Source: Charles Manson / Flickr In her post, PT blogger, Katherine Ramsland, offers some suggestions about why some women can be so attracted to, or hopelessly beguiled by, the most terrifying of human predators. At first, she provides explanations from the women themselves, women who actually married these dangerously unhinged criminals. Their reasons (somewhat elaborated here) include the assumptions that: • their can transform the convict: from cunning and cruel, to caring, concerned, and compassionate. • there’s a wounded child nested somewhere inside the killer that can be healed through a devoted nurturance that only they can provide. • they might share the killer’s media spotlight, and so triumphantly emerge from their anonymity, and maybe in the process even land a book or movie deal (an aspiration about as cynical as it is and self-serving).

Since these mostly self-deceptive notions derive from these women’s conscious minds, we need to delve much deeper if we’re to grasp the motives driving such melodramatically aberrant behavior. And here I should mention that Ramsland notes that some experts in the field regard these women either as incapable of finding love in more normal ways, or as seeking a relationship that “romantically” can never be consummated (or, I might add, domesticated).

Probably closer to the mark are other theorists she alludes to who hypothesize a more evolutionary (or Darwinian) motive, kindred to female primates regularly attracted to “larger, louder, more aggressive males.” Up just one level to the human species, we discover women drawn toward super-aggressive males who, presumably, can offer them much more status and protection than the average man. What I’d like to do in this post is expand further on the biological, sexual, and psychological dynamics that Ramsland only touches upon. After all, in trying to adequately account for a most peculiar (not to say, bizarre) female preference, it only makes sense to explore its origins on as many levels as possible.

Holmes—who was born Herman Webster Mudgett on May 16, 1861—would come to be recognized as one of America's first serial killers. HE WAS MARRIED TO THREE WOMEN AT THE SAME TIME. Holmes married his first wife, Clara, in 1878; he was only about 19. Two years later, the couple.

My key reference here is a recent, provocative book on male vs. Female sexual brains entitled by computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam (Dutton, 2011). This comprehensive undertaking (with a bibliography containing over 1,300 items) analyzes enormous amounts of data extracted mostly from the Internet to come to conclusions that at times confirm earlier research in the area and almost as frequently contradict what previously had been inferred (thereby boldly turning a good deal of conventional on its head). Electric Youth Replay RARE. To simplify this work’s findings for my present purpose, however, let me begin by emphasizing that Ogas and Gaddam find substantial evidence from Web searches, posts, and many 1,000s of romance novels that women demonstrate a strong erotic preference for dominant men. Or toward what’s now commonly referred to as alpha males—in the authors’ words, men who are “strong,, [and] swaggering [as in “cocky,” and the pun is intended].” Unfortunately, what these descriptors often imply is behavior sufficiently bearish, self-centered, and insensitive as to often cross the line into a physical, mental, and emotional that can be downright brutal.