Stop Telling Women How To Feel About Ted Bundy

What are you saying when you lecture women about Ted Bundy?

Last week I expressed concern with the inevitable return of the Ted Head. So it may come as a surprise that I'm deeply uncomfortable with the spate of articles, blogs, and social media posts wagging their fingers at women and girls who think Bundy is handsome or charming. I understand the compulsion, when I first stumbled into the hybristophilia community (looking for modern Ted Heads) my inability to understand attraction to serial killers and violent men colored my understanding of the women and girls who obsessively pined for them both romantically and sexually.

It's difficult to understand if one doesn't experience it, and since I don't, I had to work pretty hard at accepting the women and girls who write serial killer erotica and post collages with Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy surrounded by hearts as people who were even real, let alone worthy of my understanding. In my shock, I also discovered a deep curiosity. I dug deeper and tried to write about the phenomenon itself, and the women driving it, from a different point of view. What I found was - all the people wagging fingers at them, telling them they were sick, moralizing, and pushing them out of true crime communities only served to isolate them. In their isolation, they turn further into these communities and further from society. They don't talk to journalists because even the most open minded publications treat them as atrocity exhibitions. Many of these women see therapists, have "normal" romantic and sexual relationships, and in the current climate, where everyone is watching serial killer documentaries on Netflix, fit right in. Their sexual fascination with dangerous men is the only thing that sets them apart, but it's the thing that makes people flip out the most.

But who among us hasn't lusted for the "bad boy"? Are we judging the teenage girls who crush on Loki in The Avengers the way we're recoiling from our facebook friends commenting that, yeah, actually, Ted Bundy is kinda hot?

Our society romanticizes and dramatizes violence against women so cavalierly that we don't even notice how many of our favorite shows start every episode with a dead woman's body on the screen. We don't step back and wonder why so many true crime documentaries settle around traditionally  beautiful young women and girls as victims. We don't worry too much about the very real problem that women and girls are at more risk from the men in their lives than almost anything.

But we recoil at the idea that straight women might be attracted to dangerous men? Can we at least acknowledge that the moment a woman is attracted to a man she is attracted to someone who, statistically, has a damn good chance of being danger for her? Because when you raise women to accept that a ride home with a stranger may end in rape or murder, but also encourage us to date, marry, and love the same men offering those rides - you create a culture where at least some of us are going to be attracted to the devil we know.

No dangerous man is safer than Ted Bundy. Everyone knows exactly what he is capable of, everyone knows exactly how dangerous he is. And on top of that, the motherfucker is dead. He can be attractive, charming, and everything else because that particular dangerous man is no threat.

Is it any wonder some women find themselves pulled to that promise?


Now for the real talk: Ted Bundy was only able to kill women because women were told to be polite and help the clean cut guy with the cast. Because we still tell women not to trust their instincts, to give the guy a chance, to not be rude, to not be a bitch. So can we just agree that we won't police their feelings about whether Ted Bundy had a nice smile? That's not protection. That's harm.

Extra, Extra! New Project!

I've spent the last few weeks getting my creative crap together and refocusing. Projects I've wanted to do for awhile are in swing now, and it feels a lot better doing than thinking about it. The latest project is a podcast I launched with Rae Alexandra of MovieRuiner.com called Mandatory Happy.

The concept is simple, Rae and I, two somewhat cynical feminists, watch rom-coms from every era, and talk about them. We talk about what we like and dislike, and what parts of the movie are nightmarishly problematic. This may sound like it has nothing to do with writing, especially crime writing, but I'm here to tell you it does.

The issues that plague bad rom-coms are the same issues that plague bad crime stories, the same issues that plague bad action movies, etc. It's characters that do things that don't make sense, fall for things they shouldn't, and behave in ways that real humans would never behave.

As crime fiction writers, we're not writing toward a mandatory happy ending, but we're hopefully writing toward realistic characters that catch the reader's attention and feel believable.

The first episode (available now, here!) tackles the film City of Angels, which was marketed as a light hearted almost romantic comedy 20 years ago, and instead was a depressing mess of uneven tone and people behaving in unbelievable ways (if you want to know more, you're going to have to click that link, nothing in this life is free).

One thing we kept coming back to in our discussion was characters behaving in ways that didn't make any sense, things happening, and being accepted in the film that weren't really possible (even in a universe where angels walk among humans, sniffing ladies' hair and talking about Hemingway).

While many male writers still admit, sheepishly, that they don't really know how to write women, I think taking the discussion out of what you are writing at the moment, and looking critically at the writing in other mediums can be helpful. And if you do it with us at Mandatory Happy - it can be fun.

I hope you'll check out our first episode and subscribe via iTunes and join in.

Do You Have A Moment To Talk About Deadpool?

In the last couple weeks I have hidden more Facebook posts than I can count. I discovered I don't care about vitriolic posts about politicians, or arguments about the appropriate response to Justice Scalia's death. I said on Monday, "Honestly, I'd rather talk about Deadpool."

Turns out I was wrong.

