Sometimes two males combine their efforts in the sexual killing of women. Each brings a damaged history and personality. The combination then shows such additional features as male bravado, bonding and loyalty. In the best-known cases, one of the pair is the junior partner and the other the senior. This chapter looks at the lives of two such pairs: (1) Leonard Lake and Charles Ng and (2) the so-called Hillside Stranglers, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. Leonard Lake was disturbed by being abandoned by his mother. Charles Ng was subject to harsh discipline. Lake, who exhibited murderous sibling rivalry, formed the senior partner of the two. They aimed to collect a population of sex slaves. Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi both had disturbed backgrounds, Buono being the senior partner of the two. Bianchi was shunted around before being adopted. They sexually abused and tortured women before killing them.

This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.