Young women, sensitivity, sociopaths, and remote controls: a pop psychology reflection

Yesterday's post about 9/11, lukewarm marriages, and divorce has spawned a few interesting emails.  I hope to have another post up within the week on the topic.

I want to blog this morning, however, about a very different topic: the remarkable fascination so many bright, acutely sensitive young women  have with serial killers and sociopaths.  I'm not talking about the women who actually pursue and fall in love with (and even marry) actual incarcerated murderers.  I'm talking about something much more subtle, and, in my experience as a teacher and youth worker, surprisingly common.

Just this past week I was having a chat in my office with a very bright, perceptive, student of mine; I'll call her "Michelle."     She had taken my women's history class last fall, and her journals were vivid, imaginative, and indicative of an exceptionally empathy towards others.   Michelle is trying to decide on a major, and she's choosing between psychology and women's studies.  As we were exploring her reasons for picking one or the other, I asked which field of psych appealed most to her.  I must confess that based on experience, I knew what Michelle was going to say before she said it.   I was right; she answered "abnormal and forensic psychology."  She explained she's always been fascinated with "serial killers and sociopaths."  "I want to know what makes them tick", she explained, "they are endlessly interesting to me."

Without the slightest exaggeration, I can think of two dozen other young women I've worked with in the past decade who share Michelle's intense interest in sociopathic killers.  Invariably, these young women are unusually bright, unusually sensitive, and almost always either the first-born or the only daughter in the family.  I've only known of one who actually pursued forensic psychology as a career (I think she ended up at the John Jay school of Criminal Justice); the others just loyally consumed television programs, books, and movies on the subject of serial murderers.

My theory may not be original, but since I haven't seen it in print anywhere else, I'm going to put it out there.  I'm convinced that young women like Michelle become fascinated with sociopaths for the simple reason that these men represent the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from where these women find themselves.  Sociopaths, by definition, lack compassion and remorse.  The young women who become intensely intrigued by them are often overwhelmed by chronic feelings of guilt and a painfully acute sensitivity to other's perceptions.  They are often emotionally drained and exhausted, because within their families they've frequently been the ones to shoulder all of the responsibility and do all of the "feeling work" for everyone else.

I often think of emotional sensitivity as a spectrum from 0-10, similar to the volume controls for a radio.  Most "normal" folks are tuned into the needs of others at about 4 or 5 on the spectrum.  They are aware of the needs of those around them, but aren't overwhelmed by them.  The Michelles of the world hear the world's emotional noise at an 8 or 9 on the spectrum.  The needs and demands of others are so clear and loud that these young women often can't hear themselves think.  They are actually incapacitated from the effort of absorbing so much emotion, and frequently they feel immensely guilty for not meeting the insatiable demands of those around them.  Is it any wonder that they become fascinated with -- and even, in some sense, envious of -- sociopaths?  What else is a sociopath than someone whose "volume control" for the needs of others has been set to mute?  How many bright, talented, acutely sensitive young women have fantasized about having an internal "mute button" that could silence the judging, nagging, needy voices of all of those around them?

Look, I know I'm playing pop psychologist here.  I'm stepping well outside my field of professional expertise.  I'm blogging my observations as a friend and a mentor, not as a professional therapist.  But as a pro-feminist who teaches women's studies, the emotional resiliency of my female students is of significant concern to me.  And I'm convinced that one of the key tasks for those of us who do teach in this field is to help young women "find the remote control" that can help them "turn down the volume" in their lives.  Do I want to turn out young women who are amoral sociopaths, cheerfully wreaking havoc on the world?  Of course not.  But if the needs and wants and expectations of others are coming in at the  #9 setting, we who do this work need to help young women learn to turn down the volume to a balanced 4 or 5.  For some women, learning to turn down the volume comes with age and experience.  But we could spare a lot of heartache -- and perhaps reduce the demand for endless TV programs about sociopaths -- if we who teach and mentor actively encouraged young women to find their inner emotional remote and use it.

Comments

[Rob]

Nancy is a therapist. Her most vivid classes and things she related to me are about the Yanomami of the Amazon and antisocial personality disorders, esp. ye old serial killers.

But you know what? Borderlines and flaming "Cluster Bs" were up there, too. We're talking about the extremes of human pathology.

The extremes tend to be fun. Most chemists can talk to you about explosives. Most Radiochemists have attempted to design a nuclear weapon at one time or another. There's survival value here: I know someone who forgot what organic peroxides do and attempted to clean an agarose gel column with one. Everyone lived, but there were scars. Nancy, when she was a mechanical engineer, got a big lecture on how not to create mushroom clouds when she was working in the shop.

Knowing what ASPs and Borderlines (defined as "You wish they were in someone else's waiting room") and flaming Cluster Bs has survival value for the therapist. Nancy can't give me details, but it kept her alive once.

As a paramedic, knowing what to look for kept me alive, too. Appealing to a sociopath's self-interest is why I'm still able to type and think and breathe.

