It's been a while since I recorded this, so sorry the description is not more detailed!
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Friday, April 9, 2021
Male = more murderous than psychopath
Who is more dangerous, males or psychopaths?
Take a non-gendered, non sociopathic person. Are they more likely to be a murderer if we make them male or if we make them a psychopath? The answer is male.
First, homicide rates are 88.8% male in the U.S. You're 7 times more likely to be a murderer if you're male than female. Sources: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
I'm going to use 2013 FBI statistics because they seem to do a good job distinguishing between genders, but I'd love to see this actually studied and given the attention it deserves: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls
Male non-psychopathic murderers
Total in the U.S. in 2013 = 5058 male murderers
At one person's estimate, psychopaths are an estimated 25% of murderers: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201812/are-murderers-unfairly-labeled-psychopaths
5058*.75 = 3793.5 male American non-psychopath murderers.
Controlled for population size:
Total male U.S. population = 151.8 million
3793.5 male non-psychopath murderers /151.8M male americans =
0.002499011% likelihood you're a murderer if you're an American male non-psychopath
Non-male psychopath murderers
For non-male psychopath murders, let's first take the number of non-male murderers: 665
665 non-male murders again at the rate of 25% of murderers are psychopaths =
665*.25 = 166 non-male American psychopath murderers
Controlled for population size.
Total non male psychopath population in the U.S. is 176.M. Approximately four percent of those are psychopaths.
176.4M*4% = 7,056,000 non-male American psychopaths.
166 non-male psychopath American murderers /7.056M non-male American psychopaths =
0.002352607% likelihood you're a murderer if you're a non-male American psychopath
***Being male makes you more likely to be a murderer than being a psychopath.****
Both are still highly unlikely, e.g. if you come across a random male or random non-male psychopath it's still very unlikely they are a murderer.
Of course these numbers are just rough estimates, but I think this quick back of the envelope calculation suggests at the very least that common intuitions regarding the dangerousness of psychopaths need to be re-examined and further research is warranted.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Female sociopath: fact or fiction?
Merve Emre writes for Digg ("The Female Sociopath") on the popularity of the female sociopath in fiction (TV/books, etc.), and the reality. Worth reading in its entirety, the first little bit:
If you don’t know who Rosamund Pike is, you will soon. In October, she will appear in David Fincher’s film adaptation of Gone Girl, one of the most popular and addictive novels of the past decade, as Amy Dunne — the beguiling and cerebral housewife who stages her own murder and frames her philandering husband. Amy’s creator, the novelist Gillian Flynn, has proudly described her character as a “functioning sociopath,” which she is quick to distinguish from “the iconic psycho bitch.” The iconic psycho bitch, Flynn explains, is crazy because “her lady parts have gone crazy.” Think of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, so consumed with desire for Michael Douglas that she boils his daughter’s pet rabbit to death; think of Sharon Stone and Jennifer Jason Leigh (and Kathy Bates and Rebecca De Mornay) chasing men through dim rooms with sharp objects.
Unlike these women, the functional sociopath isn’t “dismissible” as a slave to her emotions. She is not outwardly violent. Patently remorseless, clear-eyed and calculating, she is chameleonic in the extreme, donning one feigned feeling after another (interest, concern, sympathy, simpering insecurity, confidence, arrogance, lust, even love) to get what she wants.
And why should she feel bad about it?
For M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of A Sociopath, such affective maneuvers are tantamount to “fulfilling an exchange.” “You might call it seduction,” she suggests, but really “it’s called arbitrage and it happens on Wall Street (and a lot of other places) every day.” Whatever you choose to call it, its appeal is undeniable when linked to the professional and personal advancement of women. “In general, the women in my life seemed like they were never acting, always being acted upon,” Thomas laments. Sociopathy’s silver lining was that it gave her a way to combat that injustice, in the boardroom of the corporate law firm she worked for in Los Angeles, but also in the bedroom, where she marveled at how her emotional detachment let her commandeer her lovers’ hearts and minds. Somewhere along the way, pathology became recoded as practice — a set of rules for how to manage the self and others.
