Our Vulnerability to Wicked Women

Borderline personality disorder is a mirror image to psychopathy

The oldest known law is the Code of Ur-Nammu. A Sumerian legal text written over 500 years before the Torah, the Code of Ur-Nammu prescribes punishments for a wide variety of crimes, including murder, thievery, kidnapping, mutilation, and rape. Some of the penalties were quite severe—the death penalty was liberally applied. But provisions for gossip, making false accusations, ruining friendships, or wrecking family unity seem to be absent. The code does mention that if a female slave makes comparisons to her mistress and “speaks insolently to her,” that her mouth should be washed out with salt, but that’s not particularly reassuring.

The absence of strong legal or social norms regarding people who destroy friendships or family bonds remains a problem even today. We can respond efficiently to violence and theft, and overt fraud and defamation we can handle. But we still don’t have much of any methods for preventing people from wrecking out the social fabric of our lives.

For example, here is the story of a Swedish family Tove wrote about on Wood From Eden:

Natalia

Kasia and Damian had two children together, Kamil and Natalia.

When Natalia was just a baby, Damian and Kasia separated and Kasia married a Swedish man called Jimmy. Jimmy and Kasia have one daughter together, Siri. When this story started, the children were 13, 9 and 6 years old... Jimmy is a social worker who helps suicidal teenage girls in the foster care system. According to Kasia, he is “one of those rare people who actually love their job”.

The problems started when Natalia suddenly told her teachers in school that Jimmy sexually assaulted her on a regular basis. Her account was detailed and explicit. The social services took over the case.

Kasia was convinced that the accusations were made up. Most of all because the details didn't fit with reality. Natalia said that her stepfather assaulted her when he kissed her goodnight. Kasia said that Jimmy did indeed kiss Natalia good night in the evenings. But he always did so for a very short time, with the door open. He went in, said good night and kissed her, and then he went out again. Kasia was sometimes in the room when it happened, and she was always on the same floor of the house. Kasia found it very unlikely that Jimmy could have forced elaborate sexual acts on Natalia under these circumstances.

Instead, Kasia thought that her daughter was lying because she was going through a tough time. A few months earlier her older brother Kamil had revealed to Natalia that Damien was her father as well as his. Previously, Natalia had been given the impression that Jimmy was her father. Also, Natalia and her mother didn't have a very good relationship. Kasia didn't dare to reveal it to the social services, but she thought that her daughter bullied her. Natalia used very demeaning language against Kasia and tried to pressure her into buying expensive stuff. 

The social services required that Jimmy move away from the home. He did so, briefly. When that happened, Natalia took back her accusations and said it was all a lie she had made up because she had read on social media that it was a thing to do to get attention. 

The social workers did not accept Natalia's new stance. They demanded that Kasia hide away with her children from Jimmy. She was ordered to not just separate from Jimmy, but to divorce him. She was offered a place in a shelter for her and her three children.

Kasia and Jimmy couldn't believe it. Was it possible that such loose accusations alone, that had even been retracted, could split up a family just like that? Jimmy was a social worker himself. He couldn't believe the system he worked in was so hopelessly subjective. So Kasia and Jimmy made a mistake: They challenged the social services to take the case to court.

In court, the social services accused Kasia of being a bad mother because she didn't believe her daughter (no matter that her daughter had said two opposing things by then). The court agreed, because they almost always agree with the social services. Since Kasia didn't believe Natalia, she couldn't be trusted to care for Natalia, the court stated.

…The situation never got any solution. Natalia was placed in a foster home with three other children. She was only allowed to meet her mother on the premises of the social services, with someone watching them and listening to every word they said. Their meetings became increasingly unpleasant. Natalia told Kasia things like “you are a 2 out of 10.” During the court hearings, Natalia has maintained that she lied about her stepfather, but she found different rationalizations to why she did so. She once said that it was her mother who had made her do it. Kasia has little hope of reconciling with her daughter. 

I’m not a Swedish lawyer any more than a Sumerian one, but so far as I am aware, what Natalia did wasn’t illegal. It was totally nonviolent. Yet it fractured her family, tarnished the reputations of everyone involved, and filled their lives with pain. And there is no way for anyone affected to seek redress or compensation for what she has done.

Now, I don’t know any of the people involved in this story. But I can vouch for the details of another story, because it involved me.

Alice

Many years ago, hoping to get my fiction published, I joined a writers’ group that met in a distant city. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but the drive was long, and I wasn’t receiving very much useful criticism or advice. So I started my own writers’ group at a nearby pizza joint. I was very careful not to poach members from the old group—I only even told one of the members I was starting another group, and they never switched to my new group.

