MVAW in crime fiction - article

[DomesticatedZombie]

www.heraldscotland.com/news/19929007.james-oswald-alex-gray-helen-sedgwick-crime-fiction-sarah-everard/

In the Herald today.

'so much of crime fiction can be mapped to the female body (and the mutilation of the female body). “It’s absolutely relentless the killing of women, the torture of women in crime fiction,” '

I'm a big fan of crime fic, but can't stand violence, anything graphic or extreme. Interesting to see the subject of male violence against women discussed, with quotes from a few authors.

Thanks! Interesting article.

Good article. I used to read a lot of crime fiction, but just suddenly had enough, and now I can't watch another police TV drama because I know at some point I'm going to want to vomit as the male murderer gets a long and moving speech to explain his motivations, while his victim doesn't get to say anything at all because she is DEAD for our entertainment.

Insomnia was the film that tipped me over the edge - Robin Williams' character with this long self-pitying rant about how he bludgeoned his teenage fan to death because she laughed at him when he made a pass at her. Like someone had read that Margaret Atwood quote and decided to just use it as the plot for everything.

(And it doesn't even make any SENSE - like an obsessive teenage fan would laugh if her idol made a pass at her. She might feel a lot of different things, but I don't think she'd find it very funny.)

It's everywhere. Excepting the Shakespeare, the three texts my dc's are studying for GCSE ALL have the murder/sexual abuse/degradation of a woman as the key plot point.

Heroes a girl is raped, and the story is all about how her boyfriend feels about it.
Of Mice and Men 'Curly's wife' is murdered and we don't even know what her name is
In 'An Inspector Calls' 'Eva Brown' turns out probably not to exist at all...

Could they have had ONE text where there's a female character with some agency?

The article seems more concerned with whether crime novels/TV let the police off the hook by writing things where police officers are good people and solve crimes, than the issue that they're basically churning out violence against women as formulaic plot points.

Doon McKichean wrote this eight years ago, but I'm afraid it's probably worse now. The account at the end of the experiences of the actor 'Sophie' is really upsetting to read: www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/enough-enough-tv-s-crime-porn-endemic-violence-assault-women-has-stop

Interesting article.
I.like Robert Bryndza crime thrillers for not falling into this trap. But as a genre- more women are murdered, nearly always by men so it is a challenge to write a realistic crime novel that's framed differently

I think I'm in the "impossible to please" group for crime fiction. I don't like the piles of female bodies, but I also feel a bit annoyed at how often the twist is a female serial killer - because in reality that's astonishingly rare.

I also think that the bad apples in the police are over-represented as "how would they know this.... only if the killer is a policeman" is also a common theme.

.I don't like the piles of female bodies, but I also feel a bit annoyed at how often the twist is a female serial killer

Agree, that's an immediate eye roll plot twist, and often quite implausible.

Hm. Tension between reflecting reality and propagating the exact culture that books describe?

There's got to be some tension between the need for a victim and the desire for justice that drives crime stories, I suppose. A crime novel seems lacking if there's no murder; a reader's looking for redemption in the plot, maybe.

I've read that authors/editors say readers want violence, I'm not quite convinced that's straightforwarsly true. At least I meet far more people who say they hate gore and violence and torture porn than I've ever heard say they like that.