October 30, 2013 • 30 mins
Whether in print or on television, true crime draws its largest audience from women. Caroline and Cristen autopsy the gory genre to understand the particularly female appeal of so-called "violence porn."
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupp
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristin's I'm Caroline And for our second Polloween themed episode
of this year, we are going to, rather than talking
about the supernatural, talk about scary things in the real world,
(00:28):
which to me are much scarier. Well, yeah, because they
can actually jump out and get you exactly, Well, I
guess racist costumes could jump out and get you too,
but yes, but we're going to talk about women in
true crime and specifically why women are so drawn to
this genre. And this first caught my eye with a
(00:48):
Time magazine article in September about the meteoric rise of
Investigation Discovery, which full disclosure. Investigation Discovery is part of
the House stuff Works and Discovery Communications family of networks,
and it's all centered around true crime shows. Yeah. It's
(01:13):
taking what is sometimes like a late night you know,
TV watching binge, and it's putting it on twenty four
hours a day. And it actually launched back in two
thousand eight and two thousand nine. It earned the tagline
of Your Guilty Pleasure. Yeah, and that with that tagline alone,
you can see how the channel is already in two
(01:35):
thousand nine starting to queue into its more female audience,
and now it is the fastest growing network for women
and the eighth most popular cable channel among women to
fifty four. And don't worry, this is not going to
be a major advertorial all episode long for Investigation Discovery.
But that is huge and notable growth. Yeah, and I
(02:01):
mean even just recently it's it's really jumped up by
Investigation Discovery or i D showed at increase over the
eighteen to forty nine year old female viewer demographic, making
it number four in daytime delivery. So it's not anymore
just like creepy crime shows that you watch late at
night with who's the guy on Unsolved Mysteries that I
(02:24):
watched as a Robert Walt, No, that's the other one. Anyway,
I watched it as a child and it scared me
so much, but I couldn't stop watching it. I wasn't
allowed to watch those kinds of face was creepy and
the screen was creepy because there was like a fog
machine all the time. Yeah. So, but anyway, it's taking
that fear and just spanning it over a whole day.
(02:45):
Well in the daytime delivery. It's also significant because that's
why in the Time magazine headline it asked the question,
is true crime the new soap opera for women because
we're watching it and not just at night but also
during the day and for those of you who might
not be familiar with I D shows includes things like
On the Case with Polazon, Final Witness, Wives with Knives,
(03:10):
and then it kind of goes on from there. You
get the general gist of it. Yeah, a lot of
a lot of shows featuring women both in the criminal
component and as the victim, a lot of them having
to do with uh, well, I'll just say that the
stereotype of like shows about you know, women going crazy
and killing their husbands and stuff like that exists for
(03:32):
a reason. Yeah. But the question is, though, especially for
those shows that aren't so much about the woman as
the killer crazed to killer, but instead where the woman
is often the victim of a male perpetrator, why some
people wonder would we be so drawn to watching that
almost putting ourselves in the place of that woman who
(03:54):
might be, you know, in the case of being stalked
or in some horribly abusive relationship, or who's who that
being murdered, and some scholars and also TV execs suspect
that it has to do with the fact that with
a lot of these true crime shows, it's not just
a glamorization of violence that's going on, but the fact
(04:16):
that it brings it full circle a lot of times
to that perpetrator being arrested. Right, it's telling the full story.
You're getting that satisfying conclusion. And as Brad Bushman points
out he's a communications and psych professor at Ohio State University,
it focuses as much on the consequences as the violent
act itself. It's not just talking about how some some
(04:39):
poor victim is being killed or assaulted. It is also
focusing on actual justice. And he also talks about how
women are increasingly comfortable with the genre itself, citing an
uptick in quote unquote violent female role models in the
media and changing societal norms. He's saying that, you know,
it used to be socially unex sceptible for women to
(05:01):
engage in such behavior, both the committing violent crimes and
even being interested in violence. Yeah, and Jane Latman, who
is Investigation Discoveries head of Development, told Time Magazine that
She thinks that watching these shows offers a quote unquote
cathartic journey for the female viewer that actually makes us
(05:26):
feel safer in the end, because it brings you face
to face with those true crimes that happen, brings you
face to face with these perpetrators, and then we see
them arrested and brought to justice. And so she says
it helps people kind of feel like, Okay, I can
(05:46):
go to bed and I'm not going to check my
door ten times. And similarly, Sarah Cazozak, who's the head
of production for I D, says that women might also
like it because it makes them feel comforted that, by
compare sin to all these crazy plotlines going on, their
families have to be normal. Yeah. I mean, you know,
(06:07):
the worst my mother does is drunk Facebook message me
or like text me from the department store. And so
I get a string of like ten texts and everything's
misspelled and and and it's confusing. But she hasn't murdered anyone. There,
You good? Good? Because yeah, a lot of these yeah,
they do focus on family sagas, and so by comparison,
my family is pretty tame. But Henry Schlife, who became
(06:32):
i D s president back in two thousand nine, had
previously run Court TV, which has a similar bent, and
he said that what we learned there, and certainly what
you can see here, is that women really love not
just the crime and justice genre, but the storytelling and
puzzle solving all around it. It feels very neat and
tidy when you're watching one of those shows. I don't
(06:53):
watch them because I will get sucked in. Um. I
have a friend who like obsessively goes how and just
like turn on crime shows and watches them all night long.
I would not be able to sleep, probably, But yeah,
I I tend not to want to get sucked in.
But I do agree that they are tied up very nicely.
