Ted Bundy's Broken Arm
Why did I read three books about Ted Bundy over the Christmas season? Why is weakness in men so attractive sometimes? Also: I am shedding all my earthly possessions as I prepare to leave London
A few weeks ago I saw a tweet by a woman which said: “I know I’m kind of munchausen like phantom thread because I love a sick or injured man I need to take care of” accompanied an old photo of a very hot Colin Farrell with a crutch and his arm in a cast. I posted the tweet to my Instagram story with the caption “Ted Bundy’s ears pricking up” because I had just spent weeks reading about Bundy, and how he would disarm women by feigning injury, crutches and casts and hobbling. Some women, his surviving would-be victims, initially were sympathetic and then reported getting a strange apparently inexplicable feeling of dread and terror as they helped him carry his belongings, casting them away and running from him.
Others followed their initial instinct to not only be helpful, useful and kind but also more specifically to assuage the vulnerability of the man before them, who was performing a kind of Gee Shucks humbled acknowledgement of how unseemly it is to be compromised or weakened as a man. And there is something horribly compelling about this trick, this instinct of his, because many women have been privy to the artful exposition of weakness which is supposed to disarm the viewer. Feigning weakness for nefarious gain is not a male trait- obviously, claiming false victimhood is a sin much more readily associated with women than men, but almost by virtue of that being the stereotypical skew, a man who knows to do so has an unusual and useful advantage.
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