Are/were sociopaths overrepresented in the gay community

Great Debates
1

I predict this thread will end well.

I am reading a book written by an admitted and diagnosed sociopath. In it she claims that sociopaths tend to lean towards bisexuality, because a persons sexuality is a very easy way to find and exploit people’s vulnerabilities and make someone easy to manipulate. She also claims that of all the sociopaths who have gone to her blog and written to her and talked to her, all (that or almost all, but I believe she said all) of them had at least one bisexual experience. She claims this is the best way to distinguish a real sociopath from a wannabe sociopath (who probably envies sociopaths because they are remorseless and efficient), by asking them about being gay or if they are gay. A wannabe will have a visceral disgust to homosexuality (because they emotionally equate it with weakness) while a sociopath will not.

Granted sociopaths also tend to be pathological liars, so who knows. However for non-sociopaths sexuality is generally associated with feelings of love and connection, and with a sense of visceral discomfort and disgust at the idea of having sex with the gender you are not attracted to. Since sociopaths don’t care about love and connection, and don’t feel visceral discomfort and disgust there are not many impulses to only stick to one gender. The author of the book says the term ‘utilitarian’ is the best description for her sexuality, because she uses it to manipulate, control and exploit people of either gender. She claims sexuality was just a utilitarian tool to exploit and control others.

Gays are more integrated in society than they were in the past, which is good. However in the past you would assume many gays couldn’t/wouldn’t go to the police if they were victims of crimes, because that means they would have to admit to doing gay things. Not only that, but law enforcement would likely take those crimes less seriously. It is similar to how serial killers target prostitutes because they are less likely to go to the police, and if something bad happens to them society and the legal system are not as interested. Or how drug dealers have to worry about being ripped off. If they get ripped off, they can’t go to the cops. Plus you have to consider that just a few decades ago being gay actually was a crime (not just socially stigmatized) so if you admit to being robbed, raped or assaulted by a gay lover you yourself could go to jail.

Plus due to the social and family rejection alot of gay people have experienced, you’d assume they would make easier targets for false sympathy, understanding and kindness from a cunning sociopath. That would make people easier to target for things like theft or assault.

So with gays being about 5% of the public, and sociopaths being 1-4% of the public, and with (according to the author) bisexuality being extremely common among sociopaths, and gays making fairly desirable targets for sociopaths due to their (at least in the past, less so today luckily) inability to get legal help, fact that they can be blackmailed and their likely need for acceptance and kindness to compensate for the social rejection (virtually everyone craves acceptance and kindness, especially young people who have been bullied and excluded), is there a history of the gay community having a very powerful minority of sociopaths wreaking havoc on it and in it?

When homosexuality was considered a mental illness, it was considered a sociopathic mental illness. Did that mean it was sociopathic as it is know today, or just that it was socially unpopular and therefore ‘against society’?

2

It seems to me this argument is conflating “willing to pretend to be homosexual to exploit someone”, and “actually is homosexual”. I’d certainly expect sociopaths to be willing to do the former, but doubt that there’s any more of the latter.

And while they don’t care about the romantic aspects of sexuality, that doesn’t mean that they find all types of sexuality attractive, any more than they are incapable of having favorite foods.

3

If any statement ever screamed for a CITE, this is it.

4

What book is it? Does the author give any evidence for her claim, or is it merely how things seem to her?

5

Just for clarity:
When you use the word “overrepresented”, is the implication that:[ol][]more sociopaths are gay than straight or…[]that sociopaths (whatever their gender alignment) prey more heavily on gays than straights?[/ol]

6

Confessions of a sociopath. Her evidence is her experience and the experience of others sociopaths.

I am having trouble finding an actual study on the sexual behaviors of diagnosed sociopaths though.

One of the diagnostic traits of sociopathy is a poorly integrated, impersonal sense of sexuality however.

Now that I think of it, there would be a counterbalance even if this did happen. The gay community would either use internal muscle or hire external muscle.

