Narcissistic women use audiences rather than mirrors to confirm their self-image

Evidence

The narcissist’s generosity is profitable to her: better than in mirrors, it is in others’ admiring eyes she sees her double haloed in glory. Without a complaisant audience, she opens her heart to a confessor, doctor, or psychoanalyst; she will consult chiromancers, mediums. “It’s not that I believe in it,” said an aspiring starlet, “but I love it so much when I’m spoken about!” She talks about herself to her women friends; more avidly than in anything else, she seeks a witness in the lover. The woman in love quickly forgets herself; but many women are incapable of real love, precisely because they never forget themselves. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1813

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the narcissist’s mode of self-confirmation — the Other’s gaze as constitutive mirror, distinct from the lover’s self-forgetting.
• XREF: connects to: Dressing for display makes women dependent on others’ recognition for self-worth — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1582; Narcissistic self-fashioning lets woman express personality without being beautiful — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1800; Influencers present divergent glamorized and grim self-images across platforms — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 204 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Influencers present divergent glamorized and grim self-images across platforms #exemplifies (0.82) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 204
• Self-reflection is where people both face and exonerate themselves from wrongdoing #exemplifies (0.72)
• The mirror stage explains why images grant and destabilize selfhood #qualifies (0.70) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 84