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Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2153
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - 6:26 am: |       |
Hi Caz
I understand what you mean when you say that Jack was driven by low self-esteem and anxiety about his lack of sexual prowess, and there may well have been an element of that.
But one could argue that a perceived lack of something or other is at the root of just about all human behaviour. The question is, why should Jack turn to ripping out wombs as opposed to doing something else?
It's as if a woman discovered that she could never have children, so went around killing everyone else's kids instead of, say, writing children's stories, becoming a tennis player, clawing her way up to head a business corporation......
Robert |
Caroline Anne Morris
Chief Inspector
Username: Caz
Post Number: 768
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - 1:30 pm: | |
Hi AP,
I’m still struggling with ‘the type of individual’ you saw in earlier posts of mine in which I described a possibly inadequate Jack, who felt he wasn’t master in his own home and took to being master of the streets of Whitechapel and its grubby whores to compensate for his perceived lack of stature in his natural environment.
You wrote that ‘we see in these posts’ a man who ‘frequented Soho ‘dancing’ bars’ and had sex with the pole dancers.
Where on earth did you get this extraordinary vision from? I don’t think I even mentioned Jack’s sex life, did I? You seem to be more obsessed with it than I am. You remind me of the chap who keeps seeing sex in random inkblots and then complains to his analyst “Me? Obsessed? You’re the one who keeps showing me the dirty pictures!” 
And you now imply, for some reason, that I see Jack as a ‘sexual predator’, and that I am stuck in a groove about it.
You’ve even got Robert thinking I said Jack was driven by anxiety about his ‘lack of sexual prowess’, which I don’t remember saying, or even putting forward as a suggestion for that matter, although I do think it’s a possibility, like many others.
I certainly couldn’t rule Jack out as someone who probably thought almost as much about the subject of sex as he did about the subject of himself. I have been led to believe that the vast majority of men are no different, whether they turn killer, poke women in the arse a bit, or never hurt the proverbial fly. You seem to have this picture firmly embedded in your mind of a poor pinball nerd who is totally out of his depth sexually, and also totally out of control as he happens to keep bumping into yet another damned whore of Whitechapel who gives him grief.
I actually see him much as you appear to see him, although in more general terms – an inadequate and twisted ball of confusion, unsure about where his life was going in general, and possibly about his sexuality and manhood in particular. But I also think he could have been very disappointed and envious, that he didn’t feel as good about himself as he imagined other men felt about themselves, couldn’t command the respect he saw his peers commanding, and so on and so forth. Male sex drive may only be a part of the power and control thing, but it seems naïve, and frankly a bit odd, to want to see it excluded altogether, considering the role testosterone presumably plays, and considering serial killers are almost exclusively male.
I allow for the possibility that Jack felt out of his depth in many ways in his everyday life, and only felt in control at the sight of another ‘dead’ whore at his feet. I do think he probably knew exactly where he was likely to find them, and went looking.
But I could be wrong.
Hi Robert,
I think Jack’s behaviour was just an extreme example of human behaviour we witness every day. Why do some abused kids go on to be abusive adults, when others vow never to inflict similar suffering on anyone else? And why do some privileged kids with loving parents turn out to be vicious and cruel, while some of the most under-privileged end up dedicating their lives to the needy?
I wouldn’t want to put Jack in a box, tie it up with string and label it, until I know a lot more than I do now.
That’s what I see AP doing, and more power to him if he knows enough to enable him to do so.
Love,
Caz
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Natalie Severn
Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 318
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - 3:19 pm: | |
Hi Caz,
I think Jack"s behaviour just an extreme example of behaviour we witness everyday
and that is more and more how I see his behaviour-though I have previously seen the butcher of Whitechapel as a "demon led" nutter rather than the murderous misogynist and sexual pervert that I myself have begun to glimpse.
I also think that with Victorian society being so male dominated and oppressive to women that there must have been a hell of a lot of people feeling pretty repressed about just about everything and its not that surprising that they produced JtR.
