If there are almost no female serial killers does it mean that women are really different than men?

Question

different in terms of
- seeing difficult tasks through?
- less tolerance to pain?
- less mental illness?
- less violent?
any other differences you may speculate?

Answer 1

I don't think we know enough about serial killers to say for sure what that means.

Serial killers seem to get off on a sense of power (derived from the fact that communities are afraid of them/shocked by their actions and they are able to confuse police). Maybe women are less likely to have that same drive. The whole sense of power thing sometimes comes from being bullied, abused, or mistreated as a child. As a boy grows up, they are told to be tough and strong by society. When their ability to be strong is taken away as a child though, it can make them feel inadequate and some individuals deal with this differently.

It could also be from retarded emotional development, and maybe that is less likely to occur in women. This could be due to some inherent difference between the genders but it is more likely due to the way that society treats women and men (women are allowed to be emotional, whereas this is frequently frowned upon with respect to boys/men).

In the end, I don't think it is necessarily an inherent biological difference between men and women, but may have something to do with societal norms, values, etc.

Answer 2

I believe that pain tolerance thingy is a complete myth; seeing as men do not have a uterus and do not give birth.
Men see difficult tasks through; another myth.
Men suffer from mental illness just as well, my mom's husband had a brother who'd spent half his life living in a mental health center. Men are less likely to talk about it.
Women are just as violent if not more so. I know personally of a girl who blinded a girl in the eye for looking at her brother.
Differences that I can speculate are men have thicker vocal cords, skin, etc. They think, understand and talk differently than women.

Answer 3

The term "Serial Killer" is actually quite vague, just because two people murder on a regular basis doesn't mean they have anything else in common, especially background and motivation. Aileen Wournos killed and robbed her victims, making her essentially an unusually violent mugger as opposed to someone like John Gacy whose murders were sexually motivated. Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad Tepes killed hundreds, as did many other rulers throughout history, but while undoubtedly deranged they do not fit the same psychopathology as would the first two I mentioned. One of the answers mentioned Lizzy Borden, who was not only acquitted at trial but, even if she was guilty, killed only two people in one incident, hardly a serial action, so we have no consensus on what a serial killer is even among this small sampling. That being the case there is no way to draw general conclusions about such a diverse group of people. As to the question of something being possible, in an infinite universe anything is possible. It's possible that there has never been a serial killer at all and that all the people mentioned were magically framed by two headed wizards from Venus on flying carpets, but barring evidence to that effect it's hardly likely. Until a definition is established that makes "Serial Killer" a diagnosis and allows us distinguish them from murderers of other kinds there is no way your question can be answered.

Answer 4

well it's kind of hard to say. it's not like there are 100k male serial killers and then 500 female serial killers. and serial killers by no means represents any sort of large demographic.

seeing difficult tasks through? uhhh i don't know what you mean by that because a lot of women in everyday life are able to see difficult tasks. and i don't see how being a serial killer proves that you can see difficult tasks through and if you can't kill 20 people and dispose of their bodies that somehow says that you can't. what exactly makes a task difficult? financial? emotional? physical? do men not face difficulties that they can't see through sometimes?

less tolerance to pain? hmmm and what would be a high tolerance to pain? not killing people? if the serial killer men are examples of having higher tolerance to pain, i'd say that it's more like a complete lack of empathy that describes this high tolerance. there have been female serial killers and there ARE sociopaths who are female.

less mental illness? hahaha. sorry, look at the world, at least half has mental illness. but are we all sociopaths? no.

less violent? ah, the old debate. women can be abusive, women can resort to physical action when threatened, women can kill. just because it happens less often or you hear about it less doesn't mean it doesn't happen. anyways, but i do think that most of the young women i have met (i am a recent college grad) including myself have self-mutilated ourselves, not necessarily to commit suicide, but to take out our anger/hate onto something. either the guys i run into won't admit to it or it just doesn't come up, it seems like they don't do this, but rather are more likely to express anger/frustration differently. i think if anything, we all feel the same things, but we also have compulsions and habits of reacting to our feelings/expressing them. are some of those compulsions/habits affected by gender norms and identity and social expectations? i'd say so.

my answer is that everyone is complicated to the point you can't narrow it down to sex/gender alone. and that each incident is complicated, and you can't trace the origins back to sex/gender alone.

Answer 5

I don't think women can't see "difficult tasks through" that's BS.

And when YOU have to endure thirty six hours of labor, then MEN can talk to US about pain.

I do think women are less violent, but from what I've read, women are more prone to mental illnesses such as depression. I'm not sure which genders has the highest percentage suffering from manic depression, schizophrenia, or other more violent diseases.

Answer 6

Women focus more on feelings and relationships, men on activities and events. Therefore: A woman would feel a greater connection to the victim and be less likely to do harm.

Women have more connections in their brains than men do, which causes them to have more "associations" in their thoughts than men. Therefore: A woman would have more than just one thought or idea about whatever the situation was leading up to the actual event of killing someone, and would therefore have more visible choices.

I read recently that new studies have discovered that decision making in men and women is different because women are more likely to think that something that has happened in the past (an if/then situation) is likely to happen in the future. I laughed for a long time over that one. Therefore: A woman would think "Other serial killers have been caught, jailed for life and/or put to death - maybe that will happen to me."

Just my thoughts...

Answer 7

Very few would suggest that women and men aren't different. If you think differently, you haven't been paying close enough attention.

The point is that people that are different (hey, guess what! We're ALL different...did you know?) can be equal...they can have equal rights, equal consideration, DESPITE having different talents, abilities, and even disabilities. When someone uses the phrase "we're all equal" they mean "we're all deserving of equal rights, equal consideration, and equal opportunity (not equal outcome).
Seriously, why is this concept so HARD for some? Our schools really need to revise their Civics courses, apparently.

Answer 8

Serial killing of ones' own babies is probably more common than we have statistics for, and is "mainly committed by young women" bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/2/1/40.pdf

If anyone has a weak stomach please don't read the following quote re serial infanticide: "Detectives found a newborn baby in a freezer and the bones of two other infants in the garden... The children's 38-year-old mother, who had seven other children, admitted killing them, apparently as a form of "contraception".

Are women different than men? Research in social psychology (e.g. Sheridan & King, 1972) suggests that all of us are capable of doing unexpectedly horrible things given the circumstances. The nursery-rhyme view of women as "sugar and spice and all things nice" and men are responsible for all the nasty things that happen in the world is hopelessly naive, but that's the view that ideological feminists have been pushing for years.

Answer 9

Women commit crimes of passion. They usually know the victim and usually love them. Women seem to not view people as objects to satisfy a fantasy.

Check the stats on poisoning and stabbing and I would venture a guess that women were the majority there.

Answer 10

Everything about men and women differ. Socially, pyschologically, phycially, and emotionally we are different.

Why are there almost no men with anarexia? Why is it that there are many more men with mental illness than women?

Women tend to have alot of pressure on looks which triggers anarexia. Men have been taught by society that we cant show emotions or we are considered unmanly/weak. Thats why there are more men with mental illness, because we keep it inside.

Even suicide statistics show that men use violent way to commit suicide whereas women almost always use less violent means.