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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
Thanks for the link -- just sent the sample to my Kindle.
What fascinated me about female killers initially was the question of anthropology: the gender-defined cultural programming that conditions valid expressions of anger. It isn't that men are trained to be SKs but rather that they're taught to identify manhood with the resolution of conflict through aggression. Whether or not this is stated overtly, the rebus of symbols plays through our culture like an equation: movies, television news, comics, games and even locker room gossip have always tended to center on men standing up to others through transcendent acts of aggression.
The civilized version of this is the man who is able to threaten violence credibly but has the self-restraint to refrain from it once his counter-aggressor submits. Even when the result itself is not violence, the role played by violence in defining his manhood is still intact.
I would argue that people with damaged object relations (narcissists and therefore sociopaths) often seek self-aggrandizement through lethal distortions of that idea.
The gender difference -- which I would argue is cultural and is slowly being minimized by feminism and increasing portrayals of women as successful aggressors in films and other cultural expressions of conflict resolution -- was that women had been taught not to display anger and even to direct it inward. Historically visible female killers tended to be poisoners or covertly dominant partners; instances of direct violence were either more rare or difficult to trace due to practiced anonymity. We tended to see more female poisoners and collaborators than confrontational sadists in the past several hundred years.
In the 60s and 70s, a transitional female killer seems to emerge: a sociopath who directs anger inward and outward. Marlene Olive has always fascinated me for that reason: She essentially hypnotized her boyfriend into killing her parents -- it was entirely her idea -- but reeled him in by seeming to be submissive even as she exerted greater and greater control.
She'd been negated as a person in all of the classic ways sociopaths usually are before morphing from chrysalid to killer. Yet because she was a woman growing up in that transitional period, I would argue that Olive felt disallowed from aiming her violent impulse directly at the object. Her arms were always scarred from the time she was an adolescent, but the scars were due to her own bite-marks long before Olive ever picked up a syringe. I believe Elliot Leyton reported they appeared at roughly the time Olive's foster mother began telling Olive that she was destined to be a whore and her real mother was a gutter tramp, etc., etc.
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It seems to me that you know nothing of Marlene olive,and the things you wrote are from the book that Richard Levine wrote in the 80s.sad how people belive everything they read! Yes some of it is true in the book but for the most part it was made up!