characteristics of a male narcissist explained — 1 brief investigation

characteristics, male edition, is a product nobody asked for but everybody apparently needs. tom is the prototype. tom is not, technically, a narcissist. tom is what a narcissist would design if you asked one to make a slightly less ambitious version. tom owns vs i rent, but the prototype is useful before we open the supermarket part of this.

it is 10:00 sharp on a friday. carla is on the third floor in a compliance refresher that nobody on this floor was told would happen this week. that buys me, by quiet calculation, the rest of the morning. i have a phone, a screen, and a list i did not write but feel obligated to investigate.

writing this from my desk. the supermarket part of the investigation has already happened. the keyboard part is happening now.

last night, in the supermarket, between the milk and the prepared sandwiches, i opened the phone. on the phone, the productivity bro had posted, with the confidence of a man who has been correct since 1994, a list. the list was titled “the 8 characteristics of a male narcissist, save this and thank me later.” i did not save it. i screenshotted it. that is a different verb. the structural cousin of all of this is my longer pillar on how gaslighting actually works in everyday relationships, which i kept open in another tab while the milk warmed in my hand.

characteristics of a male narcissist: a repeating cluster — outsized self-image, allergy to correction, audience-tuned volume, credit drifting upward and blame drifting downward, a past quietly redrafted, a calm voice during disagreement, and the absence of any suspicion that he might be the man on the list. one trait is a friday. eight, repeating, is the investigation.

1. characteristics of a male narcissist, the working list

each bullet on the bro’s tweet was, by my reading at the dairy aisle, a self-portrait the author had drawn while looking at a different man. that is the entire mechanic of the post you are reading. the characteristics of a male narcissist were, in his case, projected onto a generic “him” — the boss, the dad, the ex, the friend’s husband — while the author sat in a coworking space and described his own behavior in the third person.

the list i carried out of the supermarket has eight items. the first four are corroborated by tom, who is the control case. the second four are corroborated by the certified-letter drawer, which is a different witness, and a leaning one. the productivity bro is, throughout, the unwitting subject of his own tweet.

2. the supermarket where this draft happened with milk in hand

the milk was in my left hand. the phone was in my right. the basket was at my feet, which is not where baskets go, and the woman behind me said nothing about it, which i understood, charitably, to be a verdict.

(the muted group chat on my phone had 47 unread messages from a thread named “the boys” running, going by the timestamps, since 2018. i did not read them. i read the productivity bro instead. that, on reflection, is a separate diagnostic. the man who calls — in my notes app the entry is labeled The_man_who_calls — has, by the way, been calling more often this week. unrelated. moving on.)

the milk warmed. i screenshotted the eight bullets and walked out without buying the sandwiches, which is a separate failure. on the walk home i thought about how the term toxic people gets used loosely on the internet, because the bro had used the word “toxic” six times in eight bullets and meant six different things. one of them was “he disagreed with me at brunch”. one was “he looked at his phone during my anniversary speech”. the other four were grievances on a sliding scale that ended in actual harm. the bro did not distinguish. that is, itself, a characteristic. add it to the list. that’s nine. save this and thank me later.

3. items 1 to 4, the tom-referenced ones

tom is the prototype. tom owns a house. tom owns a volvo. tom has a pension that his employer matches. tom does not have any of the eight characteristics on the bro’s list, which is, in itself, the data point. when you find a man who matches all eight and is the one writing the list, the list is doing a different job.

1. parade-float self-image. the male version inflates the float with job title or follower count or a sentence beginning “in my role as”. the bro’s bio has three job titles separated by a forward slash. tom’s bio, were tom on the platform, would be his name and the volvo. tom is not on the platform.
2. correction is reframed mid-sentence. you flag a thing he did. by the third sentence the thing has migrated, gently, to a thing the company did, then the market did, then the universe did. the universe declined to comment. tom, when corrected, says “yes, you’re right” and adjusts the seat.
3. audience changes the volume. alone in the elevator, normal voice. with a junior in the room, performance voice. with a senior in the room, performance voice modulated for the senior’s ear. three voices, one man. tom uses one voice.
4. credit goes up, blame goes down. the work goes up the chain. the mistake goes down. the email chain has been edited in retrospect. there is a phrase, “as i mentioned in my note,” when no such note exists. tom sends two-sentence emails and signs them “t.”. the brevity is the lack of need.

4. items 5 to 8, the certified-letter ones

these four were added later, after the milk had been put in the fridge and the screenshot transferred from the phone to a folder on the desktop named “evidence”, which is a folder name i have used before in a different relationship. the certified-letter drawer is not, technically, related to any of this, but the drawer leans, the leaning is friday, and the four items below were typed against the lean.

5. empathy operates on a timer he does not set. on for the senior, off for the junior, on for the camera, off for the receptionist. you can clock the click. it sounds like a microwave finishing — the seventh microwave, dave keeps reminding me, is finishing more often than the manufacturer specified.
6. the past is a draft document. what was said in the meeting last quarter has been quietly redrafted to support what is being said now. you have notes. the notes are the receipt. the bro insists, with a calm voice, that the meeting went differently. the calmer the denial, the more concerning.
7. entitlement to seats. the chair at the head of the table. the parking spot. the leg room he did not pay for. on the airplane he reclines into the knees of the man behind him for nine hours and apologizes to the flight attendant when she asks him to put it up. apologizes to the wrong person.
8. he cites the same movie when the meeting goes long. usually whiplash on imdb, the j.k. simmons jazz-instructor picture, the “not quite my tempo” scene, you have seen it forty times because he is the one who keeps showing it to you. he says the lines as if he wrote them. he did not. damien chazelle wrote them and put a camera on them in 2014.

that brings the working list to eight, which is one fewer than the bro’s textbook count and one more than the number of red envelopes currently leaning in the drawer in my apartment, which is, by some friday accident, also eight as of this morning.

5. closing pulpit, the characteristics are gendered by language, not by mail

the search bar wanted “characteristics of a male narcissist” because that is how the search bar is fed, by people who have a specific man in mind and do not want to type the man’s name. fair. i have typed it myself, on a friday morning between 10:00 and 10:14, which is the window in which most of my searches happen. the algorithm now thinks i am preparing a court document. i am not. i am sitting at this desk with a screenshot from a supermarket.

carla just walked back past my desk from the third floor. she did not look at the screen. i minimized this anyway. the productivity bro has, in the time it took to type this, posted a follow-up tweet titled “if you triggered, you are him”. reader, i was triggered. reader, i may indeed be him. i am keeping the screenshot in any case.

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