Of course, in physics, what's everyone interested in? The Big Bang. Black Holes. Quazars and GRBs -- they weren't black hole-involved when they started out but they were big and impressive.

They are extreme. And there is survival value. Because physicists are able to calculate about black holes and the probability of them being produced by natural cosmic rays hitting the Earth, no one's worried about CERN creating them when it goes on line next year. Well, no one who knows what they're talking about.

I think a lot of it is just that extremes are fun.

By any chance, do you, Hugo, ever talk about extremes on your blog?

[Hugo]

Rob, I agree that extremes are fascinating -- what I find fascinating is that one particular group of young women seem more drawn to one particular extreme than others. In other words, the interest in serial killers does not seem spread evenly across all demographic groups.

[wolfa]

I don't know -- I don't think that the serial killer novels or movies or tv shows are watched mostly by young women. Now, maybe the interest in studying them is different -- but you've also said that most of these students don't study them, in the end. (And people in other groups generally don't have the option to say they wish they could work with sociopaths.) I can make another reasonable story about why: they want to study psychology to understand themselves, but it's culturally not ok to say that. (Although every single person I knew who studied psych as an undergrad, except 3 -- and I knew a lot, it was the most popular field at my undergrad school -- said that they were doing it to "help teenage girls like [they] hadn't been helped". Many of them changed their minds and started studying other aspects of psychology, later.)

[Lynn Gazis-Sax]

Actually, most of the people I've run into personally who were interested in serial killers were men. It's a small sample, though.

[Hugo]

I think young men and women are often fascinated with sociopaths for different reasons. Young women -- and again, this is from having seen this two dozen times, a small sample in the long run -- tend to be fascinated with what makes the serial killer tick, what his thought process is, and, above all, his absence of empathy. Young men seem to be more interested in the lurid details of the crimes than in the perpetrator's psychological make-up.

[Kimber]

Hugo, an interesting post. I can think of one woman I know who fit this to a tee, but I am not sure how many others it applies to. Now, while I have no interest in serial killers (they disgust me), I do identify with "hearing too much". Like Michelle, I feel like I feel other's emotions at an 8 or 9. It is exhausting. You're right, and I wish we could do more to help young women turn it down. How?

[Jeremy Henty]

At the risk of thread drift, I'll riff a little on previous comments...

I think people are interested in the Big Bang, and cosmology in general, because it's the history of the universe... one of the greatest stories ever told by anyone's standards! I think most people have a gut interest in this - is there anyone who's really never wondered "Where did all this come from? How did it all happen?"?

Regarding extreme people, I'm reminded of a comment I read about Syd Barrett not long after his death - "People like Syd can touch us because they don't know when to stop". (Paraphrased from memory.) You often hear about the importance of "testing the boundaries" - maybe these extreme characters are fascinating because they test the boundaries in ways that we dare not, and their music/poetry/art gives us a safe way to ape their transgressions? Hugo has by his own account been lucky (blessed, he would say) enough to return from out there. Janis Joplin and many others did not. Syd Barrett? Well, his body certainly washed up on the shore and lingered for a while. It's unclear whether *he* ever came back.

Hugo is of course welcome to challenge my interpretation of his story, but I see a great similarity between his description of himself before his conversion turned him around, and numerous rock stars who seemed to feel everything so intensely yet were so disconnected from their fellow people and the real world around them.

[karen corcoran dabkowski]

I have been drawn to studying and reading about serial killers for as long as I can remember there being such a term. (Yes, I do remember the time when such terminolgy didn't yet exist), but the first time such an idea of a 'slaughterer-of-multiple-women' came into my awareness and thence, to quite possibly an abnormally avid following of their stories and methodologies, was with Richard Speck, back in the 60's. I was just at the edge of childhood ready to enter my teen years, and it was a fear-struck horror I couldn't (and can't) turn away from; it was the fear of such things happening in the world, and in part I guess, a fear for my own safety by identification with the victims simply by their gender. It made me feel helpless and I hate feeling that way, and so I came to believe that the more I knew of them, the safer I might be.

For instance- how many times in my life have I offered help to a stranger? I'm thinking here of the young women who fell victim to the 'I'm wearing a cast' charade of Ted Bundy. I need to be alert. That's what studying them feels like: alertness. Preparedness. I am not the oldest in the family, I am the youngest- and often felt sort of lost (due to family circumstances I won't go into here)- but I often felt lost and on my own once my much older brother and sister had gotten married and I was the last one left...and even saying that, 'the last one left', gives me a chill because of how often I've stepped into the shoes of the last Speck victim, hearing everything, but unable to do anything but wait.

So while I wait, I like to know the face of the monster out there. I want to be alert. I want to not be fooled, that's all. Over time the spector of the serial killer has come to symbolize evil itself...and death...and he wears ordinary clothes and has a job and gets his oil changed- and it's that very side of normalcy that makes me very frightened.

[mythago]

The oddity of this interest is that sociopaths and serial killers aren't very interesting, despite the portrayal in movies and books. They've usually had horrible, unreal, abusive upbringing that ground all the empathy out of them; they're not especially bright or successful for the most part. There's nothing that "makes them tick"; it's more that they lack something that makes everyone else tick.