No wonder the female sociopath cuts such an admirable figure. Intensely romantic, professionally desirable, she is the stuff of fiction, fantasy, and aspirational reading. And while actual female sociopaths like Thomas are rare, and sociopathy isn’t even recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the female sociopath looms large in our cultural imagination. Amy Dunne may stand as the perfect example — a “Cool Girl” on the outside, ice cold within — but she is not alone. Of late, she has faced stiff competition from fictional females like Lisbeth Salander, the ferocious tech genius in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, or Laura, the shape-shifting alien who preys on unwitting men in Under the Skin. Network television has been even kinder to the female sociopath, placing her at the center of workplace dramas like Damages, Revenge, Bones, The Fall, Rizzoli and Isles, Person of Interest, Luther, and 24. Here, she has mesmerized audiences with how nimbly she scales the professional ladder, her competence and sex appeal whetted by her dark, aggressive, risk-taking behavior, and lack of empathy.
And so we lean in to the cultural logic of the female sociopath, for she is the apotheosis of the cool girl power that go-getter “feminists” have peddled to frustrated women over the last half-decade. The female sociopath doesn’t want to upend systems of gender inequality, that vast and irreducible constellation of institutions and beliefs that lead successful women like Gillian Flynn to decree that certain women, who feel or behave in certain ways, are “dismissible.” The female sociopath wants to dominate these systems from within, as the most streamlined product of a world in which well-intentioned people blithely invoke words like arbitrage, leverage, capital, and currency to appraise how successfully we inhabit our bodies, our selves. One could easily imagine the female sociopath devouring books with titles like Bo$$ Bitch, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, The Confidence Gap, and Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman to hone her craft — to learn how to have it all. From atop the corporate ladder, she can applaud her liberation from the whole messy business of feeling as a step forward for women, when it’s really a step back.
The result is a self-defeating spectacle of feminism that finds a kindred spirit in Rosamund Pike on the cover of W, erasing her own perfect face to reveal that what lies beneath might be nothing. Like Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, who confesses that she “has never really felt like a person, but a product” — plastic, fungible, ready to be consumed by anyone, at any time — the female sociopath is a product of a broken promise made to women, by women. She is a product poised to disappear into the immense darkness from which she came.
One of my favorite parts of studying music was learning that the representation of women in professional orchestras skyrocketed when they started doing blind auditions (i.e. the judges couldn't see who was performing). When I taught, I told my students to use their initials on their C.V.s and résumés, because it seems like every year there is another study that shows that everywhere in every field there is gender and racial bias. Sometimes I wish we could do the equivalent of blind auditions everywhere. Maybe we shouldn't out any sort of name on our résumés. Maybe we should make that illegal, like it is illegal to put your name on a standardized test. Because why should it matter?
When I first started writing this blog, it was like a blind audition. No one knew who I was, only what I wrote. I didn't realize at the time how great that felt, what a respite from my normal life that was. Without realizing even to what extent, I had been swimming against the current all of my life, until I was allowed to just be me. And then when I came out as being female there was a certain significant portion backlash that wasn't really explainable apart from being a reaction to my gender. (See also, popular science blogger Elise Andrew who got a cyclone of hate only after it was discovered that she was female.) There was probably as much backlash in my sociopath life for being female as there was in my normal life for being a sociopath. And now when I write or say things, it is seen through a different, distorted lens of my perceived femininity. I used to never get accused of the typical "oh man, you won't believe how crazy my ex-girlfriend was" type behavior -- "classic female traits" like self-harm/cutting, attention seeking, jealousy, vanity, histrionics, woman-scorned flavored vengeance, man-hating flavored vengeance, or anything else that is likely to get a woman slapped with the term "crazy". Now I get them all of the time. Which was sort of a surprise to me. Why did it bother people that I had been given the diagnosis "sociopath". Because it really seemed to. They took what I said and twisted it to fit something else, until I was "just borderline." as if the biased-female diagnosis was lesser than the sort-of male equivalent. Until I was "just crazy". Until I was something or someone that could be dismissed as a nobody nothing. Because that's how we marginalize people, I guess.
