December 5, 2018 • 32 mins
Whether in print or on television, true crime draws its largest audience from women. We investigate why in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to stuff Moa
Never told You Wealth listeners. It happened. I finally got
summoned for jury duty. I don't know how. I've never
(00:28):
been summoned before, but I haven't, and a part of
me thinks I'm still at jury duty. It really was
impressively dull. Anyway, if you've never been or aren't entirely
sure what it entails, it's mostly a lot of waiting.
There is finding out bias um listening to lawyers, to
the judge present the case, but a lot of waiting,
(00:52):
and you aren't allowed to use any electronic devices once
you're in the courtroom. So I overheard my fellow jurors
get to talk talking about true crime and how much
they love true crime. It was so cool to see
a big lift for lawyers and defendants. Now, true crime
has never been my thing, but my friends love it
(01:13):
and it kind of jumps started this whole podcast thing.
If you think about cereal and women make up a
decent chunk of that audience. For answers as to why
let's revisit this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mob Never
Told You from how stup works dot Com. Hello, and
(01:39):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, And
for our second Halloween themed episode of this year, we
are going to, rather than talking about the supernatural, talk
about scary things in the real world, which to me
are much scarier. Well, yeah, because they can actually jump
out and get you, exactly like racist costumes could jump
(02:01):
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 Time magazine article in September
about the meteoric rise of Investigation Discovery, which full disclosure.
(02:25):
Investigation Discovery is part of the How Stuff Works in
Discovery Communications family of networks, and it's all centered around
true crime shows. Yeah. It's 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
(02:48):
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 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
(03:11):
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 mean even just recently it's
it's really jumped up by Investigation Discovery or i D
(03:34):
showed a forty 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 watched as a Robert Walt, No,
that's the other one. Anyway, I watched it as a child,
(03:54):
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. Well in the daytime delivery is
also significant because that's why in the Time magazine headline
(04:18):
it asked a 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,
it includes things like On the Case with Polizon, Final Witness,
Wives with Knives, and then it kind of goes on
from there. You get the general gist of it. Yeah,
(04:41):
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 a reason. Yeah. But the question is, though,
(05:02):
especially for those shows that aren't so much about the
woman as a killer crazzed 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 might be, you know, in the case of being
(05:22):
stalked or in some horribly abusive relationship, or who's who
ends up 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 that brings it full circle a lot of
(05:45):
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 poor victim is being killed or assaulted.
(06:09):
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 unacceptable for women
to engage in such behavior, both the committing violent crimes
(06:32):
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
(06:52):
us feel safer in the end because it brings you
face to face with those true crimes that happened, 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
(07:13):
can go to bed and I'm not going to check
my door ten times. And similarly, Sarah Cauzozak, who's the
head of production for I D says that women might
also like it because it makes them feel comforted that,
by comparison to all these crazy plotlines going on, their
families have to be normal. Yeah. I mean, you know,
(07:34):
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 go, that's 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
(07:58):
I D S President back into 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 watch
(08:20):
them because I will get sucked in. Um. I have
a friend who like obsessively goes howm it just like
turns 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
(08:42):
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
(09:04):
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 Gene Merley points out in her book The
(09:25):
Rise of True Crime, 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 book because it is
(09:47):
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 depictions that distance
(10:10):
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 it's not
your husband or your cousin who's coming and assaulting you
(10:32):
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 his crime stories,
which then gives way to the hard boiled style of
(10:53):
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 gets gritty,
there's graphic sex and violence. You often have sordid urban
(11:14):
backgrounds and fast paced, slangy dialogue. Yeah. And then in
the nineteen 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 that are
emerging in society, things like civil rights feminism. Because you
(11:36):
have a genre, a narrative that is intensely gendered in
its appeal but very misogynist in 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 the
(11:57):
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
(12:19):
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, as society was becoming
(12:40):
almost more distanced 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 uh more clear
or for readers to try to use that term, that
(13:03):
mothering 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
(13:24):
books coming 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 blood
(13:46):
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 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, and people,
(14:11):
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 there are
still people who are followers of Manson because of the
(14:36):
notoriety that he received, even in two thousand thirteen. There's
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
(15:00):
enduring popularity of true crime and it's expansion from 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
(15:22):
about this appeal to women. I mean, we've talked about
ideas that maybe we like watching these shows because there's Catharsis,
we like to see justice, we like to feel more
normal in our day to day by comparison um. But
Laura Browder wrote a study called Dystopian Romance, True Crime
(15:42):
and the Female Reader, and what she did for it
was really just talked to a number of 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
(16:03):
help themselves cope with this overarching patriarchal article violence that
they have encountered in the past and 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 is going to be okay. Well,
these women that she talked to are using these books
(16:24):
kind of in the same way, reading about this terrible
crime that happens, how it is solved, 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
(16:48):
of violent crime more than men, even though excluding things
like rape and sexual assault, men are more likely to
be involved in violent crime. And on top of that,
and study found that women are more turned off by
thoughts of gory experiences, which adds to me another fascinating
(17:09):
dimension to this true crime appeal because in 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 on So
why why would we why would we want to confront
it in such a way. And so, yeah, there's this
(17:29):
idea that it helps us get into the mind of
who our potential attackers might be, so that if 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
(17:50):
minds of random crazy killers because that's just what they're
gonna do. Random crazy killers are going to randomly, 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
(18:13):
the reality of those situations happening that really 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
(18:35):
had been a couple, for instance, and uh, 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
(18:58):
that is also an a feel to some women. Yeah,
that's that's actually a really interesting point. And and she
does h 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,
(19:20):
a lot of times this this true crime, these these
terrible crimes that are written about happen among families or
among couples, and so you know, she she has this
narrative of okay, well, so you read the romance novel
where the dominant man, you know, swoops in on his horse.
