by Sady Doyle
A Boy’s Best Friend
Our age is not the first to embrace bonkers baby-raising techniques. Before you were meant to strap your baby to your chest so that it wouldn’t grow up to be a sociopath, you were meant to stop your baby from loving you so that he didn’t grow up to be gay.
Heterosexual manhood, as per Sigmund Freud, was something men obtained only by rejecting their mothers. Boys had to get over their foolish, babyish primary attachment to the woman who cared for them and learn to crave the father’s patriarchal approval. This meant that the boy would learn to see his mother as other men did: as something lesser, subhuman, a mere woman to be subjugated. It was a necessary and healthy step toward growing up and subjugating other women. But some men never made the leap. Their love got stuck somehow, and stayed with the mother rather than going forth to the father and then the world. The consequences were disastrous. Or at least they were as far as Freud was concerned.
Freud claimed that nearly all gay men had close attachments to their mothers; “this attachment [is] produced or favored by too much love from the mother herself,” he wrote, casting mothers’ affection for their own children as inherently inappropriate and even abusive.27 This emasculating tenderness was particularly harmful in single-mother families where “the boy was altogether under feminine influence.”28 The only way to preserve heterosexuality was to preserve patriarchy: fathers had to be present and dominant in order to give boys the correct understanding of a woman’s role. “The presence of a strong father would assure for the son the proper decision in the selection of his object from the opposite sex,” Freud concluded.29
The figure of the emasculating, effeminizing, too-much mother—called, variously, the “overprotective” mother, the “domineering” mother, the “seductive” mother; Irving Bieber, whose 1962 book Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals was considered the definitive text for many years, called her the “close-binding-intimate mother,” or CBI—was omnipresent in mid-twentieth-century psychology. She could be castrating and emasculating, or she could coddle her boys into marshmallows, but either way, she was the mother of monsters, the deviant from whom all other deviants sprang.
This vampiric figure would have been on the mind of every psychiatrist who handled Gein or who noted that “his attachment to the mother was closer than to the father.”30 His doctors tried to explain necrophilia the same way they explained same-sex attraction because, in their eyes, it was more or less the same problem. Whether Gein went for dead women or live men, his sex life did not contain the “correct object.”
Nor did it matter what his reasons for preferring his mother were; it didn’t matter that his father hurt him, or that his mother, he claimed, was kind. Being a functional man within patriarchy meant knowing whose side to take. Only a pervert would prefer his mother to his father; only a bad mother would permit that sort of excessive love. Given the terms of psychiatric diagnosis at the time of her son’s capture, Augusta never had a chance of being seen as anything but a monster.
In the twenty-first century, the “domineering mother” theory is remembered as an artifact of a less enlightened time. The only people who uncritically cite Freud on homosexuality are gay conversion therapists. But, thanks in part to Gein’s massive influence, the CBI mother stays trapped in amber within serial killer lore, where nearly every killer turns out to be the work of some too-much mom.
“There are remarkably many serial killers whose mothers showed [a] tendency to be highly controlling, overbearing, or overprotective of their sons,” warns Peter Vronsky in his bestselling Serial Killers.31 Serial killing, he argues, reflects a malfunction in “a boy’s ability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother—a challenge not faced by females.”32
This connection has become so anecdotally widespread as to seem self-evident. There’s an entire reality show, Murderers and Their Mothers, dedicated to showing how women become responsible for their children’s crimes. Their parenting errors range from routine sexual abuse and bestiality (for the mothers of sadistic sexual predators Fred and Rose West) to letting their sons watch horror movies (for the mother of Daniel Bartlam, whose son killed her whilst reenacting a scene from the very un-scary soap opera Coronation Street).
By the time Edmund Kemper, the “Co-Ed Killer,” was interviewed by FBI profiler John Douglas, he could cite binding-mother theory chapter and verse. His mother, his horrible, domineering mother (he said) had driven him to kill; she made him sleep in a locked basement, instead of upstairs with his little sister, and sent him to live with her husband’s parents after he’d been caught playing “death-ritual games” with the younger child.33
The stay with his grandparents, by the way, ended when Kemper shot and killed them both. Clarnell Kemper’s generosity in taking her son back in after these events seemed to be lost on him. Kemper claimed that, because he was unfairly framed as a threat to women, he had no choice but to repeatedly rape and murder young women, most of them students at the college where Clarnell worked as an administrator. This culminated in Kemper killing his mother, decapitating her, and raping her neck hole. He also threw her larynx into the garbage disposal, which “seemed appropriate…as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over the years.”34
Bizarrely, Douglas—whose work as a profiler is so widely renowned that he provided the real-world inspiration for The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon character Jack Crawford—seemed completely taken in by Kemper’s excuses. In his book Mindhunter, Douglas notes that Clarnell “was popular with both administrators and students. She was considered a sensitive caring person you could go to if you had a problem or just needed to talk something out.”35 Yet he ultimately chooses to believe Kemper when he claims that Clarnell “treated her timid son as if he were some kind of monster,” and that this was sufficient reason to kill her; “made to feel dirty and dangerous without having done anything wrong, his hostile and murderous thoughts began to blossom.”36
I mean: As if he were a monster? As a child, Ed Kemper stalked his second-grade teacher, lurking outside her window with a bayonet. By thirteen, he had dismembered not one, but two of Clarnell’s pet cats, decapitating one of them and mounting its head on a pike.37 Beginning at age fourteen, Kemper killed three members of his own family, seemingly just for fun, and he did not initially have the presence of mind to blame his bad actions on others: after his first serious crime, the murder of his grandparents, he told police that “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.”38 Add to all this the fact that Kemper was so enormous that adults had no ability to subdue him—by fifteen, he was six feet, four inches tall; he grew to be six-foot-nine and weighed at least three hundred pounds—and it should not be hard to understand why Clarnell kept her son behind a locked door at night. She may have been a flawed woman or an imperfect parent, but even the saintliest mother would have trouble sleeping next to a giant with a decapitation fetish. And in fact, that is exactly how she died; Kemper got into her bedroom and bludgeoned her with a hammer while she was sleeping. Her fear was never irrational.
