by Andrea Scrima
1. Bloodthirsty
I have a morbid personality; sometimes I stay up late at night, googling serial killers and rapists. In the light of the computer screen, scrolling through articles on websites published by amateur sleuths, I feel the dark pull of the unspeakable deed. But my fascination isn’t for the blood and gore; there is no thrill bubbling up inside, no voyeuristic kick. Nor am I moved by an urge to understand the killers’ psychological predicament or the geometry of their desire. The pull I feel is not toward their person or otherwise banal lives, but that point of no return when the not-yet-killer gives in to the irresistible urge, forfeits his allegiance to society, and defects to the other side. How strong does that urge have to be?
I worry. The brain is an organ, it’s unreliable, prone to illness; a sick brain thinks sick thoughts. There was a point in the killer’s life, I think, when he or she hadn’t yet committed the crime, a point when it would have been possible to stop and reflect on the inevitable consequences—not a life of adventure and freedom, but the monotony of prison, of incarceration and boredom, isolation, enforced celibacy. Could this happen to me—could something push me over that tipping point, and I’d find myself a moment later in a foreign land? I am horrified by physical violence; a bloody scene in a movie makes me turn my head away. The mirror neurons in my body tingle in response when I see someone else’s wound. What happens to people who lose this visceral reaction, who grow numb and enter a realm in which the divide between the self and the other is so absolute that they live as though in a vacuum, sealed off, in communion with their darkest compulsions, indifferent to the living reality of another human being’s existence?
I scroll through reports of repulsive deeds: the Danish inventor who murdered the young journalist who came to interview him because he was convinced that the rush he would experience at the very moment he was annihilating her would be superior to all the orgasms he’d had previously; the Coloradan who strangled his wife and smothered his two children in the expectation that the life he would then be free to live with his girlfriend could be happy and carefree, unencumbered by child support payments and filled with the real-life equivalents of the emojis and exclamation marks that decorated his love letters to her. Unremarkable, contemptible people on nearly every level. In the first case: megalomania and a history of power issues and abusive relationships; in the second, murderous intent hidden behind a mild-mannered demeanor and a stupidity so dumbfoundingly obvious that the footage of his interrogation at the hands of a brilliant woman detective deftly guiding him toward claims that proved effortlessly refutable is almost a pleasure to watch. And yet: there’s something I’m not getting. What is it that draws me in? Am I just another late-night computer voyeur? I have felt outrage at these people’s crimes, I’ve experienced nausea, but it’s not so much the fundamental wrongness of taking another person’s life that holds me captive, or the criminals’ refusal to recognize that a person (generally a woman) has an existence entirely independent of their own: it’s the absence of empathy, the point when that basic human connection breaks down, when the mind regards the other as nothing more than an obstruction to, and in one way or another a vehicle for, their own desire. I know, I know: the world is full of crimes of passion, of murder mysteries set in the most civilized surroundings, it’s human nature, you say—and what’s more, it’s a peculiarly American obsession! Just take a look at Netflix. But I live in Germany, which counts something like 2.5% of the total number of serial killers convicted in the U.S., and thus would seem measurably less obsessed. And so I scroll, worried and alert to the details of a case, the random observation, the anecdote—what are the telltale signs of the psychopathic personality, and if enough things go wrong in life, can it afflict anyone?
It seems like hard work to kill a person—you have to actually carry out the deed. If you don’t shoot or poison them—but rather strangle them, stab them—it seems as intimate as sex. Flesh on flesh, limbs straining against one another, the sudden muscle strength a burst of adrenaline brings, struggle, the slipperiness of sweaty skin, hot breath and bodily odors. And then there’s the obscenity of reveling in another person’s fear, of deriving pleasure from their panic. We have all found ourselves in this situation: walking late at night on a near-deserted street, a solitary woman up ahead, a nervous half-glance over her shoulder. It’s winter, perhaps; our boots clop loudly on the pavement, we see her gait quicken, and we switch to the other side of the street to indicate that we mean no harm (and if we’re women, that we know how she feels). Yet there are minds that prickle in anticipation when they register another person’s fear: it stimulates them, arouses their interest. They become inspired, creative: how can we tease out this moment, probe the full scope of its potential, its promise of joy?