You know, Fabio comes in and he marries the princess
or whatever. But then what happens after the domineering man
(19:42):
comes in? What happens when Fabio turns out of the
Ted 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
(20:04):
madly in love with. At some point, you know, we
see him brought to justice somehow, hopefully. Right. Oh. 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
(20:27):
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
(20:48):
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
percept sans of that woman and how she was so
much less sympathetic because of the fact that she wasn't
playing gender right basically, and other scholars point out that,
(21:12):
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, when the killer is a killer because she
(21:32):
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 victims are female, rather than if
(21:57):
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 like being able to try
to keep an eye out learning what you can, learning
(22:18):
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 rates of fear that something
is terrible is going to happen to us, that we
(22:41):
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 that we are living
in where if you turn on the news, it's a
(23:02):
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 when when we look at
(23:23):
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 middle class women, whereas
(23:46):
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 marathon of it.
It is so easy to sink into that feeling of
(24:09):
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 in five women is raped, nearly twice that have
experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking, and sexual assault rates
(24:31):
are higher for black women than white women, according to
the Office on Violence 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 we
hear from these shows are anecdotes and twisted lessons about
(24:55):
violence and crime all starring white women, and the attackers
are depicted it is 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,
whether it's a family member or a close friend, and
(25:16):
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
she said, there are only two kinds of crime that
(25:36):
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
are becoming dehumanized and victims become characters, and everything is
(26:02):
so formulate 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
of what true crime is truly. Yeah, and I mean
it is. I don't want to take away anyone's television
(26:23):
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
to your newspaper. So you're less aware almost and and
you know, maybe you're not. But I worry that maybe
(26:44):
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 well, we do have to
give props to Investigation Discovery for some self awareness of this,
because they do promote educational things in terms of teaching
(27:06):
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
along the lines of a zombie because I know that
(27:27):
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 it terrifies me because that's the
stuff that gets in my head of oh no, there
actually could be someone out there who wants to do
horrible things to me. So I'm not in the demographic
(27:50):
that the I'm not in that female audience of true
crime addiction me neither. I I I if I'm gonna
watch watch something about crime, I would rather watch, honestly,
like Law and Order s v U. Which is already
about horrific subject matter, but that is completely completely fake exactly.
(28:12):
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
how watching it or reading it and reliving it in
that sense could be therapeutic. Yeah, give you a sense
(28:37):
of control over it, try 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 not
just violence. And gore, and that's it. There's a lot
of stuff tied up with it when you start to
untangle all of these different social element its gender politics,
(29:01):
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
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
(29:22):
novels for the kink. 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
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,
(29:44):
we have a quick break and now back to our letters. So, Caroline,
I have a letter here from a listener who would
like to remain anonymous. So I am going to call
(30:07):
this listener Bert. Bert is not his or her name.
So Bert writes, hello, female identified human persons, just listen
to what's the difference between gender and sects? 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
(30:29):
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.
(30:51):
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 meat
in state 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
(31:13):
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 d n A.
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
(31:34):
that experience, and if you have experiences to share with us,
you know where to email us. Mom Stuff at 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 mom Stuff Podcasts, and we
are also on Instagram. You're gonna want to check out
all of our Halloween snaps we got. You can follow
(31:54):
us at stuff mom Never Told You, and we have
some hilarious Halloween eos check out as well on our
YouTube channel. It's YouTube dot com slash stuff mom Never
Told You, and don't forget to subscribe for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to stuff Moa
Never told You Wealth listeners. It happened. I finally got
summoned for jury duty. I don't know how. I've never
(00:28):
been summoned before, but I haven't, and a part of
me thinks I'm still at jury duty. It really was
impressively dull. Anyway, if you've never been or aren't entirely
sure what it entails, it's mostly a lot of waiting.