I've spent a large portion of my life as one of the few women present in male dominated areas. I walk with a limp because I broke my pelvis in the US Marine Corps - a male dominated place if ever there was one - but before that I loved getting into dirty mosh pits in the punk and metal undergrounds of Central California. I know how to handle a firearm, I like throwing a punch. Wine gives me heartburn but I love beer and whiskey. These aren't statements meant to make me sound cool - I value my friendships with women and I don't think getting lost in the comic book shop is any more or less admirable than getting lost in Sephora - and I do both as often as possible. I'm telling you this about myself for one reason only - I've spent a large portion of my life being told that the things I enjoy are for other people, or even more bluntly, NOT for me.

Look at me all wearing floral and firing a rifle at the same time! 

Does this make me masculine? Does this make me a wannabe "cool girl"?

Fuck no, it doesn't.

Even crime fiction is often thought of as a man's game. While the people in the crime fiction and true crime communities are, for the most part, welcoming and inclusive to people of all genders, the work itself is often classified as "masculine." Many women protagonists get described as "men with boobs" or dismissed entirely. It makes me want to say, "Hey, am I not a woman?" If I relate to these characters? If I enjoy their story lines - am I less a woman? More a man? Of course not.

So when I see die-hard comic book fans getting snarky and shitty about the huge response Deadpool pulled from women, it sets my teeth on edge. When I see non-comic book people wailing and gnashing teeth over the film's success because it was made for "adolescent boys" and men who haven't outgrown their adolesence, what I hear is that this thing I enjoy isn't supposed to be worth my time.

Both sides seem confident that Deadpool wasn't made for me. Deadpool wasn't made for people who like dirty jokes, gun fights, and comic books? Or was it not made for people who like looking at Ryan Reynolds (hey, his face wasn't fucked up for the whole movie). Or was it not made for people who like criminal protagonists who aren't interested in being heroes?

I'm also a feminist who isn't overly fond of the way action movies fuck up female representation - but I saw a sex worker who wasn't ever judged for her profession and who's partner didn't ask her to leave it. I saw a teenage girl be treated fairly and kick major ass without ever being discounted simply for being a young woman. I even saw the hench-woman kick Colossus's ass, where most movies would have left that fight to a man.

Negasonic Teenage Warhead IS an awesome name.

Was it perfect? Hell no! Most entertainment isn't. But I knew what I was getting into because, yes, boys and girls, I did read the fucking comics. Because I am vast and contain multitudes, I've read Deadpool and I've read Bitch Planet, I've read crime fiction and I've read feminist theory. I may not have a college degree but I am confident I'm more educated and more thoughtful than the average adolescent boy.

I should be used to it, after all - horror isn't made for me, action movies and sci-fi aren't made for me, Hemingway didn't write for me... the list goes on and on. Of course, if my interest in makeup and pretty dresses were my only hobbies, I'd be labeled an air-headed bitch.

I'm a woman, and Deadpool was made for me.

If you have a problem with the idea that me, or women like me, enjoy it when you think it belongs to you? Shut up and find a hobby. If you have a problem with the movie's success because you're deathly afraid of a world where things are popular, and the only way you can assert your intellectual dominance is to assume people who enjoyed the film are "teenage boys", hop right off the gender assumption train and check yourself.

You don't get to take the high road while sorting people into boxes based on how much smarter you think you are than them. You can't take the high road while excluding an entire gender from the things you enjoy.

So, if you can't accept that women are into all kinds of movies, books, and stories - no, I don't want to talk to you about Deadpool. Or anything else, probably.

Femmes Fatales

By Russel D McLean

It was a conversation with a friend that stared me thinking about women crime writers. A simple question; which of the current crop of female crime writers would I recommend? Who do I rate?

They should have known better than to ask.

It was my then-to-be-agent who gave me a copy of Vicki Hendricks’s Cruel Poetry; a novel that knocked me off my feet. Truly, I was smitten – and not just because Hendricks one of the few authors in the world who can write about sex in a way that doesn’t make me want to snort milk out of my nose. She hooked me with her voice, her characters, her attitude. This was a woman I could get; a woman writing about the world in a way that I could understand. She was cynical, dangerous, unpredictable and still did not disguise the fact that she was writing from a woman’s point of view.

I wanted more.

And soon enough I found it.

In Cathi Unsworth, who made my head explode with her thriller/faux punk biog The Singer; a sheer, neck-breaking scream of a novel that could have got me fired from the day job as I turned up late to shifts because I just had to know: what happened next? This book was truly something else, and it is to my eternal regret that this year when I found myself near Unsworth at the bar during the Harrogate Crime Festival this year I didn’t turn and say hello, tell her how that book just plain knocked me out.

I told my friend about how, when I saw the stunning painted cover to the unnaturally talented Christa Faust’s Money Shot, I was sold straight off. And Christa’s novel truly delivered on the promise of that cover – deadly, provocative and beautiful noir set in a world that is often used to denote sin in most crime novels. What I loved was that this author used her unique setting of blue movies in such a way that she didn’t demonise her lead character’s choice of profession so much as normalise it, creating a strange kind of equality for a character one would normally expect to feel “exploited” in a more traditional kind of noir tale.

