The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,336

out—would arouse no envy in the participant because they were women. The participant, still imagining himself the loser, then reads about a string of misfortunes that befall his envied but increasingly Job-like classmate: the classmate is falsely accused of cheating on an exam, he becomes the victim of ugly rumors, his girlfriend has an affair, his company gets into financial trouble, his bonus is small, his car breaks down, his watches are stolen, his apartment building is sprayed with graffiti, he gets food poisoning at the French restaurant, and his vacation is canceled because of a typhoon. The researchers could literally read the gloating off the participants’ brains. As the participants read of the misfortunes of their virtual better (though not of the nonthreatening women), their striatum, the part of the Seeking circuit that underlies wanting and liking, lit up like a Tokyo boulevard. The results were the same when women contemplated the downfall of an enviable female rival.

A third occasion for sadism is revenge, or the sanitized third-party version we call justice. The whole point of moralistic punishment is that the wrongdoer suffers for his sins, and we have already seen that revenge can be sweet. Revenge literally turns off the empathic response in the brain (at least among men), and it is consummated only when the avenger knows that the target knows that his suffering is payback for his misdeeds.231 What better way for the avenger to be certain in that knowledge than to inflict the suffering himself?

Finally, there is sexual sadism. Sadism itself is not a common perversion—among people who indulge in S&M, far more of them are into the M than the S—but milder forms of domination and degradation are not uncommon in pornography, and they may be a by-product of the fact that males are the more ardent and females the more discriminating gender.232 The circuits for sexuality and aggression are intertwined in the limbic system, and both respond to testosterone.233

Male aggression has a sexual component. In interviews, many soldiers describe battlefield routs in explicitly erotic terms. One Vietnam veteran said, “To some people, carrying a gun was like having a permanent hard-on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.”234 Another agreed: “There is . . . just this incredible sense of power in killing five people.... The only way I can equate it is to ejaculation. Just an incredible sense of relief, you know, that I did this.”235 Institutionalized torture is often sexualized as well. Female Christian martyrs were depicted as having been sexually mutilated, and when the tables were turned in medieval Christendom, the instruments of torture were often directed at women’s erogenous zones.236 As with the martyrologies, later genres of macabre entertainment such as pulp fiction, Grand Guignol, and “true crime” tabloids often put female protagonists in peril of sexual torture and mutilation.237 And government torturers in police states have often been reported to be aroused by their atrocities. Lloyd deMause recounts testimony from a survivor of the Holocaust:The SS camp commander stood close to the whipping post throughout the flogging.... His whole face was already red with lascivious excitement. His hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets, and it was quite clear that he was masturbating throughout.... On more than thirty occasions, I myself have witnessed SS camp commanders masturbating during floggings.238

If serial killers represent the taste for rough sex taken to an extreme, the gender difference among serial killers, who come in both sexes, is instructive. Schechter is skeptical of self-anointed “profilers” and “mind hunters,” like the Jack Crawford character in Silence of the Lambs, but he allows for one kind of inference from the modus operandi of a serial killer to a characteristic trait: “When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man.”239 It’s not that girls can never grow up to be serial killers; Schechter recounts the stories of several black widows and angels of death. But they go about their pastimes differently. Schechter explains:There are unmistakable parallels between [male serial killers’] kind of violence—phallic-aggressive, penetrative, rapacious, and (insofar as it commonly gratifies itself upon the bodies of strangers) undiscriminating—and the typical pattern of male sexual behavior. For this reason, it is possible to see sadistic mutilation-murder as a grotesque distortion . . . of normal male sexuality....

Female psychopaths are no less depraved than their male