 I have some news for you. Human beings and women from all over the world have been writing to me repeatedly, persistently and consistently. They suggested I change my name. One group suggests that I should change it to Awesome Vaknin. Now I know that I'm awesome, but I think it's a bit over the top. A bit grandiose, mind you. Okay. The second group suggests something more realistic. They say I should change my name to Handsome Vaknin. And frankly, when I look at a convex mirror, I understand this group perfectly. The third group suggests that I change my name to Awesome Bin Vaknin. Probably they hope that I'll be hunted down in my villa and executed summarily. I have no intention of doing that either. I'm going to remain Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignan Sen Flav, Narcissism Revisited and books, any books, etc., etc., about Narcissism and a professor of psychology. However, unlikely this may sound in view of the introduction. Okay, today I am going to respond to a few queries I had received about relationships with Narcissists, One Light Stands and so on and so forth. Now, there are two additional videos coming. One of them today, one of them tomorrow. The video today is going to deal with compensatory Narcissism, a total revolution in everything we have ever thought about Narcissism. But some scathing criticism of my colleagues in Akadem as well, which would please you of course no end. The video after that, which is going to be released tomorrow, might be of great interest to many of you. It will be a video comparing psychopaths to high-functioning autists, people with autism. People with high-functioning autism, people with psychopathy, what do they have in common? Is there any difference whatsoever? Maybe they're one and the same. Let's, tomorrow, the boring stuff, is today. All right, Shoshanim. Let's talk a bit about, let's respond to some of your questions. Many of you wrote to me that I seem to be very sad, very disturbed, very bothered. Yes, because I had been preparing a syllabus for the semester, the first semester of next year. And it deals with gender issues, psychology of gender and psychology of youth. And the data, the data that I see are such that I am, of course, shocked. Now, part of it is that I'm old. I'm an old man. I dined with the dinosaurs, no wonder they all went extinct. But I'm an old man and it's difficult for me to regard the young and their world and their psychodynamics as something acceptable. Every generation hates the next generation because they're young and they're going to live forever, at least. Okay, but I don't hate the young generation. I have a very soft spot for young people. That's honestly, I really, really like young people, want to help them and so on. I just can't see what's happening to them. If these studies represent the norm, I'd rather die and I mean it. I cannot survive in such a dystopian world. The young of today are invalids, they're cripples. They're emotional cripples, relationship cripples, sexual cripples. They suffer from mind-boggling levels of anxiety and depression. Many of them are substance addicts, drug addicts, alcohol, alcoholism is rampant in these age groups under 25 or by extension under 35. And I see the promiscuity and I see the drinking and I see the drug abuse and I see the meandering through life with no aim, no purpose, no reason, no rhyme. And what I'd understood from the studies that I'd reviewed, the latest ones, is that this is the norm. This is not an exception. These are not the exception. They're the norm, these kind of young people. And it reminded me of something that even more insane than me, Valerie Solanas had written. She tried to assassinate Andy Warhol, which was the only sane moment in her life. And she had written this, despising his highly inadequate self, overcome with intense anxiety and a deep profound loneliness, went by his empty self. Desperate to attach himself to any female in dim bulbs of completing himself, in the mystical belief that by touching gold he will turn to gold. The male craves the continuous companionship of women. The company of the lowest female is preferable to his own or to that of other men who serve only to remind him of his repulsiveness. Now ignore for a minute the radical feminist message and just convert the gender pronouns. And you realize that's a perfect description of the young person of today, of the youth of today. I'm really, really bothered by what's happening. All the barometers and all the thermometers and all the seismographs of well-being and welfare and happiness and mental health in young people are off the charts. I have a video dedicated to sexlessness among the young. The younger divided to highly dysregulated promiscuous people, which is a small minority, and the vast majority who are not having sex at all. Not even dating. Dating is down 56%. Okay. So this is my response to one of you who had written to me regarding the youth video. Now someone asked me about promiscuity and casual sex. The exact question was, what's your beef with casual sex? Well, I have none. I have no beef with casual sex. Sex is a beautiful thing. Absolutely beautiful. It's a process of communication, of completion, of a healthy form of merger, the only healthy form of fusion and merger, however momentarily. So I have no problem with sex and I definitely have no problem with casual sex. Casual sex with friends, friends with benefits. Casual sex in situationships. Casual sex is a wonderful way to communicate emotions, compassion, comfort, a wonderful way to enhance well-being. My problem is not with casual sex, it is with one-night stents. Now one-night stents are a subspecies of casual sex. Never