The first meeting was a small disaster, with terrible submissions by a dozen unpleasant writers. I kept my chin up, though the next several meetings had only one to four attendees besides myself, and no one ever stayed long.

In fact, weeks went by without my being able to attract any talented or serious writers, but I stuck with it, and after several months of patience and struggle, my new group began to thrive with the consistent input of around twelve writers, and though I remained the primary organizer, I gradually made room for others to take charge. My fiction improved dramatically, but by now that had become almost incidental to the joy I found interacting with everyone there.

This is about the time that someone I’ll call Alice joined our meetings. I remember her as an attractive woman in her early thirties who wrote primarily erotic urban fantasy. Her work was good, though she was politically sensitive in a way that wouldn’t be common until today, and she made odd comments about being a bitch, saying “you have to own it,” which raised eyebrows. Given how close the group had become, we’d all been visiting one anothers’ homes; I spent time with her husband playing board games, and we spoke about fiction at enough length that he lent me his copy of Hawksmoor. Our children played together, and my eldest child often asked to go to visit.

Then one day, Alice began a new group of her own. The platform we were using informed me right away, so I congratulated her on it and sent her a message to wish her well; she responded “I'll still be coming to [your group] cause I love you guys,” but, well, that was the last I ever saw of Alice.

Weeks passed, but Alice, along with almost half of our group’s core membership, were no longer in attendance. With a feeling of growing dread, I asked around and checked the online records, and it became clear where the missing members had gone—straight into Alice’s new group. In fact, her group consisted almost entirely of members she’d poached from our own. I still have the emails from that time; after discussion with the remaining members, we reluctantly concluded that Alice needed to be removed from our roster.

A torrent of protests followed. Alice wrote about how she was a very emotionally sensitive person and it deeply hurt when we “cut [her] off from those relationships” with her close friends (who agreed that she had obviously poached our members and should be removed).

Of course, all this trouble and misery could have been avoided had she shown simple decorum to begin with. And things might have even been smoothed over if she’d apologized for poaching our membership, or made some face-saving admission that “mistakes may have been made,” or just given any attempt at reconciliation. But no; she was a victim, she was hurt—and she muddied the water enough that the entire group was shaken up in the aftermath. Even now, digging through those emails makes me sick to my stomach; what about the hurt and frustration she’d caused when she fractured our group?

What Alice did wasn’t illegal. It was totally nonviolent. Yet it ruined the group I had painstakingly built over the course of a year, and tarnished the reputations of everyone involved. There is no way for anyone affected to seek redress or compensation.

More Examples

There are more examples from my own life that I could give—many more. But the truth is that I honestly don’t want to. Being victimized by those who are so egocentric that they react like aggrieved victims to the problems they themselves have caused leaves one little recourse except to move on. What else can we do, when dwelling on these little deaths casts a shadow over better times? But unless you’ve lived a charmed life—or your politics are so broken that you can’t admit there’s ever been a mean woman or girl to walk the face of the Earth—you have an example of your own.

These are the kinds of things I want you to think about when I make the broad, general statement that we are virtually helpless in the face of feminine wickedness.

We have no such trouble noticing and responding to men behaving destructively. Masculine misbehavior is stark, shocking, and even brutal; our vocabulary is brimming with graphic words like vandalism, rape, arson, thievery, molestation, fraud, assault, murder. Males commit such crimes at much higher rates than women; for example, here’s a comparison of male and female crimes from across the pond:¹

Our legal systems are finely tuned to detecting and punishing overt criminality and exploitation, and we find men are the primary perpetrators.² But more feminine misbehavior goes without response. When people say or do destructive things—especially without any obvious strategy or benefit to themselves, as Natalia did, we find it hard to notice, or even clearly name or classify the behavior, let alone take steps to stop it.

Yet though the legal system may not try to classify feminine misbehavior, the psychological profession has been dealing with these kinds of problems for some time. And while terms from cluster B personality disorders that apply disproportionately to men like antisocial or narcissistic are well known, less well appreciated are conditions such as borderline personality disorder, which is much more common in women.³

Borderline personality disorder is a kind of mirror-image to psychopathy. It manifests in a variety of ways—in unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, spending sprees, or binge eating, depending on the person; such behaviors take their toll on those who know them, leading to dramatic and unstable personal relationships.⁴ A recent meta-analysis finds the prevalence for borderline personality disorder is approximately 2%,⁵ similar to rates for psychopathy. But the causes are different: emotional volatility, extreme sensitivity to real or imagined slights, an unstable sense of self. And while psychopathy is commonly associated with emotional deficits and a lack of empathy, borderline personality disorder is associated with heightened emotion.⁶

