Telling Lies About Murdered Women
Are you familiar with the idea that if you live in a city, and you're ever in peril or having an emergency of some kind, you should yell "fire" and not "help"?
The idea is that in cities especially, if you yell help, no one will come because they're too self involved. They don't want to get involved or they're afraid they may put themselves in danger, depending on whose relating this idea. Yelling "fire" means that they may not have a choice about being in peril, because fire spreads. If say, you're attacked, that's your problem. If there's a fire, its our problem.
This idea has pervaded culture. It pops up in news commentary, books (fiction and non-fiction), film, television. It's ubiquitous. If you're raised in the US in the last sixty or so years, you come across it at some point. Maybe it's also taken root outside the US, but I can't say. I've never spent enough time somewhere outside of the US to be as familiar with whether or not it has penetrated as deeply.
It's one of those examples that often gets yanked out as an example when someone is talking about whether or not people, as in the general public, the collective "we," are decent and caring or we're selfish and uncaring. It's a perfect story, if you're arguing that people aren't so great, they kind of suck, and selfishness rules our minds, emotions and lives. It's part of the reason fiction has grabbed onto it as well. It's perfect if you're telling a story with two competing perspective of whether or not human beings have any innate goodness or evil within us. It's a little too perfect though, isn't it?
The thing is, it's almost completely bullshit.
The story all of this grew from is about a woman's murder. It says that dozens of people witnessed a murder from their apartment windows, and instead of responding to her cries for help, people decided "not to get involved," never bothered calling the police or even going to find out what was happening.
The root though, the real story that is the foundation for this apocryphal one, is the result of a lie about a woman's murder. For those unfamiliar her name was Kitty Genovese. The Wikipedia article does a good job of covering the basic details of her life, death and the misinformation about both that became the foundation for this "life lesson" that gets passed along so regularly. The important bits, for my purpose today, are that in 1964, The New York times ran a story about Kitty's murder saying that 38 people had witnessed it or heard Kitty calling for help, and no one called police. This, in point of fact, was bullshit. The number of people who heard anything at all, was a good deal less than 38, and none of them knew what was happening. They heard the vague sound of a woman yelling, and most didn't identify it as a cry for help. A few people did call police, who didn't take the calls seriously.
Keep in mind this is before the 911 system in New York, which the story did help inspire the creation of. It's also 1964, a time when a man beating his wife, girlfriend or anyone else then considered his "responsibility" wasn't the something the law dealt with. At best, a cop might show up if the neighbors called with a complaint, and tell the guy to take a walk around the block or ask the victim whether they had a place they might be able to stay, to give the abuser "time to cool off." At worst, they'd tell the women in question to stop being a pain in the ass. Women still couldn't have credit cards in their own names without a man co-signing it.
The apocryphal story of Kitty Genovese is ripe for confirmation bias. If you're already given to having a rather dark perspective on your fellow human beings, it slots in perfectly. It has that ring of "truthiness." Whatever one may feel about Stephen Colbert and the years of his Comedy Central show satirizing Fox News programming, "truthiness" was an excellent description of the way confirmation bias works. It feels true, even if there isn't anything factually accurate underpinning it, and because it feels true, we treat it as truth.
Fiction, when done well, deals in a certain variety of "truthiness" though too. When it's good, there's something in it that feels real or true, in spite of it being something made up, with the intent of striking that real or true feeling. I've always liked the idea that fiction, at its best, is telling the truth about something by telling lies about people who never existed. Things get complicated when you start involving people who have existed, and no doubt the authors perspective on their fellow human beings will effect how that plays out.
I don't have the brightest perspective on my fellow human beings. I don't think it's particularly dark either, though I've certainly been accused of it. I don't think we're innately good. I don't think we're innately evil or bad either. I think the concept of some innate moral register within human beings is something we made up, and different societies and cultures have different ways of navigating the big moral questions that we all experience as the result of being human and living with each other. It's kind of like storytelling. I've seen people use the phrase, "We are made of stories," and I don't really agree with that, but I do think there is something about storytelling we need, the evidence being how universal it is to us, across those societies and cultures.