Kemper was a smart man and an expert manipulator. He was once pulled over with two live victims in his car, both of whom were bleeding to death; he was able to convince the security guard who stopped him that the girls were just drunk and that he was taking them home. Kemper had also been assigned to administer psychological tests to his fellow prisoners and, as Douglas himself notes, “knew all the buzzwords” of his era’s mental health treatment; he could easily have fabricated a domineering mother on demand, especially for a mental health professional like Douglas, who came in looking for a mom to blame.39
Yet the obvious interpretation of Kemper’s story—Kemper is trying to make his victim seem less sympathetic and thereby minimize his own culpability—never occurs to Douglas, the expert sent to figure him out. Blaming the mother is such an entrenched part of how we see male violence that allowing a murderer
to define his victim doesn’t seem unethical if she’s also the woman who raised him. No matter what the evidence says, if the son who killed his mother says she had it coming, he’s the one we’ll believe.
Female Parts
Domineering-mother theory is also at the root of one of the most pernicious rumors about the Gein case: that Gein was transgender. To quote one typically heated account: “This grave-robbing abomination perpetrated some of the most ghoulish outrages ever committed by a man—and all because he wanted to be a woman, a longing prompted by his abiding love and reverence for his deceased, domineering mother.”40
This portrayal of Gein is echoed by his fictional doppelgangers. There’s Norman Bates wearing Norma’s clothes—though Norman never “wanted to be a woman” so much as he sometimes thought he was a specific woman, his mother. There’s Buffalo Bill, sewing his Gein-like skin suit after being rejected for gender confirmation surgery.
It’s important to remember here that Gein’s own rationale for his crimes was explicitly misogynistic; he told his evaluators that “Mrs. Worden [was] a very loose and disreputable woman who deserved to die” because she’d dated a man who had another girlfriend, and that Mary Hogan was similarly tainted because she worked at a bar.41 His descriptions of his victims’ sexual sins were vivid and passionate—he was so outraged by Bernice Worden’s love life that he wept tears of fury. Yet, in our popular retellings, Gein’s sexualized violence against female bodies—his need to, literally, treat women like objects, making chairs upholstered in female skin and coffee tables out of shin bones—is always bound up, somehow, in the terrible femininity of his body. As far as the world is concerned, Gein is not terrifying because he hated women, but because he loved them. Or, worse, because he was one himself.
To be blunt: I don’t buy it. Gein was schizophrenic. Comparing his complex, self-created mythology to the relatively straightforward experience of gender dysphoria—the average trans woman’s unshakable conviction, not that she wants to be a woman, but that she is a woman, and her body doesn’t match up—betrays a mistrust of transgender experience more than anything else. Transgender women who are denied the right to transition kill themselves. They do not, as Gein did, make soup bowls out of human skulls.
Also, Gein was not the one to bring up his gender identity. The idea seems to have been imposed from the outside, by his interrogators. K. E. Sullivan, in a paper examining Gein’s impact on the “trans killer” stereotype, notes that the media may have decided on Gein’s gender well before Gein himself provided any input: “Life magazine, which ran an 8-page pictorial sporting the headline ‘House of Horror Stuns the Nation’ two weeks after Gein’s arrest, announced that Gein ‘wished he were a woman.’ This pronouncement is surprising, given that at this point in time Gein had yet to be examined by a psychiatrist,” Sullivan writes.42 Even the police working the case were reportedly confused.
