True Crime Rots Your Brain
On true crime, pop feminism, and trusting men.
(**Content warning: abuse, violence against women, Johnny Depp, and weddings**)
When I made a TikTok video defending Amber Heard earlier this summer, I lost somewhere between 2,000-3,000 followers. It was hard to get an exact number since I was also gaining followers from other videos at the time; for days, the app would tell me “you gained 150 followers since you last logged in!” but my actual follower count would stay the same or even drop. At the time, it was a bit surprising that this many of my followers sided with the clear anti-feminism of this carefully-crafted culture war.
I am not normally interested in the internal lives of celebrities. People in the public eye (actors, musicians, content creators, etc.) exist to create entertaining and/or informative media, and then I pay them for their labor (money for theater tickets, money for vinyl records, interacting with their content through likes and shares so they can win favor with the company mining our data for advertisers, etc.) I’m no more interested in the love life of Jennifer Lawrence than I am interested in the love life of my car mechanic. You perform a job, I compensate you for that job. It’s a simple transaction.
Sometimes, though, the context of an artist’s life enhances our experience of their art, or “says something” about our broader society. Nicole Kidman’s performance in The Others (2001) becomes all the more real when you realize that it was made in the wake of her divorce from Tom Cruise. Taylor Swift crafted an entire album’s narrative around the public’s perception of her as a dumb blonde, and it’s one of my favorite records of all time. The troubled development of the Peter Jackson Hobbit films say a lot about the current state of labor and the influence of media conglomerates on the rights of small nations. So on and so forth.
So when I, Anna Marie, notorious celebrity-ignorer, actually get around to making a video about a celebrity, you know it’s important.
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It’s hard to begin to dissect everything I hated about the coverage of the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial. In my video, I discussed a few points that I thought should be able to sell someone on the idea that the trial was being used as a catalyst for widespread anti-feminism…
Depp and his team of lawyers deliberately planned for this trial to be executed in this way, going so far as to hold the trial in Virginia, the state with the most lax free speech laws. They also publicly leaked court footage that was edited down to make Amber look worse; the full footage gives complete context. The whole exercise was one of political theater, a court drama that the parasitic attention economy we call “journalism” simply couldn’t ignore.
Our society hates women and will jump at any chance to “complicate” an abuse story so that we can side with a man. We would rather believe that a woman is lying than believe that a man we like has done something wrong.
Pro-Depp and anti-Amber content was extremely profitable. Across social media, everyday creators and celebrities alike were pulling in millions of views dissecting trial content and wearing blonde wigs to stage their interpretation of various real-life abuse events. Even other celebrities like Lance Bass were weighing in, usually calling Amber the abuser in the situation despite the overwhelming incriminating evidence against Depp. In the marketplace of ideas, attention is currency.
I was extremely careful to point out that I was NOT making a statement about the specifics of the trial, which detailed the internal story of “who did what to who”, details that were being cherry-picked and mischaracterized to mock Amber. To me, doing so was not only pointless (there are details that we, the public, can/will never know) but a distraction from what this was really about: onboarding people into anti-feminism.
Recently, new information came to light that bolstered the idea that this trial was stagecraft, as though this information wasn’t readily available from the start. Again, I won’t go over the cruel details. But what we’re now seeing on social media are people coming out in droves to express their regret about not believing Amber prior to these even-worse-yet-still-not-orders-of-magnitude-worse documents being leaked. I’m sincerely glad that these people finally doing a little self-reflection, but the damage has already been done.
All of this has me asking, for the umpteenth time this year: how do we change the conversation around feminism and abuse?
True crime is often heralded as something that’s good for women. “It keeps us safer”, they say, to know how and why men enact violence onto us so that we can “protect ourselves”. Absolutely, us women should know how to protect ourselves. We should all take self-defense classes and our discernment about which men might be abusers needs to be razor-sharp. However, I can’t help but think that ingesting loads of true crime content is actually pretty dangerous, on a personal and societal level.
First off, it’s traumatized thinking. If you’re neurodivergent (like me), you know how easy it is to ruminate on things. You run through traumatic events over and over and over again in your head, because if you could just analyze it enough, if you could just pick apart every action and sub-action leading up to it, if you just could see the room you were in from all 1,000 angles, you can identify exactly what went wrong and exactly what you could have done different. This is not processing your trauma; it’s picking at a scab to prevent it from healing. Knowing that there are others out there who have been through what you’ve been through and that you’re not alone is incredibly helpful; but what good is your 30th serial killer podcast episode doing for you?
