Girl Power
Women and True Crime
Relative to men, women are much more interested in true crime and are more likely to rate it favorably. In fact, nearly one in five women in the United States considers true crime their favorite cultural genre, a rate more than double the favorability ranking among men. Women are also significantly less likely than men to express neutral or negative opinions about true crime.
Overall, women have a viewpoint about true crime, and it is resoundingly positive.
The female proclivity for true crime material is also wide-ranging. Women are more likely than men to consume true crime content about every form of criminal activity. They are interested in far more offenses than the crimes where females have higher risk of serious harm, such as sexual assault, intimate partner homicide, and sexual homicide.
Across several dimensions, women are more likely than men to see positive features about true crime content, but less likely to see its negative attributes. Women believe true crime provides a better understanding of the criminal justice system, helps people understand and empathize with crime victims, and helps people understand criminals and their motivations. These factors suggest true crime holds important intellectual value for women, just as it does for consumers overall.
I see this firsthand in my teaching career where female students are much more likely than their male contemporaries to discuss current criminal cases and true crime documentaries with me before, during, and after class. It is not just casual conversation either. My female students generate and sustain most of the class discussion in my criminal justice courses, some of which directly engages true crime material.
Large segments of the true crime ecosystem reflect these gender differences in topical interest. Podcasts that prioritize gender and crime, for instance, bring these issues to light on a broad scale. The podcast Female Criminals showcases female offenders, exploring the psychology and motivational factors driving their crimes. Equally as important, it presents cases where women are not “just the victims,” as is often the case in podcasts devoted to serial murder and sexual homicide, for example.
Female crime podcasts place women at the forefront of crime. And several other podcasts including MurdHer: Women in Crime, Sistas Who Kill, Black Girl Gone, and Madams of Murder, focus on cases involving females, in part to inform the gender-specific features of true crime, which women find compelling.
Beyond intellectual intrigue, true crime serves other functions for women as well. Women are more likely than men to agree that true crime provides people with a sense of excitement and suspense, no different than a page-turning novel or gripping feature film. In this way, the genre is both educational and entertaining.
To serve their own interests in self-defense, women are more likely than men to believe that true crime content makes people more vigilant and safety conscious. It provides cautionary tales that are instructive for self-protection. Stories about the women who got away from violent predators are of special interest.
True crime is a source of girl power.
Women also see considerable practical utility in the true crime genre. They are more likely than men to believe true crime helps solve crimes that otherwise would not have been. Women see that true crime provides a public service. Millions of women going down the rabbit hole of a cold case podcast are evidence.
Despite their enthusiasm for true crime material, women are not blind to its potentially negative features. They are much more likely than men to agree that true crime content is often graphic and disturbing, that true crime desensitizes people to violence, and that true crime potentially makes people unnecessarily fearful and paranoid. The visceral nature of true crime content can be triggering for some and turns them off to the genre.
However, when considering most negative valuations about true crime, women are less critical in their viewpoints than men. For examples, women are less likely than men to agree that true crime sensationalizes violence and less likely than men to believe the genre exploits victims and their families (even though it disproportionately affects women). Women disagree that true crime makes people less empathetic, just as they are less likely than men to believe true crime content is biased and inaccurate.
Women are the great champion of true crime.
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Several interesting reasons explain why women gravitate toward true crime material more so than men. Some of these are rooted in cultural and behavioral differences between men and women in American society. For instance, there are significant differences in the types of book content that women and men read and review for publication. By and large, women read and review true crime works whereas men read and review books in the war genre.
Thus, within violence-oriented genres, women pick crime, men pick war. This is not to suggest that men are disinterested in true crime, far from it. But whereas men show interest in several violence-oriented genres, women are more narrowly focused on true crime.
Some of the underlying rationale for true crime interest also varies by sex. Women are more likely than men to consume true crime content for information about how to repel an attacker in the event of a violent crime attempt. There is a significant self-defense concern that women derive from true crime books and movies. My female students write about this in their seminar papers. Of particular interest are stories about women who were able to thwart attacks from violent criminals.
Perhaps for this reason and relative to men, women are disproportionately drawn to true crime books that describe cases involving female victims or podcasts dedicated to women. Women also show greater interest in the psychological factors that motivate serious violence, thus reinforcing that the sex differences in true crime book patterns also have a basis in intellectual curiosity. That is expected since roughly two-thirds of psychology undergraduates in the United States are women.
Beyond concerns about potential self-defense, women are also more empathic and tender-minded than men. These are not cultural stereotypes but reflect core sex differences in emotionality and personality as shown by decades of psychological research.
All other things being equal, women are more inclined than men to respond to the compelling, often highly emotional life stories of offenders and victims. Women appreciate the nuances of emotional relatedness and understanding relative to men, particularly in cases where an offender has sympathetic or mitigating features.
Women’s emotional relatedness and understanding also helps to explain why they are more likely to read true crime books about female victims.
True crime provides a refuge to intellectualize and process violence against women.