You feel a sense of order in the world when
you when you watch these narratives happen. Yeah, And even
(07:16):
though Investigation Discovery is a relatively new network, um and
we've had shows in the past, things like Unsolved Mystery
and Court TV in a different kind of way we
had We've had true crime on TV for a while,
but not in the two fourth seven kind of format
of I D. But of course this true crime genre
(07:38):
and its appeal to women has been around a lot
longer in the form of true crime books. Yeah. Just
like women are the biggest audience for romance novels, we
are also the largest buyers of mystery books and suspense thrillers.
And as Jean Merley points out in her book The
(07:58):
Rise of True Crime Time, this genre, especially in the
written form, has been around for a very long time,
and she says that what looks like voyeurism or thrill
seeking may actually mask the gut level human desire to
comprehend the irrational. Yeah, and if you are a fan
of true crime, I do want to plug Jean Merley's
(08:19):
book because it is fascinating to take a deeper look
into this appeal and how it coincides with violence and society.
Um So, she talks about how modern true crimes earliest
appearance is made in the detective magazine in the nineteen
forties and fifties. Although in the nineteenth century we had
(08:41):
depictions that distance the killer through the language of monstrosity,
we already have. You know, they're obviously like more violent
texts that are going on before the nineteen forties and fifties,
but the language of it evolves, right, It's the whole
scary person standing in the shadows, that whole distancing. It's
(09:01):
it's not your husband or your cousin who's coming and
assaulting you or hurting you and your family. It's some crazy,
psychopathic other. And then this develops, and in the early
twentieth century we have Edmund Pearson's whose popular murder narratives
used more of a self mocking, almost sarcastic tone to
(09:21):
his crime stories, which then gives way to the hard
boiled style of crime fiction, which found its way into
the narratives of the thirties and forties. And with the
hard boiled style, which is really distinct to American crime writing,
it brings those true crime aspects to the forefront. It
(09:42):
gets gritty, there's graphic sex and violence. You often have
sordid urban backgrounds and fast paced, slangy dialogue. Yeah. And
then in the nineties sixties we start to see a
very interesting parallel two things going in opposite directions. Crime
narratives around this time end up running counter two issues
(10:05):
that are emerging in society, things like civil rights feminism.
Because you have a genre, a narrative that is intensely
gendered in its appeal, but very misogynist and its subject matter.
But it also on top of this avoids any discussion
of race and multiculturalism. And in terms of what's meant
by misogynist subject matter, it's continually the pattern of placing
(10:30):
the woman as the victim and usually being drawn in
by these men's charms. And so some more feminist scholars
too will will look at true crime as being very misogynistic. Um,
but it's also a reflection of in a response to
arise in violent and seemingly random crime that starts to
(10:52):
escalate in the sixties and then throughout the seventies, eighties,
and nineties, there's this enormous anxiety in American culture about
a specific type of crime that was interpreted as an
indicator of a widespread and irreversible decline in the care, compassion,
and regard for others. It's like it's just as society
(11:13):
was becoming almost more distance from itself, this coldness set in,
and so we have the rise of terms like psychopath
and sociopath to indicate the monster that first emerged in
those earlier nineteenth century texts. Yeah, it becomes more clear
for readers to try to use that term, that mothering
(11:37):
term of a psychopath or sociopath to indicate, Okay, well
this is the scary person. They obviously are not normal.
They don't have a conscience, so they are bad. There's
more of a black and white distinction there. And simultaneously
you can see this evolution from true crime making sense
of things like the Manson killings. When you have these
(11:57):
books from me out in the seventies and then in
the eighties and nineties, it's as though true crime takes
on almost an educational tech. Whereas Jean Merley points out,
all of a sudden, these consumers of true crime books
are able to talk about details of forensics work, profiling,
and highly technical aspects of criminology. People can talk about
(12:19):
blood spatter patterns and things like that. Yeah, but I
mean that's where we get the terms crime porn. I
mean that that people talk about when they talk about
these kinds of shows, because you start getting it moves
from the serials and the books of the thirties and
forties and fifties into television shows featuring all of this stuff,
and it shows close ups of bruises and blood splatter,
(12:43):
and people, particularly women, just can't get enough. And and
part of it is like, we have this rise of
a celebrity culture, and so a lot of these sociopathic others,
you know, these killers become their own sort of crazy
celebrity figures. Oh yeah, I mean take Manson alone. It's
(13:04):
there are still people who are followers of Manson because
of the notoriety that he received, even in two thousand thirteen,
there are still people out there. And we're about to
delve into the appeal of true crime to women specifically,
but before we do, let's take a quick break. So clearly,
the enduring popularity of true crime and its expansion from
(13:27):
magazines to books to television really does pray a lot
on societal fears, maybe changes in the domestic sphere, all
of the different societal changes that have been going on
in the past fifty years. But what is it more
specifically about this appeal to women. I mean, we've talked
(13:48):
about ideas that maybe we like watching these shows because
there's catharsist, we like to see justice, we like to
feel more normal in our day to day by comparison
and um. But Laura Browder wrote a study called Dystopian Romance,
True Crime and the Female Reader, and what she did
for it was really just talked to a number of
(14:12):
true crime addicts, specifically true crime books, right, and she
found that, Uh, it boiled down to the fact that
many of these readers, from all different types of backgrounds,
they had, all different types of professions, typically read these
types of books to help themselves cope with this overarching patriarchal,
arical violence that they have encountered in the past and
(14:33):
that they fear still in the present. Because we talked
about how, you know, like the shows in particular, it
ties it up all nice and tidy and so you
feel you feel better and more reassured that everything's going
to be okay. Well, these women that she talked to
are using these books kind of in the same way,
reading about this terrible crime that happens, how it is solved,
(14:53):
but also trying to get out of it something along
the lines of what do I do in that situation?
