The Secret Self: Narcissism, the Herd, and the Failure to Self-Author

Performance is only part of how a woman comes to know herself — feminism, when practiced as allyship or identity rather than internal work, is simply one of its more contemporary forms. But to truly know oneself as a woman requires something prior to any political commitment: not the ways the patriarchy has deemed her, but the internal workings of herself and how to combat it directly through herself. Fighting this external performance is where the work starts — primarily through the relationships women have to and with men. Women have been looking to be absorbed into a man for as long as time, that is, simply by making it their goal to be with a man, but what a lot of women don't understand is that—depending on the man she is with—her value is not in the uniqueness of who she is to him, rather, through the availability she gives him. What goes ignored or often unknown, is that if it wasn't her, it could very well be someone else; most of the time it is. As long as she meets the bare minimum—making herself available to him—she is replaceable. If she is not insisting on a certain standard being met, then she is at risk of only satisfying his standards, which are most likely lower than her own. A man's standards are already set when he buys her a new pair of underwear, expecting her to wear them for his pleasure, not hers. In fact, that should not only be the dead giveaway of his standards, but what level she is willing to perform at; meeting a man's bare minimum needs and disliking it is common among women who lack agency, because it only reaffirms the reason she is with him. Is she with him to fulfill his needs and ignore herself altogether? The question is rarely asked outright, because asking it requires a self to ask it from — and it is precisely that self, distinct from his needs and independent of his approval, that so many women have never been permitted to build.

Simone de Beauvoir locates the origin of this pattern not in any individual man's behavior, but in a structural absence: women, she argues in The Second Sex, are so rarely permitted self-realization through action that many come to believe they possess some other, hidden form of depth instead — a secret self that substitutes for a self that was never allowed to be built. While she uses the psychoanalytic diagnosis of narcissism, the phenomenon suggests that women’s inability to separate herself from the relationship they have to or with men, is a huge reason as to why women also lack the internal perspective of themselves. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the man himself that a woman is fixated on, but Beauvoire argues that whatever a woman is lacking, gets redistributed externally, which is also something similar to Freud’s theory of the lost object that gets projected through one’s ego. Beauvoir writes, “a trait such women have in common is that they feel misunderstood; people around them fail to recognize their special qualities; they translate this ignorance or indifference on the part of others into the idea that they hold some secrets in their hearts” as though it were a delusion, a part of narcissistic personality, that suggests their reason for performing in such a way: only for the gaze of a man, although this can be applicable to not only men but the general public. Her reasoning follows the idea that women have buried their childhood or youth episodes which have great importance to their true life stories; but the “heroine of the narcissistic woman is only imaginary”, against herself, “since the latter lacks self-realization in actual life”. Instead, Beauvoir believes it to be a hidden principle that only these women possess, which is their own definitive ‘force’ or ‘virtue’ as obscure as phlogiston. 

While the internal battles a woman faces is only part of the problem when it comes to women taking on their own autonomy, the work does not stop at nearly addressing childhood or youth experiences; it comes from the understanding of what has happened and the choices to make going forward to ensure what was initially missing or made to sound as though it may be, isn’t. Beauvoir claims that it also has to do with the empty conviction they have deep within them that they excuse through justifying feelings and actions. But what is easily recognizable with women like this is they are often equipped enough to know they pathologically lack power, in a state of inertia, causing their own delusions and further relying on her own victim mindset as a reason she is—as Beauvoir mentions— a mystery. For it is this mysterious state that she uses as a part of her performance, especially when it comes to the perception of others, as well as how to get herself a man. “Her home becomes a temple where her worship is performed…bestowing as much care on the furniture and ornaments that enframe her as on her costume”; it is the external portrayal of self, of mystery and internalized delusion, that becomes harmful for a woman in this sense, as she has yet to directly address her past and passivity in a productive manner. The growth has yet to transpire. This is evident in the present day, as women become so self-interested that it takes over their entire possibility for a relationship with a man if the man does not explicitly show proof of adornment; the woman, who has yet to prove better judgement for herself, only sees herself as ‘hated’ by the man she is courting. For all we know, a narcissistic woman might not even be attracted to a man she so desires adornment from, she just lacks that much self authority to search elsewhere, search internally for her own validation. Even Beauvoir writes, “a woman so infatuated with her ego loses all hold on the actual world, she has no concern to establish any real relation with others. 

"If he wanted to he would" functions less as a rule women fail to apply than as a symptom of what the phrase assumes about where her needs come from in the first place. The phrase treats his eventual action as a test of a standard she already holds. But look closer at what she’s actually settling for: the bare minimum he offers becomes, retroactively, her need — a need she would have no attachment to at all if it weren’t already shaped by his standards. She isn’t measuring his behavior against her own independent sense of what she wants; she’s forming her sense of what she wants out of whatever he’s already willing to give. This is the same collapse Beauvoir locates in the erotomaniac, who convinces herself of a man’s passion before he’s shown any proof of it, and who then reads his ordinary indifference as evidence that she is “hated” rather than simply overlooked — both women are reading his behavior as a message about her, because neither has a standard of her own to read it against. “If he wanted to he would,” then, isn’t a rule women fail to apply correctly. It’s a symptom that they have no independent instrument to measure him against in the first place — no self standing outside his behavior from which to hold a standard that is actually hers. “The woman who imprisons her lover in the immanence of the couple dooms him and herself to death…her memory becomes fixed,” Beauvoir writes; women without a standard and following this projection only limit themselves to their own version of timeline, with no consideration for what does not pertain to her. “If he wanted to he would” implies a level of narcissism, but also a rejection of self authorship, complying to the standards of the external and the social. 