See also SNL – Red Flag | Katabatic Digital
If you don’t know who Rosamund Pike is, you will soon. In October, she will appear in David Fincher’s film adaptation of Gone Girl, one of the most popular and addictive novels of the past decade, as Amy Dunne — the beguiling and cerebral housewife who stages her own murder and frames her philandering husband. Amy’s creator, the novelist Gillian Flynn, has proudly described her character as a “functioning sociopath,” which she is quick to distinguish from “the iconic psycho bitch.” The iconic psycho bitch, Flynn explains, is crazy because “her lady parts have gone crazy.” Think of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, so consumed with desire for Michael Douglas that she boils his daughter’s pet rabbit to death; think of Sharon Stone and Jennifer Jason Leigh (and Kathy Bates and Rebecca De Mornay) chasing men through dim rooms with sharp objects.
Unlike these women, the functional sociopath isn’t “dismissible” as a slave to her emotions. She is not outwardly violent. Patently remorseless, clear-eyed and calculating, she is chameleonic in the extreme, donning one feigned feeling after another (interest, concern, sympathy, simpering insecurity, confidence, arrogance, lust, even love) to get what she wants.
And why should she feel bad about it?
For M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of A Sociopath, such affective maneuvers are tantamount to “fulfilling an exchange.” “You might call it seduction,” she suggests, but really “it’s called arbitrage and it happens on Wall Street (and a lot of other places) every day.” Whatever you choose to call it, its appeal is undeniable when linked to the professional and personal advancement of women. “In general, the women in my life seemed like they were never acting, always being acted upon,” Thomas laments. Sociopathy’s silver lining was that it gave her a way to combat that injustice, in the boardroom of the corporate law firm she worked for in Los Angeles, but also in the bedroom, where she marveled at how her emotional detachment let her commandeer her lovers’ hearts and minds. Somewhere along the way, pathology became recoded as practice — a set of rules for how to manage the self and others.
No wonder the female sociopath cuts such an admirable figure. Intensely romantic, professionally desirable, she is the stuff of fiction, fantasy, and aspirational reading. And while actual female sociopaths like Thomas are rare, and sociopathy isn’t even recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the female sociopath looms large in our cultural imagination. Amy Dunne may stand as the perfect example — a “Cool Girl” on the outside, ice cold within — but she is not alone. Of late, she has faced stiff competition from fictional females like Lisbeth Salander, the ferocious tech genius in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, or Laura, the shape-shifting alien who preys on unwitting men in Under the Skin. Network television has been even kinder to the female sociopath, placing her at the center of workplace dramas like Damages, Revenge, Bones, The Fall, Rizzoli and Isles, Person of Interest, Luther, and 24. Here, she has mesmerized audiences with how nimbly she scales the professional ladder, her competence and sex appeal whetted by her dark, aggressive, risk-taking behavior, and lack of empathy.
And so we lean in to the cultural logic of the female sociopath, for she is the apotheosis of the cool girl power that go-getter “feminists” have peddled to frustrated women over the last half-decade. The female sociopath doesn’t want to upend systems of gender inequality, that vast and irreducible constellation of institutions and beliefs that lead successful women like Gillian Flynn to decree that certain women, who feel or behave in certain ways, are “dismissible.” The female sociopath wants to dominate these systems from within, as the most streamlined product of a world in which well-intentioned people blithely invoke words like arbitrage, leverage, capital, and currency to appraise how successfully we inhabit our bodies, our selves. One could easily imagine the female sociopath devouring books with titles like Bo$$ Bitch, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, The Confidence Gap, and Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman to hone her craft — to learn how to have it all. From atop the corporate ladder, she can applaud her liberation from the whole messy business of feeling as a step forward for women, when it’s really a step back.
The result is a self-defeating spectacle of feminism that finds a kindred spirit in Rosamund Pike on the cover of W, erasing her own perfect face to reveal that what lies beneath might be nothing. Like Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, who confesses that she “has never really felt like a person, but a product” — plastic, fungible, ready to be consumed by anyone, at any time — the female sociopath is a product of a broken promise made to women, by women. She is a product poised to disappear into the immense darkness from which she came.
One of my favorite parts of studying music was learning that the representation of women in professional orchestras skyrocketed when they started doing blind auditions (i.e. the judges couldn't see who was performing). When I taught, I told my students to use their initials on their C.V.s and résumés, because it seems like every year there is another study that shows that everywhere in every field there is gender and racial bias. Sometimes I wish we could do the equivalent of blind auditions everywhere. Maybe we shouldn't out any sort of name on our résumés. Maybe we should make that illegal, like it is illegal to put your name on a standardized test. Because why should it matter?