They're actually kind of seeking answers from it. Yeah, And
when you think about women's fear of violence, there is
a counterintuitive aspect to it, because research shows that we
fear becoming victims of violent crime more than men, even
(15:14):
though excluding things like rape and sexual assault, men are
more likely to be involved in violent crime. And on
top of that, study found that women are more turned
off by thoughts of gory experiences, which adds to me
another fascinating dimension to this true crime appeal, because in
(15:37):
a way, it's it's this direct violation of a taboo
because we're not supposed to, you know, be into violence.
We are turned off by Gore, We are afraid of Vince,
So why why would we why would we want to
confront it in such a way. And so, yeah, there's
this idea that it helps us get into the mind
of who our potential attackers might be, so that if
(16:00):
that happens in the real world, then we'll know how
to escape, right But she points out that, as you know,
reassured us that might make you feel as the reader,
you know, you still will never be able to get
into the minds of random crazy killers, because that's just
what they're gonna do. Random crazy killers are going to randomly,
(16:20):
crazily kill people, and there's not much that you know
you can do. It's like you're building a bomb shelter
underneath your house and filling it with spam, that kind
of thing. But nevertheless, because it's presented as true crime,
it is the reality of those situations happening that really
(16:42):
pulls a lot of women in. There was one woman
who told Browder, why would anyone read fiction when the
reality is so much more extreme? And she talks about
how true crime books usually will involve photographs of the
killer and the victim, and sometimes both of them together
if they had been a couple, for instance, and uh,
(17:02):
and there's also speaking of uh, you know, the man
killing the woman and if they had been a couple.
There is a lot of sex that gets tied up
with true crime as well, and for some readers, in
reading true crime, women vicariously experience kinky sex and violence
and survive. And that is also an appeal to some women. Yeah,
(17:25):
that's that's actually a really interesting point. And and she
does links. She links these books and this genre not
only to the taboo of looking at porn, but kind
of you know, where that romance novel that they picked
up at the drug store leaves off. So you know,
a lot of times this this true crime, these these
(17:46):
terrible crimes that are written about happen among families or
among couples, and so you know, she she has this
narrative of okay, well, see you read the romance novel
where the dominant man, you know, swoops in on his horse,
you know, five, comes in and he marries the princess
or whatever. But then what happens after the domineering man
comes in? What happens when Fabio turns out of the
(18:09):
head Bundy, right, exactly. Yeah, And she talks about how,
in contrast to romance novels that culminate in marriage, true
crime culminates in punishment. And that's the satisfaction gleaned of
seeing these men whom the female protagonists might have been
madly in love with, at some point, you know, we
(18:31):
see him brought to justice somehow, hopefully, right. Yeah, a
lot of the women she talked to, you said, they
stopped reading when he got sentenced or whatever. Yeah, they
don't care what happens. As long as he's behind bars,
then that's fine. And in addition to sexual politics that
are going on within these books, there obviously are, as
(18:51):
we have implied, plenty of gender politics to dissect as well.
For instance, Broughder notes how there was a boom in
true crime that paralleled the rise of the women's movement
in the seventies. Yeah, and then she focuses a lot
also on one true crime narrative in which the killer
(19:11):
was a woman, and not only was the killer a woman,
but she killed her children, so already that's two strikes
against gender norms. And she focuses a lot on people's
perceptions of that woman and how she was so much
less sympathetic because of the fact that she wasn't playing
(19:32):
gender right basically, and other scholars point out that, you know,
this style of book, the style of writing lets you
be kind of an armchair killer. So whoever the killer is,
particularly if it's female, like it lets us act out
or or imagine the things that we would never do
in reality. But here, in that particular case, for instance,
(19:53):
when the killer is a killer because she has killed
her children, all of a sudden, that is so much
less palatable to the reading audience. And that's one reason why,
perhaps in a more recent study that came out in
also looking at why women are drawn to true crime novels,
um women consider true crime books more appealing when the
(20:17):
victims are female, rather than if you are reading about
a female murderer or sociopath or psychopath, whatever kind of path. Yeah,
and a lot of that goes back to what we
touched on as far as women being able to put
themselves in that vulnerable woman's position and gain tips. It's
(20:38):
like being able to try to keep an eye out
learning what you can, learning those fitness relevant tips to
keep your own self safe if you were ever to
happen to get in a situation like this. But at
the same time, there is something that scholars call the
fear victimization paradox, which is that mismatch of our elevated
(20:59):
ray of fear that something is terrible is going to
happen to us, that we are going to be assaulted, murdered, etcetera,
versus how men are far more likely to be the
victims of violent crime. But still at the same time,
some caution that the escalated true crime media saturated environment
(21:23):
that we are living in where if you turn on
the news, that's a lot of violent crime. If you
turn on you know, obviously Investigation Discovery, it's crime to
four seven. And then if you're also reading these books,
it's kind of everywhere that there's a problem with it,
almost turning it into fiction. There is a distancing effect
(21:46):
when when we look at the statistics, there are you know,
crimes that are happening specifically to women. And we also
to have to talk about the fact that a lot
of times, not just in true crime, but also in
news stories that we hear about with women as victims,
it's always white women. For the most part, it's white
(22:07):
middle class women, whereas crimes against women of color are
severely under reported. Yeah, I I those are all incredible points, because, Yeah,
when you're sitting there on your comfy couch with your
popcorn or whatever, and you're watching a show about some
grizzly murder, it is easy, especially if you're watching a
(22:28):
marathon of it. It is so easy to sink into
that feeling of like I'm safe, it's fine, you know,
this is this is just entertainment, and so it completely
distances us from actual statistics of sexual violence. Yeah, and specifically,
you know, one five women is raped nearly twice that
(22:50):
have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking, and sexual assault
rates are higher for black women than white women, according
to the Office on Violent against Women in the National
Institute of Justice. Specifically, the rate of intimate partner violence
against black women is about twice that for white women,
with economic distress hugely proportionate to violence, and instead what
(23:15):
we hear from these shows are anecdotes and twisted lessons
about violence and crime, all starring white women, and the
attackers are depicted as strangers and don't worry because forensics
science will solve everything. But when you look at the
reality of these situations, that's just not the case. Typically
it is someone the attacker is someone the woman knows intimately,
(23:36):
whether it's a family member or a close friend, and
often those attackers are the attacks themselves are not reported,
and the attackers don't go to jail. Yeah, and this
is kind of a side note, but in Gertrude Stein
actually wrote about this for the New York Tribune in
an article called American Crimes and How they Matter, and
(23:57):
she said, there are only two kinds of time that
people care about. The crime hero and the crime mystery.
