I'm Obsessed With Serial Killers

[ismnotwasm]

Western culture has a nasty obsession with the murder of women. The more brutal the death, the more the fascination grows. I would like to tell you that I'm above all this and that I reject the torture of ladies as entertainment, but — as my late night Google history will show you — I'd be lying.

Of all the killers who've preyed on women, few have captured imaginations (mine included) in the same way as Jack the Ripper, the murderer who likely killed five women in London's Whitechapel district in 1888. Jack, who was never caught, has been the inspiration for countless books, television shows and movies and there are people out there still dedicated to unearthing his identity. (Recently, a man announced that he solved the case, although many have their doubts on whether or not he actually did.)

Salivating over the details of the Jack the Ripper mystery is sinister for obvious reasons (we're exalting a man who slit people's throats and cut up their bodies as a hobby), but it's also, as New Republic writer Katie Engelhart points out, damn anti-feminist.

In her piece Our Jack the Ripper Obsession Is Misogynist, Engelhart writes:

The Ripper industry...involves very little respect, and plenty of irreverence. This is an entertainment enterprise, pure and simply. Murder is stripped of its context; victims are stripped of their dignity. And if the murders hadn't happened so very long ago, we would probably be very repulsed that a Ripper industry exists at all. Semi-professional "Ripperologists" (most of them male; see Ripperology magazine) pontificate at length about who Jack was—and why he killed. But we hear little of the victims and their exacting lives. Jack's ubiquity has veiled his crimes in myth. He now stands within a Gothic literary tradition more than a historical one: rubbing fictional shoulders with the likes of Sweeney Todd, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde.

And then there's the glib treatment of the story's violent sexual component. While there is no evidence that Jack raped his victims, he did give several of them crude hysterectomies. In one case, he walked off with a victim's uterus. But Ripper mythology reinforces a sense that these women had it coming. The victims were all pushers of the "four-penny knee trembler"—prostitutes. Today's Ripper tour guides give us all the titillating details. In this, the tour guides are not unlike Victorian-era journalists, who emphasized how "depraved"—and, thus, perhaps, deserving of their fate—the victims were.

http://jezebel.com/im-obsessed-with-serial-killers-1633527837


I used to be as well. Having a friend murdered by one may have triggered it, but it wasn't until an older nurse told me the probable real reason: "You're a potential victim" because I was a subclass of 'woman'-- a nurse. Creeped me right the fuck out. Then, for a while I liked CSI shows, until I heard the term "dead chick shows" (I still call them that) and saw one that disgusted me with it's blatant over the top misogyny. I don't watch them anymore.

I'm a horror fan, it's not like I'm unfamiliar with guts and gore and psychopaths in cinema. I like "bad" horror too. (Not torture porn, so much) It is perhaps, a variation of the serial killer obsession, except everyone gets killed, and it's seems to lean toward more casual sexism than misogyny, although it's gotten a bit better. Like the ending of Hostel 2-- no one is safe and nothing is sacred.