When I first started writing this blog, it was like a blind audition. No one knew who I was, only what I wrote. I didn't realize at the time how great that felt, what a respite from my normal life that was. Without realizing even to what extent, I had been swimming against the current all of my life, until I was allowed to just be me. And then when I came out as being female there was a certain significant portion backlash that wasn't really explainable apart from being a reaction to my gender. (See also, popular science blogger Elise Andrew who got a cyclone of hate only after it was discovered that she was female.) There was probably as much backlash in my sociopath life for being female as there was in my normal life for being a sociopath. And now when I write or say things, it is seen through a different, distorted lens of my perceived femininity. I used to never get accused of the typical "oh man, you won't believe how crazy my ex-girlfriend was" type behavior -- "classic female traits" like self-harm/cutting, attention seeking, jealousy, vanity, histrionics, woman-scorned flavored vengeance, man-hating flavored vengeance, or anything else that is likely to get a woman slapped with the term "crazy". Now I get them all of the time. Which was sort of a surprise to me. Why did it bother people that I had been given the diagnosis "sociopath". Because it really seemed to. They took what I said and twisted it to fit something else, until I was "just borderline." as if the biased-female diagnosis was lesser than the sort-of male equivalent. Until I was "just crazy". Until I was something or someone that could be dismissed as a nobody nothing. Because that's how we marginalize people, I guess.
See also SNL – Red Flag | Katabatic Digital
Thursday, June 14, 2012
The gendered sociopath
It seems to be common among a good majority of men that, men just "can't understand" women. Like they can't understand why women act certain ways about certain things, or why they feel certain ways of certain things that the men can't seem to understand.
Do you think this applies to sociopathic men? Me, I've always considered myself an abstract thinker, I don't see any big mystery behind women. I understand women are psychologically different and therefore emotionally value certain things in a different manner. Yet, somehow, 'normal' men do not understand this?
Are "normal" men just so involved in their own emotional impulses that it blinds them from understanding the emotional impulses of women? Perhaps sociopaths are not blinded because they are not heavily involved in their emotions, and as a result they can better understand the emotional impulses of others, namely, members of the opposite sex.
I thought it was an interesting theory, and probably accurate. I believe that sociopaths don't project their own mental states on people as often as empaths do (or even other non empaths because narcissists and autism spectrum types also project all the time, with autism spectrum people not having hardly any theory of mind at all).
For the sociopath, it's not any big mystery that men and women think differently and it's as easy to understand the one as the other. It could also have something to do with the fact that sociopaths don't identify as much with their gender, so do not have the same gender specific blindspots as most people do.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Gender
A reader asks:
What do you think the differences are between male and female sociopaths?
Females are known to be more hormonal and emotional than men, especially during a certain time of the month. How do you think this effects sociopathic women?
Also, oral contraceptives, or "the pill", increase women's estrogen and/or progesterone hormonal levels, which may, in return, cause them to be more emotional and can increase their sense of empathy. If a female sociopath is given such hormones, do you think that she could become more emotional and even feel a little empathetic towards others?
My response:
I think gender must have a big role in making us different. Gender is a big deal for society. There are a lot of gender roles that sociopaths of both genders who have to confront and adapt to. Those adaptations would certainly give a unique flavor to the sociopathic style of the individual. Perhaps an even bigger deal is the different brain chemistry that each gender would have. I know myself that even when I am sick or tired, I am a much different person than when I am not. Transgender people frequently experience a personality modification as a result of taking different gender hormones.
To get more specifically to your question, though, what do you experience when you have a surge of female hormones? Are you more emotional? If you are more emotional, are those emotions legitimate responses? Or are they something more akin to an emotional hallucination?
Reader:
I, too, agree that gender plays a big role in regards to behavior. As a woman, I feel that there is a certain level of femininity I must present to others. It appears that we, as women, are expected to be emotional, submissive, and cautious beings. I, however, am not, and have noticed that a lot of times both men and women seem to not know how to respond to this. Thus, I feel forced to act “sweeter” and more “girly” than I actually am in order to blend in.
When I experience a surge of hormones, I feel as though my thinking process becomes very foggy. I normally prefer to handle situations with logic and efficiency, but when I am hormonal, I can’t think straight and believe I’m losing my mind.
What do you think the differences are between male and female sociopaths?
