Maria Campai was killed with her bare hands, perhaps for fun. “I wanted to know what it feels like to kill a person,” confessed the 17-year-old killer. We are faced with yet another heinous crime, committed by a young boy for trivial reasons. The narcissistic society is increasingly ruthless, selfish and dehumanizing: the other becomes a puppet to be manipulated, exploited and used for one’s own personal interests, without any empathy. People even kill for the sheer pleasure of it, and this motive is much more common than one might believe. But let’s try to dig a little deeper to try to understand the peculiar dynamics of this particular crime.

The glorification of feminicide

Among the various clues that the young executioner left online, in his social posts and in his research, two elements in particular struck me: the idealization of Filippo Turetta and the obsession with muscles. “Turetta good boy”, and again, “You will always be a hero”, he wrote online. The understanding, justification and glorification of feminicide is a sadly common dynamic in the “incel” world (i.e. the “Involuntary Celibates”, heterosexual males frustrated by the inability to establish sexual and sentimental relationships with women). In fact, the 17-year-old has demonstrated blatantly misogynistic, sexist and chauvinist attitudes on social media, which he also seems to trace back to a lack of female validation. “Being skinny all my life made me think about ending it, I couldn’t find a girlfriend (and I still can’t and I lost confidence in myself). But the day I discovered the gym and started training training and building muscle I kept going and now I’ve been going to the gym for a year. I regret a lot of things I did, but going to the gym isn’t one of them,” he was said.

What is bigorexia

This expression, combined with the infinite number of photos and videos where he proudly shows his voluminous muscles, may lead one to think that the young man also suffered from bigorexia, i.e. an obsessive compulsive disorder linked to the size of his muscles, which never seem to be big enough . The bigorexic person has usually experienced direct or indirect pressure (social models) on his body, and therefore tends to perceive it as too thin. This pushes him to abuse weight lifting, as well as products aimed at increasing muscle mass, from food supplements to anabolic steroids. It is a rapidly growing psychological disorder, which obviously affects men almost exclusively.

An offensive weapon

These extremely voluminous muscles are often used only for aesthetic purposes and sexual attraction, but in some cases they can also become a weapon of offense, which you want to test in everyday life. Let’s think for example of the White Brothers, who were also passionate about wrestling. Personally, I find overlapping dynamics between Willy Monteiro’s crime and Maria Campai’s murder: machismo, the exaltation of violence and brute force. With the aggravating circumstance that here we are not talking about a fight, but rather about a lucid and relaxed context. Exactly like the killer, who after committing the crime, seems to have continued his life as if nothing had happened, until the day of his capture.

Article updated on Saturday 5 October with new details