Cold-blooded

I have some quick survey questions for the sociopaths, mainly just curiosity as to objective physical manifestations of sociopathy. Answer as many as you wish. Feel free to email me answers if you want to get into more details that you would rather not be public. Some of the questions are red herrings (at least I think they are).

1. Do you have normal average blood temperature, run hot, or run cold?

2. Do you have normal blood pressure, run high, or run low?

3. What is your relationship to food?

4. Do you have corrected vision, i.e. glasses, contact lenses?

5. What is your tolerance to pain? Low, high, or normal?

6. Have you ever had stitches or surgery that could have been otherwise been preventable based on lifestyle choices?

7. Would you say you look about your age, younger, or older than your age?

8. Do you take cold medication? How soon after a cold do you start taking medication?

9. Do you have trouble sleeping

10. Which do you crave more, salty or sweet foods?

Any other suggestions?

Sociopaths in the news: DecorMyEyes

I love this story of cyber bullying between the owner of online retailer "DecorMyEyes" and his complaining customers. It reminds me of the stories empaths sometimes tell of trying to get even with their oppressors. It's a long article, worth reading, but here are the excerpts that lead me to think sociopath:

Dozens of people over the last three years, she found, had nearly identical tales about DecorMyEyes: a purchase gone wrong, followed by phone calls, e-mails and threats, sometimes lasting for months or years.

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

“When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses,” he starts. “If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn’t matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will come knocking.”

Selling on the Internet, Mr. Borker says, attracts a new horde of potential customers every day. For the most part, they don’t know anything about DecorMyEyes, and the ones who bother to research the company — well, he doesn’t want their money. If you’re the type of person who reads consumer reviews, Mr. Borker would rather you shop elsewhere.

It’s almost painful to say, but Mr. Borker is amusing company. He is sharp and entertaining, although much of the entertainment comes from the way he flouts the conventions of courtesy, which he does with such a perverse flair that it can seem like a kind of performance art.

Despite the fear he has inspired, Mr. Borker doesn’t regard himself as a terror. He prefers to think of himself as the Howard Stern of online commerce — an outsize character prone to shocking utterances.

Except that Howard Stern doesn’t issue threats, I say.

“People overreact,” he pshaws, often because they’re unaccustomed to plain speaking, New York-style. Anyway, he adds, if somebody messes with you, and you mess back, “how is that a threat?”

And the victim's failed attempt of a comeuppance:

Ms. Rodriguez [a victim] has a meticulous record of all things Russo. Sitting at a table with a laptop, she reads some of his e-mails and plays several saved messages left by him on her phone. It is unmistakably Mr. Borker.

“I’m stubborn,” she says when asked about her persistence in the last few months. “I wasn’t going to let this guy push me around.”

I contacted T-Mobile to let them know I was being harassed,” she says, “but they said there was nothing they could do because it was coming from a blocked number.”

FOR months, Mr. Borker and Ms. Rodriguez were essentially working opposite sides of the Internet. He operated in the seams and cracks of the Web’s underbelly, while she was pleading for help with what is supposed to be the Web’s protective layer: a variety of corporations and law enforcement entities that could have intervened.

None did.

Moral of the story is don't bother trying to get back at them. Even I don't mess with people like this if I can avoid it. If they get you, learn a lesson and be more careful next time. Trying to get even is like throwing good money after bad. But I understand that for some people it is difficult to make coldly rational decisions, even for what is essentially a business transaction.

Rape and sexual abuse

This post is not about sociopaths committing rape or sexual abuse (this time), but rather about sociopaths being the victim of rape or sexual abuse.Sociopaths who have these experiences are typically female.

Female sociopaths have particularly complicated existences. They need power, like all sociopaths, but there are certain situations in which they will always be more vulnerable than a man, if for not other reason than women are far more likely to be victims of sexual assaults than men. I would imagine that there would be a certain indignant detachment for the female sociopath that an empath wouldn't feel. Here is one female sociopath's experience with rape:

Saturday evening.
He spiked my Jack and Coke.
My body has never responded well to drugs, so it didn't take full effect like it ought to have: I was blinded and paralysed but had every other sense and was conscious. Not alert, but awake. He took himself for a joyride on my body for a couple of hours. Don't quote me on that, haha, my perception of time was warped. As I was kinesthetic for the whole event, I believe it was like this: missionary, spooning, doggy, missionary. Intermittent oral sex. I blindly (literally, not figuratively) fought to stay awake. When I awoke, my sight had returned, blurry but enough for me to drive myself home. Before I left, I gave him a kiss. We dated for a couple more weeks, then I called him and more or less told him thanks.

I wonder how normal people would react to this situation. I imagine the typical sociopath victim of rape would not report the incident, unless she thought the news would come out anyway. Otherwise I think the sociopath would only report it if there was a very good chance of the perpetrator getting caught, e.g. good description of who it was, DNA. The sociopath would wonder how the rape had changed them, question whether they "feel" anything about the rape, wonder what they were expected to feel. If the sociopath victim felt anything, I think it would be something like a feeling of loss, perhaps powerlessness, and isolation. I think all rape victims feel those last three to some extent, but the sociopath's strange relationship to self, power, and society would give them a unique flavor of nihilistic-void-"traumatized".

I think the example from "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a good fictional depiction of what a female sociopath might do in response to that experience. Here is another sociopath experience of sexual abuse and domestic violence:

I know that between the ages of 3 and 5, another little girl and I were molested by some guy and our reactions were quite different. She became withdrawn and cried easily. From what I remember, I thought it was boring and annoying, but I recall being so confused as to why she'd cry and get weird when it happened. Dude gave me candy (the good stuff), so I think it was a fair trade. Eventually I told the guy that he'd better give me more candy or he'd be in trouble. Score. I know that this was at my babysitter's, but I don't know exactly what year/age I'm remembering. Even if it was at 5, that is pretty young to be so different from that other girl, the control in this experiment.

Additionally, as far back as I can remember, my mom always had us sleep with weapons in case the "bad people" would come. She meant my father, and I knew that, but I never felt afraid. Just prepared. Sometimes my 7-year-old self would lay awake planning how I could best bring him down if he were to show up. Again, I wasn't scared, but I loved to picture beating some guy's knees, and then back, and then head with the ball bat I kept by my bed. I was basically fantasizing about beating this man who I had never met (and harbored no negative feelings about) to a broken heap.

My first recurring dream that I remembered involved one of my childhood "bad people." Every time I had the dream, he would kill me. Each time I dreamt it I could remember what happened last time and plan ahead to avoid the same mistakes, but I would always die finally. The last time I had this dream, it ended with me bashing his head in repeatedly, then running as I heard the gurgling of air and blood pass through his mangled face while he suffered to death. This was my first violent fantasy hat I can remember. So I guess I feel like I can relate to the victim who is a sociopath.

Sociopath girl and gaslighting: Mini's First Time

One of my readers recommended Mini's First Time as a portrait of a young, teenage, sociopath girl. It's not the best film, but relatively accurate (for Hollywood) and also an excellent portrayal of gaslighting someone.

Sociopath song: John Wayne Gacy Jr