I"m gradually coming to a view about the case.
Best Natalie |
AP Wolf
Chief Inspector
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 889
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 - 4:53 pm: | |
Caz
it's no big deal.
Simply said and felt, I just do not see Jack's crimes as having anything to do with sex.
With life, yes, but that aint the same thing.
I do think that in the broadest sense possible we do agree with each other in our dream portrait of Jack, but might niggle over some of the fuzzy edges.
My only complaint earlier on was that things were getting too 'girlie-girlie' on this thread, and I never like that. |
Caroline Anne Morris
Chief Inspector
Username: Caz
Post Number: 778
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - 9:30 am: | |
Hi AP,
Yeah, but what is my ‘dream’ portrait of Jack?
I know what yours is because you keep telling me. But I thought I just went to a great deal of trouble explaining yet again that I have no fixed picture of Jack in my mind. I do have a few ideas of what Jack may not be, and that includes an asexual being.
They say obsessional love is akin to obsessional hate. If sex doesn’t – or can’t - interest your Jack in any way, shape or form, I do have a wee bit of trouble with your earlier bombing MacDonald’s analogy. Would an obsession to destroy a street woman’s ‘bits’ really afflict someone who has no more interest in marking his territory or the subject of sex than my cat, who had his bits taken away before we got him? Not to mention the penchant for lurking on the very streets where alley cats are bound to be hanging out?
Sorry to hear about your girlie complaint. Hope I haven’t just made it worse. I can recommend a good cream – I use Baileys Irish. Cheers!
Love,
Caz
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AP Wolf
Chief Inspector
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 891
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - 1:54 pm: | |
Caz
You are right of course, I don’t know what your dream portrait of Jack is, but I am glad to hear that neither do you. That makes things easier.
Sarcasm aside, I don’t believe I have been telling you what my dream portrait of Jack is either, because I don’t know that neither.
That makes things easier.
As I think you must be aware I have gone to great lengths in an effort to encourage people to look a little further than blithely labelling Jack’s crimes as ‘sexual’ in their origin, purpose and nature, and have dangled all manner of specimens in front of the audience in this attempt, creatures like Pitchfork who killed moths when they flew into the light rather than away from it but then attempted to make it look like the moths had flown into his net, which he never had in the first place.
I have never ruled out the very likely possibility that Jack was a serial killer motivated by a sexual purpose, I have merely said that the sexual purpose remains unknown and obscure to us.
And this is the part of the mystery that attracts me the most, for I would give a sexual purpose to this fellow if I could.
And lord knows I have tried.
I refer you to the orang-utan who threw his fruit out of the cage and then devised laborious methods in which to retrieve it. His obvious motivation was hunger, but the old chap wasn’t doing that because he was hungry, he was doing it to relieve tedium and more importantly to make himself hungry; now that aint the same thing as being hungry.
I see something of Jack in that.
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Erin Sigler
Sergeant
Username: Rapunzel676
Post Number: 13
Registered: 1-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - 3:41 pm: | |
A.P., if I could jump in here, I think I can clarify things a bit. For a long time I had trouble understanding how you could not label this series of crimes as sexual, but after discussing it with you at length in another thread, I think I finally have a pretty good idea. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying is that what Jack's murders were not necessarily motivated by what we think of as traditional (albeit warped) sexual impulses, but by a desire to destroy his victims, to obliterate what made them female and even what made them human (an attempt at total depersonalization which culminated in the mutilation on Eddowes' and Kelly's faces). You can call this sexual in the sense that his attack is focused on the victims'sex organs, but I tend to agree with A.P. that he's targeting their genital areas because of what they represent--female power (particularly reproductive power) in general, not simply female sexual power alone. It's as if he's spent his life feeling emasculated by women, so he responds by taking the power (which he feels is rightfully his) back, both literally and symbolically.
