In addition, I highly recommend the following documentary about male inmates who lead and participate in workshops on personally healing from and combating toxic masculinity: The Feminist in Cell Block Y, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYxTzsabkH8.

HI Matt,

I understand not wanting to exclude men from the conversation – on the contrary, I would love it if more men were engaged! I also don’t wish to negate the fact that women can also be perpetrators of violence.

However, there is unfortunately no way around the fact that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are massive factors in violence generally and in cases of narcissistic abuse. If men and women committed violence at equal rates, or were narcissistic at equal rates, we would be having a different conversation. They don’t, and they aren’t. Men are the perpetrators of the vast majority (from 80-99%) of all cases of violent assault, rape, sexual assault, homicide, and mass shootings, and the breakdown of narcissism by gender is around 80%/20% respectively. Yet, “Speaking of male violence is called ‘blaming men’; it is ‘political,’ often in the dismissive sense. More subtly, bureaucratic, political and academic discourses often maintain what appears to be a willful blindness to the gendered nature of violence” (Feminist Frameworks: Building Theory on Violence against Women).

I believe men will have to show some humility and get on board with interrogating their own privilege, as well as their pain, and work together with people of all genders to end abuse in every sense. As someone who has many lovely men in my life, I know as well as anyone that no, it’s not “all men.” But it’s far too many. And, through psycho-education, we have the power to change that, for everyone’s benefit.

Please feel free to get in touch with me! I know these are uncomfortable conversations that deserve time and care.

Best,
Sophia

I really enjoyed reading your article; it helped me touch into my experiences in a straightforward and direct connectedness with – in my case – parental narcissistic abuse by both my mother and my father. My sister also suffered at the hands of those two difficult, difficult parent-children that my sister and I had separately to parent and partner. Thanks for an accessible and well-conceived view.

I was sad to see that the penultimate paragraph in your article pins narcissism and violence into – seemingly, in the absence of any mention of women – the realm of a ‘masculinity’ and/or ‘patriarchy’ issue.

Humans are violent, not men. Violence manifests in nature in many ways, not all of which are so obviously physically delivered. One of these is physical violence, to which both men and women are prone to use. Both sexes take advantage of their relative strengths to exert their aggression, their violence. With physical prowess, men generally have an advantage physically; with linguistic and relational capability, women generally have an advantage emotionally and psychologically. Other factors (especially individual differences) obviously skew both of these ‘advantages’ this way and t’other in a standard distribution curve.

I respect your own, your mother’s and your sister’s experience of this one man, your father. But I don’t accept or condone the use of that experience to conflate narcissism and violence (although clearly narcissism of any flavour is a violence) and then attach them solely to masculinity. That excludes men from being seen, from being free to claim their own witness.

I suggest we both know just how difficult that is for anyone whose had to endure a narcissist in any relationship. Please don’t exclude men in your bringing into the light so eloquently this sort of education. Having worked in psychoeducation in UK mental health services, I humbly agree on its effectiveness and importance. Let’s make it equally welcoming to both women and men.