All the other crimes everybody forgets as soon as they
find out who did them. And if we fast forward
that too today, it really is almost that blown up
out of proportion, because it's almost as though our crimes
(24:18):
are becoming dehumanized and victims become characters, and everything is
so formulaic to the point to where it's always the
same cast of characters looking the same and in the
same socio economic class, where that's a very unrealistic snapshot
(24:38):
of what true crime is truly. Yeah, and I mean
it is. I don't want to take away anyone's television
or anything, but it is too bad that a lot
of the time shows like this, networks like this, Uh,
they attract so many eyeballs, and that means that eyeballs
are not going to your local news, They're not going
(25:01):
to your newspaper, so you're less aware almost and and
you know, maybe you're not. But I worry that maybe
people are less aware of the actual crime that's going
on in their own community, the stuff that they really
need to worry about, versus things that are more abstract.
And I do have to what we do have to
give props to Investigation Discovery for some self awareness of this,
(25:25):
because they do promote educational things in terms of teaching
women about crime, risk and safety and domestic violence. But
I do want to know from true crime fans out
there what the appeal is and whether or not it
makes you feel less safe, because for me, if I
want to watch a scary movie, it's gonna be something
(25:47):
along the lines of a zombie because I know that
that's not going to happen to me, and I can
deal with that. But stranger danger kind of things, that
sort of true crime if terrifies me because that's the
stuff that gets in my head. Oh no, there actually
could be someone out there who wants to do horrible
(26:09):
things to me. Yeah. So I'm not in the demographic
that the I'm not in that female audience of true
crime addiction. Me neither. I I I if I'm going
to watch something about crime, I would rather watch honestly,
like Law and Order SDU, which is already about horrific
(26:31):
subject matter, but that is completely completely fake exactly. There's
that that distancing factor in there. But as was it.
Browder pointed out in her study, a lot of these
women who were the most drawn into true crime had
been victims of crime, right, And I could totally see
(26:51):
how watching it or reading it and reliving it in
that sense could be therapeutic and give you a sense
of control over it, trying to find answers as to
why it happens to other people. Yeah, and camaraderie for
victims who survive and are okay after that. So I
mean it's it's a it's a highly nuanced drama. It's
(27:13):
not just violence and gore and that's it. There's a
lot of stuff tied up with it when you start
to unentangle all of these different social elements, gender politics,
sexual politics, which is one thing that the two thousand
ten study that got a lot of press um looking
at why women are obsessed with true crime it got
(27:35):
some criticism because it completely neglected the sexual politics aspect.
No one wants to say that, well, some women might
like it in the same way that we like romance
novels for the keenk here aspects of it too. So
here's Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of taboos
being violated in true crime books. Yeah, so this is
(27:58):
where we want to hear from. You. Send us an
email at mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, and we
have some listener mail for you. But before we read it,
we have a quick break. And now back to our letters. Si, Caroline,
I have a letter here from a listener who would
like to remain anonymous. So I am going to call
(28:20):
this listener Bert. Birt is not his or her name.
So Bert writes, Hello, female identified human persons, just listen
to what's the difference between gender and SCTs and had
a couple of things to share. When I first started
working in healthcare fifteen years ago, I encountered a baby
born with ambiguous genitalia. I didn't really understand how this
(28:42):
could be unclear until I saw the quote unquote down
below bits and it really was hard to call. This
baby was born to very traditional parents from another culture,
and they were very distraught. You mentioned picking names, but
what about telling the rest of your family. Usually it's
a boy or it's a girl, is the first thing
that happy dad shouts when he comes into the waiting room.
