I'm not sure I'd go with the "women on a pedestal" analogy, but I do think we tend to believe that women just don't do certain things. I remember about 15 years ago, a friend's son divorced his wife over her serial cheating. I found myself making all kinds of mental excuses for her because in my day, the only women who cheated were the small percentage who were "*advertiser censored*." It took me awhile to realize how stereotyped my thinking was. Nowadays there is something in the news Every.Single.Day about a female teacher having sex with her teenage student(s). It still amazes me.
So I don't think women are "better" at being sociopaths, partly for this reason. There is also a story that during WW II, Dr. Spock (of baby book fame) worked on a study of sociopaths. The study showed that men rarely caught the female sociopahts, while the women caught them right away. And women never caught the male sociopaths, but men did. With men still having most of the supervisory police positions, I think it is simply harder for them to believe the little woman is guilty of these things.
I think it's becoming clearer and clearer to LE that women can do some incredibly bad things; it's Jodi's misfortune that she wasn't born twenty or thirty years earlier.
Well, "women on a pedestal" was a bit of hyperbole, but you do get that in typically sexist fashion, women tend to be described in terms of positive attributes and when they are not behaving as such, they are described behaving in masculine terms. I was reading an article about a month or so ago about the binge drinking problem in Britain and some of the so-called experts did exactly that, attributing women passing out in their own puke after getting in a cat fight to behaving like men rather than just behaving like, well, drunk women.
Sure, there are counter-examples, and I'm speaking very generally, but I think we can be quite invested in viewing women in a certain way that can only be described as a form of benign sexism.
I think Mrs. G Norris got what I was driving at.
Couldn't agree more!
I think the reason that sociopathic men stand out more than women is because female sociopathy is interpersonal which is not something you can get arrested for. Like a woman will ruin another females reputation with a smear campaign, or do a little character assassination, tell malicious lies, sleep with all her friends husbands, hook up with a guy and take him down to the point where he's a shell of his former self, that kind of thing.
You hear about things like that in the workplace or in a small town, but it's not illegal activity, no authority is going to get involved, it's not recognised as sociopathy the same way fraud or embezzlement is for instance.
Just as damaging, not as illegal.
That's exactly it. I probably made the point artlessly the first time around. I didn't mean male and female sociopathy manifests itself in the same way. Either through women sociopaths having a different strategy relying on interpersonal manipulation, as you note, or that we tend to view exactly the same behavior differently depending on a variety of factors including gender.
Of course, here Bill Burr starting at 2:30 in, explains the dynamics of dealing with the female psycho:
Warning- Lots and Lots of NSFW language.
[video=youtube;Zr162OZ2Z0w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr162OZ2Z0w[/video]
When Burr does it it's funny, but when you think about how Jodi Arias operated with the relentless endless drama and attempts to isolate Travis Alexander from his support, perhaps culminating in at least emotional blackmail (if not actual with the "sex tape" and photos), ending up with destroying him rather than letting him be free of her, it's not that funny.