What is the most striking difference between male and female psychopathic killers?
Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College, City University of New York, writes in The Serial Killers Files:
“There are unmistakable similarities between the violent behavior of male serial killers—the phallic thrusting, penetration, rapaciousness…—and typical male sexual behavior. It may therefore be useful to view sadistic mutilation-murder as an aberrant variant of normal male sexual behavior…”
“Female psychopaths are in no way inferior to their male counterparts in evil. But rough penetration does not excite them. Their excitement does not come from using phallic objects to invade strangers’ bodies; it comes from a perverse imitation and cruel distortion of intimacy and tenderness—for example, feeding poison into the mouth of a trusting patient or a sleeping child. In short, what excites them is gently turning friends, family members, and people who depend on them into corpses—sending them to their deaths through acts of nurturing.”
In a nutshell:
Male psychopathic killers feel like they’re having sex!
Female psychopathic killers feel like they’re raising children!
…Wait, wait, wait—isn’t this description basically Wu Song killing Pan Jinlian with a knife and Pan Jinlian poisoning Wu Dalang?!
The connection between male violence and sexual behavior can often be observed in ordinary men as well.
“The circuits controlling sexual and aggressive behavior in the brain are intertwined within the limbic system, and both respond to testosterone.” Men’s bodies also secrete far more testosterone than women’s. This might explain why “male aggression contains a sexual component. In interviews with soldiers, many used stereotypically pornographic language to describe warfare.” It may also explain why torture carried out by men so often contains an element of sexual release.
As for the connection between female violence and nurturing behavior, I haven’t yet found a neurological explanation. I assume there’s probably a similar connection.
p.s.:
People needn’t take all these “explanations” of psychopathic killers too seriously, because psychopathic killers are extraordinarily rare. “By any method of counting, at most twenty or thirty serial killers are active in the United States at any given time, and only a very small fraction of the 17,000 murders committed in the country each year can be attributed to them.” The number who are caught and studied is smaller still. With such a tiny sample, it is basically impossible to draw especially reliable scientific conclusions. Even the question of why female psychopathic killers favor poison can be fully explained by saying that women have less physical strength and poisoning has a higher success rate.
References:
1.Schechter, H. (2003). The serial killer files: The who, what, where, how, and why of the world’s most terrifying murderers. Ballantine Books.
2.Steven Pinker. (2015). The Better Angels of Our Nature. CITIC Press.
Note
- The articles in this “New Psychology Knowledge Mini-Course” series were short popular-psychology essays and musings written at the time to accompany material related to Zhichao Wei: New Psychology Knowledge Course. They were published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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