The distinction is a fine one, and I freely admit I may not have explained well, but I do think it's important to recognize that the distinction can exist. John Douglas mentions the case of a team of two serial killers, one of whom raped the victims while the other murdered them. The latter of the two, when asked about his role in the crimes, insisted that he did not wish to rape the victims, only to "destroy" them. I'm inclined to believe, like A.P., that this is the sort of killer Jack was.
P.S. Sorry about doing my bit to get things off topic here. I haven't quite decided what my position is on the original issue.
(Message edited by Rapunzel676 on February 25, 2004) |
AP Wolf
Chief Inspector
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 893
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - 4:22 pm: | |
Thanks Erin
you have almost captured a corner of my mind which I have not yet managed to capture myself.
But as right and correct as I think you are I do shy away from words like 'power' and 'targeting' in connection to these crimes, simply because there is a massive part of my mind that says 'fear' rather than 'power' and 'happenstance' rather than 'targeting'.
I see the male gorilla isolated in his cage for twenty long years and then finally - courtesy of the observing humans - being rewarded with the company of a female gorilla.
And what does he do?
He rips that female apart in a frenzy of... what?
It isn't sex is it? It's fear isn't it?
Isolation creates a void and vacuum where nothing ever really happens, and all our normal reactions and reflexes become perversely helter-skleter, where something that we could most secretly desire and lust after - in our mind - becomes in reality a savage affront to our isolated condition.
That is perhaps why I see Jack as being isolated from women rather than attracted to them.
Nice to hear from you. |
Caroline Anne Morris
Chief Inspector
Username: Caz
Post Number: 787
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2004 - 7:11 am: | |
Hi AP,
I didn’t detect any sarcasm in your first paragraph – I have been telling you endlessly that I don’t know what my dream portrait of Jack would be if I had one. It would have made things easier for both of us if you’d caught on a bit sooner.
The female gorilla was introduced to the male gorilla in his cage - his (enforced) territory. What would have happened if a male gorilla had been put in there instead? Would they have scratched their heads and arses a bit, then shaken hands and started swapping their filthiest jokes about bananas?
Jack went into the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street voluntarily. If the presence of Annie was so frightening, why did he stay? If the closeness of any of his victims made him react violently through fear, why did he allow himself to get so close, over and over again? A guilty fascination, perhaps? A fatal attraction, like the one that lures someone with a fear of heights to the edge of a cliff and perhaps over it, just to stop the fear?
I am trying to consider your arguments, but I still can’t discount the idea that there was a need to exercise power and control, which is inevitably bound up with testosterone, even if sex only reared its ugly head by association. If it was just fear and confusion and isolation from the opposite sex that drove Jack, why don’t we see as many Jills as Jacks reacting in this way and attacking total strangers?
Erin,
Jack ‘responds by taking the power back, both literally and symbolically’.
Which is pretty much precisely what I have been suggesting might possibly be the case! But this is a possibility that AP rejects, as is his prerogative.
Love,
Caz
(Message edited by Caz on February 26, 2004) |
Natalie Severn
Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 323
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2004 - 9:40 am: | |
Caz,must compliment you on making me burst out laughing again.I can picture all this so easily.
What I have real trouble with is a JtR veiled from the world almost in a nun like state of chastity and in terror and retreat from having copped sight of a woman having a pee[last time Hanbury Sreet was being discussed] or being frightened by the sight of Catharine walking unsteadily towards Mitre Square.
I understand that to bring attention to other suspects it can be helpful to turn things round
a bit but to throw out the evidence from the crime scenes which reveal a vigourous, obsessive
throatcutter and savage mutilator revelling in crude and repetitive display of his victims and stealing away with their organs---seems to be not to be viewing what was somehow.Best Natalie. |
AP Wolf
Chief Inspector
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 894
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2004 - 2:06 pm: | |
Caz
I can’t argue with much of what you say, as ever, apart from saying that when introducing primates together a period of distanced association is always best, where they can exchange stories through the bars and get to know each other before the gates are thrown open. As far as I am aware the territorial imperative always rests with the male gorilla so it would be impossible for him to ‘invade’ a female’s territory, and as he entered the female’s cage it would automatically become his territory, unless of course there happened to be another male about.
