My wife was telling me about how annoying it is that she’ll try listening to new true crime podcasts and they’ll shit like “unalived” instead of “killed”. Comes across hella disrespectful to the victims.
To be fair, it’s pretty bleak to use someone’s grisly murder as a means of entertainment. Our society is weird
“Hey there all you horror sweeties, I’ve got a sloppy poppy oopy goopy murder of a three year old little girl brought to you by Squarespace”
Humans have had a taste for the macabre at least for as long as we have written history. Public executions used to be a past time activity (even Jesus’ crucifixion is told like it was a public show), the morgue of Paris was a tourist attraction, even the sanitised (and controversial) Body Worlds exhibition has no trouble finding an audience. Maybe what’s weird is our relationship with death and putrefaction. It happens to everyone yet it’s somehow in bad taste to talk about it.
I get so annoyed listening to true crime stuff on YouTube these days and having the audio cut out any time a person uses the word suicide or rape, but not the gorey details of murder; no that’s perfectly fine to hear every excruciating detail, but lord forbid your precious ears here the letters S-U-I-C-I-D-E in order.
The percentage of women I know that are into murder porn is alarming to me.
It’s not (mostly, I can’t speak for the weirdos out there) murder porn, though? For a while, it was a movement of almost solidarity with other women, because these stories could easily happen to us. So it was almost like listening to survival tips, as well as paying respects to those lost by trying to learn from their experiences. It probably wasn’t a coincedence that the ‘true crime wave’ happened around the time of Me Too.
And to soothe your mind, true crime as a ‘fad’ is dying quite a bit. People realized that, hey having a frivolous show where you clown and make cocktails or some shit while talking about real victims just isn’t okay.
Source: am a woman who was (and is) interested in true crime, and have spoken to many other women from different circles—and even states/cities—who were also interested in the topic.
It’s not exclusive to woman either – guys (especially young guys) watch police bodycams of shootings, combat footage, and gore-porn TV shows or movies. There were entire subreddits dedicated to actual videos/pictures of people dying – and I’ll give you one guess as to what the demographics of their user bases were.
It’s almost as if a lot of people are morbidly curious about death and violence.
True crime has been popular since the 50s and has no signs of winding down.