(29:04):
But in these cases, what can you say. In this
particular case, there was a significant cultural pressure to produce
a son or air, so this ambiguous quote unquote situation
was just about intolerable. The baby was a pre me
and stated at the hospital for about a month, but
had very few visitors, including only rare visits for mom
and dad. The last I heard was that they were
(29:26):
waiting for a DNA test. But as you know, that
still doesn't guarantee the child will want to identify himself
herself as the sex that best matches the DNA. I
pray the parents didn't feel pressured to perform assignment surgery
too early, and that the child is now a healthy
and happy team. So thanks Anonymous Burt for sharing that experience,
(29:49):
and if you have experiences to share with us, you
know where to email us. Mom Stuff Discovery dot com
is where you can send your letters. You can also
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(30:12):
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thousands of other topics. Doesn't how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupp
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristin's I'm Caroline And for our second Polloween themed episode
of this year, we are going to, rather than talking
about the supernatural, talk about scary things in the real world,
(00:28):
which to me are much scarier. Well, yeah, because they
can actually jump out and get you exactly, Well, I
guess racist costumes could jump out and get you too,
but yes, but we're going to talk about women in
true crime and specifically why women are so drawn to
this genre. And this first caught my eye with a
(00:48):
Time magazine article in September about the meteoric rise of
Investigation Discovery, which full disclosure. Investigation Discovery is part of
the House stuff Works and Discovery Communications family of networks,
and it's all centered around true crime shows. Yeah. It's
(01:13):
taking what is sometimes like a late night you know,
TV watching binge, and it's putting it on twenty four
hours a day. And it actually launched back in two
thousand eight and two thousand nine. It earned the tagline
of Your Guilty Pleasure. Yeah, and that with that tagline alone,
you can see how the channel is already in two
(01:35):
thousand nine starting to queue into its more female audience,
and now it is the fastest growing network for women
and the eighth most popular cable channel among women to
fifty four. And don't worry, this is not going to
be a major advertorial all episode long for Investigation Discovery.
But that is huge and notable growth. Yeah, and I
(02:01):
mean even just recently it's it's really jumped up by
Investigation Discovery or i D showed at increase over the
eighteen to forty nine year old female viewer demographic, making
it number four in daytime delivery. So it's not anymore
just like creepy crime shows that you watch late at
night with who's the guy on Unsolved Mysteries that I
(02:24):
watched as a Robert Walt, No, that's the other one. Anyway,
I watched it as a child and it scared me
so much, but I couldn't stop watching it. I wasn't
allowed to watch those kinds of face was creepy and
the screen was creepy because there was like a fog
machine all the time. Yeah. So, but anyway, it's taking
that fear and just spanning it over a whole day.
(02:45):
Well in the daytime delivery. It's also significant because that's
why in the Time magazine headline it asked the question,
is true crime the new soap opera for women because
we're watching it and not just at night but also
during the day and for those of you who might
not be familiar with I D shows includes things like
On the Case with Polazon, Final Witness, Wives with Knives,
(03:10):
and then it kind of goes on from there. You
get the general gist of it. Yeah, a lot of
a lot of shows featuring women both in the criminal
component and as the victim, a lot of them having
to do with uh, well, I'll just say that the
stereotype of like shows about you know, women going crazy
and killing their husbands and stuff like that exists for
(03:32):
a reason. Yeah. But the question is, though, especially for
those shows that aren't so much about the woman as
the killer crazed to killer, but instead where the woman
is often the victim of a male perpetrator, why some
people wonder would we be so drawn to watching that
almost putting ourselves in the place of that woman who
(03:54):
might be, you know, in the case of being stalked
or in some horribly abusive relationship, or who's who that
being murdered, and some scholars and also TV execs suspect
that it has to do with the fact that with
a lot of these true crime shows, it's not just
a glamorization of violence that's going on, but the fact
(04:16):
that it brings it full circle a lot of times
to that perpetrator being arrested. Right, it's telling the full story.
You're getting that satisfying conclusion. And as Brad Bushman points
out he's a communications and psych professor at Ohio State University,
it focuses as much on the consequences as the violent
act itself. It's not just talking about how some some
(04:39):
poor victim is being killed or assaulted. It is also
focusing on actual justice. And he also talks about how
women are increasingly comfortable with the genre itself, citing an
uptick in quote unquote violent female role models in the
media and changing societal norms. He's saying that, you know,
it used to be socially unex sceptible for women to
(05:01):
engage in such behavior, both the committing violent crimes and
even being interested in violence. Yeah, and Jane Latman, who
is Investigation Discoveries head of Development, told Time Magazine that
She thinks that watching these shows offers a quote unquote
cathartic journey for the female viewer that actually makes us
(05:26):
feel safer in the end, because it brings you face
to face with those true crimes that happen, brings you
face to face with these perpetrators, and then we see
them arrested and brought to justice. And so she says
it helps people kind of feel like, Okay, I can
(05:46):
go to bed and I'm not going to check my
door ten times. And similarly, Sarah Cazozak, who's the head
of production for I D, says that women might also
like it because it makes them feel comforted that, by
compare sin to all these crazy plotlines going on, their
families have to be normal. Yeah. I mean, you know,
(06:07):
the worst my mother does is drunk Facebook message me
or like text me from the department store. And so
I get a string of like ten texts and everything's
misspelled and and and it's confusing. But she hasn't murdered anyone. There,
You good? Good? Because yeah, a lot of these yeah,
they do focus on family sagas, and so by comparison,
my family is pretty tame. But Henry Schlife, who became
(06:32):
i D s president back in two thousand nine, had
previously run Court TV, which has a similar bent, and
he said that what we learned there, and certainly what
you can see here, is that women really love not
just the crime and justice genre, but the storytelling and
puzzle solving all around it. It feels very neat and
tidy when you're watching one of those shows. I don't
(06:53):
watch them because I will get sucked in. Um. I
have a friend who like obsessively goes how and just
like turn on crime shows and watches them all night long.
I would not be able to sleep, probably, But yeah,
I I tend not to want to get sucked in.
But I do agree that they are tied up very nicely.