But the absence of an internal instrument is not only a private failure — it is a collective one. Nietzsche's account of the herd offers a way to understand why so few women arrive at the standard “if he wanted to he would” fails to supply. The herd, according to Nietzsche, is not simply a group but a synchronized set of behavior: eager to please, mediocre, oriented toward comfort rather than confrontation. Within it, very little gets voiced, and even less gets challenged, because deviation from the herd’s shared logic reads as a threat to the herd itself, not a legitimate act of individual reasoning. A woman who insists on a standard she alone holds is not simply resisting one man’s mediocrity; she is stepping outside of a system that depends on her not doing so. This is where the harm compounds: it is not only that she lacks a self to measure him against, but the herd around her actively forecloses the space in which that self could ever be built, since the herd’s comfort requires that nothing be examined too closely. Self confrontation only works if the psychology is oriented toward truth over self protection, external and ego-centric self protection the herd offers in the form of company, agreement, and unspoken permission. What happens when the women responsible for their own decisions decline accountability in this way, is they continue to live in a false reality, submissive and passive of not only those around them but of herself. 

Beauvoir writes more on “The Woman in Love” following her notes on narcissism; that a what a woman recovers through a relationship is not love in any active sense but a “roof over her head, walls that prevent her from feeling her abandonment in the wide world, and authority that protects her against her liberty.” The convenience explored earlier—the comfort of a man who meets her needs just enough to make leaving feel unnecessary—is precisely this shelter. It isn’t that she has weighed him against a standard and found him sufficient; it is that his presence removes the burden of having a standard at all. The “childhood drama” that Beauvoir says women prolong, the being called “little girl”, relieves a woman of her identity into child without authority, because smallness asks nothing of her that largeness would; there is no challenge in that. “If he wanted to he would” persists here in its most literal form: instead of reckoning with the truth, requiring something for and of herself, she must question not if he would, but what she actually requires.  

What makes this conformity so difficult to break is not only social pressure, but something closer to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls stupidity — a condition he considers more dangerous than evil, because at least evil announces its intention and, in doing so, “carries within itself the germ of its own subversion.” Stupidity offers no such opening; it is tolerated rather than confronted, excused with a shrug — “that’s who they are”, “well that’s not something that involves me directly” — precisely because it is not malice but an outsourcing of one’s own critical thinking to a third party: a man, a relationship, a herd. This is what makes challenging stupidity so difficult, and it is here that Bonhoeffer’s account meets Beauvoir’s: beliefs this unexamined do not remain only beliefs, they harden into identity, and challenging identity feels indistinguishable from an attack on the self—which is precisely why convenience and comfort in a false persona is so rarely questioned from within. Self-confrontation, then, only works if the psychology beneath it is oriented toward truth over self-protection — not the self-protection of malice, but disguised, more forgivable and kind: the self-protection of not wanting to know. Reconsider our own relationships to others, become radical in doubt, curious and questioning the things around them

Suppression plays a quieter version of the same role, and emotional response is part of the internal work the rhetoric and behavior forecloses, which like a belief, it too gets conditioned from the outside rather than generated from within. A woman conditioned to swallow guilt, shame, and exclusion is not practicing restraint, but the same outsourcing that Bonhoeffer describes, just in the register of feeling instead of belief. Social conditioning also frames this suppression as maturity, when it in fact short-circuits the very space in which emotion, and eventually judgement, can develop. An emotionally mature woman must be able to locate her own guilt or shame and ask where it originates, rather than deflecting it toward her position relative to a man’s — but this is difficult for exactly the same reasons that Bonhoeffer names: naming the feelings means confronting what produced it, and confrontation feels like self-attack when the feeling has quietly become a part of who she believes herself to be. What looks like composure is very often just stupidity’s counterpart in the emotional register: a well-mannered refusal to know; willful ignorance; self indoctrination. 

Against the narcissist’s invented mystery, the task is not self-belief but self-examination: actually returning to the buried episodes Beauvoir says get displaced into “secret” rather than letting them remain a private mythology that excuses her from the work of understanding them. Against the herd, the task is deliberately seeking spaces where disagreement is possible and even expected, rather than mistaking agreement from support—since a herd that only ever affirms her has not actually tested anything. Sebastian Purcell’s Aztec decision circle offers a working model rather than a contemporary abstraction: when faced with a difficult decision, the circle is consulted not to provide comfort but specifically to provide dissent, an alternative position that must be reckoned with before a choice is made. A woman doing this work needs the human equivalent—not a circle that reflects her decisions back to her—one willing to complicate it. Against Bonhoeffer’s basis of belief and identity, the task is learning to treat a challenged belief as information rather than threat, which requires separating who she is from what she currently happens to think. Against, “if he wanted to he would”, the task is building the instrument the phrase assumes she already has: naming what she needs before he acts, so that his behavior is being measured against something that already exists within her, rather than generating her sense of what she needs after the fact. Self autonomy and agency is a slow, less narratable work of no longer passing time waiting for external proof before she is willing to define herself. To internalize one’s own external decisions—to stop letting a man’s action, a herd’s agreement, or an unexamined belief stand in for a self she has yet to construct—is not a conclusion feminism can simply assert on a woman’s behalf.