The Curious Case Of Psychopathy and Female Attraction

I explore female attraction to psychopaths.

There are many ideas and concepts in human psychology that do not have the mainstream relevance they they should have, despite their explosiveness. Of these ideas, perhaps the best well kept secret of the entire field of human psychology is the female attraction to psychopathy. The evidence for this phenomena is so expansive, comprehensive and unimpeachable that the reason why it is not more spoken of in mainstream discuss tells us more about who has the power of setting agenda than anything else.

In this letter, I will be outlying the strings of evidence for this assertion and will be adding links to them so that curious people can research more if they like. I will also be giving my own amateur (but certainly scientifically literate) reasons for this behavior. Lastly, I will be analyzing what it means for young men, young women, and general dating trends in human society.

First, I’ll start with a true but controversial statement. Women are uniquely attracted to psychopathy and many of its attendant symptoms. This attraction isn’t fake, a meme, or a product of the boogeyman of society and/or internalized misogyny. Women simply love psychopaths, and in many cases they cannot help it. This attraction persists in spite of their best reason, and not because of it. It’s instinctive, and cannot be helped. It’s the sort of ailment that afflicts a pedophile, or a person with perverse sexual fetishes.

If you’re a woman, your first instinct would be to rebel against this, as you may feel that it says something about you in particular. But before you do that, I would ask you to calm down. A general statement, such as this one, says nothing about you. For example, if I said that men love football and often turn to shrieking clowns during the 90 minutes of a match, I would not be wrong. This is despite the fact that some men don’t love football. In ordinary circumstances, I would not be making this caveat. But I have recently decided not to commit the typical mind fallacy by assuming logic that is obvious to me is clear to everyone else.

An average person’s reaction to my assertion would be to fault it. It does not make any sense that women would be uniquely attracted to psychopathy. Aren’t psychopaths evil people, one might wonder. Why would women be attracted to evil people? Why indeed. Perhaps the first thing to understand about this is that attraction, especially of the sexual nature, is not something of logic. People don’t like people because of well defined reasons. The most gripping crushes I have ever had have been unexplainable. The girl is usually not the most beautiful I have ever seen, and her character doesn’t usually stand out. But it grips me all the same. That is what usually happens with sexual attraction.

Another thing you should understand is that psychopaths are not obviously degenerate. In many cases, they come across as superficially charming, extremely confident, and impulsive. These are all traits that may make a woman swoon if one has them in good enough quantities.

While these traits may attract women, they certainly are not enough. There seems to be something else — something darker, that elevates a psychopath from being an ordinary chad to a super chad.

My interest in this topic first arose when I read about the story of a man named Chris Watts. By all accounts, Chris Watts is an extraordinarily evil man. In 2018, Chris strangled his pregnant wife and then smothered his two little children to death. At first, he denied the crime but he soon confessed that he was the one behind the murders. He was sentenced to life in prison, and most people assumed that would be the last they would hear about him. They were wrong.

A few months later, it was revealed that Chris had been getting dozens of love letters from women who were sexually attracted to him. Remember, at this point Chris had already confessed to the murders and had been convicted. These women knew that he was a murderer of his wife and children, and they still felt attracted enough to him to send him letters detailing their love and affection. One of them even sent a bikini picture to him, so that he could maybe rub one out to it

The most shocking thing about this story is that it isn’t rare or unusual. Almost every popular serial killer you can think of had admirers. Despite being gay, Jeffery Dahmer had dozens of letters from swooning women delivered to his cell every month. He had a fan club of women who lusted voraciously after him. They even asked for his autograph and sent him money. The same goes for killers like Dylan Roof (who killed black people in a church), Anders Brevik (a Nazi who killed over seventy people), Kenneth Bianchi (who strangled over twelve women), James Holmes (who killed people in a movie theatre), Ted Bundy (who killed multiple women and girls) and Richard Ramirez (who raped and murdered over twenty women).

Some of these men even get married to their admirers in prison. Richard Ramirez, for example, got engaged to one of the fans who was writing to him. Ted Bundy also got married to one of his admirers. Asides from that, these men also get their prison guards, psychologists, and even judges to fall in love with them.

There is no doubt that these men became more attractive to women after getting convicted and sent to jail. You might say that they certainly received more hate too. You might even argue that the love they received is nothing close to the disgust and hatred they generated in the hearts of most people.

That could be true. But what is also true is that their actions made them so attractive to women that they sent them hundreds of letters professing their love and adoration. The question now, is why? Why would these women behave like this?

Scientists have a few theories. Some argue that this behavior might be common amongst love-avoidant females. That is, women who want romance but eschew the physical aspects of it. These women, they argue, may think it prudent to fall in love with a convicted felon. However, other popular non-violent criminals do not get the sort of love that serial killers get. In fact, they don’t get any love at all. It seems this female proclivity to be attracted to criminals is reserved for the murdering type.