You feel a sense of order in the world when
you when you watch these narratives happen. Yeah, And even
(07:16):
though Investigation Discovery is a relatively new network, um and
we've had shows in the past, things like Unsolved Mystery
and Court TV in a different kind of way we
had We've had true crime on TV for a while,
but not in the two fourth seven kind of format
of I D. But of course this true crime genre
(07:38):
and its appeal to women has been around a lot
longer in the form of true crime books. Yeah. Just
like women are the biggest audience for romance novels, we
are also the largest buyers of mystery books and suspense thrillers.
And as Jean Merley points out in her book The
(07:58):
Rise of True Crime Time, this genre, especially in the
written form, has been around for a very long time,
and she says that what looks like voyeurism or thrill
seeking may actually mask the gut level human desire to
comprehend the irrational. Yeah, and if you are a fan
of true crime, I do want to plug Jean Merley's
(08:19):
book because it is fascinating to take a deeper look
into this appeal and how it coincides with violence and society.
Um So, she talks about how modern true crimes earliest
appearance is made in the detective magazine in the nineteen
forties and fifties. Although in the nineteenth century we had
(08:41):
depictions that distance the killer through the language of monstrosity,
we already have. You know, they're obviously like more violent
texts that are going on before the nineteen forties and fifties,
but the language of it evolves, right, It's the whole
scary person standing in the shadows, that whole distancing. It's
(09:01):
it's not your husband or your cousin who's coming and
assaulting you or hurting you and your family. It's some crazy,
psychopathic other. And then this develops, and in the early
twentieth century we have Edmund Pearson's whose popular murder narratives
used more of a self mocking, almost sarcastic tone to
(09:21):
his crime stories, which then gives way to the hard
boiled style of crime fiction, which found its way into
the narratives of the thirties and forties. And with the
hard boiled style, which is really distinct to American crime writing,
it brings those true crime aspects to the forefront. It
(09:42):
gets gritty, there's graphic sex and violence. You often have
sordid urban backgrounds and fast paced, slangy dialogue. Yeah. And
then in the nineties sixties we start to see a
very interesting parallel two things going in opposite directions. Crime
narratives around this time end up running counter two issues
(10:05):
that are emerging in society, things like civil rights feminism.
Because you have a genre, a narrative that is intensely
gendered in its appeal, but very misogynist and its subject matter.
But it also on top of this avoids any discussion
of race and multiculturalism. And in terms of what's meant
by misogynist subject matter, it's continually the pattern of placing
(10:30):
the woman as the victim and usually being drawn in
by these men's charms. And so some more feminist scholars
too will will look at true crime as being very misogynistic. Um,
but it's also a reflection of in a response to
arise in violent and seemingly random crime that starts to
(10:52):
escalate in the sixties and then throughout the seventies, eighties,
and nineties, there's this enormous anxiety in American culture about
a specific type of crime that was interpreted as an
indicator of a widespread and irreversible decline in the care, compassion,
and regard for others. It's like it's just as society
(11:13):
was becoming almost more distance from itself, this coldness set in,
and so we have the rise of terms like psychopath
and sociopath to indicate the monster that first emerged in
those earlier nineteenth century texts. Yeah, it becomes more clear
for readers to try to use that term, that mothering
(11:37):
term of a psychopath or sociopath to indicate, Okay, well
this is the scary person. They obviously are not normal.
They don't have a conscience, so they are bad. There's
more of a black and white distinction there. And simultaneously
you can see this evolution from true crime making sense
of things like the Manson killings. When you have these
(11:57):
books from me out in the seventies and then in
the eighties and nineties, it's as though true crime takes
on almost an educational tech. Whereas Jean Merley points out,
all of a sudden, these consumers of true crime books
are able to talk about details of forensics work, profiling,
and highly technical aspects of criminology. People can talk about
(12:19):
blood spatter patterns and things like that. Yeah, but I
mean that's where we get the terms crime porn. I
mean that that people talk about when they talk about
these kinds of shows, because you start getting it moves
from the serials and the books of the thirties and
forties and fifties into television shows featuring all of this stuff,
and it shows close ups of bruises and blood splatter,
(12:43):
and people, particularly women, just can't get enough. And and
part of it is like, we have this rise of
a celebrity culture, and so a lot of these sociopathic others,
you know, these killers become their own sort of crazy
celebrity figures. Oh yeah, I mean take Manson alone. It's
(13:04):
there are still people who are followers of Manson because
of the notoriety that he received, even in two thousand thirteen,
there are still people out there. And we're about to
delve into the appeal of true crime to women specifically,
but before we do, let's take a quick break. So clearly,
the enduring popularity of true crime and its expansion from
(13:27):
magazines to books to television really does pray a lot
on societal fears, maybe changes in the domestic sphere, all
of the different societal changes that have been going on
in the past fifty years. But what is it more
specifically about this appeal to women. I mean, we've talked
(13:48):
about ideas that maybe we like watching these shows because
there's catharsist, we like to see justice, we like to
feel more normal in our day to day by comparison
and um. But Laura Browder wrote a study called Dystopian Romance,
True Crime and the Female Reader, and what she did
for it was really just talked to a number of
(14:12):
true crime addicts, specifically true crime books, right, and she
found that, Uh, it boiled down to the fact that
many of these readers, from all different types of backgrounds,
they had, all different types of professions, typically read these
types of books to help themselves cope with this overarching patriarchal,
arical violence that they have encountered in the past and
(14:33):
that they fear still in the present. Because we talked
about how, you know, like the shows in particular, it
ties it up all nice and tidy and so you
feel you feel better and more reassured that everything's going
to be okay. Well, these women that she talked to
are using these books kind of in the same way,
reading about this terrible crime that happens, how it is solved,
(14:53):
but also trying to get out of it something along
the lines of what do I do in that situation?