Is borderline personality disorder literally the thing that went wrong with Alice or Natalia? That’s hard to say. Maybe they were really just psychopaths; there are psychopathic women and girls out there, just as there are borderline men. But borderline personality disorder is an explicitly feminine problem, stemming from causes that differ wildly from the cold, calculating motivations for overtly criminal behavior. So if we were to ask why someone suffering from borderline personality disorder kept poisoning their relationships with family or friends, would we really be satisfied with an explanation that they were motivated by a rational desire to benefit, even at the expense of others? Look as long as you like, the motivation never quite seems to be there.

Missing Motives

In criminal cases, the prosecution is often very interested in establishing a motive, anticipating that bad behavior is at least somehow rational. Having an explanation for destructive behavior makes it much easier to believe that an injustice has been done. As a New York legal team explains:

[I]t comes down to human nature. Juries are made of human beings, and human beings like to know why something happened. Without a reasonable explanation for why someone assaulted another person or killed them, for example, it’s very hard for people to understand. When a crime appears to be unmotivated, that can lead to reasonable doubt in a juror’s mind.

I wouldn’t be surprised if things were just the same way in Sumeria. Yet, the assumption that rational motives drive most bad behavior is not as plausible as people like to think. I’ve written before that selfish people do not benefit, overall, from the harm they cause others. Moreover, a great deal of bad behavior is hard even to conceptualize as selfish; it’s often just dysfunctional and impulsive. Nearly half of the adults in America eat to obesity; estimates of smartphone addiction across the developed world vary between 20% and 35%.⁷

What is the motive for obesity or smartphone addiction? What was Natalia's motive for lying, belittling her mother, and constantly coming up with new explanations for lying? We might wonder whether she was competing sexually with her mother for the affection of her stepfather Jimmy, or whether she wanted attention from her classmates, or was just really angry. But the result is so obviously bad for Natalia herself that we tend to shrug, or become confused, or think “Well she got what she deserved.”

That is why these stories continue to form the fabric of our lives. We wring our hands over psychopaths lacking feminine traits like empathy or social connection, but when we see lives threatened and destroyed by drama and gossip, we hesitate. Is drama such a big deal? Is gossip really so bad?

Well think back. Do the math. Because it adds up. All the little things—the exclamations, the snipes and “harmless jokes.” The white lies, the “innocent” gossip, the angry outbursts, the passive-aggressive games. The complaints, the selfish tears, the hurt, despairing demands for an explanation: “Why are you doing this to me?” None of it can be addressed, and there can never be accountability, because every act, every utterance, every destructive instinct is completely deniable in and of itself. And of course none of it ever forms a pattern, does it? And if you insist that it does, that there really is something wrong, then what’s wrong is, of course: “Why do you hate me?”

Psychopathy is a clinical term with broad cultural recognition; most people don’t even know what borderline personality disorder is. But we should. Because without having the language to describe or discuss what is happening to us, we’re at the mercy of the whims and wiles of disordered women. And ultimately, so are they.

1. U.S. violent crime victims, by gender 2022. (2023, October 26). Statista. Retrieved February 24, 2024, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/423245/us-violent-crime-victims-by-gender/

2. Cynical readers might suspect that if these rates compared two different ethnic groups, that the gross inequities in our culture would be to blame. But this is men committing crimes we’re talking about here, and nobody feels like doing that.

3. Borderline Personality Disorder. (2021, August 19). Psychology Today. Retrieved February 24, 2024, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/borderline-personality-disorder

4. Borderline Personality Disorder. (n.d.). NIMH Publications Catalog. Retrieved February 24, 2024, from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/sites/default/files/documents/health/publications/borderline-personality-disorder/borderline-personality-disorder.pdf

5. Volkert, J., Gablonski, T. C., & Rabung, S. (2018). Prevalence of personality disorders in the general adult population in Western countries: systematic review and meta-analysis. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 213(6), 709-715.

6. Roters, J., & Book, A. (2023). Using the HEXACO to explain the structure of borderline and psychopathic personality traits. Personality and Mental Health.

7. Olson, J. A., Sandra, D. A., Colucci, É. S., Al Bikaii, A., Chmoulevitch, D., Nahas, J., ... & Veissière, S. P. (2022). Smartphone addiction is increasing across the world: A meta-analysis of 24 countries. Computers in Human Behavior, 129, 107138.