The issue of psychopaths emerges often in TRP.

Why do women love psychopaths?

Does is have to do with psychopathy itself, or it is because they become successful, and women are attracted to success?

I was actually prompted to write this piece after reading an interview of /u/Rollo-Tomassi. He states:

I would say that the reason the Dark Triad personality traits are attractive to women is because they were survival traits in the past. Those were the guys who got things done. Those were the guys who took care of their own. Those were the guys who were volatile enough to be fun in bed. Those were the guys who had the capacity to kill off a rival, to defend the woman with his life.

And in our evolutionary past, the guy who could kill someone, that had the capacity for violence, was a highly valuable guy.

Now, there has been a controversy in TRP around Rollo, lately, and I really don't want this discussion to revolve around it. I will simply state that I trust Rollo to offer the manosphere genuine insights on gender dynamics. As much as I value his comments on the societal issues, I think he often misses the mark when discussing evolutionary psychology. This is due to his upper-middle class, conservative bias: challenging the power structure feels threatening, when you're middle class and above, so he resorts to a "biological" explanation of the status-quo, including female attraction to the upper classes. So let's get things straight.

...OK, this statement from Rollo, above, is so wrong I don't know where to start. "the guys who got things done"? "took care of their own"? "defending the woman with his life"? This is certainly not the psychopath.

What is the psychopath, then?

Until recently, psychopaths were thought to have no empathy. Today we know that functioning psychopaths do have empathy, perhaps even more acute than other people. They are able to tune in to your feelings and figure you out. What differentiates them is that they don't use that capacity to feel connection and help others, but to manipulate them for their personal profit, inflicting a cost. They are the I Win - You Lose types. (In this regard, psychopathic empathy is like female empathy. Or, if you prefer it the other way around, female empathy is a psychopath's empathy.)

High functioning psychopaths are not unfeeling individuals. On the contrary, they have a vibrant emotional life. Their difference is that every emotion is self-centered, and give no shit whatsoever for other people's emotions or well-being. A psychopath can be profoundly moved by a majestic sunset, so much so he would just shove his own grandma down the cliff because she blocked a part of the view.

Let's get to the most interesting part: Why do women find them attractive?

You first have to understand the general mechanism by which women find behaviors in men attractive: Women are attracted to the leader of the band. The leader of their own band, was, of course, known. Leaders of other bands, less so. Now, the declaration of a man "I am the leader of a band" carries no value whatsoever. It is a "trash signal": has zero cost, and anyone can claim it. What does carry weight, and is a reliable signal, is exhibiting leadership behavioral traits. Leaders are largely defining (or expressing) the norms, so they lack inhibitive feelings. They lack shame, guilt, remorse. This allows them to extrude self-assuredness. This behavioral outlook is reliable, i.e. difficult to fake, because strutting around faking them, behaving as you like, assuming others are approving of your actions by default, etc, is most probably going to get you into a lot of trouble in the band, if you don't merit it. So humans evolved to actually use these negative feelings, i.e. shame, guilt, remorse, in order to be able to follow societal norms effortlessly, and keep out of trouble. And because of this particular evolution, the lack of shame, guilt etc, are reliable signs of high status, and women's attraction circuits lock in on them to be guided efficiently and reliably. I hypothesize that this mainly has to do with their extra-band, "Alpha", mating. (Read my Alpha vs Beta sex: their evolutionary origins. A very disturbing theory. article)

Now, consider a window of opportunity in a tribe, where punishment of unwarranted behavior is delayed. If you are "born" (I'm simplifying for clarity, psychopathy also has developmental etiology), so, if you are "born" predisposed to exhibit the "leadership" traits irrespectively of whether you are the leader or not, you get the chance to fuck the women and spread your traits before other men in the tribe find you out and off you.

This, then, is the evolutionary explanation of psychopathy.

Its Win-Lose nature doesn't confer "advantage" to the gene pool within which it emerges (the band, tribe, society), as Rollo claims. Psychopathy is an evolutionary HACKING of the female attraction circuits - and of the general population's good will. Psychopaths are social parasites. That's why in stable societies psychopaths are systematically weeded out: in primitive societies it was often the family's responsibility to kill the psychopath, while today they are put in prisons, if they act out their impulses.

Psychopaths are the real "toxic". Women crave them, they were built this way, can't help it. Left to their own device, women would fill the world with psychopaths, letting other men do the chore of raising them. And a world filled with parasites would be a world heading for disaster. Which is what many people claim to be the case, nowadays.