I scroll; I find horrible things. Once, I found video footage of a woman who understood that the man holding her captive—the man filming her—would soon torture and murder her as well; the image of her squirming, lashing out, hissing like a cornered cat, is burned indelibly in my mind. I stopped watching after perhaps ten seconds. I felt sick at the thought that people can log on and watch her endure her last moments; it’s too late, we can’t save her, but now she no longer even has a right to privacy, or to decency: strangers can study her in the appalling knowledge of her imminent, violent death; they can replay it again and again. People with the inclination but not the courage to become murderers themselves can find the video online and experience the thrill of the voyeur; they can masturbate to it. For some, the material will presumably serve as a set of instructions, helping them convert their vicarious stirrings into action. For others, like myself, the few seconds of exposure remain forever lodged in the memory, like a bad seed.
I imagine myself in the killer’s shoes, try to picture the victim’s gradual understanding, when their fear and horror congeal into sickening certainty, when there is no going back, no chance to explain things away, when it’s clear that you are not who you’ve pretended to be. The locking of eyes; the sudden knowledge. I try to imagine what goes on in the killer’s mind at that moment; it reminds me of the film version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, when the father, who had only a moment before took his killer to be a decent young man, suddenly understood. This is the moment the killer kills—he cannot stand the look in the father’s eyes, cannot stand being seen for the depraved person he’s turning into at that very moment. There’s no going back, he’s striking out at his own mirror—at least this is how the film portrays him. My imagination shrinks at the thought of anyone looking at me in that way: contempt curling at the edges of their fear, my evil nature no longer a secret. I feel naked and filthy; it’s the point at which my exclusion from humanity comes full circle. I think about the awful truth of a person’s life coalescing, about the loneliness of that moment—and all at once I realize that the loneliness is quite likely a figment of my imagination. Surely, it’s not loneliness the murderer feels, but liberation. I am glad that you know, glad the cat’s out of the bag. I’m relieved; I am free, now, to be who I’ve always been.
2. Worthy
Research tells us that psychopaths are born with an aberrant neurophysiology, whereas sociopaths are once-normal children whose absence of moral understanding has been conditioned by outside circumstances: an emotionally deprived upbringing, disturbing or traumatic experiences, and later, the socio-economic reward that goes along with beating the game. Research also tells us that the vast majority of sociopaths and psychopaths are men. This is where the American obsession with violence converges with its equally absorbing obsession with being rich; on some level, people admire the ruthlessness required to rise in the ranks, the indifference to the inevitable collateral damage. It’s well known that the number of psycho- and sociopaths among CEOs is disproportionately high: the absence of a moral conscience, lack of empathy, and inability to feel remorse or shame, paired with an ability to charm while coolly assessing a situation and manipulating it to one’s own advantage, are assets that facilitate the sociopath’s climb.
Studies, including those recently conducted by Paul K. Piff at the University of California, have shown that higher socio-economic class is associated with a corresponding increase in narcissism. People from a wealthier economic bracket are statistically more likely to engage in unethical behavior and less likely to demonstrate spontaneous generosity, for instance in the form of donating to charities. This has political implications, of course, because it suggests that individual psychology plays an underexamined role in the widening gulf between rich and poor and that mechanisms of entitlement need to be more clearly understood when seeking to identify the root causes of economic conservatism, with its vehement opposition to taxes, providing basic services such as single-payer health insurance, and the concept of a social contract to benefit the greater good.
Perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch to leap from the heartlessness of political conservatism to murder, but I offer you the case study of a very wealthy person who was also, as it happens, a serial killer. Robert Durst was a real estate heir known for erratic behavior; as we know from his widely publicized trials, he wore a disguise and lived under multiple aliases while hiding from law enforcement and battling his siblings for access to the family trust and fortune. In 2021, elderly and frail, he was convicted for the murder of a friend who had provided him with an alibi for the disappearance and suspected murder of his first wife forty years previously. Several years prior to this conviction, he’d been acquitted of another murder, that of a neighbor who’d exposed one of the false identities he’d assumed in hiding. The case was bizarre, and it inspired a movie and six-part HBO series that detailed the circumstantial evidence implicating Durst. The attention proved irresistible to him, and Durst was soon providing unrestricted access to personal documents and granting interviews to the film’s directors. On one of these occasions, muttering to himself in the bathroom and unaware that the microphone he was wearing was still recording his every word, Durst wound up confessing to the crimes. He is also believed responsible for a series of additional unresolved cases of young women who went missing in areas he could be directly tied to at the time. He died before he could be tried for the 1982 murder of his wife, who was in her last semester of medical school and had recently, after seeking out emergency medical attention for a series of bruises to the head and face, filed for divorce. Apparently, Durst was given to outbursts of narcissistic rage.
Narcissists tend to be charming and charismatic, and even very intelligent people wind up falling for them. During the last three years of his marriage, up until the time of his wife’s disappearance, Durst had been dating the sister of Mia Farrow, who was incidentally the subject of the Beatles song “Dear Prudence,” written in 1968 while they were on an Indian retreat to learn transcendental meditation from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Apparently, it was this detail of her past that thrilled Durst, this brush with timeless fame, but it’s hard to imagine the ordinary emotion of love in a man accustomed to regulating his personal life through a series of financial transactions all designed in one way or another to ensure and maintain power. It’s reported that Prudence did all she could to be with him and called his wife to persuade her to leave him; in an incredible stroke of luck, she failed.
Durst’s family had sought multiple restraining orders and asked for police protection. His brother assumed he was planning to murder him. He reported that Robert had once kept a series of Alaskan Malamutes, each of which he’d named “Igor”; all of these dogs died under unknown circumstances. The brother surmised that Durst used the animals to perfect his dissection skills before killing his wife and disposing of her body; the prosecutor at his trial for the murder of the neighbor, whom he’d admitted to carefully dismembering, remarked with a shudder that the body had been cut apart with a degree of expertise that only repetition and practice could have achieved.
3. Shameless
There seems to be a connection between sociopathy as an accepted part of corporate culture, rituals of male assertion and domination, unchecked ambition, and sexual violence—the question is how to define the continuum. Aggressive and abusive behavior is normalized and even celebrated as an expression of true masculinity, while everyday language—“fuck someone over” or “fuck someone good”—equates penetration with conquering and destroying. It’s so common that I’m almost embarrassed to write it—but as Lenny Bruce said, “If fucking is so great, then why is Fuck you one of the most offensive retorts in the English language?” We’ve seen rape culture nearly everywhere, from its systematic implementation as a tool of warfare to the highest echelons of global politics—Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund, comes to mind, but with an added layer of truly clueless class-based entitlement. A more recent example is his plebeian namesake Dominique Pelicot, who, following a widely publicized trial, was jailed for orchestrating, over many years, the mass rape of his wife Gisèle, whom he drugged to the point of unconsciousness and exposed to sexually transmitted disease and HIV and who suffered from gynecological pain of unknown origin. Leaving his own well-known record of sexual harassment aside for the moment, and the fact that he was ordered to pay damages for the defamation and sexual abuse of writer E. Jane Carroll, the launch of Trump 0.2 in four days’ time is an occasion to look at some of the individuals, many of them billionaires, whom he has in mind for the country’s highest offices.
For instance “Fox & Friends” news host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for the next Secretary of Defense, who paid a secret settlement to a woman who’d accused him of raping her. Prior to this, Hegseth looks back on a long history of allegations including reckless intoxication; budgetary mismanagement and other financial shenanigans; sexual and personal misconduct; and creating a sexist environment for female colleagues so toxic that they were too afraid to speak out. His own mother provided a particularly astute diagnosis, telling him at one point that he was “an abuser of women [who] belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” an assessment she later, in view of his pending nomination, retracted. And then there’s Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for US attorney general until he dropped out only eight days before his nomination in response to accusations that he’d engaged in paid sex with a minor and violated federal sex trafficking laws. A House of Representatives ethics committee report found that Gaetz had spent more than 90,000 dollars on sex and drugs while serving as a US congressman and had “violated House rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
Slated to be Trump’s “Efficiency Czar,” Elon Musk was sued by eight former SpaceX employees for allegedly treating women as “sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter,” and, according to court documents, poisoning the working environment with “vile sexual photographs, memes, and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community.” Musk also, of course, more broadly spearheads a media crusade that champions sexist and misogynistic claims and openly interferes with international politics by promoting what can only politely be called “misinformation.” The list goes on: Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for the head of the Department of Education, was named co-defendant in a lawsuit alleging that the company she and her husband founded, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., had created a working climate that allowed multiple WWE employees to sexually assault underage boys, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for the Department of Health and Human Services—who has frequently bragged about his sexual conquests—was accused of sexually assaulting a former family babysitter who was 23 at the time. At this juncture, it seems like a mere footnote to add that Trump is considering Herschel Walker, a former contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice” and an unsuccessful Georgian Republican nominee for Senate who admitted to wife abuse, to build a missile defense shield for the US military.
