True Crime Dramas are pure poison

True crime "documentaries" are a poison on the airwaves, infecting us with a paranoid, self-contained, and desperately unhappy vision of America. Omaha watches them, and I sat down to watch a couple of episodes with her on Netflix. The attitude they have toward sexuality, any sexuality, is pure American-grade poison.

The first episode featured a female serial killer of young children, a nurse who deliberately poisoned the children on her ward to spite the doctors and higher-level nurse practitioners who, she felt, were less intelligent than she was.

These shows are only about 22 minutes long, so they have to be choosy about which sequences they film end up in the show. So during an interview with a journalist who'd written a book about the case, the journalist said, "She talked about sex a lot although she was not an attractive woman."

What. The. Fuck. does that have to do with, well, with anything? The comment isn't actually connected to the way she acted. As far as the show was concerned, she never had a lover of any note while she was doing the killing. What business was it of this asshole to make this statement, and why did the producer choose to leave it in?

I'm still angry about this connective idea, that should a merely "ordinary-looking" woman would talk about a sex, there's something hideously nefarious going on.

I've been to a few sex parties in my time. Very few of the people who attend are Hollywood gorgeous. Most are older, sagging and faded, and yet they were great people who still love sex. And as far as I know, none of them were serial killers.

Later shows featured Dungeons & Dragons panic, and another featured a detective saying, "I don't know what it is, but every pedophile I've ever busted was a huge Star Trek fan."

Lines like that remind me most forensics is indistiguishable from witchcraft.

And these shows must be utterly bewildering to European audiences. They normalize gun ownership, and talk about how ordinary teachers, doctors, and secretaries all own guns, and all the time these are ordinary teachers, doctors and secretaries who are killed with their own guns. And this is, apparently, totally normal and expected.

Never do ordinary citizens successfully use guns in self defense. In the true crime universe, Americans own guns as a means of facilitating their own deaths. And that's just the way it is.

There were a few episodes in which a man murdered her wife to be with another woman, or a woman murdered her husband to be with another man. There was one, though, where a married woman murdered her girlfriend because she was afraid of losing the money her husband afforded her, and the way the narrator said "threesome" with so much gusto it chilled me. The journalist working the case had that... cadence... you hear when a man just wants to taste the world "llllesbian." The detective put special emphasis behind the phrase "with a woman," and in all three you could hear or see the porn movie music playing in the backs of their minds.

The last show I watched was about a young woman who, while working on a psychology degree, started out writing a report about high-end escorts and decided that the work was for her, that she enjoyed it, and that she was good at it, and she joined a call-out escort service. Then she ended up dead. At the end of the episode, the detective and the journalist both moralized about how "their reports and shows like this" were meant to show how dangerous, even deadly, sex work could be. Neither one of them took even a millisecond to wonder if maybe they had contributed to the dangerous environment by forcing it underground.

Several of the episodes featured the police force, and the detectives working the cold case files, of Flint, Michigan. It was so disconcerting to see these shows praising these detectives for going above and beyond the call of duty, performing expensive and esoteric DNA and microanalysis, to avenge the deaths of various white women... and knowing that all the time the black population right out of sight beyond the camera's arc was slowly being poisoned by the same government funding all that wonderful forensic "science."

Here's the thing that really gets me, though: on all the broadcast channels in the Seattle television market, a "fairly progressive" market by most people's standards, there are three channels that are nothing but this stuff, or fictionalized "made for TV movie" versions of these stories, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

That's five hundred hours a week of self-important journalists and overfed pompous detectives describing a world where guns are great (although you might get killed with them and that's just the price of doing business), sex is ever and forever scary and frightening and a source of criminality (especially if it's not monogamous hetero sex with the lights out), women who like sex are singularly, murderously dangerous all the time, homosexuality in women is especially dangerous (but also kinda entertaining!), while homosexuality in men is sad and disgusting.

This cannot be good for the human psyche. And yet enough people lap it up, day in and day out, to support three broadcast channels. It's going to be on Netflix into eternity, even though every episode is available on YouTube.