The Female Sociopath

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2014-05-15 06:46

Article here. Excerpt:

'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.
...
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.'

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I once had an interesting discussion with a clinical psychotherapist about the prevalence of sociopathology in the U.S. today, among other disorders. He said he did not see nearly as many "functional sociopaths" (as this article describes) when he was starting out in practice than he was seeing these days; same went for virtually everything else, too, from bipolar depression to schizophrenia and points north, south, east, and west. [In fact, mental health professionals all over the world have been raising the alarm on ever-greater numbers of people displaying mental illnesses due to family-of-origin-related trauma, trauma-inducing circumstances (combat environments, not just in re soldiers but civilians as well), behavioral maladjustments due to overexposure to technology, high divorce rates (and of course the many bad effects thereof on children and their dads), and the list just goes on.] But as for functional sociopaths, maybe there were as many back then (the late 1970s) as there are today and he simply wasn't as good at spotting them as his years of experience would make him become, but I believe what he said. As for the kind of femme fatale (as they used to be called) functional sociopaths this article describes, are there more percentage-wise today than there used to be, or the same percentage as before, just now they have more ways to manifest their empathically-devoid ambitions for... what? Status? Money? Respect? Who can say what motivates such people. I suspect most if not all are simply on auto-pilot.

Person of Interest, which in fact gets named in this article, has a female character in it ("Sameen Shaw"), a woman who is, if not in possession of a genius-level IQ, then very close, who trained to become an M.D. and had little trouble succeeding at it. Problem is, she has no empathy. She has no internal process that allowed her to ask herself how she may come across to others because she had no way to connect with them emotionally. What appeared to be clinical detachment to her professors was fast revealed during her first year of residency to be sociopathology, and she realized it herself after learning about its symptoms. Incidents wherein she simply walked into a room and informed frightened family members/patients that so-and-so had a terminal condition and nothing could be done but wait, all while she snacked on something from the cafeteria, then walked out, cinched it. Her medical career was cut short quickly, and of course she turned to killing people for the government as her next career. Turns out she was very good at it and could defend herself quite ably, as she was utterly devoid of fear, anger, or any other emotion that might get in the way of making self-defense decisions in the blink of an eye. When and how she kills others matters not at all to her. She doesn't care about how much pain they suffer, because she cares not how much she suffers (indeed, she can't); in fact, the character says more than once she "gets off on" pain, perhaps because it's the only thing she can actually connect with, as typical forms of pleasure don't register in her brain.

That's a sociopath for you. But not all sociopaths are quite that extreme. This character represents one that is not a "functional sociopath", but is only still alive for the time being since she has the assistance of people who can help her avoid being caught up with and killed by her former employer. But otherwise, she would have been killed by them long ago, and that isn't very "functional". No, people like the ones described in this article float through largely undetected, but the trail of broken hearts, marriages, and bodies (metaphorically-speaking) give them away to those paying attention. And as the article so ably points out, "functional sociopathology" is an equal-opportunity employer.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2014-05-15 06:47