They're actually kind of seeking answers from it. Yeah, And
when you think about women's fear of violence, there is
a counterintuitive aspect to it, because research shows that we
fear becoming victims of violent crime more than men, even
(15:14):
though excluding things like rape and sexual assault, men are
more likely to be involved in violent crime. And on
top of that, study found that women are more turned
off by thoughts of gory experiences, which adds to me
another fascinating dimension to this true crime appeal, because in
(15:37):
a way, it's it's this direct violation of a taboo
because we're not supposed to, you know, be into violence.
We are turned off by Gore, We are afraid of Vince,
So why why would we why would we want to
confront it in such a way. And so, yeah, there's
this idea that it helps us get into the mind
of who our potential attackers might be, so that if
(16:00):
that happens in the real world, then we'll know how
to escape, right But she points out that, as you know,
reassured us that might make you feel as the reader,
you know, you still will never be able to get
into the minds of random crazy killers, because that's just
what they're gonna do. Random crazy killers are going to randomly,
(16:20):
crazily kill people, and there's not much that you know
you can do. It's like you're building a bomb shelter
underneath your house and filling it with spam, that kind
of thing. But nevertheless, because it's presented as true crime,
it is the reality of those situations happening that really
(16:42):
pulls a lot of women in. There was one woman
who told Browder, why would anyone read fiction when the
reality is so much more extreme? And she talks about
how true crime books usually will involve photographs of the
killer and the victim, and sometimes both of them together
if they had been a couple, for instance, and uh,
(17:02):
and there's also speaking of uh, you know, the man
killing the woman and if they had been a couple.
There is a lot of sex that gets tied up
with true crime as well, and for some readers, in
reading true crime, women vicariously experience kinky sex and violence
and survive. And that is also an appeal to some women. Yeah,
(17:25):
that's that's actually a really interesting point. And and she
does links. She links these books and this genre not
only to the taboo of looking at porn, but kind
of you know, where that romance novel that they picked
up at the drug store leaves off. So you know,
a lot of times this this true crime, these these
(17:46):
terrible crimes that are written about happen among families or
among couples, and so you know, she she has this
narrative of okay, well, see you read the romance novel
where the dominant man, you know, swoops in on his horse,
you know, five, comes in and he marries the princess
or whatever. But then what happens after the domineering man
comes in? What happens when Fabio turns out of the
(18:09):
head Bundy, right, exactly. Yeah, And she talks about how,
in contrast to romance novels that culminate in marriage, true
crime culminates in punishment. And that's the satisfaction gleaned of
seeing these men whom the female protagonists might have been
madly in love with, at some point, you know, we
(18:31):
see him brought to justice somehow, hopefully, right. Yeah, a
lot of the women she talked to, you said, they
stopped reading when he got sentenced or whatever. Yeah, they
don't care what happens. As long as he's behind bars,
then that's fine. And in addition to sexual politics that
are going on within these books, there obviously are, as
(18:51):
we have implied, plenty of gender politics to dissect as well.
For instance, Broughder notes how there was a boom in
true crime that paralleled the rise of the women's movement
in the seventies. Yeah, and then she focuses a lot
also on one true crime narrative in which the killer
(19:11):
was a woman, and not only was the killer a woman,
but she killed her children, so already that's two strikes
against gender norms. And she focuses a lot on people's
perceptions of that woman and how she was so much
less sympathetic because of the fact that she wasn't playing
(19:32):
gender right basically, and other scholars point out that, you know,
this style of book, the style of writing lets you
be kind of an armchair killer. So whoever the killer is,
particularly if it's female, like it lets us act out
or or imagine the things that we would never do
in reality. But here, in that particular case, for instance,
(19:53):
when the killer is a killer because she has killed
her children, all of a sudden, that is so much
less palatable to the reading audience. And that's one reason why,
perhaps in a more recent study that came out in
also looking at why women are drawn to true crime novels,
um women consider true crime books more appealing when the
(20:17):
victims are female, rather than if you are reading about
a female murderer or sociopath or psychopath, whatever kind of path. Yeah,
and a lot of that goes back to what we
touched on as far as women being able to put
themselves in that vulnerable woman's position and gain tips. It's
(20:38):
like being able to try to keep an eye out
learning what you can, learning those fitness relevant tips to
keep your own self safe if you were ever to
happen to get in a situation like this. But at
the same time, there is something that scholars call the
fear victimization paradox, which is that mismatch of our elevated
(20:59):
ray of fear that something is terrible is going to
happen to us, that we are going to be assaulted, murdered, etcetera,
versus how men are far more likely to be the
victims of violent crime. But still at the same time,
some caution that the escalated true crime media saturated environment
(21:23):
that we are living in where if you turn on
the news, that's a lot of violent crime. If you
turn on you know, obviously Investigation Discovery, it's crime to
four seven. And then if you're also reading these books,
it's kind of everywhere that there's a problem with it,
almost turning it into fiction. There is a distancing effect
(21:46):
when when we look at the statistics, there are you know,
crimes that are happening specifically to women. And we also
to have to talk about the fact that a lot
of times, not just in true crime, but also in
news stories that we hear about with women as victims,
it's always white women. For the most part, it's white
(22:07):
middle class women, whereas crimes against women of color are
severely under reported. Yeah, I I those are all incredible points, because, Yeah,
when you're sitting there on your comfy couch with your
popcorn or whatever, and you're watching a show about some
grizzly murder, it is easy, especially if you're watching a
(22:28):
marathon of it. It is so easy to sink into
that feeling of like I'm safe, it's fine, you know,
this is this is just entertainment, and so it completely
distances us from actual statistics of sexual violence. Yeah, and specifically,
you know, one five women is raped nearly twice that
(22:50):
have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking, and sexual assault
rates are higher for black women than white women, according
to the Office on Violent against Women in the National
Institute of Justice. Specifically, the rate of intimate partner violence
against black women is about twice that for white women,
with economic distress hugely proportionate to violence, and instead what
(23:15):
we hear from these shows are anecdotes and twisted lessons
about violence and crime, all starring white women, and the
attackers are depicted as strangers and don't worry because forensics
science will solve everything. But when you look at the
reality of these situations, that's just not the case. Typically
it is someone the attacker is someone the woman knows intimately,
(23:36):
whether it's a family member or a close friend, and
often those attackers are the attacks themselves are not reported,
and the attackers don't go to jail. Yeah, and this
is kind of a side note, but in Gertrude Stein
actually wrote about this for the New York Tribune in
an article called American Crimes and How they Matter, and
(23:57):
she said, there are only two kinds of time that
people care about. The crime hero and the crime mystery.
