Here is my part of the New York Magazine article that dropped today (along with Lee, Sam, Noodles, and a couple others). I think I scared the journalist. 😈😂 nymag.com/intelligencer/article/diagnosed-narcissi…
One of the strangest, most shockingly honest products of this pipeline is Sara Crouson, who makes content under the moniker “Cluster B Milkshake.” Crouson’s journey to self-awareness began several years ago. She was writing letters to an imprisoned serial killer. “He killed people, cut their calf meat off, cooked it, and sold it to people,” she tells me. She’d always suspected that there was something different about her — that there was an emptiness inside her that allowed her to deceive others easily — and she hoped that by corresponding with a very obviously disturbed person, she might come to understand herself better. Crouson was married at the time and flirting with numerous men online out of sheer boredom. She wasn’t interested in any of them but enjoyed the power trip of stringing them along. Was her small-scale manipulation somehow analogous to calf meat selling? she wondered. She never found out. She says, “I told my sister and my gay best friend — who are both pussies, by the way — who I was writing to, and they were like, ‘Noooooooo! Stop it!’ So I stopped.” Then she discovered Vaknin. Soon, everything started to click. Like Hammock, she joined a Facebook group, received a diagnosis, then started her platform. She says she was initially motivated by “Fame. Fame, fame, fame.” She was jealous when she saw other narcissists profiting from their condition. But then, through chatting with some of her new narcissistic followers, she gradually started to accrue other rewards. She began feeling shame for the first time. It was a mixed blessing. “I used to push my feelings into a black hole inside of me,” she says, “and they would just disappear. If somebody tried to make me feel like shit, I just made them feel like shit. It was a perfect system.” Now, she sits with her feelings and processes them. She takes walks and tries to prevent emotions like guilt and shame from turning into rage. Crouson often speaks in a slightly unsettling baby voice, which makes sense because she believes that her NPD began as a defense mechanism in her unstable childhood — she needed to numb herself to survive. It’s outdated now, but she can’t quite shake it. “We’re just toddlers inside,” she says of narcissists. “We’re just little kids throwing tantrums. Would you get offended if a little girl screamed and threw her doll at you? Or would you just ignore her and let her run off to her room?” The stigma against narcissists, she says, is severe. “They think we’re black-eyed demons — vampires, descending with our rubber wings to suck their blood.” On her channel, she’s doing her best to provide a different image. I ask Crouson what her relationship with her viewers is like and whether having an audience has impacted her NPD. “It’s simple,” she tells me in the baby voice. “I read books about narcissism and make videos. And you better fucking watch them … and fucking like … and fucking subscribe … and” — transitioning out of baby voice, she turns deadly serious — “shut the fuck up.”
cLuStEr B MiLkShAkE
Here is my part of the New York Magazine article that dropped today (along with Lee, Sam, Noodles, and a couple others). I think I scared the journalist. 😈😂 nymag.com/intelligencer/article/diagnosed-narcissi…
One of the strangest, most shockingly honest products of this pipeline is Sara Crouson, who makes content under the moniker “Cluster B Milkshake.” Crouson’s journey to self-awareness began several years ago. She was writing letters to an imprisoned serial killer. “He killed people, cut their calf meat off, cooked it, and sold it to people,” she tells me. She’d always suspected that there was something different about her — that there was an emptiness inside her that allowed her to deceive others easily — and she hoped that by corresponding with a very obviously disturbed person, she might come to understand herself better. Crouson was married at the time and flirting with numerous men online out of sheer boredom. She wasn’t interested in any of them but enjoyed the power trip of stringing them along. Was her small-scale manipulation somehow analogous to calf meat selling? she wondered.
She never found out. She says, “I told my sister and my gay best friend — who are both pussies, by the way — who I was writing to, and they were like, ‘Noooooooo! Stop it!’ So I stopped.” Then she discovered Vaknin. Soon, everything started to click. Like Hammock, she joined a Facebook group, received a diagnosis, then started her platform. She says she was initially motivated by “Fame. Fame, fame, fame.” She was jealous when she saw other narcissists profiting from their condition. But then, through chatting with some of her new narcissistic followers, she gradually started to accrue other rewards. She began feeling shame for the first time.
It was a mixed blessing. “I used to push my feelings into a black hole inside of me,” she says, “and they would just disappear. If somebody tried to make me feel like shit, I just made them feel like shit. It was a perfect system.” Now, she sits with her feelings and processes them. She takes walks and tries to prevent emotions like guilt and shame from turning into rage.
Crouson often speaks in a slightly unsettling baby voice, which makes sense because she believes that her NPD began as a defense mechanism in her unstable childhood — she needed to numb herself to survive. It’s outdated now, but she can’t quite shake it. “We’re just toddlers inside,” she says of narcissists. “We’re just little kids throwing tantrums. Would you get offended if a little girl screamed and threw her doll at you? Or would you just ignore her and let her run off to her room?”
The stigma against narcissists, she says, is severe. “They think we’re black-eyed demons — vampires, descending with our rubber wings to suck their blood.” On her channel, she’s doing her best to provide a different image.
I ask Crouson what her relationship with her viewers is like and whether having an audience has impacted her NPD. “It’s simple,” she tells me in the baby voice. “I read books about narcissism and make videos. And you better fucking watch them … and fucking like … and fucking subscribe … and” — transitioning out of baby voice, she turns deadly serious — “shut the fuck up.”
4 weeks ago | [YT] | 118