There is finding out bias um listening to lawyers, to
the judge present the case, but a lot of waiting,
(00:52):
and you aren't allowed to use any electronic devices once
you're in the courtroom. So I overheard my fellow jurors
get to talk talking about true crime and how much
they love true crime. It was so cool to see
a big lift for lawyers and defendants. Now, true crime
has never been my thing, but my friends love it
(01:13):
and it kind of jumps started this whole podcast thing.
If you think about cereal and women make up a
decent chunk of that audience. For answers as to why
let's revisit this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mob Never
Told You from how stup works dot Com. Hello, and
(01:39):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, And
for our second Halloween themed episode of this year, we
are going to, rather than talking about the supernatural, talk
about scary things in the real world, which to me
are much scarier. Well, yeah, because they can actually jump
out and get you, exactly like racist costumes could jump
(02:01):
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 Time magazine article in September
about the meteoric rise of Investigation Discovery, which full disclosure.
(02:25):
Investigation Discovery is part of the How Stuff Works in
Discovery Communications family of networks, and it's all centered around
true crime shows. Yeah. It's 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
(02:48):
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 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
(03:11):
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 mean even just recently it's
it's really jumped up by Investigation Discovery or i D
(03:34):
showed a forty 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 watched as a Robert Walt, No,
that's the other one. Anyway, I watched it as a child,
(03:54):
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. Well in the daytime delivery is
also significant because that's why in the Time magazine headline
(04:18):
it asked a 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,
it includes things like On the Case with Polizon, Final Witness,
Wives with Knives, and then it kind of goes on
from there. You get the general gist of it. Yeah,
(04:41):
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 a reason. Yeah. But the question is, though,
(05:02):
especially for those shows that aren't so much about the
woman as a killer crazzed 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 might be, you know, in the case of being
(05:22):
stalked or in some horribly abusive relationship, or who's who
ends up 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 that brings it full circle a lot of
(05:45):
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 poor victim is being killed or assaulted.
(06:09):
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 unacceptable for women
to engage in such behavior, both the committing violent crimes
(06:32):
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
(06:52):
us feel safer in the end because it brings you
face to face with those true crimes that happened, 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
(07:13):
can go to bed and I'm not going to check
my door ten times. And similarly, Sarah Cauzozak, who's the
head of production for I D says that women might
also like it because it makes them feel comforted that,
by comparison to all these crazy plotlines going on, their
families have to be normal. Yeah. I mean, you know,
(07:34):
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 go, that's 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
(07:58):
I D S President back into 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 watch
(08:20):
them because I will get sucked in. Um. I have
a friend who like obsessively goes howm it just like
turns 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
(08:42):
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
(09:04):
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 Gene Merley points out in her book The
(09:25):
Rise of True Crime, 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 book because it is
(09:47):
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 depictions that distance
(10:10):
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 it's not
your husband or your cousin who's coming and assaulting you
(10:32):
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 his crime stories,
which then gives way to the hard boiled style of
(10:53):
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 gets gritty,
there's graphic sex and violence. You often have sordid urban
(11:14):
backgrounds and fast paced, slangy dialogue. Yeah. And then in
the nineteen 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 that are
emerging in society, things like civil rights feminism. Because you
(11:36):
have a genre, a narrative that is intensely gendered in
its appeal but very misogynist in 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 the
(11:57):
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
(12:19):
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, as society was becoming
(12:40):
almost more distanced 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 uh more clear
or for readers to try to use that term, that
(13:03):
mothering 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
(13:24):
books coming 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 blood
(13:46):
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 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, and people,
(14:11):
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 there are
still people who are followers of Manson because of the
(14:36):
notoriety that he received, even in two thousand thirteen. There's
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
(15:00):
enduring popularity of true crime and it's expansion from 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
(15:22):
about this appeal to women. I mean, we've talked about
ideas that maybe we like watching these shows because there's Catharsis,
we like to see justice, we like to feel more
normal in our day to day by comparison um. But
Laura Browder wrote a study called Dystopian Romance, True Crime
(15:42):
and the Female Reader, and what she did for it
was really just talked to a number of 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
(16:03):
help themselves cope with this overarching patriarchal article violence that
they have encountered in the past and 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 is going to be okay. Well,
these women that she talked to are using these books
(16:24):
kind of in the same way, reading about this terrible
crime that happens, how it is solved, 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
(16:48):
of violent crime more than men, even though excluding things
like rape and sexual assault, men are more likely to
be involved in violent crime. And on top of that,
and study found that women are more turned off by
thoughts of gory experiences, which adds to me another fascinating
(17:09):
dimension to this true crime appeal because in 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 on So
why why would we why would we want to confront
it in such a way. And so, yeah, there's this
(17:29):
idea that it helps us get into the mind of
who our potential attackers might be, so that if 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
(17:50):
minds of random crazy killers because that's just what they're
gonna do. Random crazy killers are going to randomly, 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
(18:13):
the reality of those situations happening that really 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
(18:35):
had been a couple, for instance, and uh, 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
(18:58):
that is also an a feel to some women. Yeah,
that's that's actually a really interesting point. And and she
does h 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,
(19:20):
a lot of times this this true crime, these these
terrible crimes that are written about happen among families or
among couples, and so you know, she she has this
narrative of okay, well, so you read the romance novel
where the dominant man, you know, swoops in on his horse.