mind what hookup adherents tell you. Never mind what the practitioners of one-night stents insist on. The biological and psychological data are overwhelming and unequivocal. One-night stents involve emotions, involve attachment, involve intimacy to varying degrees. There are biological, hormonal reactions, there are psychological reactions. To deny and repress these reactions repeatedly. To me it sounds a lot like self-trashing, unhealthy defenses. Moreover, participants in one-night stents all of them report liking the partner, trusting the partner. Of course you go to bed with someone because you like him to some extent. You find that he's nice or cute or something or you like the way he speaks or you like something about him and you trust him. You trust him not to knife you in the middle of sex or something. So there's an element of trust, there's an element of liking, mutual liking and there's an element of intimacy, nascent, emergent, primordial intimacy. Not very well developed of course. But the adepts, the initiators of one-night stents refuse to explore the partner further. They deny themselves. The incalculable riches and pleasures, that's real intimacy, getting to know the intricacies of another person. This real intimacy provides these riches and pleasures and joy. And in a one-night stent there is this artificial limit. We're going to have sex but we are never ever going to develop intimacy, I'm never going to get to know you better and you're never going to get to know me better. And if you try, you are breaching the etiquette of the one-night stent. One-night stent is a prison. No wonder the majority of people who participate in one-night stents don't have orgasms. Because it's a prison cell. One-night stents are about self gratification, they're kind of power play. They involve the objectification of the other, transforming your partner into an object. A sex toy. And so these are the hallmarks of narcissism and psychopathy. Indeed recent studies in 21 countries have all come to the same conclusions and these countries included Egypt and China and Russia and the United States and Canada and Israel and all came to the same conclusions. The vast majority of people who engage in one-night sex and the vast majority of people who engage in compulsive sexting, mainly with strangers, these people possess marked enhanced super dark triad traits. They are narcissists, they are psychopaths, they are Machiavellian. I'm going to mention one of well over 200 recent studies, 200 studies published since 2017. You don't have to take my word for it. Just go to Google Scholar and type 16 dark triad, type one-night stent dark triad. See what comes up, 200 studies, some of them very big. I'm going to quote and refer to one of them. It was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 2021 Vol. 18 and let me cite from the article. An online survey was completed by 6,093 participants from 11 different countries, which covered four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and America. Participants completed the sexting behavior questionnaire and the 12-item dark triad dirty doesn't scale. Results, hierarchical regression analysis showed that sharing texts, sharing own texts was positively predicted by Machiavellianism and narcissism. Both risky and aggravated sexting with strangers or involving criminal activities like blackmail, but especially with strangers. So sexting with strangers was positively predicted by Machiavellianism and psychopathy. So if you sext with friends and so on, but you do it compulsively, you have narcissism and Machiavellianism. If you sext with strangers, you're probably a psychopath. The present study provided empirical evidence that different sexting behaviors were predicted by dark triad personality traits showing a relevant role of Machiavellianism in all kinds, all kinds of investigating sexting behaviors. Now we all sext, but it's different to sext to your loved one. It's different to sext with a friend. It's different to sext with an intimate partner who is far away. It's different than sexting to total strangers in chat rooms or providing cam footage or masturbation videos. It's a totally different realm. The latter behaviors, psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian, and they involve dark triad practitioners. So you're beginning to see why I have a very dim view of one-night stents and similar behaviors like sexting with strangers, sex with strangers that is limited in scope, that does not involve exploring the partner and that a parent on the surface seems to be impersonal, unemotional and meaningless. Last question I was asked, how does the narcissist or the psychopath, having teamed up with a promiscuous, femme fatale woman, with a promiscuous woman, having recruited, having groomed a promiscuous woman to participate in the shared fantasy, how does he regard this woman? How does he reframe this type of woman? And again, I'm saying he and woman reverse it. It's perfectly valid. Reverse the gender pronouns and it's valid. Okay, for convenience sake, I'm using he and she. So the first thing the narcissist does when he recruits or grooms or love bombs a promiscuous woman, a femme fatale, into the shared fantasy, he reframes her extreme promiscuity. Instead of saying she's extremely promiscuous, she has no boundaries. She's all over the place. She's public domain and public property. You know, she's a sea dump. Instead of saying all this, the narcissist says she has been sexually exploited and abused by others. This is intended to preserve the woman's essential goodness because if the woman is not good, if she's dissolute, if she's, you know, a whore, essentially, it threatens