Yesterday I attended a family celebration in honor of my little niece’s First Holy Communion. The guest of honor, my niece, is in the second grade and is a beautiful, vibrant child—blond hair, blue eyes with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. In her white Communion dress, she looked like a little angel.
It was a sunny day and a pleasant get-together. Most of the guests had left when my niece and her friend, another little girl, wanted to put on a “show” for those of us who remained. We, of course, agreed to be the audience.
With a video clip from the Internet providing the music, the girls sang and danced to the song Beggin’ On Your Knees by Victoria Justice.
I was horrified.
Victoria Justice
Victoria Justice is 18 years old. She has been performing since the age of 10, and has acted in several TV shows on Nickelodeon. Without a doubt, she is a beautiful, talented singer and dancer. But she is also selling sex to little girls.
Here’s the video of Beggin’ On Your Knees.
The video is slick, obviously packaged by entertainment executives and corporate bigwigs to appeal to tweens—and younger. It’s set on a seaside amusement pier, with the actors playing arcade games and going on rides. The performers, of course, represent a nice multicultural mix—I’m sure the money men don’t want to miss any marketing opportunities.
So Victoria Justice sings about her relationship with some guy, and how he cheats on her. The chorus goes like this:
and One day i’ll have you begging on your knees for me
yeah, One day i’ll have you crawling like a centipede
You mess with me?
And mess with her!
So I’ll make sure you get what you deserve
yeah, One day you’ll be begging on your knees for me
So my little niece, who a few hours earlier was angelic in her white Communion dress, was shaking her body and crawling on the floor as she sang along to Beggin’ On Your Knees.
She, of course, had no idea what the words meant. But the messages are there for anyone to see: Girls achieve success by attracting good-looking boyfriends. Good-looking boyfriends cheat on their girlfriends. When cheating happens, girls take revenge.
Gee—when I was my niece’s age, I watched Shirley Temple sing Animal Crackers in My Soup.
Cheerleaders
This isn’t the first time I was struck by the blatant sexual messages being communicated to young girls. A few months ago, friends were in Atlantic City to watch their daughter perform in a big cheerleading competition. They invited my husband and I to join them.
This girl is a senior in high school and has been cheerleading since she was young. Approximately 3,000 girls were participating in this competition, ranging from high school age to girls my niece’s age—or younger.
As I walked around Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, I could not believe my eyes. All of the girls, down to the youngest ones, were parading around in cheerleading costumes that featured off-the-shoulder tops, bare midriffs and extremely short skirts. They all wore heavy make-up. They were all being taught to strut, show what they’ve got, and smile.
Abusive dating
I, in the meantime, am preparing to talk to another group of high school students about Sociopaths and Abusive Dating Relationships.
Part of my message is that sociopaths use sex to trap their victims. If you’re lonely, you are vulnerable. And when you have sex, you form a psychological bond that makes it difficult to get away if the person turns out to be an abuser. This is how domestic violence starts.
Yet according to the constant bombardment of messages directed towards young girls, their success depends on how sexy they are, and whether they can attract a hot boyfriend. Any girl without a boyfriend, therefore, will feel lonely, and will be vulnerable to the abuse of a sociopath.
So how do I compete with overwhelming, lifelong marketing? How do I tell these high school students that sex may get them in trouble when they’ve been fed a steady diet of “sex sells” since they were little kids?
Girls are being brainwashed by marketers out to make a buck. I don’t even know how parents can protect their kids from the onslaught—they’d have to raise their daughters in a cocoon. As a result, so many little girls are probably ripe to become the next generation of victims of sociopaths.
I used to think my husband so socially gifted b/c he was the most charming man I’d ever met. But without empathy, he’s not truly socially gifted, he would never fit in with normal social interactions, just exploitative events. I don’t see where machiavelliaism fits on this list, the ability to manipulate without conscience? THAT is where he was a master.
Darwinsmom,
empathy is very much like language in humans.
We are genetically predisposed to learn it, but we can learn it best between the ages of 0 and 4 years old. if we fail to learn language or empathy at that age, we will not be able to learn it very well if at all. Some people are predisposed to better language SKILLS than others. For some it comes more rapidly, and they talk early on. Others take longer. Girls are usually better at both language and empathy, than boys.
So although it is a skill, it is one that needs to be learned in childhood or the part of the brain that “gets” it becomes “gelled” without it and it’s very hard to create the neural pathways for language or empathy afterwards.