The list doesn’t end there—there are simply too many Trump allies and appointees with a history of misogynistic behavior to name, such as Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of attempted rape—but I think we all get the point, which is that a certain type of toxic male behavior is increasingly excused, downplayed, or simply tolerated. Male violence against women is situated on a continuum of misogyny at every level of culture, politics, business, and the media. But do we understand what’s at stake? The last election saw an extreme form of backlash against the perception that women might finally be taking the next step in terms of income equality and independence—after all, we had a formidably articulate presidential candidate armed to the teeth with facts and able—with one hand tied behind her back, so to speak—to easily pin Trump against the wall in any argument. And so, predictably, the new battle cry was “toxic femininity”—as though women’s progress or even the right to live our own lives and to make decisions about our own bodies and welfare existed in a zero-sum game in which our autonomy is seen as something threatening to men that happens at the expense of male well-being and even—it would seem from the, yes, hysterical rhetoric—survival.
What role does the fantasy of sexual coercion play in the assertion of power?
When does this cross the line to outright violence?
What does it mean when men belittle women? When they use drugs to incapacitate women in order to rape them—are they fantasizing about raping a corpse? Of having some kind of ultimate control? Or is this type of intercourse simply easier than trying to sexually satisfy a consensual partner?
How much of this is about revenge in an imagined scenario of past humiliation or trauma?
Porn normalizes violence against women. Instead of recognizing it for what it is—a sign of equally dangerous forces brewing beneath an increasingly brittle surface—it’s seen as a legitimate sub-genre, a sexual perversion, a form of kink.
How dark do we have to go before we understand the connection?
Hostility and violence toward women are not fringe phenomena; they are part of society’s warp and weft, part of its political fabric, and we’re unlikely to understand what is happening to us until we finally face misogyny’s root causes. When the new administration takes over, attacks on women—who embody the dreaded “feminine” subconscious of the toxic male psyche, the “weakness” they so fear—are likely to emerge in sharper relief. As we continue to consume alarming amounts of true-crime media, we should abandon the notion that sexual violence is an unfortunate but random phenomenon and expose the ways in which misogyny is inextricably intertwined with everything else these people about to govern us stand for: banning abortion; targeting the rights of women and everyone else that doesn’t fit into their narrative of white male supremacy; abandoning the few social programs still in place to protect the weak; rejecting environmental protection and clean energy strategies for phasing out fossil fuels; climate denial; anti-intellectualism and a hostility toward contemporary art of all kinds; putting an end to “wokeness” and “critical race theory” once and for all; separating families at the border; stoking the flames of racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia; aggressively promoting a judicial system based on denial, attack, and the reversal of victim and offender; defending in an infantile way and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary the unrestricted right to bear arms; using force over diplomacy and a politics of peaceful cooperation; normalizing cruelty on nearly every level; fomenting fantasies of imperial expansion; “alternative facts,” propaganda, and outright lies—in short, the absence of any stake in creating a sustainable and caring matrix of coexistence, of building a safer and fairer society, of educating our children and protecting the Earth, of leaving the world a better or even livable place for coming generations. And so we sit and wait—and steel ourselves for the fight ahead. Because for many of us, the horrors it promises—and the inevitable rise in gender-based and other forms of violence—cut dangerously close to home.
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