Meet the Femme Fatale

Source: Author's drawing

In today’s rape-aware climate, allegedly predatory males aren’t given an easy pass: Just ask Bill Cosby. I was about to celebrate 24 hours of not noticing a headline about him in a major news source when I saw a new one on the website of People...and then another on Vanity Fair.

Is the behavior that Cosby is accused of rare among famous men? And are men, famous or not, unique in employing sexually coercive behavior?

Apparently, it is not—and they are not.

According to research psychologists from the University of Liverpool, women are often sexually coercive. But rather than rape, they use emotionally manipulative tactics like threatening blackmail or vowing to harm themselves. Or they resort to seduction via drugs or alcohol, a là the Cosby allegations.

According to the Liverpool team's paper, “The Ultimate Femme Fatale,” the women to watch out for are, not surprisingly, narcissistic. (Those are the men to watch out for, too.) The paper cites study after study showing that, in both men and women, narcissists’ inflated self-importance, deep need for admiration, and lack of empathy are statistically associated with persistent sexual persuasion, coercion, and aggression.

If unwelcome sex is practiced by narcissists of both sexes, why did this study call attention only to women? According to the authors, virtually all previous scholarly investigations of the relationship between narcissism and sexually predatory behavior had been conducted only with men. Theirs, they believe, is the first to include women. Their study sample was 329 adults, most of them undergraduate students at a university in northwest England. Narcissism was measured using a standard personality inventory that also rendered scores for a few personality measures not strictly part of the narcissism portfolio, such as feelings of entitlement and self-perceptions as a leader or authority figure. Sexually coercive tactics were measured by the Post-Refusal Sexual Persistence Scale, a 19-question survey that ranks coercive tactics by increasing severity.

Some highlights:

• In general, the higher either a man or a woman scored on measures of narcissism, the more likely he or she was to report having used sexually coercive tactics.
• Men scored significantly higher than women on measures of narcissism and sexual coercion. But, like men, narcissistic women were more likely than other women to be sexual bullies.
• When men perpetrated coercive sex, they often resorted to physical force. Women, however, were more covert and cunning, using lies and threats.
• Many men with a high sense of entitlement did follow the pattern of covert coercion. On the other hand, coercive men who saw themselves as leaders or authority figures were likely to use any kind of sexual persuasion on the Post-Refusal Sexual Persistence Scale—except if they also scored high on classic measures of narcissism. Men who scored high on that scale tended to favor emotional manipulation and taking advantage of an intoxicated target.
• Narcissistic men and women both reported that sexual refusals excited them, fueling desire and leading them to escalate tame situations into coercive ones.

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One may pore over results like this and gab about where Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, or any number of accused-but-not-convicted newsmakers may or may not fit in. But the news here is not that celebrities and politicians can be narcissists, or even that sexual predators can be. Long before this study, research had turned up solid evidence of all that.

The news is that narcissistic women can be sexually dangerous.

Their tactics differ from those of men. They may inflict guilt and fear more than bruises or broken bones. But it appears that sexual predation knows no gender boundaries when the potential predator has inflated self-importance, a deep need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. And sexual aggression by narcissists of either gender can be difficult to escape—really difficult.

For more information

Victoria Blinkhorn, Minna Lyons, and Louise Almond, "The ultimate femme fatale? Narcissism predicts serious and aggressive sexually coercive behaviour in females" in Personality and Individual Differences.

Source: Author's website.

By day Rebecca Coffey is a science journalist, contributing to Scientific American, Discover, Vermont Public Radio, and other radio and newspaper outlets. But by night she is a novelist and humorist.