I would sooner get stabbed again than have someone make a podcast about me
I was having outdoor drinks with my girlfriends when one of them mentioned her plan to do some solo backpacking in the Pacific Northwest. āPlease be careful,ā another friend said. āIāve watched way too much Dateline.ā Later, while checking Twitter, I ran across a Nextdoor post detailing the saga of a woman who rang someoneās doorbell and asked for a Band-Aid. She was driving a black Mercedes-Benz, the post continued; was it possible she could be scouting the place to rob later? The comments agreed that it was highly suspicious; no one pointed out that most thieves would probably not case a neighborhood in a Mercedes with a clearly visible license plate. My breaking point came when Newsweek, a magazine with 3.4 million Twitter followers, reported that an internet sleuth had discovered ādisturbingā footage of Brian Laundrie, then a suspect in the death of his fiancĆ©, reading the novel Annihilation and provided it as proof he had murderous intentions.
I say this as someone whoās been obsessed with the genre since watching Paradise Lost and learning about the West Memphis Three: itās time to admit that true crime has rotted our brains.
With the exception of a spike in murders in 2020 that coincided with Covid, major crime has been steadily decreasing for 18 years. Even with the spike, murder rates are a third of what they were in the ā90s. You are more likely to die from heart disease or a car crash than you are from being murdered. And in the U.S., men are far likelier to be homicide victims than women. But listening to true crime podcasts, you would never suspect this. Most of the audience and the hosts themselves are female, and most cases covered by true crime podcasts are about women. Itās making women paranoid.
Pointing this out doesnāt always go over well. In August, my friend Sam tweeted that true crime āis so obviously designed to make you buckle in terror whenever you leave the house.ā He was immediately inundated with quote tweets claiming that of course a man couldnāt understand the threats women face on a daily basis, the tweeters either ignoring his profile picture or unaware that Black men in America face a much higher risk of victimization.
Iām not oblivious to violence against women, on the contrary, I am intimately familiar with it. Iāve written and spoken extensively about my own attack, when I was stabbed multiple times by a stranger while walking my dog. But anecdotes arenāt data, and the fact remains that statistically, what happened to me is incredibly rare. That didnāt stop multiple tabloid magazines from emailing me after it happened, asking for interviews. When I looked them up I found articles devoted almost exclusively to crimes against white women with titles such as āMy Boyfriend Killed and Ate His Secret Loverā and āMy Hubbyās Killer was Hiding in the Wardrobe.ā The covers are splashy, sensational, the message clear: danger is all around you. This isnāt new, but what used to be contained mainly on supermarket check-out shelves is now everywhere: on our TVs, on our computers, in our ears. āYouāre in danger,ā says the new Netflix documentary. āSomeone could be outside your door right now,ā warns the neighborhood surveillance app. āThis dead woman thought she was safe,ā chirps the cheerful podcast lady.
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Crime stories are a fundamentally conservative way of looking at the world. Republicans bleat about high crime rates in lawless liberal cities because someone stole a toothbrush from a CVS. Suburban crime paranoia is as old as the suburbs themselves ā hell, itās why they exist to begin with. The reactionary basis of true crime is how you end up with ostensibly liberal podcast hosts defending the death penalty and arguing against double jeopardy protections. Itās easy and correct to condemn Fox News for increasing our grandparentsā blood pressure, keeping them in a perpetual state of fear about roving gangs of MS-13 coming to their gated communities, but we should also consider that other demographics might be susceptible to fear-stoking propaganda. How can we listen to story after story of women being abducted or murdered and expect it to not have an effect on our psyche? A study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania found that fear of crime and violence on television have both increased over time, despite crime rates declining, and that women reported more fear of crime on surveys than men. True crime runs on heightened emotion and fear, convincing people, and especially women, that every stranger is a possible murderer. I see women on Twitter questioning whether itās safe to let a plumber into their house, or instructing others to rip out strands of hair to leave in cabs for DNA evidence in case the driver murders you. These are not sensible reactions, they are the thoughts of someone who has been deeply traumatized. So many true crime shows advise women to trust their instincts, but how can we trust instincts that have been hijacked by induced anxiety?
āStay sexy donāt get murdered,ā is the tagline of one of the most popular true crime podcasts, as if being murdered is a choice women make, or a risk that can be avoided if weāre just smart enough. Women arenāt stupid; we donāt walk down dark alleys alone while wearing stilettoes and lamenting loudly about how no one would miss us if we disappeared. We all take precautions, we lock our doors and let our friends know where weāre going. āBe aware of your surroundings and donāt trust strangersā is not particularly helpful advice for avoiding the one scenario in which women are most likely to actually be murdered: by their partner. Itās victim blaming dressed up in empowerment; no one questions someone killed in a car accident, but if a woman is murdered her story becomes a precaution.
















