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

This helps explain why television programs about violent death can feel so strangely soothing: they teach us that even the most senseless crimes can be interpreted and, ultimately, explained.

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

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.

Yet there are so many ways that people can mess things up, so many ways our human tendencies toward bias, sloppiness, error, and fraud can get in the way. Ultimately, we’re such bad detectives, at least by the standards of my young self. We haven’t figured out how to see without being seen. We’re far from all-powerful. We fail at omniscience. Even

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,

Dollhouses are an almost too-literal example of these women’s shrunken ambitions—of how, when you don’t have control over the big decisions shaping your life, you narrow your focus to a world that’s small enough for you to impose your will on it.

The underlying, unarticulated assumption of this political talk was that victims and criminals were two distinct categories of people with diametrically opposed interests.

“Mean world syndrome” was a theory developed in the 1970s by a professor of communications named George Gerbner. Gerbner argued that the more media people consumed, the more likely they were to believe that the world was a dangerous place; in the decades since, a number of studies have borne out Gerbner’s conclusions. Mean world syndrome is one exp

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