This is why women are obsessed with stories about women being murdered

According to a recent article in The Guardian, nine out of ten bestselling novels in the UK centre around a woman being murdered. 

This is hardly a new phenomenon. Stories built around dead women are as old as storytelling itself: the murdered madonna is the ultimate symbol of violated innocence, while the murdered sex worker has been a staple of crime fiction for centuries.

But those stories were written by men and largely for men. Today’s obsession belongs to women, who make up around 70% of crime fiction readers and are twice as likely to consume true crime content.

This certainly rings true in my own life. Almost all of my female friends are obsessed, in one way or another, with true crime or murder mysteries. The internet is now full of young women explaining the details of gruesome femicides while doing their makeup or making their morning coffee.

We are inundated with headlines about men killing their partners and women being attacked by strangers. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that, rather than burying our heads in the sand, many women seek out fiction and non-fiction about the thing they fear every time they walk home alone or meet a man from a dating app.

I asked some female friends why they love true crime, and why they think women like to read about other women being murdered.

“I think reading about the worst-case scenario when it comes to violence against women is a way of processing that ever-present consciousness of our own vulnerability to violence”, said Hillary, a PhD student. “It also parcels it away into the fictional world where murders are solved and people are brought to justice, which gives structure to the kind of amorphous anxieties women experience.”

Another friend said she was more interested in true crime as a kind of social commentary, and finds cases of couples like Fred and Rose West or Myra Hindley and Ian Brady so interesting because of how gender functions in that power dynamic. 

I’ve long had a theory that many men of a certain age are fascinated by the second world war for a similar reason. It’s not that women can’t find those stories moving; I certainly do. But for many men there is an extra layer of identification. They know that, had they been born a generation earlier, it could very easily have been them.

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I recently visited the D-Day Museum with my partner. We stood looking at a photograph of boys younger than us sitting inside an armoured vehicle, waiting to be deployed. I saw brave young soldiers whose lives had been cut short. He saw young men who, under slightly different circumstances, might have been him.

Is that what women are doing when we read about murdered women? Looking not just at victims, but at versions of ourselves? Thinking: in another city, another decade, another relationship, that could have been me.

Which raises another question: why don’t men consume true crime in the same way? Given that men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime, you might assume they would be the audience most fascinated by it. If you were told the bestselling books were all about femicide, it wouldn’t be absurd to imagine they were being read by the people fantasising about committing those crimes

In reality, men actively shirk away from it. My own guilty pleasure is Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a long-running American cop drama about rape, kidnapping and murder. The criminal is always caught, justice is almost always served – the formula is so predictable, even down to the dialogue, that it becomes strangely comforting.

An old flatmate of mine found my love for it completely incomprehensible. One evening he walked in for the final ten minutes of an episode about a trafficked little girl. Afterwards he admitted he couldn’t sleep. Not because he thought it might happen to him, but because he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that someone else — a man — had done it.

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Perhaps that is the difference. Men are more likely to recoil from what those stories reveal about other men. Sort of like how very few meat eaters actually want to watch what happens in an abattoir. Women, by contrast, often consume them as preparation—as if understanding the worst might somehow make us safer from it. 

The only thing I wonder is whether we are becoming more desensitised to the very worst violence. Watching Agatha Christie adaptations was something my mum and I did together, just as she had with her own mum. But that was cosy crime. You never really saw the violence, Poirot always solved the mystery, and Maggie Smith was there with a perfectly timed one-liner.

Now, TikTok videos detailing every gruesome aspect of real murders rack up tens of millions of views from young women watching on the bus to school or while making dinner. 

This may be a tangent, but I recently stumbled across an online discussion about why so many coming-of-age stories for girls revolve around navigating labyrinths — Alice in Wonderland, Coraline, Spirited Away. One reply has stayed with me ever since:

“Women, especially young women and girls are forced to deal with the world as it is, instead of shaping the world to what they want it to be.”

Maybe that is what all of this really is: not an obsession with murder, but a lifelong attempt to map the labyrinth.