From the Frying Pan into the Fire: Podcasts to Class
WC Blogpost by: Nina Sayers
It was my first time taking the New York City subway alone.
During the long commute from my suburban town to my first day of freshman year in Manhattan, I stood nervously shifting my feet and gripping the metal rail with white knuckles. After “watching the gap between the platform and the train” exactly as the disembodied subway voice announced, the doors closed and the train lurched forward. From the corner of my eye, I could see a man moving his hand in a repetitive and slight motion. Heeding the warnings of my older friends to avoid eye contact on the train, I kept my eyes glued to my school shoes instead. Only after the man started groaning loudly to himself while accelerating his hand movements did I realize my situation. I pulled my short uniform skirt as far down as I could and stood frozen, only moving with the train’s inertia. As much as I adore New York, it is not a city of people who would readily intervene in such situations. This apathy confused me greatly. While I stood sick with fear in this man’s gaze, the older woman sitting in front of me filled out the Monday morning crossword. Such cognitive dissonance in the face of casual violence sparked my juvenile interest in a genre popular with hundreds of thousands of American women: true crime.
From that day, I started every morning the same – rising before the sun, standing on the dark train platform, and listening to the rhythmic chugging of the approaching locomotive.
Chug-chug – chug-chug – chug-chug – chug-chug…
In Pavlovian fashion, this rhythm unconsciously prompted me to reach for the tangled wire headphones I hurriedly crumpled into that same Catholic uniform skirt’s pocket. In keeping with my morning routine, I adjusted my volume until the chugging faded from my perception and the sounds of true crime podcasts filled the resulting void. Tales of murder, depravity, deceit, and degeneracy simultaneously provided me with a sense of intrigue and calm. In a strange sense, hearing women discuss -- usually male – violence against women provided me with the sense of solidarity that I lacked on the 4-train during my first commute to school. However, the extent of the violence discussed in these podcasts somehow assuaged any fears I had. In my mind, “it could always be worse.” In other words, true crime functioned as both escapism from the fear of everyday violence and reinforcement of the fact that women should fear. Even today, the only people with whom I’ve spoken who have truly understood this dual nature of the genre have been other women. This essential, and often unspoken, understanding of violence prompted me to take the class “Women and Crime in the Evolution of American History” at my university. I gleaned women’s relational understanding of violence, whether in the form of offhand verbal harassment or more physical forms of abuse, from everyday life. Now, as a college student, I want to depart from the individual experiences of myself and my friends by immersing myself in the entire legacy of female criminality in the history (or herstory) of the United States.
In my experience with true crime, it becomes easy for the listener to predict the many cliches of the genre and, thus, of crime itself. The first thing I unlearned in my new class is that there is no expected profile of a criminal. Before writing this blog post, I asked my friends to picture a violent criminal – one that committed a crime such as murder, for example. All of them generated similar scaffolds of a murderer: a man, usually tall, and between the ages of 20 and 60. However, in one of our first classes this semester, we were asked to challenge the notion of criminal predictability. To reinforce this, our class viewed the episode “Try & Catch Me” from the hit TV show Columbo. This episode features a wealthy, elderly, white woman as the murderer, the violent criminal. This profile of a criminal defies all social expectations of criminality. Wealthy people are often not prosecuted for the “white collar” crimes they are more likely to commit, and can afford any resource to avoid consequences for whichever crimes they may commit. Elderly people are assumed to be incapable and harmless, procluding them from suspicion of violent criminality which often requires physical and mental strength. White people have historically been treated more leniently by the American criminal justice and policing systems when compared to their counterparts of color. Finally, women are assumed to be less violent and disobedient than men either due to genetic or socially conditioned components.
Ruth Gordon's character of "Abigail" in this episode was especially impactful as it allowed me to reflect on the ways in which predictability, or, better said, profiling, has allowed for centuries of criminal injustice in the United States, usually as it relates to race and class. The most poignant example of this also comes from my neck of the woods: New York. The infamous “Central Park 5” case shows how some identifiers, in this case race and class, outweigh others, age. Five young black and Latino boys between the ages of 14 and 16 were wrongfully charged with and convicted of the brutal rape and beating of a 28-year-old white woman. The police, of course, not having a perpetrator, relied on their own conscious or unconscious biases to imprison these children for a great part of their youths. Racial bias and hatred allowed this case to become a public spectacle and a sort of social lynching as powerful, usually white, New Yorkers called for their imprisonment, at best, and for their execution, at worst. Donald Trump, namely, printed a page in the Newsday newspaper calling for New York to “bring back the death penalty” and to bolster policing (Newsday, 6). It is easy to see how predictability or assumption of criminality often reinforces white supremacy, classism, and the state. One may think that a single Columbo episode is nothing more than a source of entertainment, but "Women and Crime" teaches us to look deeper than the surface.
True crime, however, often relies on both perpetrator and victim predictability to create a wider audience base. The current formula which works for true crime media seems to follow the white-male-killer and white-female-victim paradigm. I especially want to focus on our obsession with the white female victim. White women, long the symbol of innocence and purity in American culture, became the poster children for true crime victims despite facing less violence than women of color in the United States. Yet whenever one consults true crime sites or even more reputable news sources, their cases are discussed much less or not mentioned at all. This idea of “the less dead,” that one type of victim is worthy of mourning whlie others are neglected, is nothing new. In class we read the article “‘She Must Go Overboard and Shall Go Overboard’: Diseased Bodies and the Spectacle of Murder at Sea” which discussed an unnamed enslaved woman’s murder at sea during the Transatlantic slave trade. Despite the act of her murder being recorded in immense detail, the woman’s name was never recorded and has subsequently been lost to history. Instead of recounting her death in this blog as it is movingly described in the aforementioned article, I want to briefly describe the publishing process of said article. In class, we discussed how the author, Dr. Mustakeem, was unable to find an American publisher who would tell this unnamed woman’s story. The story of her death, told from a deeply focused and personal perspective, makes American audiences uncomfortable. Publishers did not feel that the story was fresh or entertaining enough for readers. However, millions of women flock to true crime to hear similarly gruesome stories of abuse and murder. The victim profiles of women often determine whether a story is perceived to be tragic and enthralling or boring and expected. This specific example further illustrates how women of color face persisting erasure in criminal justice and media dating back to before this country was even incepted. While I hesitate to say that the sensationalization of violence inflicted upon white women is empowering in any sense, it does reflect the power structures that pervade every aspect of American society and culture.
True crime, although it offered me personal comforts, often relies on abusive power structures to keep viewers engaged to generate a profit. However, my new class this fall has already offered me another path through which to examine violence and justice: that of thorough examination and humanity. In this way, education, whether it is gained formally in a university class or by sleuthing on one’s own, offers us the power to challenge the tropes and clichés that further perpetuate injustice. I appreciate our class’s focus on shattering expectations and taking the educational road-less-travelled. This class, more than anything else so far, has raised my excitement to delve deeper into the seemingly novel history of female criminality which reflects the very common realities of life in the United States.
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