Why do women write books about brutal murders and sexual violence against young women and attract an almost entirely female readership?
If you’ve looked through women's bookshelves or seen girls reading for pleasure in public places or on holiday, you may have noticed titles such as A Girl On a Train, Gone Girl, Then She Was Gone, The Girl in the Ice. Thrillers about the murder of a young woman. They seem especially popular with post-wall women, but I've also known college-aged girls who read these types of books.
We know about the prevalence of first person rape and violent sexual fantasies among women, but what about violence against other women. Why do some women enjoy murder mysteries involving female victims?
I think the reaction to cases like Cologne and Rotherham make it clear that women in general are not as concerned with real cases of rape and other violence against young women as men are, which makes sound evolutionary sense. In fact women in general have shown almost complete indifference. But the popularity of books about the murders of young women shows that many actually positively enjoy fictional descriptions of violence against other young nubile women.
I’ve found one explanation for this in an article by a feminist professor in the London Review of Books.
Let’s try to imagine that Oxford-educated Professor Rose’s bulletproof explanation that the patriarchy made women write these books, and then manipulated women into reading them is wrong.
What’s the reason for this morbid female interest?
With an increasing number of women entering the policeforce and becoming judges I think it should be a cause for concern.
- Is it raw hybristophilia, with women reading these sorts of books due to a sexual interest in the fictional male perpetrators?
- Why do the victims always seem to be young women?
- Is it that lower value women have a genetic interest in higher value women being taken out of the sexual market, so that books like this satisfy their hindbrain? Especially given that most of our evolutionary history has involved high female to male sex ratios, with an abundance of women.
- Or is it something else entirely?
If you’ve looked through women's bookshelves or seen girls reading for pleasure in public places or on holiday, you may have noticed titles such as A Girl On a Train, Gone Girl, Then She Was Gone, The Girl in the Ice. Thrillers about the murder of a young woman. They seem especially popular with post-wall women, but I've also known college-aged girls who read these types of books.
We know about the prevalence of first person rape and violent sexual fantasies among women, but what about violence against other women. Why do some women enjoy murder mysteries involving female victims?
I think the reaction to cases like Cologne and Rotherham make it clear that women in general are not as concerned with real cases of rape and other violence against young women as men are, which makes sound evolutionary sense. In fact women in general have shown almost complete indifference. But the popularity of books about the murders of young women shows that many actually positively enjoy fictional descriptions of violence against other young nubile women.
I’ve found one explanation for this in an article by a feminist professor in the London Review of Books.
Quote:Quote:
Corkscrew in the Neck
Jacqueline Rose
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Doubleday, 320 pp, £12.99, January 2015, ISBN 978 0 85752 231 3
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Weidenfeld, 512 pp, £8.99, September 2014, ISBN 978 1 78022 822 8
...
One of the reasons for the success of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train may be that they make violence not just compelling, like any horror story, nor just manageable, like detective stories (which always reassure us that the worst will finally be contained by the law), but digestible, a bit like consuming a TV dinner, legs outstretched, in an armchair. Sitting there (metaphorically), I felt I was being invited to identify as a reader with a man – a man not particularly sexual, or fit or even menacing, in fact someone who is pretty bored by the world – for whom misogyny just happens to be the best show in town, and, since both these stories were written by women, simply a fact of life that has nothing to do with him (even if, as we will see, he just might be a killer). This is Tom, key male player, near the end of The Girl on the Train: ‘He leans back on the sofa, his legs spread wide apart, the big man, taking up space.’ That women make up a large part of the readership of these novels would be no objection. Again there is nothing new here. Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves. ‘I don’t understand myself; I don’t understand the person I’ve become,’ laments Rachel, the first and main narrator of The Girl on the Train (she is the girl in question). ‘God, he must hate me. I hate me’ – self-hating and self-ignorant, both.
Let’s try to imagine that Oxford-educated Professor Rose’s bulletproof explanation that the patriarchy made women write these books, and then manipulated women into reading them is wrong.
What’s the reason for this morbid female interest?
With an increasing number of women entering the policeforce and becoming judges I think it should be a cause for concern.
- Is it raw hybristophilia, with women reading these sorts of books due to a sexual interest in the fictional male perpetrators?
- Why do the victims always seem to be young women?
- Is it that lower value women have a genetic interest in higher value women being taken out of the sexual market, so that books like this satisfy their hindbrain? Especially given that most of our evolutionary history has involved high female to male sex ratios, with an abundance of women.
- Or is it something else entirely?