the narcissist because she can abandon him. So he needs to reframe her as an essentially good person who had been abused and exploited by evil doers and ruthless and callous people. And this triggers immediately the rescuer savior behavior. The narcissist becomes a rescuer. Receiver is going to fix her. He's going to heal her. He's going to convert her from pervious and wicked ways. He's going to transform her. And so this is the Carpenter drama triangle. The second thing the narcissist does, he infantilizes the promiscuous woman. He attributes to her emotional stunting. He says she's emotionally immature. That's why she's behaving this way. She's a child. She's a kid. He starts to call her babe or kiddo, so he renders her an infant. Now as an infant, her promiscuity is not threatening. First of all, because he's the father figure and what infant would abandon the father, but also because there is space and place for growth. And presumably once he makes her grow up, once he induces in her personal development and growth, she will have lost her promiscuity. So this allows the narcissist to render his promiscuous partner dependent and submissive, legitimizes. The attempt to render her dependent submission is doing it for her own good. He just wants her to mature and grow up. The next thing that the narcissist attributes to his promiscuous partner is a lack of insightful self-awareness. He says she's not self-aware. She has no insight. And this, of course, allows him to play the role of a guru or a father, thereby guaranteeing that there will be no abandonment for stalling abandonment. Masa's main hysterical concern is to not be abandoned. He will tolerate anything and everything just to not be abandoned. And yes, if it reminds you of codependency, it is in some ways the object in consistency is common to the two conditions because the two conditions, codependency and narcissism, start off identically with childhood abuse in a variety of ways. Next thing, the narcissist attributes to his promiscuous partner dissociation. He says she doesn't remember. The events are so traumatic. She's so drunk, something. She's amnesiac. She had depersonalized. She went into alcoholic blackout. She doesn't remember. If he were to attribute to her functioning memory and intent, that's very threatening. So he needs to think that whatever is happening is beyond her control and she has no recollection of it. And this allows him to construct a fake kind of biography of the woman, conducive to idealization in the shared fantasy. Now he can provide her with a biography on a platter and say, this is your biography. That's actually what happened to you. It's a form, of course, of gaslighting. Then the narcissist attributes to his promiscuous partner denial and literal thinking. He says she can't perceive subtleties and nuances. She's literal. She reacts to the words, to the vocabular or dictionary meaning of the word. And she's in denial about what is happening to her. So I'm going to help her. I'm going to cure her. The narcissist needs his promiscuous partner to adulate him and to confirm and acknowledge his superiority. If the promiscuous partner embarks on vicious total devaluation and this is coupled with self-trashing promiscuity with other men, the narcissist is going to bail out, bail out completely, turn her off, ruin, destroy the shared fantasy and walk away. If the promiscuous partner is devaluing, especially if she's maliciously devaluing, and if at the same time she engages, she misbehaves with other men. She cheats, she flirts, she introduces other men into the diet as a form of triangulation or actually by engaging in sexual behaviors with other men, that renders the narcissist a statistic and indistinguishable conquest, yet another one of her conquests. Because the devaluation, the message of the devaluation is you're not special, you're not unique, you're not who you think you are. It's a mortifying message. And if at the same time the woman chooses other men, that's a total slap in the face. It causes severe injury to the point of actual modification. It's easier for the narcissist to dump, to get rid of, primary psychopathic borderlines than secondary ones. Now, the vast majority of women with borderline personality disorder have a secondary psychopathic self-state. So under stress, facing rejection, humiliation, real or potential abandonment, borderline women become secondary psychopaths. They switch into a self-state, which is essentially secondary psychopath. The secondary psychopath has empathy. It's a psychopath that has empathy, who has empathy. It's a psychopath who has emotions. This psychopath behaves psychopathically, she's defined, she's contumious, she's impulsive, she's reckless. Everything that the psychopath is, she is, but she preserves empathy and she preserves her emotions. So vast majority of borderlines are like that. But some borderlines are comorbid with primary psychopathy, they're actual psychopaths. This is of course by far the most horrible combination, way more horrible than the narcissist. And so it's easy for the narcissist to get rid of psychopathic borderlines. It's easy to eject them from the shared fantasy because they are malicious and they are defiant and this legitimizes discarding them from the shared fantasy. And so I hope I've answered all your questions. And remember a bit later, I'll release a video about compensatory narcissism, the recent discoveries. And tomorrow, premier psychopathy and high-functioning autism are they one and the same thing? And this is awesome, handsome, awesome bin vaknin, wishing you a great, absolutely great and pandemic-free week, wherever you may be. Good night and good luck.