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Although homicide is primarily a male-on-male phenomenon, women incur greater homicide victimization risk for other forms of lethal violence. According to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, women are seven times more likely than men to be murdered in an intimate partner context. These cases touch a significant cultural nerve particularly because they can feature a seemingly “normal” male, whose conventional behaviors are a façade obscuring a darker side.
Audiences crave these types of cases. For evidence, consider the flood of true crime content devoted to the murders of Shanann, Bella, and Celeste Watts in August 2018. These works include documentary films (American Murder: The Family Next Door), books (John Glatt’s The Perfect Father: The True Story of Chris Watts, His All-American Family, and a Shocking Murder and Lena Derhally’s My Daddy is a Hero: How Chris Watts Went from Family Man to Family Killer), podcasts (The Unforgivables and The Devil Beside Me: The Chris Watts Story), and countless news stories.
The Watts case offered a seemingly perfect leading man, a devoted husband and doting father who helped to achieve a comfortable lifestyle. But that leading man was also unfaithful and annihilated his family to pursue the novelty and excitement of a new relationship, one without the emotional attachments and financial responsibilities of married life.
Perfect life in hand, he threw it away in the most violent and despicable way imaginable. For many American women (and men, for that matter), commitment and infidelity, marriage and family are highly personal themes.
The Watts murders are a tragic example of carnage unfolding from apparent normalcy. Fortunately, in the general population, homicide victimization has a very low likelihood of ever occurring. That does not mean that American lives are devoid of violence, however. Personal experiences with domestic violence and sexual violence are far more prevalent, particularly for women. These experiences can influence the type of cultural material one consumes.
For instance, women with sexual victimization history are particularly fond of true crime material. An avalanche of true crime programming, especially in the podcast sphere, is devoted to survivors of sexual abuse. Due to their experiences, sexual assault survivors have greater fear of rape, which is associated not only with consumption of true crime media, but also a motivation to learn about strategies for defensive vigilance against sexual assault.
In this respect, true crime interest is intertwined with victimization experiences, sexual history, and fear of crime. These experiences drive a deep-seated desire for legal closure; a feeling widely held in the population. As a culture, we want wrongdoers to pay for their crimes.
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Beyond victimization experiences, people enjoy true crime for other reasons as well. One is morbid curiosity, the interest in dark or unpleasant material. Relative to women, men tend to have greater morbid curiosity, such as expressing an interest in seeing an autopsy or witnessing an execution. For some, morbid material is interesting. For others, morbid content is difficult to handle.
Another morbid concept is hybristophilia, which is a paraphilic condition characterized by sexual arousal and attraction toward criminals. Although a rare phenomenon, there are disturbing cases where women pursue and even marry notorious condemned offenders, including Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez. Many citizens view such conduct—a woman marrying a man who raped and murdered numerous women—as highly distasteful. It is one reason true crime critics consider the genre lowbrow.
Men have much greater preference for sexual content in media than women, evidenced by sex differences in pornography use. These sex differences are substantial. However, interest in other material including serial murder, psychologically morbid material, and general psychological material is comparable for women and men.
That unanimity bears repeating. Regardless of sex differences in true crime interest, there is broad cultural concern about sexual violence and the degree to which society should attempt to prevent it. National surveys indicate that nearly 75% of Americans believe that murder and rape are equally serious, despite the differences in legal seriousness between the crimes.
The American public is willing to invest considerable resources to prevent the crimes featured so prominently in the true crime paradigm. For instance, monetization research, where direct and indirect costs of crime are studied, shows that upwards of 70% of the total costs of murder are the public’s willingness to pay for interventions to prevent homicide. For rape, willingness to pay accounts for two-thirds of the total costs.
Regardless of gender, people are willing to invest to reduce violence. They are willing to invest resources, and they are willing to invest of themselves. Given their altruistic sensibility, no wonder Americans care so deeply about true crime.
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Women believe true crime helps them to better understand and empathize with both victims and criminal offenders. In the latter case, women want to understand offenders’ motivation because it offers insight into how we should respond to them. Depending on an offender’s motivation and other circumstances about their life, the American public can ignore, despise, or embrace them. Their backstory matters.
Mundane criminals, without intriguing psychological conditions or behavioral disorders, are of little interest to the true crime enterprise. Of great interest are those who are villainous and have few if any redeeming qualities to their character. True crime ignores the mild and boring, embraces the strange and bad.
Between those extremes are criminals who have complex personality features, some repellent, but some of which remind us of the positive features about ourselves. Sometimes, even severe criminals activate the public’s compassion and empathy. Although we do not excuse their behavior, we want to understand it. And in some respects, we have a shred of pity for the perpetrator. Aileen Wuornos is a case that comes to mind.
Florida executed Aileen Wuornos by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. Between December 1, 1989, and November 19, 1990, Wuornos murdered six men, receiving a death sentence for each homicide. She was also convicted of five counts of robbery with a gun or deadly weapon for which she received sentences ranging from 10 to 40 years in prison. Wuornos avoided prosecution for a seventh murder because the victim’s body was never found.