Another theory is that these women believe that they can change these men. In any case, this issue has become so prevalent that there is now a medical term for it, and it is called hybristophilia. The women who suffer from this paraphilia are not under a spell as you might think. In fact, many of them realize that what they are doing is wrong. Unfortunately, as I explained earlier in this article, they literally cannot help it. They are sexually attracted to serial killers, and that is that about that about that.

When these women are asked about why they are attracted to these killers, they give different reasons. But one common thread that these reasons have is that they are are centered around the man’s dominance. And when you think of it, it is hard to disagree. What is more dominant as a human being than killing multiple human beings? What is more dominant than going against the entire legal and state system and imposing your judgement of life and death over multiple people?

In this case, serial killers are not just killers. They are symbols of victory over the flesh, as it were, and a symbol of victory over the state. If someone were attracted to power and its expression, it would make sense that they would be attracted to these killers as well, regardless of the moral judgements that come with it.

The fact that power and its expression have such a huge chokehold on some women means that some things are not just accidents. If hundreds of women are willing to go the extra mile of actually professing their love to these killers, who knows how many more harbor feelings for them but do not express it because its taboo? You might argue that those numbers cannot be outrageous. Well, I felt the same way too.

When one plans to analyze the behavior of a certain class of people, the best thing to do is not to listen to what they say, but what they do. And in this case women do a lot. Asides from their affection for serial killers in real life, they also harbor these affections in fiction too. Fifty Shades of Grey and the Twilight series are some of the most popular books in the world, and they are read almost exclusively by women. Both books elevate sadistic personalities to the level of romantic interest, and found immense success doing it.

But even those books — as a female friend once reminded me — are tame when compared to the smut that women regularly read. One obscure example is a book called Haunting Adeline. The protagonist of the book is someone named Zade Meadows. Meadows is a vigilante in the book, but he also abuses and rapes the heroine, Adelaine. You would assume that a book with such an awful hero would not be popular, right? Well, here’s the thing.

Not only is this book popular (over seventeen thousand reviews!), the reviews of it are also positive.

The book is so horrid that one man who took the time to read it had this to say about it.

Here is one interesting review the book got from a woman.

In this review this person clearly says she does not condone this behavior, but somehow it scratched a “deep recess” in her mind.

Here is yet another review of someone calling it what it is.

And books like this are very popular. They form a subgenre of romance novels called dark romance, and they are quite the rave. In fact, one example of the subgenre recently made it to your screens. It is the series called You. If you were not aware, the series is about a stalker and murderer who eventually gets his dream woman. Which is not the sort of thing you think women would like, but apparently the show has been very successful. This success is because it is quite popular among female fans.

If books and shows like this are so popular, it follows that the number of women that fantasize about being dominated by a psychopath is certainly not trivial. Now, this might just be fantasy, and might not lead to any action in the real world — but it is curious to me that this fantasy exists anyway.

Why are women like this? This behavior — even when discounted as figments of the imagination, does not parse with what women say. You don’t know a single woman who would find the antics of a rapist or a stalker cute even in fiction. Or at least they would not tell you that they find it endearing anyway. Yet — yet — they write letters to serial killers, and consume media that glorifies men like this.

Why?

Before we go into the why, I would like to talk about some objections about my thesis and the evidence I have presented so far. A common objection, I suppose, would be that this behavior isn’t widespread enough to be indicative of general female attitudes since only a minority really indulge in it.

The thing about that objection is that I already addressed it in the beginning of this article when I said this;

Furthermore, this behavior is widespread enough among women for it to say something about their psychology. And psychologists agree. In 2019, a group of scientists conducted video interviews for certain men and asked them their opinions on a wide range of issues like what they wanted in a relationship and what they would want to do on a first date. Asides from that, they asked the men to complete assessments psychopathy, social intelligence, and sexuality.

These researchers showed over a hundred women the videos of the men speaking and and asked them to rank them based on attractiveness. When the women were done with the ranking, the researchers discovered that the men who scored higher on the psychopathy assessment were ranked more desirable by women.

Studies like this tell us two things. The first is that this tendency to be attracted to psychopathic behaviors and isn’t a rarity amongst women. It is prevalent, and is not just a result of a few wackos acting out. Secondly, it tells us that the fantasies that women have about psychopaths do not just stop at fantasy; many of them are influenced by these fantasies in choosing partners (to the extent that they choose partners anyway). This reality is jarring when you understand that the traits these women are attracted to include things like “exploitation of others, deceitfulness, impulsivity, aggressiveness . . . [and] accompanied by lack of guilt, remorse and empathy.”

It doesn’t make sober reading at all. And it somehow gets even worse.