Being reminded of the difference between the apocryphal version of the story of Kitty Genovese's murder and the factual reality surrounding it struck a chord. I think, in part because our information environment is such an awful mess these days. Reading and watching the news coverage of the last ten years, especially related to the coalescence and rise of a fascist movement, and not to mention my own experiences with seeing news reports contradict the reality of events I've witnessed first hand (including a woman's murder), there's a lot to be learned from understanding how the apocryphal, bullshit version of the story of Kitty Genovese's murder came to be so ubiquitous. It's a reminder that though there is a good deal more bullshit being slung, the line between whether we perceive something as fiction or reality has been pretty thin and permeable for a long time.
"Truthiness" seems to be winning the day where news and current events are concerned, and that's a problem.
The other reason it hit particularly hard right now is the slasher novel I'm working on. One of the major themes is the relationship between horror culture and the various forms of media we consider to be within the true crime genre. I've seen a few other slasher and horror stories glance at this relationship, give it a slight nod, and then choose not to dig too deeply into it. Scream kicked off the meta horror explosion, and it dabbled in the relationship between horror and true crime, but it was pretty superficial about it. I don't mean that as a dig or slight either. I love Scream, but the intent of it was more about putting the tropes of the slasher under the microscope, not the relationship between horror and true crime or the way capitalism effects that relationship.
As a horror fan, and someone whose curiosity can take them into the true crime genre, I have no intent of shitting on these genres either. I wouldn't be interested in writing the equivalent of a lecture listing what's terrible in all of it. I could just write a Patreon post, if that's what I was interested in. I do know I've never read or seen a slasher or a horror story that centers on the cycles of economic exploitation in that relationship though, and I have a long list of questions about all of that. A good bit of this slasher novel is about those questions. Honestly, I think part of the reason Scream shied away from those questions is that there isn't a studio or production company which would put the questions about economic exploitation front and center. I can see how they'd see it as a bad business decision to remind the audience the film they're viewing for entertainment came about in no small part because someone wanted to make money from it. Fortunately for me, I have very little faith in the idea I'll make a small fortune on this novel or any other, so I can write about what interests me. I happen to think I'm not so unique to be the only one interested in these questions. In fact, I know I'm not, because I do see some of them brought up on occasion.
Thinking about Kitty Genovese, the way the bullshit version of the story of her death permeated society, and the many ways horror and true crime are related, made me think about how much of this is, at base, telling lies about women who've been murdered. I know it's more nuanced than that, of course. There are different reasons people might write fiction with some basis in real events. Sometimes, they are purely sensationalistic and crassly capitalist, a kind of tabloid fiction. In other instances, writing about something based in real events is the way to ask questions about ourselves and the world we live in, that are in some way related to them.
There's a certain degree to which this novel is about my own sense of crossing from horror fandom to writer/creator, with the intent of making my work public. I don't think it serves the genre to shy away from the less complimentary questions about it. I think there's also some sense of responsibility on my part, to engage with the things in the genres history that are and have been destructive. A whole slew of the less than positive aspects of the horror genre can be boiled down to "Telling lies about murdered women," and I think it's necessary and can be interesting to confront that. I'm pretty sure I've found a good way to do it that isn't simplistic and superficial.
In reality, it's hard to escape the truth that there's a lot of money in telling lies about murdered women. There's also an entire spectrum of media dedicated to manipulating public sentiment around violence against women in general. It's something I can't in good conscience ignore, as it's clear to me it's a public health problem we can take action to address. Being no stranger to the way different political movements use this fact to inspire loyalty also factors in. One of the longest running narratives within white supremacy is about the dangers men who aren't considered white pose to white women. It's also one of the most effective narratives they have for radicalization. It's also been repurposed by the TERF movement to target trans women too. There is no evidence of any kind to support the idea that men are posing as trans to attack women in bathrooms, but it's a narrative that doesn't die because it speaks to particular fears many women have, and it speaks to the anxieties in men about the expectations related to protecting women.
There are entire cottage industries related to the portrayal of violence against women, including but not limited to murder. In media criticism and discussion, saying something is "like a Lifetime movie" has a whole set of connotations related to what role violence against women or the threat of it plays. In many ways, Lifetime built a network on it. I don't think it's fair to say the entire true crime genre is built on it, because the genre casts a much winder net than that, but I do think it's fair to say it's the main economic driver. Podcasts, long running television series, documentaries... murdered women are big business. There's nothing straightforward about it though. The depth and breadth of complication in the subject makes it rich for storytelling.
Hopefully, my skills as a storyteller are up to the task.