Anxious, Stressed, and True Crime Obsessed: Reddit Users' Beliefs About Women's True Crime Consumption

Abstract

The Western fascination with true crime (TC) narratives and content is well-established and shows no signs of slowing. Relatively recently, consumers and academics alike have noted that the genre’s audience is predominantly made up of women, the same demographic most likely to be victimised in ways similar to those commonly depicted in TC content. A question that has received little academic attention, however, is why? Much of the intracommunity and layperson discussion regarding women’s TC consumption happens online, and Reddit has been noted in the literature as a particularly lively arena for discission of this phenomenon. The present paper offers an exploratory grounded theory of Reddit users’ constructions of women’s disproportionate consumption of TC content. The theory suggests a discursive theme, Capacities for Empathy, as a schema for understanding the ways in which Reddit users construct the social concern of women and their relationship with true crime content. The discursive theme includes the constituting elements empathizing, perceiving risk for victimization, rehearsals of survival, and interpassive justice.