Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.

Part of the curriculum of growing up as a girl is to learn lessons about your vulnerability—if not from your parents, then from a culture that’s fascinated by wounded women.

This is one of the risks of taking on the role of the defender: if the dream is to lose yourself in a cause, you might wake up one day and realize that you’ve succeeded, and that there’s hardly anything left of you. Women, who are socially conditioned to be selfless, can be particularly susceptible to a version of heroism that sucks them dry.

Nothing makes people more righteous than feeling they are in possession of a truth that others don’t want to hear.

It takes so little for us to shut ourselves off from someone else’s suffering—all he has to do is be wearing the wrong team’s jersey. Human beings are such good othering machines, so talented at dividing up the world into who matters and who doesn’t.

I know I’m not the only woman who draws satisfaction from true crime stories that expose the corruption and errors of people in positions of authority—narratives such as that of the West Memphis Three. The shadow side to this, however, is something such as the Satanic Panic, a narrative that was largely advanced by women. The role of the defender,

Since 1980, when the victims’ rights movement took off, higher-education spending in California has decreased by 13 percent, while investment in prisons has grown 436 percent; the state now spends far more money on prisons than it does on colleges and universities.

they weren’t the only ones warping my sense of reality—it was also the many flavors of online Nazi, the school shooters and the girls who longed to love them, the edgelords and their aggressive brooding, cranky old Ayn Rand—all these various manifestations of a worldview that insisted what mattered most was power, and that getting attention gave yo

and hate and strength, about being beyond good and evil, about how being free from empathy