Once we learn language or empathy, though, even if it’s the most rudimentary bits of it, we have the capacity to expand and refine it. It’s very interesting how language and empathy seem to go hand in hand. I wonder if there isn’t a connection.
Kay,
The X-S in my life is very similar…in fact he joined Toastmasters to learn to become a “better comunicator” and “better listener”….even claiming this has helped him in his relationships. All it’s done is taught him how to be a better manipulator with out conciousness.
I talkied to someone in his club who described how glib and manipulative he was, and how he’s created chaos out of the club! totally socially inept!
I saw him at an event last Saturday and he was walking with a cane, looked older and feeble and harmless like never before. I have had NC with him for that past 6 weeks until then, he thought I would take pitti on him and ask him how he was doing. I ignored him completely treating him like a potted plant. You know what I got in return? a text message saying “love you, always will” manipulation at it’s best!
p.s.- I did NOT reply
Aeylah = 10
Spath = 0
Excellent payback.
I had been thinking that it might be similar to language. I know of the examples of kids raised by pack of wolves never learned to speak later on in life when discovered. They would just growl.
I would think there is a link. Language is an extended form of body language to make yourself understood. Animals express their emotions and or intentions with body language (fear, curiosity, contentness, excitement of having prey near) and in some cases make sounds. I’m mostly familiar with cat language (body and sound), and it’s a special case for cats, because housecats kept as pets are essentially kittens with an adult cat body. But closing your eyes signals “I’m not going to harm you.” (and why people who are scared of cats and avoid eye contact often end up having the cat of the person they visit jump into their lap). They purr to signal contentment when getting attention (naturally kittens do it when drinking from the mother cat who purrs in response to encourage them to keep drinking). The might do a little rrrr in greeting. Mine talks back with and without sound if I use a high pitched voice and short words or sounds. Anyhow, animals communicate to show the other animal what their mood and intentions are. And I’m of the opinion it is nearly impossible for animals to understand the signs without it being connected to somesort of sensation that would release stress or aliveate it, and that this may be somesort of instinctual empathy. If the other animal fails to read those signs, then they might end up in a fight. So, it’s highly important for survival that they learn the meaning in their nest life.
A common example of miscommunication across species is that of a cat or dog where at least one is unfamiliar with the other one’s body language. Dogs introduce themselves and get familiar with each othe by sniffing each other’s rear end. Cats do nose-nose touching, and a stranger going for the rear is a threat. A cat wags its tail only if excited of seeing prey or when about to attack. It’s an aggressive sign. So, a content dog wagging its tail and going straight to sniff the cat’s rear shows nothing but threat signs. When the other can hurt the cat (size and weapons such as teeth and claw) a cat resorts to a tactic that will automatically instill fear in the “enemy”: they mimic body language signs of snakes. Tail will blow up, and wriggle, they hiss and even spit. If the dog doesn’t back off, there will be a quick strike with the paw to scratch the nail across the nose, like a snake striking and biting. Fear for snakes is instinctive (though people may learn to control it), because the risk of deadly injury is too high when encountered. There is no second chance to learn that snakes are dangerous, if the animal ends up being bitten by a venomous one.
The reason though why the body language in the animal world is not majorly instinctive is proven by the fact that if at least one is brought up as a little pup or kitten with the other, the sign language can be crossed over to the other species.
There’s for example a purring squirrel after it was adopted by a mother cat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBb7gdF2Gf4
In other worse, all these mammals at least must know the same sensations (well emotions) and intentions, and have some type of primal form of empathy in order to feel what the other must be feeling. They normally develop their own species body and sound signals if growing up with their own species, but they are able to learn and act correctly upon the signals of other species if they end up being adopted into it.
Most of our communication, even with humans, is done via body language and pitch and tone in our voices, rather than the words itself. Someone breaking up in tears and pleading is very heart to resist. If the same please were said without those body signs and intonation in the voice we would never believe that expression of grief. What we do not realize when encountering a P for the first time in our lives, is that it can be acted convincingly. We know actors do it, but we imagine them to pretend deep down in their mind the recollection of something that actually was painful and made them sad. They must have studied empathic humans closely in order to know how to pull it off: pitch, tone, intonation, movement… And I can imagine that indeed it must give someone a kick that if you know you lack emotion you can act so well that people believe it to be real. It is once their is no stimulus around, that you can notice the real emotionless state of them: they just sit, stare, and seem fathomless in their expression.
