Reasons Ladies Love True Crime Stuff

A 2010 study in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science found that women love true crime more than men. Why women like true crime can be boiled down to a host of reasons that include their ability to relate to its storylines and the necessity they feel to prepare for the worst. It's definitely not just some desire to join the illustrious ranks of other terrifying female serial killers. As such, women disproportionately ingest true crime when compared to men. For example, the host of the true-crime podcast Sword and Scale, Michael Boudet, said that 70% of his fans were female between the ages of 25-45.

So, why exactly do women eat up this true crime stuff? Read on in the list below to find out.

How often have you read or watched true-crime fiction and the line, “she was just a regular girl, it could’ve happened to me,” was said? A bunch, right? That’s because true-crime is extremely relatable. Most of the time the victims of true-crime fiction aren’t derelicts or sex workers. They didn’t “have it coming” (not that anyone does), but these women did not put themselves in harm’s way. Women are also able to empathize more with the victims of true crime than men, says Dr. Howard Forman, a forensic psychiatrist at Montefiore Medical Center.

“By the time you get to adulthood, women are able to empathize to a greater degree than men on average,” Forman told Tech Insider. “That may lead to true crime being more interesting to women than men, simply because if you empathize more with the victim, it may be more relevant to you and more gripping.”

In the 2010 study, the researchers found that the primary motivation women had for reading true-crime novels was so that they could watch for signs of a potentially murderous situation. Reading this material allowed them to learn how to look for signals of potential violence in a jealous boyfriend or spouse. They also read the novels so that they could learn ways to escape, in case they ever found themselves bound and gagged in the back of some van.

And that's totally fair. Women are far more likely to be the victims of sexual violence than men. In fact, one out of every six women in the United States has been a victim of an attempted or completed rape. Women also account for 70% of the victims of serial killers who murdered between 1985 and 2010, and that is primarily because there is a sexual motive behind most mass killers. Those statistics are staggering, and it makes sense that a woman would want to know what to do to survive in a situation like that.

Men might be more likely to find themselves on a deserted island with limited resources. So, they’re probably more likely to watch Man vs. Wild to learn how to survive than they are to be taking notes from The Fall. Women, are far more likely to fall into the hands of a sociopathic predator. So what do they do? They read true-crime.

Come on, there is an entire TV show called How to Get Away with Murder?, and the main character is a strong female lead, played by Viola Davis. It’s not so much that women want to actually study how to commit a crime, but it can be pretty fun to pretend. Women enjoy playing the role of the detective and CSI specialist.

Shows like Making of a Murderer, Jinx, and the podcast Serial, have also given the American public a deeper understanding of the justice system. It’s not every day that you get an inside view of a courtroom and see the unfolding of the legal process. This is something that deeply intrigues women.

“I think the real reason we’ve become so obsessed with true crime is more about wanting to understand why the legal system works the way it does. Most of us have never been in a courtroom, let alone a murder trial, and our knowledge of the legal system doesn’t encompass much more than a few episodes of Law and Order or The Good Wife,” wrote Molly Fosco for The Huffington Post.

Some people enjoy being afraid. Fear can be a rush, and the emotion can actually release the hormone dopamine. Some women can get off on feeling scared, and true crime represents many women’s greatest fears. Women are already more conscious of their surroundings then men are; they don’t feel as confident walking home alone at night, for example. They may also keep their keys in their hands, ready to gash a potential attacker’s eyes out. Reading true crime can make that fear tangible, but it’s still at comfortable distance. Once they put the book down or turn off the TV, they feel more confident or empowered because they’ve “experienced” a situation and survived it. However, women reading true crime out of fear can have adverse effects, the study found:

“It is possible that reading these books may actually increase the very fear that drives women toward them in the first place. In other words, a vicious cycle may be occurring: A woman fears becoming the victim of a crime so she turns to true crime books in a possible effort to learn strategies and techniques to prevent becoming murdered. However, with each true crime book she reads, this woman learns about another murderer and his victims, thereby increasing her awareness and fear of crime.”

True crime fiction addresses important issues to womanhood that the larger society pays little attention to. It emphasizes the imbalance of power in the home, and it explains how that could lead to potentially violent situations. In addition, it takes on the idea of self-doubt in terms of motherhood and child rearing.

Women are often portrayed in culture as naturally caring and born-to-be mothers. As true crime shows, in the many cases of women killing their children, this is not always the case. Many women feel trapped by motherhood and are ambivalent towards their children. True crime shows that women do not always bounce back from heartbreak, and they can actually become calloused and irreparably damaged. These are things that women come in contact with on a daily basis, but they don’t have the opportunity to hear or read about in the broader culture. For these reasons, true crime can feel like a safe space where it's OK to admit that the mundane aspects of your home life are actually different than they may appear.

People can discuss whether violence and rape fantasies are normal (or healthy for that matter) until the cows come home, but it doesn’t change the fact that some women are turned on by acts of violence. For the most part, these fantasies remain just that... fantasies. These women would never want these things to really happen to them in real life, and they publicly decry violence against women. But in the privacy of their own minds lurks a secret they would never share with the world; there is something that arouses them about violence. It is not uncommon for women to have rape fantasies. When Daniel Bergner posted asking women to share their fantasies on his DoubleX Desire Lab blog, he got a lot of responses from women who have had rape fantasies.

You've probably also seen that real-life serial killers get huge fan followings made up of primarily women, the very group of people that they’ve brutally murdered. Does this mean that these women have a death wish and want to be murdered by them? Probably not. While on trial for murder, Ted Bundy got hundreds of letters from “groupies” and even married and fathered a child with one of his fans while in prison. For some women, the “bad boy” (that is taking that term very lightly in the case of Bundy) persona is just too irresistible.

Not all crime novels are about a man stalking a woman, terrorizing her, and bringing her under his control. Sometimes, it is the exact opposite. In Dorothy B. Hughe’s In a Lonely Place, the reader sees a man, the killer (Dix Steele... Yes, that was his real name), become unraveled by the power of the smart woman. There are in fact two smart women in the novel: the wife of the police detective on the case and the killer’s love interest. Both women inspire hatred from the killer because they can see him for who he truly is, not a man of absolute power, but a weak, vulnerable, and damaged person.

This theme is often seen in true crime fiction. Take the role of Stella Gibson in The Fall. Stella, played brilliantly by Gillian Anderson, can understand the killer, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), for who he really is. He is a broken boy, driven to kill because of his deep-rooted misogyny. Stella is the only legitimate threat that stands in Spector’s way. Spector is obsessed with Stella, and at the same time hates her immensely because of her intellect and position of power, something that Spector was never able to achieve in his unremarkable life. For female viewers and readers, this inversion of the power dynamics between men and women can be highly appealing.

Some women don’t read true crime because they get off on the gore and violence. For them, it's more of an opportunity to understand how seemingly “good” women can just snap. There’s a whole TV show on Oxygen devoted to that called Snapped because women love watching it so much. It’s interesting to understand the steps that led to a break in these women’s psyches. For example, what made those young peace-loving hippy girls become slaves to and commit brutal murder in the name of Charles Manson in Helter Skelter? Could you be so easily led?