From the beginning, the Wuornos case was exceptional. Multiple decades of the FBI’s data show that only 5% of sexual homicides involve women as perpetrators. A prostitute for much of her adult life, it was initially unclear to what degree sexual predation played a role in her murders.
The legal punishment also made the case unique. Women are grossly underrepresented among condemned populations in the United States; thus, the execution of a female offender is rare, and, usually newsworthy. Many Americans recoil at the thought of executing a woman.
Leading up to and after her execution, Wuornos became a cause célèbre and the case galvanized the country. Regardless of one’s true crime fandom, a palpable sense of intrigue and concern surrounded the case. In some quarters, the notion that a female prostitute strikes back and kills men after a lifetime of abuse and degradation was highly resonant.
In 2003, the year after her execution, a full-length feature film titled Monster burst on
to the cultural landscape. In Monster, actress Charlize Theron played the role of Wuornos, gaining significant weight and wearing prosthetic makeup to physically transform herself into the main character.
In capturing the full scope of Wuornos’s dispiriting life, Theron’s performance was extraordinary, and earned her the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress.
But Monster was not simply a motion picture about a career criminal or a serial killer. It sparked controversial debates about the morality of her victims and the culpability of those who use prostitutes. It also showed the vividly violent realities of sex work. As Theron states in the film’s trailer, “There’s a whole world of people killing and raping, but I’m the only one killing them.”
Beyond Hollywood, Aileen Wuornos was also the subject of forensic examination. Like Monster, forensic psychiatrists similarly documented the assorted abuses and deprivations Wuornos suffered in her formative years, along with her track record of clinically remarkable conduct problems. Assorted relatives abused and neglected her in a variety of ways, and sexual abuse, some of it of an incestuous nature, was a recurrent part of her developmental history. From the beginning, her life was thoroughly depressing.
Wuornos was also a highly psychopathic, chronic offender. Interpersonally and emotionally, she was prone to boredom, highly sensation-seeking, manipulative, remorseless, callous, cold, and generally lacked empathy. She led an aimless, parasitic lifestyle, was grossly irresponsible and impulsive, and showed self-regulation and behavioral control deficits.
Her versatile criminal history ran the gamut of violent, weapon, property, drug, and public-order crimes. In fact, her score of 32 on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised places Wuornos at the 97th percentile among female offenders in North America. Her murders were fully congruent with her antisocial personality features.
Within the true crime community and beyond, a profound sense of novelty surrounded the Wuornos case. However, aside from gender, her life was far from novel. Her developmental history, criminal career, and psychopathological profile are frankly common among serious offenders. Many condemned multiple homicide offenders, the overwhelming majority of whom are men, also have distressing back stories of adverse childhood experiences, disadvantage, and deprivation.
Much of their trauma exposure is horrific, and in some respects the trauma—especially sexual abuse—has direct effects on their murders. Yet the media rarely portrays these men in a sympathetic light in anywhere near the same way Wuornos was. It is likely the romanticizing of violent women like Wuornos reflects broader cultural minimization of the pathologies of female offenders. Although sadistic females are less prevalent than their male peers, their behaviors are just as disturbing, in some cases, worse.
For all of these reasons and more, Wuornos was a fascinating case. She was a textbook psychopath who suffered a tragic upbringing and led a chaotic life of vice, misery, and degradation. In this respect, she was like her male brethren whose tragic backstories are not as frequently discussed or seen as pertinent to their antisocial development. Because of this, the American public had to face the double standards in its reaction to the gendered components of the Wuornos case.
And that is one of the lasting values of the true crime genre itself: the utilization of rare, pathological cases to engage broader cultural conversations about hot-button societal topics.
Wuornos, and the accolade-laden film about her life, made for uncomfortable dialogue about prostitution, violence, deservedness, and retribution. It raised important issues, prompting similarly uncomfortable conversations about our differential reactions to an offender depending on their sex.
Other cases do this too. In Bright Young Women, novelist Jessica Knoll fictionalizes women touched by Ted Bundy’s crimes in Florida and Washington but utilizes a very different approach than most books about the infamous killer. Tired of the notoriety that Bundy and offenders like him have received, often at the great expense of the women they victimized, Knoll does not refer to Bundy by name at any point in her book, only occasionally referring to him as “the defendant.”
Partially driving that decision is the author’s disgust about the entirety of Bundy’s case and the typical narrative that Bundy was a charming, intelligent, and attractive man. Knoll has a different take, “A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies.”
Most true crime discourse about Bundy is not focused on sex and gender, but the case engages that issue as thoroughly as the case of Aileen Wuornos. Either way, women notice.
In the end, victimization is only one piece of the formidable female interest in true crime. It is not the reason, just one of them. By gravitating toward and consuming true crime content, women flex their intellectual muscles particularly in terms of understanding offender motivation.
True crime allows the pursuit of the why question, the solving of the mystery. And if that investigative energy also engages empathic concern toward the offender, victim, or criminal justice system, it is even better.