What Gender Does—and Doesn't—Tell Us About Psychopathy

Liz Lemon, Tina Fey’s character in the TV show "30 Rock," poses a question that’s plagued feminists for decades: Why aren’t there more female serial killers? Today we have an answer. They’re on our movie screens.

This two-part series will look at the construct of the “female psychopath.” In part 1, I dissect the concept of the “female psychopath” to question whether gender is a helpful lens to consider the different ways psychopathic tendencies present. In part 2, I'll explore ten films with female psychopaths from the past five years and detail how they help us better grasp the true heart of psychopathy: predation without dissociation.

The “Female” Psychopath

A glance at contemporary research on female psychopathy brings up a few themes. There are those hoping to determine if Hare’s psychopathy checklist can adequately screen for differences in gender (Vital et al, 2002). Others ask if the Rorschach test might give trace clues as to a woman’s psychopathic tendencies (Smith et al, 2021). Still more rely on brain scans and the medical model to determine what’s unique about female psychopaths’ physiology (Harenski et al, 2014).

What’s certain for most researchers is that the female psychopath is a different beast than her male counterpoint. She’s eager for social acceptance, displays more neurotic tendencies, has unstable emotions, is more prone to social and relational forms of manipulation, and uses her sexuality rather than brute force to coerce her victims.

These mainstream studies on female psychopathy use cultural norms to explain the different presentations in male and female psychopaths. Young girls are socialized to be kind, polite, and internalizing, we’re told, while young boys are socialized for aggression and acting out. It’s therefore a given that female psychopaths are more eager for social acceptance and sexual manipulation than male psychopaths, given the impact of social conditioning.

While these well-worn tropes about the differences between men and women are tempting to believe, they may have the unintentional effect of simplifying a much more complex situation. As a cultural studies researcher, I can see the value of these “social construction” arguments. I’ve spent a career studying the insidious ways culture can influence developing brains, hearts, and minds. The impact of social conditioning cannot be overstated.

And yet.

How certain can we be that it’s the psychopathic individual—and not the researchers studying them—that are in fact the ones most impacted by social conditioning?

Epistemology: How Do We Know What We Know?

I approach this question as an epistemologist might. Epistemology is the philosophy of asking, “How do we know what we know?”

When reading research articles about female psychopathy, I take this epistemological approach seriously: How do researchers know what they know about women, about psychopathy, and about the explanatory power of their chosen research methodologies?

To help answer these questions, I consider a researcher’s “positionality,” as well as my own. Positionality is a concept developed by feminist scientists and philosophers, like Donna Haraway, who claim that a scientist’s position in society—their race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc.—influences how they come to know the world (Haraway, 1988). When researchers don’t consider their own socialization, assumptions, and biases, the knowledge they produce tends to maintain social hierarchies and unequal power dynamics the researcher inherited from her cultural upbringing.

Let’s think of a hypothetical researcher socialized as white and male who has spent a significant amount of time training to interview inmates thought to be somewhere on the psychopathic spectrum. His research would indicate what behavioral and emotional traits to pay attention to when talking to men vs. women (in this hypothetical situation, considerations for race, sexuality, or nonbinary/transgender identities aren’t in play). He may rely on his binary understanding of gender given both his training and the fact he was raised and socialized in the U.S. as a white male.

This hypothetical researcher may underestimate the effects of what I might call his cultural countertransference and projection when interviewing women. That is, if this male researcher expects a female interviewee to behave in a hyper-sexualized, validation-seeking manner, it’s possible, and even likely, that a true psychopath will sense this and play into those assumptions as a tool of manipulation.

Or more troubling, if this same researcher doesn’t find a woman behaving in a sexualized or internalizing way, he may miss the signs that the person in front of him is in fact psychopathic. In short, his positionality, education, upbringing, and diagnostic tools produce blind spots through no fault of his own.

That’s why I think we can’t rely on the social conditioning hypothesis alone to explain how a female psychopath might behave. And I think Liz Lemon might agree with me when I argue that the term “female psychopath” is like Bic's "For Her" pens: a head-scratching category that misses the point that pens are pens, regardless of the hand that uses them.

Film and Psychopathy

Filmmakers, unhindered by the constraints of a research psychologist, are able to provide many more accurate, diverse, and compelling examples of psychopaths who happen to be women, though this is a relatively recent trend.

In their comprehensive overview of psychopaths on film, Samuel J. Leistedt M.D., Ph.D., and Paul Linkowski M.D., Ph.D., have only this to say about female psychopaths on movie screens: “As in reality, film female psychopaths are rare (and not well known and studied), and when used, they often serve as scheming manipulators whose main weapons are sexual” (Leistedt and Linkowski, 2013). I’m happy to report that in the ten years since their analysis, female psychopaths of all stripes are starting to have their day at the movies.

The films I'll introduce in par 2 explore how gender intersects with other identities, like race, ability, sexuality, nationality, political affiliation, and religion, to complicate any easy distinction between male and female psychopathy. Many times when research psychologists discuss women, there's little by way of an intersectional analysis—that is, an analysis of how gender is also influenced by a person's race, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and other markers of identity that mediate behavior.

Many of these psychopathic characters wouldn’t fit within the models provided by contemporary research into “female” psychopaths. These characters therefore offer valuable lessons about the ways cultural norms can obscure reality rather than describe it.

Part 2 coming soon.