A primal type of empathy not only serves to understand the other animal in an unexpected encounter, it mostly serves I think to create a bond. And even solitary species create a bond in their infancy, with the siblings and mother that nurses them. The bond is not only important for the kitten, the mother must feel a bond as well, in order to get the motivation to starve herself while nursing initially, and later to give up the hunted prey to the nest instead of herself. The more social a species is (existing in packs and depending on it), the more bonds needs to be created, more than just the mother, and the more this primal empathy matters.
Especially baby animals seem to inspire a type of empathic response within adult female mammals. It must be nature’s way to still try and save a newborn animal, even if its chances of survival are small. Or it’s because the primal empathy needed to overcome mere self-serving survival needs within the mothers must be so strong to accomplish that and nature is unable to make it specially only. It probably is both. Since often females are the sole or the primary caretakers of the young, it must be mostly developed within females, and since language is a tool of both creating the bond as well as making oneself understood that might be a reason why women are often better communicatioin skilled than men. But even male mammals, including solitary species, can feel a protectiveness towards baby animals. Darwin was taken care of by his presumable father after the mother disappeared. Darwin’s survival tactics (hide, not make a sound, not move, until mom physically gets you out of the hiding place) show though that the male was incapable of rearing the kittens properly. He just mimicked what the mother taught the kittens at the stage of their development, when she disappeared.
There’s the case where a lioness keeps adopting baby oryxes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1905363.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1746828.stm
Or a jaguar trying to take care of the baby babboon after killing the mother babboon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpfvkeo0KBc&feature=related
And we cannot but help when reading or seeing such “weird” interspecies adoption stories to feel fuzzy or eaven tearful.
In that sense, Psychos are a freak of nature, an aberration, because they lack what is a natural responsive reaction in most mammals, even across species. They are comparable to the male lion, who lets the females do the hunting for him, and kills off the babies of other males to get the females of the overtaken harem in heat again.
Yes they are exactly like male lions, if you have a den they will try to take it over for themselves and push out your children like a cuckoo does. Especially if they are Leos as well LOL. Like male lions too they will not adapt and will stay in their territory after the herd has moved on following the rain and the grass. They just stay there getting hungry waiting for the next batch of victims to pass by.
Most species are not cannabalistic or predatory of their own species, even if those animals are not “herd” animals, but live solitary lives exscept when breeding or raising young.
Psychopaths though are predators of their own kind…I can see some advantages in their predation at times of short supply of resources because they would take the resources from others to keep themselves alive.
For example, they would kill and eat the young of others (an example is the story in the Bible where the two women agreed to eat each other’s sons and the women ate one son, but then the other woman backed out and the woman whose son had been eaten already complained that the other woman renigged and wouldn’t give up her son to eat.)
We’ve all read of instances in life boat or other starvation situations where one or two in the group would kill someone else to eat their body…the person who could do such a thing with little or no guilt would have an advantage of survival over those who would not do such a thing.
The same thing in “breeding” in that the psychopath who will take the women by force, “spread his seed” and move on leaving behind more and more offspring might have the reproductive advantage over the man who stayed around to raise the children.
Male lions’ behavior is obviously successful or they wouldn’t have survived. Wolves’ pack behavior with only the alpha couple reproducing is also successful, and cooperation is necessary for them to do well and survive, with more than one set of adults better able to provide for hungry pups and to train them. Wolves, too, will kill a pup that does not adhere to the social norms of the pack. Occasionally wolf packs will go to “war” and kill another pack “just for the hell of it” even though the territory is not one they can actually take over and use.
Humans are “herd” or “pack” animals just as some other mammals are, tigers are solitary for the most part except for breeding. Cheetahs are also solitary except for breeding times and solitary hunters rather than cooperative like lions for the main part.
Humans have like many mammals chemical bonding agents that are released during birth, nursing, and sexual contact. The psychopaths have been shown to have fewer receptors to this hormone (Oxytocin) Dr Leedom did an article here on it about how if this hormone is blocked mammals will not “bond” to their babies.
In “normal” people oxytocin is released during sex, thus bonding the pair, especially women….but with a psychopath, they are much more able to have sex and NOT have the bonding, thus making it much easier for them to have multiple partners and to change partners frequently.