Gein’s eventual psychological report made note, multiple times, of his “extreme suggestibility.” It’s why he was found unfit to stand trial; you couldn’t put him on a witness stand. “Questioning this man requires a great deal of tact because he is extremely suggestible and will almost invariably agree to any leading questions,” one doctor wrote.43 Meanwhile, the section of Gein’s confession that concerns gender identity is entirely comprised of leading questions. The interrogator, Joe Wilimovsky of the Wisconsin State Crime Lab, confronts Gein with detailed scenarios—“do you ever have any recollection, Eddie, of taking any of these female parts, the vagina specifically and holding it over your penis to cover the penis so you couldn’t see the penis, and just see the vagina of a woman?”—and occasionally assures Gein that he already knows these scenarios to be true, whether Gein says so or not.44 He says, repeatedly, that he is helping Gein to accept the truth, which he knows and Gein doesn’t: “I am trying to clear your mind in this respect,” he tells him. “You see that I know about these things, that I understand.”45
Gein goes along with this—he apparently went along with most things—but his responses are brief half-sentences along the lines of “I suppose I could say no,” or “it’s possible,” or “well, part of that is true.”46 He tells no stories, volunteers no details. It’s not that he’s afraid of revealing something shameful; elsewhere, he tells Wilimovsky exactly how he oiled the face skins to keep them wearable. It’s more likely that he doesn’t share details about his life as a trans woman because he doesn’t know any—he’s waiting for Wilimovsky to supply them, to tell him the next thing he’s supposed to say. The whole confession eventually had to be thrown out; this was partly due to the fact that police had used undue force on Gein after his arrest, throwing him against a wall hard enough that he could have incurred a head injury, but with Wilimovsky’s shady interrogation tactics on display throughout the record, it’s harder than it should be to regret the loss.
To be clear, if Gein were a trans woman, that wouldn’t be shameful (there are plenty of other things for Gein to be ashamed of), nor would it mean that all transgender women are crazed killers. Some trans women have, in fact, claimed Gein, either as a historical figure or through one of his fictional incarnations. Jos Truitt has tied The Silence of the Lambs and Buffalo Bill to a whole history of trans women who were rejected for gender confirmation surgery because they were seen as too queer or too broken or too feminist to “really” be women. Truitt finds power, she writes, in seeing Buffalo Bill as a woman “who was pushed to her most heinous acts by the dismissal of medical gatekeepers.”47 To do so is an act of “claiming and owning the traces of those who came before me, represented as horrifying monsters in cissexist stories.”48
You can see the appeal: the heart of American horror as a woman, lashing out because the world refuses to honor her truth. Yet, though that female desperation may well drive Buffalo Bill, for the historical Gein, the evidence doesn’t stack up. It seems far more likely that establishing Gein as someone who “wanted to be a woman” was a way to mark him off, not as transgender, but as a sissy—someone who valued femininity too much and masculinity too little, someone who had failed at being male within patriarchy.
In Bloch’s novel Psycho, Norman Bates tries to introduce his mother to psychology, particularly “what they call the Oedipus situation.” It goes about as well as you’d expect: “I don’t need to listen to a lot of vile obscene rigmarole to know what you are,” Norma insists. “Why, even an eight-year-old child could recognize it…. You’re a Mamma’s Boy.”49
And that, given the less-than-advanced state of gender relations and/or psychiatry in 1957, was pretty much the actual diagnosis for someone like Gein.
Which is to say: It’s not really Gein’s gender we’re worried about. It’s his mother’s. The enduring implication is that Gein wasn’t a real man because Augusta wasn’t a real woman. She was a ballbuster, a man-hater, and a breadwinner, a woman who usurped male prerogatives. Biographer after biographer mentions her desire for daughters (as if she injured her sons by failing to recognize the innate superiority of male offspring) or depicts her as inappropriately repulsed by male sexuality, seeing men as “lustful, sweating, foul-mouthed creatures” rather than masters to please and serve.50 In Psycho, Norma herself functions as a kind of female father: Her son’s name is literally Norma with -man attached to the end, his gender tacked on like a suffix or an addendum. She usurps the patriarchal right of running the household; she gives her name to the family line. Like any good patriarch, Norma Bates tries to make her son into a perfect image of herself. What makes her horrifying is that she succeeds.
It’s hard to believe that our terror of femininity could possibly run that deep; that we see women who give life as more frightening than men who take it. Then you remember that Gein cut a woman’s head off and made Fleshlights out of human corpses, and the worst thing we could think to say about him was that he seemed girly.
The Sins of Women
Feminists are often accused of seeing women a
s powerless, or blameless; framing women exclusively as victims, and leaving out the ways in which they can victimize others. Certainly, with a book devoted to valorizing monsters, I’ve more than laid myself open to the charge.
In some ways, I suppose, I’m guilty. I do think the T. rex in Jurassic Park was right to try to eat those children. She was a dinosaur, and they were in her way. I do think women—even the least lovable and most frightening women—arise from a context of violence and oppression, and can only be understood with reference to it. Context changes everything: look at Godzilla on her own, and she’s a guy in a rubber suit, but surround her with tiny model buildings and she’s fifty feet tall.
Yet we are not dragons. The archaic Mother can be ruthless, or brutal, because she is part of nature. Nature is beyond morality; it gives us everything we have and it kills us all. Human mothers are not natural. We are people, created by and accountable to our culture. This means we are accountable to other people—our children most of all.
The mother who stands out most to me, in our gallery of imagined Augustas, is Margaret White—the bellowing, towering, scripture-loving mom who has not a son, but a daughter, and whose flaws are therefore embodied to the world, not as a hulking male slasher, but as a poltergeist-ridden, possessed girl.
