychiatric disorder involves much more than one symptom. NPD is not a trait, it is many traits. In addition, the research that shows that kids consider themselves to be important is a marker of improved self-esteem, not abuse in the way Gibson has perpetuated it.
Whew, I am exhausted. Brooks seems to think that Gibson's behavior is the result of too much love for himself. It's not. It's the result of a lifetime of privilege. Gibson is not ultra-confident, he simply views himself as better than women, gays, blacks, and Jews. I'm sure if we give him time, he'll reveal many more prejudices to us. It is his privilege that gives him the chutzpah (best word I could think of) to verbally and physically abuse the woman who is the mother of his child. Instead of excusing Gibson's behavior with fancy pseudo-diagnoses, I hope Brooks will have the wherewithall to step up and acknowledge the very real problem of abuse in the US and worldwide. I'll probably be waiting a long time.That doesn’t make them narcissists in the Gibson mold, but it does suggest that we’ve entered an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.
Every week brings a new assignment in our study of self-love. And at the top of the heap, the Valentino of all self-lovers, there is the former Braveheart. If he really were that great, he’d have figured out that the lady probably owns a tape recorder.
*ETA* Brooks has been blasted.
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