Perhaps me and you should let the argument rest there, as I do have considerable problems with your use of words like ‘power’ and ‘control’ when it comes to Jack’s crimes, mainly because they seem to imply some kind of male feeding frenzy inspired by the butchering of women, with the hungry shark biting out - not for flesh - but for portions of power and control which he sees in his walnut sized brain through his glassy eyes as more edible than the bloody flesh which flows through his teeth. And for me that is the smelly crutch piece of this argument, for I see a senseless, blind, unprovoked, unwarranted, meaningless rhyme to the crimes of Jack whilst you must shove them in the box in which these sort of crimes are usually shoved. There must be a reason and the reason must be sex, you say, it must be a grasping for power, domination and an urgent need for control, it must be a need to pay back that damned womb and take control, symbolically or otherwise… and then I see Colin Pitchfork, on a freezing winter’s evening standing there exposing himself to countless women and nothing ever happens in this winter wonderland of Pitchfork’s imagination, and then suddenly one little girl doesn’t react in the way that Colin planned in his sexual fantasy and ‘bang’ that girl is dead and mutilated. Colin didn’t want that, the girl certainly didn’t want that, but it happened, simply because a girl did something different, she confronted Colin’s fantasy with reality, and she were dead.
Colin gathered his power and control from the dark shadows of his fantasy, the cold reality flipped his mind and made him act in a way that he really did not want to, for his plan was to carry on exposing himself to women until the day he died, he collected the experiences like we collect co-op stamps, but when the blood dried Colin had done what he had done - murdered and mutilated two young girls - because they had got in his damn way, they had ruined his fantasy with their damn reality.
Now where in the devil’s groin is the power and control there, where the paying back, where the symbolism? They spoilt his party, that was all.
No Caz, let us call truce there.
|
Caroline Anne Morris
Chief Inspector
Username: Caz
Post Number: 798
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 1:39 pm: | |
Hi AP,
For the last time I am not shoving anything in a box.
You are using gorillas in cages and trying to compare them somehow with Jack, and you haven’t answered my question about what the difference would be in the isolated male gorilla’s reaction if he were introduced to another male, instead of a female. Your argument is no good if the stronger gorilla would similarly pulverise the weaker.
You accept that male gorillas are naturally territorial, even those who have been isolated against their will, and end up unnaturally violent as a result, due to confusion or fear or whatever. Yet you don’t appear to accept that Jack, a human male, might be similarly territorial, and that his extremes of behaviour toward women – not men apparently – could be caused by something other than your male gorilla’s dilemma of being kept away from the ladies for too long.
I don’t say there must be a reason, or that the reason must be sex, or the need to assert oneself, or to dominate, or whatever. I will just repeat that I can’t dismiss the possibility just because you happen to reject it. Explain to me why serial killers are almost exclusively male and I may be more willing to reject the quaint idea that testosterone might have something to do with it.
Ok, I’ll leave it there, but I will be trying to work out when eating my next banana exactly what kind of fantasy the female gorilla ruined for the male gorilla by showing up uninvited. You realise you’ve just ruined the perfectly good fantasy I would normally enjoy.
Love,
Caz
PS Nat, it’s great to have feedback about making people laugh with my drivel. That’s one of the biggest kicks I can get – thanks!
|
Gary Alan Weatherhead
Chief Inspector
Username: Garyw
Post Number: 546
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 2:52 pm: | |
Hi ALL
That is an interesting point that Caz brought up. Why do we never see female serial sexual killers attacking a mans genital area with a long bladed knife? There are surely emasculating women to be found in society. Could it be that women have found a different way to gain control and domination over the helpless and pathetic male of the species.