One of the books that truly captivated me of late – and this book, I didn’t dare put it down unless I truly had no choice – was Megan Abbott’s stunning Bury Me Deep, which continues the author’s fascination with the same 1930’s noir-land that James Ellroy once inhabited, where the gumshoes and femme fatales walked the dark alleys. But she tackles this mis-en-scene but from a decidedly female perspective. Abbott is a stunning writer, one whose voice grips and holds the reader, whose sheer style and energy crackles off the page. And if you want female noir, you have to pick up one of the best anthologies of the last few years, A Hell of A Woman, edited by Abbott herself.

And there were so many others out there I had to tell my friend about. As though, once I started to answer what should have been a simple query, I just couldn’t stop.

I told them about Zoe Sharp’s thrillers that beat most male writers hands down for sheer adrenaline rush. And Canadian Sandra Ruttan’s compassionate take on the police thriller that truly turns the tables on the reader to the point where you reach the last page of her second book and wonder, “did she just do that?”

And how could I not mention Laura Lippman, whose book, The Power of Three, did the most unexpected thing and made this cynical bastard shed a couple of tears by the book’s end. How the hell did that happen?

Closer to home, there is Denise Mina, who got me with her run on the Hellblazer comics, a run that convinced me I really had to pick up her actual books – and, oh yes, let me tell you I wasn’t disappointed (although there was a distinct lack of chain smoking mystics schlepping round the streets of Glasgow in her actual crime novels, but her voice and narrative were so strong that in the end it simply didn’t matter).

A simple question, then. But anyone who has a bookseller for a friend should know better than to ask them who they rate, what they love, the writers they dig. You can narrow it down all you like. You can say, “just the women” or “just the men” or “just the noir writers”, but if they’re anything like me, there’s going to be a whole list of authors they can think of. And along with the names, there’s going to be a host of reasons why they you’ll dig those writers.

So, to continue to help my friend, I turn to you, fellow DSDers (both the contributors and the commentors) to ask which female crime writers you’d recommend they read.

Boys and Books

by Dave White

Men don't read.

I hear that all the time. I'll be at a book signing or at a bar or at a school workshop and I hear two complaints. Men don't read. And the other one is "people don't read." I have no solution for this generation. However, I can trace the origin of the problem. And for a minute, I'd like you to forget the other distractions like XBox, iPods, computers, TV, movies and the like...

As discussions go, and researching the way to teach reading goes, the new hot theory is this. Kids need to read books that interest them. That's right, the big theory now is groundshaking. Earthshattering. It's a breakthrough. I'll restate it, just so you have it.

In order to get kids to enjoy reading, they need to read things that interest them.

Whoa.

I mean, I can't believe no one thought of that, he says knowingly. And this leads to the crux of the problem, doesn't it.

People don't like to read because it has always been promoted to them as WORK. You have to read a book and write an essay on it. You have to discuss what goes on in the book. In school, you have to pour over every word and find meaning in it. You can't just enjoy the book. So it is ingrained in you that reading is work. That's going to knock a bunch of readers out to begin with.

Reading is starting behind the 8 ball.

And then we move on to boys. Boys read less than girls. Why? Well, let's go back to the big breakthrough. Kids have to read things that interest them. And what interests boys? Guns, explosions, drugs, sex, music, sports. You know, the fun stuff. The stuff the DSD guys write about.

And where are you exposed to reading mostly? (Especially if your parents aren't readers... Which they should be. Speaking as a teacher, PARENTS... READ TO YOUR KIDS)...

School.

And who teaches kids... especially at a younger age?

Women.

And, let's face it. Women have different tastes in literature than men do. It's not a sexism thing. Women like different types of stories. Women pick out stories about a boy who's father won't kiss him good night anymore because he's too old. Women read you stories about ducks and supermarket attendants. I know, I've heard these stories. They're not bad stories. Some are actually really well written, and are going to inspire other girls to read. But you know what? That's not what boys want to read.

When I was in middle school I read James Lee Burke, Ian Fleming, Michael Crichton, and Jefferey Archer. I was reading crime and gang stuff. I was buying Spider-man comics up the wazoo. My dad (there's that parent thing) used to buy me Spider-man stuff when I was in elementary school. I went beyond what the teachers wanted us to read because I didn't like what teachers wanted us to read.

I try to get my kids to read. I remind them, every day, to bring in something THEY want to read. We read gang stories. We read mysteries, both old and new. I also try to mix in the stuff that girls would like too. You have to get everyone to read.

That's why I think THE OUTSIDERS is the perfect book for teens. It's got the stuff that boys like: the violence, the gangs, the blood. But it also has the heart and sappy moments that girls that age like.

Does it sound like I'm being sexist? Maybe. But it's also true, at a young age, boys think girls are icky. And when you are taught by a female with female tastes, AND IT'S CONSIDERED WORK, you are turning off boy readers.

What's the solution? Let kids read what they want. Don't look down on comics or crime novels or books with violence in them. Don't look down on video game magazines. They are reading. And a good book will lead a kid to another good book and so on.

And parents, encourage your kids to read beyond the curriculum. Get them excited. Take them to Barnes and Noble. Take them to the comic shop.

What do you think?