"The assumption is now ? and it seems to be correct ? that audiences are happy to watch their heroines being beaten and gagged, and to stare at explicitly rendered photographs of women cut and splayed and killed."
Great article by Natasha Walton in the Guardian today about the intense and lingering depiction of violence against women in films and TV programmes that habitually excuse their horrific images by presenting them in stories that are 'moral' because they narrate the investigation, condemnation, and punishment of the crime.
When Stephen Griffiths describes himself in court by the 'crossbow cannibal' tag that a newspaper gave him, don't we have to see that the conventional excited and graphic presentation of the murder of women in the media in news reports and in drama feeds back into reality, nourishing the fantasies and encouraging the actions not just of serial killers but of common-or-garden misogynists?