Quote:
Originally Posted by DaddySpice
Someone just wants their 15 minutes of fame. Ho hum.
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It's a lot more complicated than that. It's a pathology known to psychiatrists as
hybristophilia. The word is formed from the Greek word meaning "to commit an outrage" + the term
philia (fraternal love).
There are thousands of people who exhibit the characteristics of hybristophilia. They are most often white women of a certain privilege. They are unhappy or bored in their lives, often in spite of being married or having children. They tend to be educated and successful in responsible jobs (or are married to someone with money) and usually are more physically attractive, and have more money, than the average person. So don't be surprised that Manson's fiancee is pretty. Most "jailhouse wives" are.
But somehow these women feel tremendously unfulfilled and unloved and their expectations of intimate relationships are abnormal. Oddly, the
identify with prisoners. They claim to "understand" them because they, too, are misunderstood by society and they see themselves as being in their own "prisons," no matter how absurd that may be. They also take a certain pleasure in demonstrating how little they care about societal conventions. They believe they're "different" and take a secret delight in outraging friends and family.
Some of them write to prisoners for a long time (through organizations that exist to hook prisoners up with pen-pals) before forming a close personal attachment, but when they do "fall" for one particular person, be it for their looks, or their "sad" history, or their neediness, they fall hard. They come to believe they are saviors to men who have nothing. The prisoner often knows just how to play these girlfriends to get affection, attention, gifts, and special privileges. They show extreme devotion and offer flowery declarations of love that the women respond to. And the women feel safe in the relationship because their dangerous love object is, literally, being kept in a cage.
Marriage is a way for the woman to convince herself that the prisoner is sincere in his undivided devotion to her. They get a powerful thrill from being the person the prisoner claims is "the only one who has every understood me." And the more heinous the criminal is, the more the woman can believe she
alone sees the good in this man. Her love is unique and she doesn't expect "ordinary" people to understand. In fact, she disdains those who would criticize her. Many women with this pathology lose their families rather than give up on this elaborate fantasy.
The jailhouse wives aren't looking for sex. They usually have never had fulfilling sex lives, so the fact that they can't have a normal partnership with their prison husbands means little to them. Fantasy is far better than reality to them. In that way, they are like extreme versions of women who ignore real men, preferring obsessive devotion to an entertainer or sports star they may never have met in person.
Author Julie Bindel has done a lot of research on this pathology and has several interesting observations. "... I began to see these women similarly to the white female sex tourists in Jamaica on whom I once did some research. The class privilege is all too apparent, as is the eroticization of 'otherness' and the image of the caged beast looking for its savior. It is easy to tell the 'death row divas' from the veterans [what Bindel calls women who are
really married to men who become incarcerated during their life together]. The women who have been with the men from before their convictions often appear to be poor and suffering from mental and physical ill-health. The tourists are sweet-smelling, well dressed and, invariably, white. They talk of having 'rescued' men whom no one else wants."
Bindel quotes Dr. Lorraine Sheridan, a forensic psychologist, who says, "These women have a relationship, in their perception, with an exciting, high-status person ... The death row romances take this a step further, in that they [the women] are able to have a reciprocal 'celebrity' relationship. There's also the factor of having nabbed an ultra alpha male, one who has carried out the greatest of violent acts."
Charles Manson Marrying Afton Elaine Burton: Why Would She Wed Him? | New Republic
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