[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think part of that is also that traditionally women have been seen as weaker in body so that they aren't perceived as a threat a lot of the time.

One has to distinguish between the appearances themselves and the reason for them. I doubt that Delphine LaLaurie, the first known American female serial killer, was much concerned with passive poisoning or any "weakness in body." The site of her grim fun, unearthed by local firefighters, was as gruesome and fetishistic as anything contained in the movie Se7en: "Upon being refused the keys by the LaLauries, the bystanders broke down the doors to the slave quarters and found 'seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated . . . suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other'"; victims with their lips sewn shut, victims that had been completely skinned; a man whose genitals had been altered to resemble a woman's; etc., etc. And remember: LaLaurie was the first.

The (chronologically) second American female killer, Lavina Fisher, used poison and in that sense fits the classic profile. But anyone who reads of her last attempt to escape execution, and her final words to the crowd that had gathered to watch, will realize she was far from passive.

The third, Belle Gunness, was formidable in size and only drugged her victims to more easily bludgeon or otherwise dispatch them. In that, she was no different from many famous male serial killers.

Many writers have noted that female serial killers are often active for far longer stretches of time than men, and suggest they're often better than their male counterparts at not being caught.

One theory of mine is that, for a female killer, ultimate power itself can be enough. Sexual power is narrowly focused by comparison. The point might be to make someone else the victim and in that sense follow the male serial killer's ritual of transferring powerlessness to the victim and killing their own internal and hated weakness through an effigy.

Originally Posted by crich70

It's also why they use poison most often I think.

It sounds as if you might not have seriously considered what I said about poison being the most common method for the moment. That statistic seems to be changing.

My theory, as I said, is that it will continue to change as women become socialized to express aggression more actively.

There aren't as many female SK's I don't think as there are male ones. At least you don't hear about them in the news as often, things like poisoned pain reliever capsules not withstanding.

This blogger has something to say which seems so obvious you wonder why you don't hear it more often:

Which reminds me of something a prominent Australian forensic psychiatrist once told me about the way a serial killer’s crimes are studied to produce a “profile” to help catch the suspect. Such profiling techniques, pioneered by the FBI, are based on studies of serial killers in jails.

The problem with that technique is that authorities are learning to profile unsuccessful serial killers. . . . It tells you nothing about the number of successful serial killers who don’t make mistakes. . . .

In that, women have had a certain advantage in the past, as they were socialized to be background figures no matter how strenuously they fought to overcome that fate. The result is that their chameleonic qualities are often enhanced, which makes them difficult to detect and too elusive to pigeonhole.

It would be interesting to find yourself the only man in a world full of women who had reproduced by other means and never seen a member of the opposite sex. They wouldn't have been conditioned to find men attractive and would probably consider you grotesque. Nor would you necessarily seem fully human to them, since you'd have no historical or cultural precedent. Erotic fantasies notwithstanding, you'd probably end up in a circus or a a cage or, possibly, the morgue.

I say this not to impugn women's characters in particular but because human beings in general have a history of dehumanizing the unfamiliar. I'm also arguing that the ways in which we express aggression are learned and not genetic.