Because the sexual market is, well, a sexual market, and demand has to meet supply somehow, a lot of men who are not psychopaths eventually have to ape psychopathic behavior. When women analyze the antics of “man-o-sphere” influencers like Andrew Tate and his band of weed-smoking and podcast-making retards, they make a point to argue that he has a flawed model of sexual relationships and attraction. Unfortunately for these people, the evidence is not on their side.

Like it or not, men like that — and I am acquainted with many in real life — get women certainly more easily than normal people. When Tate and his band of merry idiots say things like “be mean to this girl if you want her to like you”, women may disagree and say he is misleading men. But the men who take his advice and then see some success in getting laid would obviously disregard the opinions of these women. In the end, this creates a sad circle where more men are being intentionally psychopathic and are influencing younger men to be the same. In case you did not realize, this dynamic is where the idea of being an “alpha male” is borne out of.

The biggest victims of this sad situation are normal women who are not attracted to psychopathic behavior. These women have to put up with men they like acting like assholes just because some bald (and retarded) influencer put them up to it. Some may even decide not to date these men, and would quickly find out that the idea of “alpha maleness” has eaten so deeply into the male psyche that they cannot find a suitable mate who has not fallen to this mind virus.

It is truly unfortunate.

Now that I have addressed the common and perhaps smartest objection regarding my assertion (since, like I said, the evidence is essentially unimpeachable), it is time to go into the why.

In the beginning, I said that this attraction was instinctive, and many women — including the ones who write letters to serial killers — argue that they cannot help it. It is like when you see an extremely attractive woman and you are walking with your girlfriend. You don’t want to think bad thoughts because you have a babe, but you think them anyway. Because what can you do? It is instinct. Some evolutionary psychologists have led the way on this, and their working thesis is that psychopathic behavior often signals capacity and power.

If you happened to be a woman in the plains of the Sahara or the caves of the Caucasus mountains during pre-history, you would want to get attached to a capable mate as quickly as possible. But how do you know a capable mate? Well, that would be someone who gets things done. It would not really matter how they get these things done. It could be through deceitfulness, aggressiveness, or impulsivity.

Remember, this is pre-historic times and life in such conditions is often nasty brutish and short. Hence you would also need a mate who is capable of going against his fellow man, and if needs be, the entire tribe. You do not even need evidence that he can do that for you — evidence that he can do that for himself would be enough. Women who were attracted to such men would often live long enough to give birth to many children, since their mates would be capable, as it were, of safekeeping them.

If you were a psychopathic man in pre-historic times, you would also have very little qualms with grabbing a maiden out on the field and raping her, and then making her one of your wives. Women with the genetic predispositions to be satisfied with this arrangement would live longer and bear more children for this psychopathic man. Women who did not would rebel, and would be killed — because this person is a psychopath and does not really have any qualms with taking human life. In the end, this would result in even more women with the genetic predispositions to not just tolerate this arrangement, but to be attracted to it, being born.

Women like that would not just get preyed on from men in their society. If a marauding tribe conquers their village, kills all the men, and then takes the women for wives, only women who can develop some affection for the soldiers from the enemy tribe would survive. This is despite the fact that the enemy soldiers likely murdered their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. If the women do not quickly make peace with this, they would also be murdered. Therefore, only women who can not only make peace with this, but make it quickly and also love the psychopathic man would survive and continue to bear children. Hence, evolution optimizes for women who have this tendency. Here is a good example of such tendencies in the form of a screenshot.

While such men are great for their families and may be instrumental for warring tribes, they are horrible for societal fabric when in excess. Society needs only a few psychopaths because having too many often many destroys the fabric that holds the community together. This means successful societies will ideally optimize to ensure that men like these either don’t find a mate, or find it extremely difficult to get one. Unfortunately, these societies cannot quite optimize for this if women are left to their own devices since they will hardly make the sensible choice.

If women are allowed to choose their own mates, there’s a preponderance of evidence that they are more likely to choose psychopathic men. This dynamic would obviously create even more psychopathy (yes, before you argue, psychopathy has genetic factors) as more male children would be likely to develop the condition.

In any case, if this happened the society would find itself suddenly overwhelmed with men who are not fit for coexistence. The state would also suffer in the short term as more men would have to ape psychopathic behavior to get ahead in the sacred arts of getting laid. The obvious solution to this problem (and many others) is arranged marriages.

By arranging a marriage, the family, the lowest factor of the society, takes special interest in guiding the woman’s choice. The mate chosen for her is usually from a good family, and must have non-psychopathic traits that make him amenable to the whims of society. This is something even you — dear reader — must have noticed in movies.

When the family of a bride chooses a husband for her in movies, they consider traits like wealth, behavior, standing in society, and family. This groom is often revealed as a boring unexciting man who has no clue. The bride’s taboo love interest, on the other hand, may be poor, come from a rough family, and have very little standing in society.