All the other crimes everybody forgets as soon as they
find out who did them. And if we fast forward
that too today, it really is almost that blown up
out of proportion, because it's almost as though our crimes
(24:18):
are becoming dehumanized and victims become characters, and everything is
so formulaic to the point to where it's always the
same cast of characters looking the same and in the
same socio economic class, where that's a very unrealistic snapshot
(24:38):
of what true crime is truly. Yeah, and I mean
it is. I don't want to take away anyone's television
or anything, but it is too bad that a lot
of the time shows like this, networks like this, Uh,
they attract so many eyeballs, and that means that eyeballs
are not going to your local news, They're not going
(25:01):
to your newspaper, so you're less aware almost and and
you know, maybe you're not. But I worry that maybe
people are less aware of the actual crime that's going
on in their own community, the stuff that they really
need to worry about, versus things that are more abstract.
And I do have to what we do have to
give props to Investigation Discovery for some self awareness of this,
(25:25):
because they do promote educational things in terms of teaching
women about crime, risk and safety and domestic violence. But
I do want to know from true crime fans out
there what the appeal is and whether or not it
makes you feel less safe, because for me, if I
want to watch a scary movie, it's gonna be something
(25:47):
along the lines of a zombie because I know that
that's not going to happen to me, and I can
deal with that. But stranger danger kind of things, that
sort of true crime if terrifies me because that's the
stuff that gets in my head. Oh no, there actually
could be someone out there who wants to do horrible
(26:09):
things to me. Yeah. So I'm not in the demographic
that the I'm not in that female audience of true
crime addiction. Me neither. I I I if I'm going
to watch something about crime, I would rather watch honestly,
like Law and Order SDU, which is already about horrific
(26:31):
subject matter, but that is completely completely fake exactly. There's
that that distancing factor in there. But as was it.
Browder pointed out in her study, a lot of these
women who were the most drawn into true crime had
been victims of crime, right, And I could totally see
(26:51):
how watching it or reading it and reliving it in
that sense could be therapeutic and give you a sense
of control over it, trying to find answers as to
why it happens to other people. Yeah, and camaraderie for
victims who survive and are okay after that. So I
mean it's it's a it's a highly nuanced drama. It's
(27:13):
not just violence and gore and that's it. There's a
lot of stuff tied up with it when you start
to unentangle all of these different social elements, gender politics,
sexual politics, which is one thing that the two thousand
ten study that got a lot of press um looking
at why women are obsessed with true crime it got
(27:35):
some criticism because it completely neglected the sexual politics aspect.
No one wants to say that, well, some women might
like it in the same way that we like romance
novels for the keenk here aspects of it too. So
here's Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of taboos
being violated in true crime books. Yeah, so this is
(27:58):
where we want to hear from. You. Send us an
email at mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, and we
have some listener mail for you. But before we read it,
we have a quick break. And now back to our letters. Si, Caroline,
I have a letter here from a listener who would
like to remain anonymous. So I am going to call
(28:20):
this listener Bert. Birt is not his or her name.
So Bert writes, Hello, female identified human persons, just listen
to what's the difference between gender and SCTs and had
a couple of things to share. When I first started
working in healthcare fifteen years ago, I encountered a baby
born with ambiguous genitalia. I didn't really understand how this
(28:42):
could be unclear until I saw the quote unquote down
below bits and it really was hard to call. This
baby was born to very traditional parents from another culture,
and they were very distraught. You mentioned picking names, but
what about telling the rest of your family. Usually it's
a boy or it's a girl, is the first thing
that happy dad shouts when he comes into the waiting room.
(29:04):
But in these cases, what can you say. In this
particular case, there was a significant cultural pressure to produce
a son or air, so this ambiguous quote unquote situation
was just about intolerable. The baby was a pre me
and stated at the hospital for about a month, but
had very few visitors, including only rare visits for mom
and dad. The last I heard was that they were
(29:26):
waiting for a DNA test. But as you know, that
still doesn't guarantee the child will want to identify himself
herself as the sex that best matches the DNA. I
pray the parents didn't feel pressured to perform assignment surgery
too early, and that the child is now a healthy
and happy team. So thanks Anonymous Burt for sharing that experience,
(29:49):
and if you have experiences to share with us, you
know where to email us. Mom Stuff Discovery dot com
is where you can send your letters. You can also
find us on Facebook and messages there, or follow us
on Twitter at and stuff podcast, and we are also
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(30:12):
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