Not that everyone who has multiple partners is a psychopath, I don’t mean that at all, because there are other and cultural considerations as well, but that natural tendency to bond with those we are sleeping with being there, sex is one way they keep us hooked. Also the natural tendency to bond with your offspring, even adult offspring, keeps us trying to “help” those offspring even when they are themselves psychopathic. Unlike the wolves, we don’t tend to want to kill abberant offspring.
I just lost a huge post. GRAAAAAAHHH!!
I thought it an important post, so will try again.
This point that feral children are unable to develope language skills, if they miss the window, and the ethics of adopting pets as babies…..the experience of the trauma bond often being precipitated by a seperation from the primary care-giver in infancy.Nuerol pathways in the brain.
I had an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. Pinky has decided that he wants to follow me everywhere. So when he tried to follow me to the store, instead of trying to catch him(he had his mind made up, not to be caught), instead of picking him up, carrying him back to the house, climbing the stairs, I decided to charge him, thinking it would scare him into running home. Interesting result: While he obviously startled, he chased after me more ferverantly. I tried it twice…he became MORE dtermined to be close to me and go where I go.
Pinky is a rescue cat who was nothing but skin and bones when I started feeding him, and caring for him. He had a severe eye infection, and was very weak. Not even sure if he HAD a mother.
Now, I’m not suggesting that there was anything unethical in my rescuing Pinky, but it does raise questions about taking our pets away from their mothers for our pleasure and benefit.
Also, about empathy and language skills: They both develope at about the same time as the ability to walk upright. Also, toilet training, and the terrible two’s, the child’s love for the word, “NO” and the resolution of the OEdipal complex.
It is the ability to use language, and our ability to walk upright as well as the incest taboo that seperates humanity from animality, so I don’t see why empathy isn’t apart of the dichotomy, as well. This is in perfect keeping with the idea that spaths developement is frozen in infancy, for some reason.
Just thinkin’.
There was something about my P regarding bonding that I wondered about. There was something that he seemed to crave for all the time, when we were private. If he laid down, he would take my hands and put them on his head and I was supposed to rub through his hair. When I originally did it the first time, it had been on my initiative, and I simply rummaged softly through his hair, and pulling it softly. After that, it became a habbit, one he would ask for if I forgot. He would fall asleep like a baby almost if I did that, and if I stopped too early, he’d moan, take my hand again and put it on his scalp again.
He’d grow truly peaceful and relaxed. It might be possible that it may have relieved a bit of the headaches he often complained about. But I just kinda think it simply soothed him in general. And though it wasn’t intended like mothering from me, he would be so peaceful like a babe, that picturing him with a thumb in his mouth would not be far from correct in comparison.
Kim, I too feel like as if they’re stuck in the ego phase of infancy. But if it would just be stunted development in the older toddler phase, then it would not explain the lack of empathy.
LOL, the oedipus complex, for girls it’s called the Electra complex. When I started at kindergarden (age 2.5) my parents interviewed me on the kids I played with (on a big revox tape) and asked me who I was gonna marry. I mentioned a boy from kindergarden, and shocked my mom asked, “What? Don’t you want to marry your dad?” Then there’s a few seconds of silence, as I pondered how to answer that question most diplomatically. “I’d rather not,” was my answer… hehe
As for seeing us as apart of the rest of the animal world. Every animal has its specialisation, and if it had cognitive reasoning, would argue they are different and set apart from the rest. Birds can fly. Whales and dolphins can live in water. Cheetas run the fastest. Fish can breath under water. We have the biggest and most developed brain in proportion to the rest of our body mass.
Incest is not just a human taboo either. The examples mentioned with chimp sons trying to have sex with their mother, is one of chimps in captivity. If humans would be stuck with each other for 20 long years in a cage, without any possibility to meet other people, there would be more incest occurrences as well.
http://www.livescience.com/2226-incest-taboo-nature.html
I agree though about the proximity reactin when growing up. I went to a public HS (in Belgium there is little or no academic difference between private or public, though the private may try to claim so) where girls and boys would share classes. When I went out and some girl of an all girl’s school learned that this or that guy was in my school or class or year, they wondered aloud how much fun it would be to be at our school. They thought that we were busy all day with flirting with each other or something. And all I could think of was the guy as a kid of 12 in our first years there. There was NO interest, not from them to us, not from us to them (except maybe those of a year higher, who you only knew from the lunch breaks, from far away). I always thought that the best way to keep your kids from overromanticising the other sex was by having them grow up with each other in close proximity.