The point of such movies is to ask people to follow their hearts, and give true love a chance. But in reality, what they are truly portraying is the feminine lust for psychopathy, and society’s age-long grappling with it. This does not mean that the family always got it right with arranged marriages, but the fact that the family had different, and perhaps more sensible motivations — like preserving the bloodline and providing the woman with a respectable life — meant that they probably made better choices than young women, given the constraints of pre-industrial society. This dynamic also meant that even psychopathic men had to put reigns on their psychopathy if they wanted to get a family. They had to show that they could behave within the narrow confines of societal expectations.

This, in a way, culled the society of psychopaths and kept them at an acceptable level. The industrial revolution changed all of that, as it meant people did not have to be tied to rural communities and there was an abundance of urban centers to live in. This meant greater freedom for women and men, and left to their own devices these people will almost always make horrendous mating decisions. The sexual revolution and the invention of things like the birth control pill, condoms, and safe abortions meant that women and men also had infinite mating chances.

So what if you fall in love with a psychopath? What if you write a letter to a serial killer? There are no lasting consequences, really. You do not have to get pregnant because of the pill, and can get an abortion if you feel like as well. Easy divorces also mean that women who fall into this trap can back out relatively easily.

You might say, well, you have no evidence for what you have written. That may be true, but the internal logic is coherent and the explanatory power of my narrative is adequately strong. For example, Stockholm syndrome, the condition that makes victims to have affection for their abusers, is found predominately in women. Asides from that, there are no shortage of examples of women lusting for, fighting for and willingly longing for outlaws, vagabonds, cultists, and all manner of social invalids with a psychopathic streak.

If we accept this narrative as true, which the evidence says we should, it may at least partially explain the troubling situation where a woman sticks with her abusive husband or partner no matter what. It may not be because this man has some leverage over her, or because she is scared of him (although that is certainly the case in some situations), it may be because she is simply attracted to his horrific behavior. Another phenomena that it explains is the all too common female complaint that some men don’t provide enough excitement in the way of emotional travails, and this makes relationships with them boring.

Now, women like this have the better sense not to make the case that they are attracted to psychopathy when asked about it. But does it not get your brain tingling that this might be the issue?

In any case, we can say this tendency expressed by many women is certainly deviant in nature. But it is a strange kind. Male deviants like rapists, pedophiles, and psychopaths themselves often gain some mental and material pleasure from their deviancy.

However, deviant women who are likely to be attracted to psychopaths either get a broken heart, get killed, or seriously hurt. They don’t gain anything from the adventure, and it is a waste of time for them. That is because the world has now changed, and there isn’t a benefit to being with a psychopathic killer. It may have helped on the banks of the Nile and in the Amazon forests a thousand years ago. But it does not help anyone today.

There is sadly no solution to this deviancy. Men and women are locked in an everlasting game of mating and these pressures will either breed or remove certain traits from the gene pool. As long as psychopaths and women who love them continue to be evolutionarily successful, this deviancy will continue. It is the way of Darwin.

An important caveat to add; this attraction is not to be mistaken with hypergamy, which isn’t insane in any manner. The women I am talking about have shown a certain streak of attraction to psychopathic behavior, not elevated status (even though psychopaths may also have elevated material status).

Now, to why I wrote this letter. I find this tendency amongst women so curious because no one talks about this or acknowledges this in any sane way. The men who talk about it, like the man-o-sphere idiots like Andrew Tate and Kevin Samuels, are unintellectual goons who just want to get laid. Instead of asking men to look for sane women — for there are many of them — they instead ask men to ape psychopathic behavior to attract insane women. That is not sensible.

This is in stark contrast to the attitudes taken when it comes to talking about deviant behavior amongst men. I have lost count of articles I have read concerning pedophiles, psychopaths, rapists, and all other kinds of people. I have lost count of talking heads who complain about men playing violent video games, and I have equally lost count of women who scream about the shocking genres of porn that men watch. Male sexual perversion and deviation is an evergreen topic that comes with no social cost whatsoever. Any random person can bring it up in any setting.

However, female sexual perversion is spoken of in hush tones and any mention of it may earn you an accusation of misogyny. Unfortunately, I do not care that much about that, and I will not be defending my scholarly interests, as it were. I have written about male deviancy (and general incompatibility with sane society). Here is my article about it.

My advice to men who are faced with dealing with insane women who crave psychopaths is this; there are some sane women out there. There is no point aping psychopathic behavior. You are not one, and you shouldn’t be taking advice from fools like the Tates either.

The quote for this newsletter is something my female friend told me when I wondered about the popularity of books like Hunting Adelaine.

“I am sure it was a man that groomed the female author into writing it.”

-Gbohunmi Celine.

She was joking, of course. As always please like and share if you like my schizo postings. Also do if you don’t like it. Thanks. See you next week.