Second, it runs counter to abolitionist thinking. We live in a world where the default response to harm (or perceived harm) is punishment, often incarceration. Our society’s answer to the question “Why do people commit crimes?” is something like “some people are just inherently anti-social weirdos who do fucked-up stuff and so we have to lock them away”. As an abolitionist, my goal is to nudge people toward a different answer: people commit crimes as a response to not getting their needs met by society, and the root cause of that being a fusion of capitalism (people need to pay money for food/shelter/health care, so they “steal” when they don’t have them), patriarchy (men feel entitled to power over women), white supremacy, homophobia, etc. (breaking the law is sometimes necessary for political liberation). Also, we humans can have skewed perception about what a “crime” is in the first place (e.g. why is smoking weed a punishable offense? Racism, of course.) Punitive justice thinking says that people are evil and dangerous, and asks us to be fascinated with why that is and the implications of this. Restorative justice thinking says that people are neither good nor evil by nature (or at least doesn’t claim to answer this definitively), and asks us to be critical of the systems that force people to act in evil ways.
Finally, true crime content can affirm sensationalist and even white supremacist thinking, especially when made by people who aren’t trained journalists. The over-focus on missing white women in this content is not random. Roughly one year ago, the death of Gabrielle Petito attracted online attention as the same kind of people who consume true crime content treated her murder like a game show. This in and of itself was disgusting, but it’s all the more horrific when you realize that missing and murdered Indigenous women don’t get nearly the kind of media coverage as one white woman. Even our popular feminist slogans can be incomplete: how far does “believing women” go when it’s a white woman accusing a Black man of a crime?
In my mind, True Crime can serve as an entry point into the alt-right pipeline. The Right is incredibly good at weaving a particular narrative around harm and what needs to be done about harm, and while much digital ink has been spilled on how white men get radicalized by online content, there’s much less coverage on how white women are susceptible to these same ideas. For example, it’s not yet a major point in popular feminist discourse how internalized misogyny exists and how white women uphold white supremacy (although this is changing).
If your goal is to change the dominant cultural narrative about the general treatment of women, it’s easy to feel hopeless. That there are no allies left and that the far-right media machine has already won. That in the eyes of popular discourse, whatever that means, the conversation is too toxic; all things progressive are now “woke” and woke = bad. Christopher Rufo, the conservative who masterminded the strategy to label all left-leaning teachings as “critical race theory”, literally admitted that this was his plan all along…
I’m not sure what the solution is. I do think that we should show some grace to those who were tricked by the far-right media machine into engaging with anti-Heard content. Disrupting a machine of hate requires that we act with love, and love often takes patience. If you can leverage any sort of privilege in your particular social setting (e.g. if you’re a white man reading this, or a white women who has friends who love true crime), try your best to do so before somebody gets hurt. Keep acting wherever you are, making wherever you are as safe of a place as possible for survivors, and eventually we will win. It will be a confusing, messy journey, but we will win.
Yesterday, I watched my sister get married as these thoughts about popular feminism swirled in my head. She married a good man, a feminist man who is unafraid to call his male friends out on their bullshit. My sister and I have long reckoned with our own histories of abuse (a story for another time), but she has spoken to me at length about how her now-husband puts in the work to understand this history. He is her emotional rock during extended visits with our parents. He sees when her “fawn” response becomes activated and he empowers her to act in more self-preserving ways. He has earned the trust of my entire, gigantic Polish family through nearly a decade of kindness, loyalty, and good Italian food.
I still have a hard time trusting most cis men, but when they do prove themselves, they can truly be our greatest allies. Whenever my mind wanders about how we can win feminist causes, all paths lead here: co-liberation or bust.
Currently Reading
So, this is hilarious: an Australian airline is having their executives serve as baggage workers. Since Qantas is so understaffed, it’s actually getting the ruling class to perform working-class labor. It puts a smile on my face to think that the execute class, perhaps even the ones who made the decisions to cut thousands of jobs to save on costs and not increase worker pay in accordance with inflation, will have to haul luggage themselves to keep their operation going. More of this, please.
Speaking of feminism & social media: it actually happened! Meta turned over 300+ MB of private data, including messages between a Nebraska mother and her 17-year-old daughter, when police issued the company a warrant. All because they suspected that the daughter got an abortion. Welcome to post-Roe America. All the more reason to organize for codified rights and supporting the My Body, My Data Act that I talked about in this newsletter’s first issue.
Rainwater may already be unsafe to drink around the world, according to a new study from Environmental Science and Technology. The study discusses a “planetary boundary for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) being exceeded” and mentions that this could lead to global soils being “ubiquitously contaminated”. This is bad news for anybody who needs to collect rainwater for drinking, and is yet another example of environmental injustice. Regulate these fuckers to hell and back.
Watch History
What does feminism have to do with quantum physics?
More perspectives on pop feminism’s downsides from fashion icon & cultural critic Mina Le.
More than an hour of curated interviews from content creators who joined OnlyFans. Definitely worth listening to if you want to learn more about sex work!
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
I was not only a bridesmaid in my sister’s wedding this weekend, but I DJ’d the cocktail party afterwards. If you’re in the mood for some classics, check out my Spotify playlists here (one for schmoozing and one for grooving).
This cover of Dandelion Wine is majestic and makes me want to record my own music 🥺
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna