On "Savage Appetites"

Why do we always assume true crime consumers are women?

After a month of teaching, I finally Googled it: Why are so many true crime consumers women? The search results included an interview from The Guardian with author Rachel Monroe for her book Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession.

In the interview, Monroe is asked, “As you point out in Savage Appetites, the consumers of true crime are overwhelmingly female. Why do you think that is?” Monroe answers: “It’s complex and there is no single, monolithic answer – in part because there’s no single, monolithic woman.”

And I agree (while simultaneously finding this answer unsatisfying). But I would further broaden her answer to say that there is no single monolithic consumer. My class roster has 33 students, 16 are men. There are plenty of reasons to consume true crime content, and if you’re a listener of The Journal and listened to Camp Swamp Road, you may not have even registered that’s what you were going.

Either way, the interview with Monroe persuaded me to find her book because I wanted answers (shout out to Boulder Public Libraries and Libby). I wanted to better handle some of the generic questions that I’m regularly asked. The gendered aspect of many of these questions was definitely interesting to me. Especially because, whether because of this class, my writing, or my friend group, I have recently interacted with so. many. men. who also regularly consume true crime.

Savage Appetites

Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Obsession, and True Crime, opens with Rachel Monroe at the 2018 Nashville based CrimeCon (this is actually the second book I have read in the past month that referenced the 2018 CrimeCon, the other was Shadow of the Bridge: The Delphi Murders and the Dark Side of the American Heartland). In the introduction, Monroe writes about a packed Opryland Hotel where she starts our investigation into what is up with women and their true crime fascination. She writes that “the true crime obsessives packing the hallways at CrimeCon were almost all women was, on its surface, perplexing. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men. Most murder victims are also male. Homicide detectives and criminal investigators: predominantly male. Attorneys in criminal cases are mostly men” (4).

Immediately, we are confronted with an idea that already exists in the public’s head: true crime is a woman’s pastime. Men can be panelists or dragged along by female friends or counterparts. Women are the consumers and voyeurs, men are the professionals or supportive partners. But it still felt odd to have the genre so cleanly cleaved liked this — women as watchers, men as professionals — because I didn’t buy it.

Later in the introduction Monroe says:

“…the murder stories we tell, and the ways that we tell them, have a political and social impact and are worth taking seriously. Lessons are embedded within their gory details” (9).

And this is where I felt like Monroe was actually getting somewhere. True crime, while giving the morbidly curious a place to spend their time and energy, also conveys cultural truths and lessons. Tales of murder, kidnapping, family annihilations, all come with lurid details that allow us to pass judgement and say things like, “I could never,” “how horrible,” and “could you imagine?” about topics that are not always fit for family dinner conversations.

And this connects the genre to something else that is often gendered as a female activity: gossip.

Gossip

We all know gossip, and I bet you we all have opinions on gossip. Beyond those opinions though, gossip has really important cultural significance – it conveys not just interpersonal information but also communicates group values. There is another word that is sometimes used interchangeably with gossip: rumor. Before we go further, I want to briefly explain the difference between the two because I find a lot of the issues that people have with gossip are not actually gossip, but rumor.

Gossip is a means of transferring information that can have interpersonal significance, while rumor is topic that contains unsubstantiated information. Can they be intertwined? Absolutely. Gossip and rumor also have siblings you may know, conspiracy theory and urban legend. The Venn-diagram of these words is important but not something I’m going to focus on here. What I want you to remember here is that gossip transfers information between individuals and groups that contains a details about a group and its values.

Gossip denotes membership to a group, as Robert Paine wrote:

“Gossip is here being brought into service to illustrate two bedrock assumptions of much structural anthropology, namely, the ‘unity’ of the group… Thus gossip is conceived as a property of the group; its use is regulated by the group in such a way that it serves to demarcate the group and, at the same time, helps to perpetuate it” (1967, 279).

(You can find the full text of the Paine article here.)

