My Favorite Murder (Lighthearted)

I’m not really into true crime. Fantasy murder is fun, but real-life murder isn’t something that interests me. I used to listen to This American Life back in 2014 and was inadvertently sucked into the first season of Serial, and I watched a few episodes of Tiger King at the beginning of the pandemic last year, but that’s about it. Real-life murder is almost always sad, and the last thing I need is to be more depressed.

So last week one of my students recommended the podcast My Favorite Murder, and during the past few days I’ve managed to become obsessed with it. I started with Episode 169, "The Power Ranger Murders," and I haven’t stopped listening since then.

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The longer numbered episodes of the podcast recount documented criminal cases, but they’re interspersed with “minisodes” in which the hosts read and respond to stories submitted by listeners. For me, these minisode stories are much more palatable because, while the hosts take them seriously, I can treat them as something resembling fiction. These stories also tend not to be as heavy, and they often involve behavior that’s more “borderline” than criminal, which is much more of a concern in my everyday life.

Even though most of us are (hopefully) unlikely to be murdered, it’s statistically probable that we’ll have to deal with at least a few seriously unbalanced people in our lives, and it’s nice to feel less alone in having these experiences.

Re: My Favorite Murder (Lighthearted)

I also love that there's no gender essentialism on the podcast. It's not an issue because that type of discourse never even comes up. There's no "women are more intuitive" or "every woman knows xyz" bullshit, and I appreciate that.

And I think that, once you get to a stage where you can believe what women are saying without questioning their sanity, that's when you can get into legitimate "crazy" behavior. A "crazy" woman on this podcast is not someone who speaks a truth that doesn't fit into an accepted narrative. A "crazy" woman is not someone whose behavior seems slightly off-kilter because she's suffering from trauma. Rather, a "crazy" woman is someone who gets a license as an in-home caregiver in order to steal from elderly clients before killing them by setting their houses on fire, and is therefore wanted by the FBI. For example.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, once you remove patriarchal prejudice from these stories, they have infinitely more nuance. And for me, this is groundbreaking because I've never heard stories like this told in this way. Never. Not even when they've happened to me.

I've read a fair share of criticism about true crime podcasts that uses My Favorite Murder as a scapegoat. I've only listened to a few episodes, but I don't think the source material justifies the vehemence of the critique. All things considered, it's actually fairly tame, and the hosts always take care to stay very far away from gory and ghoulish details. It's also not political, aside from a general leftist disdain for racism and corporate greed. If I had to guess, I'd say that what actually upsets people about this podcast is that its shift of the "true crime" narrative is so radical.

Re: Re: My Favorite Murder (Lighthearted)

Sorry, I'm not done yet.

For a good long while, it was my academic project to try to look at popular media created by and for women in a way that didn't take a male gaze for granted. To give an example, many highly respected North American scholars used to insist on seeing Sailor Moon as child pornography for adult men. Which is absurd. So I wrote an article unpacking this sort of discourse and argued that it makes much more practical sense to read Sailor Moon with a female gaze in mind.

I thought I was saying something obvious, but people HATED that I said it. Like, I've had famous scholars come up to me at conferences and tell me that I should be ashamed of myself. Because of the blog posts I wrote while I was thinking through the material for the article, I even became a minor target of Gamergate, of all things.

And then I was pressured to write an entire book on the subject, and... yeah. Don't get me started.

So when I see these incredibly virulent accusations leveled against My Favorite Murder (or the first season of Serial, for that matter), I'm just like, Bro you mad????