[Jeremy Henty]

While we're at it, why don't we all read this account of someone who actually *knew* a serial killer?

Life and Death

Jeremy Henty

[Arwen]

Theory...

I was a genre fiction addict for many years, inhaling the "Lone-female-wolf investigator who is grudgingly respected by the peers who berate her constantly while she uses non-traditional methods to hunt down murderers" genre.

It's a subset of hard-boiled mystery novels, and I think all of them satisfy a pretty primal self-defense archetype; there are rarely deep romantic attachments, only flirtations or affairs in which the woman is often the one uncomfortable with commitment; there's repeated smack-downs of patronizing "little-lady" talk; there's the need to overcome danger, and the attempt to understand it; and I think most importantly, the women tend to admit when they're scared, hurt, annoyed, angry, or obsessed. I know a lot of women who snacked on those books, and interest in sociopaths can certainly grow out of that.

I would actually put the female hard-boiled detective novel on a required reading list for a cultural women's studies course. The formula undeniably confronts the issues of womanhood post second wave: what it means to be in a world that might kill you without the protection of a husband. And the sales figures were astounding: this was a pretty big genre, for a subset.

Of course, nowadays, there's a backlash; or at least something else coming out in the stories. (Janet Evanovich's characters are dependent and foolish, but it may be fair to characterize them as satire. Or at least where the hard-boiled female genre mated with "Bridget Jones".)

[Arwen]

( In fact, I'd say interest in sociopaths almost always grew out of addiction to this genre in my younger friends, whereas my older female family members liked the puzzle part. Wouldn't surprise me that there's not a high commitment rate to that path, but also wouldn't surprise me that the interest is there, since those I knew evidenced it. Obv., interest in sociopathology may come from many sources, but I'd still hazard the guess.)

[Jeremy Henty]

To clarify, I posted the link to "Life and Death" above to highlight the article itself, not the discussion beneath it. I'm saying that because that discussion is tainted by a lot of ugly pro-verses-anti-Christian trolling and I'd rather everyone ignored that part of it. Y'all are free to talk about it if you really want, just don't imagine that that was my intention when I posted the link.

Aak, 1.40am, time for bed.

[JoieB]

I think you may have a semi-working theory. My sister, the first born child is extremely empathetic with a borderline obsession with true crime stories and sociopaths. I've often wondered myself when I do encounter others who seem to fall into those same categories whether there was a correlation.

[Anna Phor]

What Karen said. I don't think it has anything to do with being envious of a lack of empathy at all. I think it's insurance. I think it's directly tied to the cultural myths that violence done against women is done by psychopathic strangers, not by intimates. And I think the popularity of crime fiction among women, particularly crime fiction with female protagonists, is a manifestation of the same phenomenon. Notice that what you don't see is women devouring fiction where the aspirational protagonist lacks empathy.

[marge Johnson]

Thank you JoieB. There's a twisted obsession w/ serial killers, rapists, etc...in our culture. Just flip channels--it's on documentaries, TV shows--Law & order has made a whole industry out of murdered and mutilated women. Interest in this subject is a mantifestation of internalized oppression and perhaps neurotic/obsessive response to our twisted, frightening culture.

[Stacey]

The young women you describe sound like "gifted" adults. I have done a little bit of reading on this topic, and I think part of the fascination is that these women feel the need to understand the world around them. Their heightened sense of empathy (which I also believe they have) wants to include all humans in the answers they find. That is very difficult to do with these extremes.

[Burton]

I'm convinced that young women like Michelle become fascinated with sociopaths for the simple reason that these men represent the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from where these women find themselves.

I'm convinced that she's fascinated with sociopaths because she is into "bad boys." She's out there chasing those alpha males!

[Ron]

Sorry for bumping an old thread:

"I'm convinced that young women like Michelle become fascinated with sociopaths for the simple reason that these men represent the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from where these women find themselves."

Your completely wrong about this one. Your religion is blinding you from the fact that women are naturally attracted to alpha males because as human beings we are animals. If this thing we call society one day collapses and all the loonies in Jail go free, guess who's going to be king? That's right, its gonna be alpha male. Faced with the prospect of being raped/used and abused by males, Females will gravitate to an alpha male that can protect them. There is also a sexual component, these women are craving a man that can fully satisfy them, who better to rock your brains out than a sociopath who see's you as a piece of meat. Oh the more degrading the sex acts the more that the human animal (both men and women) love it. Why? Simple, it allows us to be fully what we truly are, allows us to express our truly animalistic side fully and without reserve. Society has yet to take this away from us, its clearly something religion has been trying to do away with for a while.

Are you forgetting we were once cave people running around with sticks and stones?
You religious nut jobs never cease to amaze me. You guys think "a grand designer sat there and figured us all out and made us of his own image". What a pretty picture to paint. But in case you haven't noticed, reality doesn't match up.

Why don't you take a look here, we have a lot more in common with some close relatives than you'd perhaps like to admit:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html