When it comes to culturally specific places like college campuses, gossip is an essential form of communicating information. When I was an undergrad, girls circulated information on boys who treated them poorly or were known for not being good at hearing the word “no.” And while that may upset some people, rates of sexual assault is high on college campuses. This information can be life saving.

On this idea Monroe writes:

“While women are less likely to be murdered, they make up about half of all victims of violent crime – perhaps more, since many crimes that disproportionately affect women (intimate partner violence, sexual assault) are underreported… Violence within families had long been considered a taboo subject, a private matter that was best dealt with internally. True crime books were a socially sanctioned way to learn about abusive and controlling behavior and its potentially dire consequences” (84-85)

True crime and gossip allow us to explore dark, lurid topics and worlds in the safety of our headphones or screens. However, I think with both gossip and true crime, the reason behind our drive towards it and attraction to it can and does change.

The Near Miss

True crime, while letting us explore dark, morbid topics in the privacy of our own earbuds, also lets us experience our own anxieties and close encounters to situations we were not part of (and often hope to never experience). In Savage Appetites, Monroe discusses her own fixation with the disappearance and murder of a woman named Taylor Behl.

Taylor Behl was a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) when she disappeared on Labor Day, 2005. Monroe writes that as she was obsessing over the case, “There was, of course, one key difference between me and Taylor Behl: she was missing, and I was safe. But that might be even have been part of what obsessed me about the case. It felt good, in a bad way, to think about my own proximity to violence. To imagine my life as a near miss” (74).

When I read this, I immediately understood something that had happened in my own classroom. Namely, my students fixation with the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle, also known as the Idaho Four. My students are undergraduates at a state school with a prominent football program, the Idaho Four were undergraduates at a football school too, the murders happened on a game day. Every day, my students interact with teaching assistants and graduate students who are supposed to be helping them. Bryan Kohberger was not only a graduate student (granted, at a different university), but he studied criminology. This alone, I think provided plenty for students to chew on. Their proximity gave them a positionality that likely felt too close for comfort, the fact that Bryan Kohberger could have been studying crime perhaps to commit the perfect crime, is something straight out of television. And, while statistically speaking, this kind of murder is rare, its unusual nature only makes it harder to look away.

So why do we like true crime?

Honestly, I dunno. This is the question I was hoping Monroe would answer. And while I never got a clear cut explanation from her, the best answer I came up with for myself is equally unhelpful because it changes all the time.

Recently, I have been fascinated by Peacock’s series “The Gilgo Beach Killer: House of Secrets.” The series is about Rex Heuermann and the women who were found on Gilgo Beach thanks to Shannan Gilbert’s desperate 911 call in May of 2010. The show is anchored on interviews with his wife, Asa Heuermann, their children, journalists, and friends of Rex. The Long Island Serial Killer (LISK), is something I have been fascinated with for years now, largely because it was unsolved for so long. Heuermann has been charged with the murder of seven women, four of whom were found on Gilgo Beach.

I’ve also been listening to Hell in Heaven by Exactly Right Media, a deep dive into the death of John Bender in Costa Rica. John and Ann Bender were building a personal retreat in the Costa Rican jungle only for John to end up dead, shot in the head. It’s a story of extravagance crossed with a tropical mystery – American riches in the jungle, a dead man with connections to shady financial and cartel connected characters. It listens like a thriller.

But recently, I have been having a hard time listening to the true crime content that first got me into the genre to start with - the more casual stuff where hosts joke and banter before, during, and after discussing a case. My own listening and consumption habits often change. Next week, the opposite listening and watching patterns may be true. If my own listening and reading habits change so often, how can I assume that others aren’t the same? How could I possibly answer why people are so fascinated and drawn to true crime if it’s a moving target?

While Savage Appetites didn’t necessarily answer the questions I hoped it would, there were certainly aspects I agreed with. Saying that there is no monolithic consumer of true crime is an easy response when people ask me why I think true crime consumers are attracted to the genre, but there was another theory presented in the introduction that I found both satisfying in its simplicity and also entertaining:

“A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us” (Monroe, 5)

Enjoy fall break, you creepy kids.