You know, Fabio comes in and he marries the princess
or whatever. But then what happens after the domineering man
(19:42):
comes in? What happens when Fabio turns out of the
Ted 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
(20:04):
madly in love with. At some point, you know, we
see him brought to justice somehow, hopefully. Right. Oh. 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
(20:27):
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
(20:48):
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
percept sans of that woman and how she was so
much less sympathetic because of the fact that she wasn't
playing gender right basically, and other scholars point out that,
(21:12):
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, when the killer is a killer because she
(21:32):
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 victims are female, rather than if
(21:57):
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 like being able to try
to keep an eye out learning what you can, learning
(22:18):
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 rates of fear that something
is terrible is going to happen to us, that we
(22:41):
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 that we are living
in where if you turn on the news, it's a
(23:02):
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 when when we look at
(23:23):
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 middle class women, whereas
(23:46):
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 marathon of it.
It is so easy to sink into that feeling of
(24:09):
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 in five women is raped, nearly twice that have
experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking, and sexual assault rates
(24:31):
are higher for black women than white women, according to
the Office on Violence 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 we
hear from these shows are anecdotes and twisted lessons about
(24:55):
violence and crime all starring white women, and the attackers
are depicted it is 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,
whether it's a family member or a close friend, and
(25:16):
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
she said, there are only two kinds of crime that
(25:36):
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
are becoming dehumanized and victims become characters, and everything is
(26:02):
so formulate 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
of what true crime is truly. Yeah, and I mean
it is. I don't want to take away anyone's television
(26:23):
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
to your newspaper. So you're less aware almost and and
you know, maybe you're not. But I worry that maybe
(26:44):
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 well, we do have to
give props to Investigation Discovery for some self awareness of this,
because they do promote educational things in terms of teaching
(27:06):
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
along the lines of a zombie because I know that
(27:27):
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 it terrifies me because that's the
stuff that gets in my head of oh no, there
actually could be someone out there who wants to do
horrible things to me. So I'm not in the demographic
(27:50):
that the I'm not in that female audience of true
crime addiction me neither. I I I if I'm gonna
watch watch something about crime, I would rather watch, honestly,
like Law and Order s v U. Which is already
about horrific subject matter, but that is completely completely fake exactly.
(28:12):
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
how watching it or reading it and reliving it in
that sense could be therapeutic. Yeah, give you a sense
(28:37):
of control over it, try 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 not
just violence. And gore, and that's it. There's a lot
of stuff tied up with it when you start to
untangle all of these different social element its gender politics,
(29:01):
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
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
(29:22):
novels for the kink. 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
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,
(29:44):
we have a quick break and now back to our letters. So, Caroline,
I have a letter here from a listener who would
like to remain anonymous. So I am going to call
(30:07):
this listener Bert. Bert is not his or her name.
So Bert writes, hello, female identified human persons, just listen
to what's the difference between gender and sects? 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
(30:29):
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.
(30:51):
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 meat
in state 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
(31:13):
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 d n A.
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
(31:34):
that experience, and if you have experiences to share with us,
you know where to email us. Mom Stuff at 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 mom Stuff Podcasts, and we
are also on Instagram. You're gonna want to check out
all of our Halloween snaps we got. You can follow
(31:54):
us at stuff mom Never Told You, and we have
some hilarious Halloween eos check out as well on our
YouTube channel. It's YouTube dot com slash stuff mom Never
Told You, and don't forget to subscribe for more on
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