I’m sure there would be a few dozen tough gays (military, martial artists, bodybuilders, bikers, brawlers, cops, etc) willing to form goon squads and beat any exploitative sociopath half to death. Its like Henry Hill said in Goodfellas, the mafia is like the cops for people who can’t go to the cops. So the gay community would probably organize some toughs from the community to beat up anyone who pulled these kinds of things.

Not only that, but they could hire external muscle (mafioso, bikers, etc) to do that for them. Pay them protection money, and in return just turn over names and photos of abusers and exploiters.

So my whole theory, even if true, probably wouldn’t work.

7

[quote=“trabajabamos, post:5, topic:660331”]

Just for clarity:
When you use the word “overrepresented”, is the implication that:[ol][li]more sociopaths are gay than straight or…that sociopaths (whatever their gender alignment) prey more heavily on gays than straights?[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]

  1. No, that sociopaths are indifferent to sexual orientation and have no real preference. But since gays make up 5% of the population and heterosexuals make up the other 95%, the chances of running into a sociopath (who are 1-4% of the population) are much higher in the gay community than in the straight community if a sizable chunk of sociopaths are bisexual, esp when you add in the other factors (inability to ask the law for help, easy to blackmail, more emotionally damaged due to rejection and bullying, etc). A group that is 2% is small (assuming there are 4% of the public who are sociopaths, and half are bisexual) compared to 95%, but 2% of a group that makes up 5% of society is pretty large. Even if that 2% isn’t part of that 5%, you end up with 7%. So 29%.

  2. I don’t know if sociopaths prey more heavily on gays. I was saying that it seems gays would be a natural target of sociopaths, especially before the gay rights movement.

8

Am I allowed to post pictures of my ass, because that is where I pulled those stats from.

9

No doubt because “sociopath” is not a diagnosis currently used by the mental health community. (That is, found in the DSM-IV.)

Antisocial personality disorder is. But self-described sociopaths never have the usual adjuncts to that diagnosis: I.e., multiple incarcerations, low educational attaintment, drug addiction, an inability to hold a job and corresponding poverty. (When I say “I’m a sociopath,” I mean the just the glamorous parts! Like always getting my way and having lots of one night stands. Not the stuff like I’m a bad student and broke and probably an ex-con and addicted to painkillers.)

Do all of us flirt with the idea of being smarter than everyone else and bossing people around and manipulating them? That our lives would be a whole lot easier if we could just jettison our empathy and do what’s best for us? And especially so if we came with a label that announces our generally bad-assedness, such as “sociopath.”

But of course. Your so-called “sociopath” has merely monetized that observation and is tapping into these feelings.

In other words, it’s a load of clinical-sounding, psychobabble baloney.

10

I see. I don’t have much to offer in terms of hard facts on your question one way or the other.

That said, couldn’t we just as easily surmise that sociopaths, simply by virtue of demographics, would be far more likely to stumble upon a straight person they can manipulate than a gay person? If nine in ten people our hypothetical sociopath encounters are straight and only one is gay, what are the odds that none of those straight people will fit the bill?

Your argument seems to hinge on the notion that gay people are inherently either more susceptible to the influence of sociopaths or more desirable targets. I’m not sure how you’d justify that, exactly.

11

It also hinges on the assumption that a larger percent of people who engage in homosexuality are likely to run across a sociopath.

As far as gays being easier targets, today that might not be the case. But in history when gays were more legally and socially excluded they were likely easier to blackmail and had more trouble contacting law enforcement to report crimes.

12

Not that I’m aware of, and it doesn’t seem likely to me.

First, I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to describe someone as “bisexual” just because they’re willing to feign sexual attraction to both men and women as part of an attempt to manipulate others.

Second, some of the major identifying characteristics of psychopaths are their poor judgment, poor planning skills, and lack of concern for how their actions might harm not just others but themselves. So a psychopath seems unlikely to think “I’d better limit myself to preying upon homosexuals, as they’re more vulnerable and less likely to seek legal help.”