All The Best
Gary |
Kris Law
Inspector
Username: Kris
Post Number: 200
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 2:58 pm: | |
Gary,
What about Lorenna Bobbet? Not exactly a serial killer, but she certainly went berserk on the man's john thomas.
-K |
Gary Alan Weatherhead
Chief Inspector
Username: Garyw
Post Number: 547
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 3:10 pm: | |
Hi Kris
Yes I thought about her and her exploits with a knife. But, I was thinking about a more general means of control that women may choose to exercise over men.
All The Best
Gary |
Natalie Severn
Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 337
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 3:11 pm: | |
Hi Gary-I think Andy Warhol was attacked like this by some woman who said she represented SCUM[society for cutting up men].I don"t know much more than that but I think the woman was sectioned.
Best Natalie. |
Kris Law
Inspector
Username: Kris
Post Number: 202
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 3:24 pm: | |
Hi Natalie,
Valerie Solanis did attack Andy Warhol, she said he had "too much control over" her life. Despite the fact that he really didn't know her all that well.
But, she didn't attack his genitals, and actually didn't touch him at all, she shot him from about five and half feet away.
She shot another guy there too (through the hip) but he doesn't get much media attention. She then went to the offices of Maurice Girodias (publisher of books like Lolita and tropic of Cancer) and tried to kill him too, but he was in Montreal at the time. I assume she would have just shot him too though.
After that, she approached a beat cop in Times Square and handed him her gun in a paper bag, saying "I shot Andy Warhol, people are looking for me".
-K |
Gary Alan Weatherhead
Chief Inspector
Username: Garyw
Post Number: 549
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 3:33 pm: | |
Hi Natalie
I recall the incident you mention, but it dosen't seem like the idea behind SCUM ever really caught on with women.
A section sounds appropriate to me.
All The Best
Gary
P.S. Was Andy Warhol straight or did he play for the other team?
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Kris Law
Inspector
Username: Kris
Post Number: 203
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 3:38 pm: | |
Gary,
From what I've read, mostly asexual, but he did live with a man for most of the 70's, so I would wager on the other team.
-K |
Natalie Severn
Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 339
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 3:42 pm: | |
Hi Kris thanks for that.Quite right she shot at him.I knew her name was Valerie but couldnt remember the rest.
I wonder whether you could include women like Lucrecia Borgia and Catherine de Medici[the latter was a mass murderer and Lucrecia allegedly a poisoner.There seem to have been a number of such women in ancient Rome Nero"s mother was it Aggripine? and Messalina etc who never blinked about being brutal and ruthless towards their
adversaries.And when it came down to it Elizabeth and Mary were just as ruthless and able to order executions of adversaries etc as old King Harry.
Best Natalie |
Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2166
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 5:00 pm: | |
Hi all
I do think that sex can be overrated as a motivation - not just re JTR, but everywhere.
Nor do I believe that men think about sex once a minute, or whatever it is. I've just been dusting a room and the only thing on my mind was "when will this bloody end?"
Robert |
Gary Alan Weatherhead
Chief Inspector
Username: Garyw
Post Number: 551
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 6:31 pm: | |
Hi Robert
Men are said to think about sex every 30 seconds or something stupid like that. Speaking as a married man I know that I am not afforded that indulgence.
Best
Gary |
Michael Raney
Detective Sergeant
Username: Mikey559
Post Number: 144
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 6:34 pm: | |
All,
Yes, he was Gay. So what??????
Mikey |
Gary Alan Weatherhead
Chief Inspector
Username: Garyw
Post Number: 552
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 6:45 pm: | |
Hi Mikey
If he was gay, women could not exercise sexual influence over him in the same nefarious fashion they do with straight men.
All The Best
Gary |
Michael Raney
Detective Sergeant
Username: Mikey559
Post Number: 145
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 27, 2004 - 6:52 pm: | |
Gary,
Point accepted. I just misunderstood the conversation.
Mikey |
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