Females are known to be more hormonal and emotional than men, especially during a certain time of the month. How do you think this effects sociopathic women?
Also, oral contraceptives, or "the pill", increase women's estrogen and/or progesterone hormonal levels, which may, in return, cause them to be more emotional and can increase their sense of empathy. If a female sociopath is given such hormones, do you think that she could become more emotional and even feel a little empathetic towards others?
My response:
I think gender must have a big role in making us different. Gender is a big deal for society. There are a lot of gender roles that sociopaths of both genders who have to confront and adapt to. Those adaptations would certainly give a unique flavor to the sociopathic style of the individual. Perhaps an even bigger deal is the different brain chemistry that each gender would have. I know myself that even when I am sick or tired, I am a much different person than when I am not. Transgender people frequently experience a personality modification as a result of taking different gender hormones.
To get more specifically to your question, though, what do you experience when you have a surge of female hormones? Are you more emotional? If you are more emotional, are those emotions legitimate responses? Or are they something more akin to an emotional hallucination?
Reader:
I, too, agree that gender plays a big role in regards to behavior. As a woman, I feel that there is a certain level of femininity I must present to others. It appears that we, as women, are expected to be emotional, submissive, and cautious beings. I, however, am not, and have noticed that a lot of times both men and women seem to not know how to respond to this. Thus, I feel forced to act “sweeter” and more “girly” than I actually am in order to blend in.
When I experience a surge of hormones, I feel as though my thinking process becomes very foggy. I normally prefer to handle situations with logic and efficiency, but when I am hormonal, I can’t think straight and believe I’m losing my mind.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
I'm not an addict
People have suggested to me several times that drugs might enhance my ability to "feel," particularly MDMA or cannabis. I haven't tried either, but even if I were to feel different things I think my brain would reject them as not coming from me. Already when I have emotional hallucinations, I basically ignore them as being quirks in my brain chemistry, like you might ignore voices in your head. I think the same would go double for narcotics, particularly if I knowingly consumed them as opposed to be drugged.
Sociopaths are supposedly prone to addiction. I can sort of see why that might be true for some--chronic boredom would mean self medication in some form or another. I have never been drawn to narcotics, though, in fact I would say that I affirmatively dislike them because they hamper my brain function/control. Not only do I not like narcotics, a recent study, discussed in this NY Times article, suggests that sociopath's brains may make them particularly unsusceptible to addiction. The article first discusses how addicts tend to have an underactive reward system in the brain:
Sociopaths are supposedly prone to addiction. I can sort of see why that might be true for some--chronic boredom would mean self medication in some form or another. I have never been drawn to narcotics, though, in fact I would say that I affirmatively dislike them because they hamper my brain function/control. Not only do I not like narcotics, a recent study, discussed in this NY Times article, suggests that sociopath's brains may make them particularly unsusceptible to addiction. The article first discusses how addicts tend to have an underactive reward system in the brain:
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has shown in several brain-imaging studies that people addicted to such drugs as cocaine, heroin and alcohol have fewer dopamine receptors in the brain’s reward pathways than nonaddicts. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter critical to the experience of pleasure and desire, and sends a signal to the brain: Pay attention, this is important.In contrast, there is research that suggests that sociopaths have an overactive reward system, which would presumably make them largely immune ("aversive") to at least certain substance addictions.
When Dr. Volkow compared the responses of addicts and normal controls with an infusion of a stimulant, she discovered that controls with high numbers of D2 receptors, a subtype of dopamine receptors, found it aversive, while addicts with low receptor levels found it pleasurable.
This finding and others like it suggest that drug addicts may have blunted reward systems in the brain, and that for them everyday pleasures don’t come close to the powerful reward of drugs.
Interestingly, the article cites the borderline personality disordered as being particularly susceptible to addiction ("People with borderline personality disorder, who struggle to control their impulses and anger, often resort to drugs and alcohol to soften their intolerable moods."). Is this possibly a way to distinguish between the brains of sociopaths versus those with BPD for purposes of diagnosis? If so, it might be a step toward ending the gender stereotype for sociopathy and BPD.
In any case, those facing drug addiction problems can always rely on Vermont addiction services or other similar programs across the United States for treatment help.
In any case, those facing drug addiction problems can always rely on Vermont addiction services or other similar programs across the United States for treatment help.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