Third, if there were any psychopaths who had good judgment/planning skills and were concerned about avoiding trouble themselves then they probably would not have chosen to associate with members of a stigmatized minority group that was considered at best sick and at worst criminal. Gay bars used to get raided all the time, and I doubt saying “Sorry for the confusion officer, I’m not really one of these perverts, I’m just looking for someone to blackmail” would have done much good.

13

Sociopathic bisexuality is definitely a real thing. When you don’t really believe that other people exist, it’s hard to get hung up on gender. Men, women, dogs, planks of wood–they’re all objects, one is as useful as another.

Whether these people constitute a part of “the gay community” is perhaps a little more ambiguous.

14

Say what!? :eek::confused:

This makes no sense.

I see know way in which the Gay community would be organized in this fashion. If the LGBT community did have an organized crime arm, certainly they would have been sent after true homophobes, rather than just manipulative people.

I have no doubt that there are a great many people who use sex to manipulate gays, in the same way there are a great many people who use sex to manipulate heterosexuals. No one sends thugs against them they just try to be avoid them and warn others.

There is also the possibility that I am being Wooshed in which case, well done :slight_smile:

15

I knew the exact title before you mentioned it. It’s a great read.

Pretty much. But you also have to understand that as sociopaths are 1-4% of the population, but only about 20% of the inmate population, that a lot of sociopaths either aren’t caught, or are smart enough to stay within the law. You can use someone for sex, money, amusement/entertainment, etc… without actually blackmailing them. But as most sociopaths tend to be male, it’s quite possible that they’re over-represented in the gay community. It’s easier to keep up a social mask, however, if one sticks to proscribed gender norms. A ‘bisexual’, manipulative, remorseless person will attract much more unwanted attention than a straight man who’s a jerk to the women he dates. And any ‘high functioning’ sociopath would have to be able to “hide in plain sight”. It would seem that messy fights with an often despised sub-population would be a poor way to go about that. At least, that’d be my guess.

There’s also growing research into something that the psychological community, with great melodrama I might add, is calling “the Dark Triad;” Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism. (Others have argued that there’s really a fourth factor, sadism.) It makes sense that, depending on how high/low one scores on the M, P, N, or S scales, the specific expression of their condition would differ.

That’s probably because those aren’t at all mandatory and are generally only found in low-functioning ASPD folks. Moreover, y our “usual adjuncts” are not found as necessary criteria in Hare’s work, or any other serious diagnostic tools that I’m aware of. Nor are they part of the formal, or quick or dirty diagnostic criteria for “Dark Triad” personalities. In other words, you’ve evidently imagined that those are some sort of diagnostic criteria. In point of fact, people with ASPD are often “in many positions of power, including law, surgery and big business.”

16

Your article also says they often don’t hold those jobs for very long.

Because of mainstream media, everyone thinks “sociopaths” (people with ASPD or NPD) are like Hannibal Lechter, Patrick Bateman, or Dexter Morgan. Charming super-geniuses who are usually extremely successful and wealthy with a Machiavellian ability to plan fantastically complex schemes to get what they want.

That’s really more like how they see themselves instead of how sociopaths actually are.

Also, IANA psychiatrist, but just because someone is a selfish, manipulative jerk doesn’t necessarily mean they are a sociopath.

17

That’s true. But, at least in the research I’ve read, that’s because they get bored and switch to new jobs/careers. It’s not that they don’t hold a job for long and then end up on the streets. It’s that they don’t hold a job for long because they’ve moved on to a new one.

18

IRL? No. In media? Traditionally.

19

Personally, speaking from my own experience, you are more likely to find Sociopaths amongst those who have been in prison for more then a very short stay, rather then amongst any other groups.

Though I’m undecided as to whether its their being Sociopaths that got them locked up in the first place, or whether they became Sociopaths as some sort of survival mechanism to deal with prison life.

20

35% of males and 38% of females with the borderline personality disorder reported “Homosexual/Bisexual Orientation and/or Same-Sex Relationship” in one study Table - PMC (not the antisocial personality disorder but it shares some characteristics).