I went through a phase of buying these magazines with my pocket money when I was about nine or ten and reading them on the bus. I did this with the furtiveness of the child pervert, knowing that magazines about people who’ve experienced some of the worst things that could happen to you were not only not age appropriate, but also embarrassingly fusty. While pages ten to 32 are true stories, on page 37 you can find “Aren’t men daft? Give us a laugh!” On page 28, there’s a consumer-rights-style story about a woman who found a cushion-stuffing tool inside one of her new cushions, which scratched her son’s leg. A page is dedicated to household tips and tricks which, of course, reflect a country 12 years into austerity (“instead of boiling the kettle multiple times per day, invest in a good flask”). The Instagram page British Goop curates a selection of the best of these household tips, my favourite of which involves flattening down foil pie containers with the side of your fist so you can use them as coasters.
The principal threat that violence poses to the domestic unit is moral disintegration. Academic Helene P. Foley, writing on Electra’s inability to live alongside her mother Clytemnestra, explains that sharing physical space with a perpetrator of violence poses an existential threat: “Living with injustice and the memory of injustice corrodes morality and even eventually begins to make telling right from wrong impossible.” The woman who found her mother and fiancé on the kitchen table: “It was so shocking, my body’s reaction was to let out a raw, animal cry.” The main corrective the magazine essays offer is tonal: the editorial line flattens out not only emotional complexity, but also the imaginative idiosyncrasies this produces, the unlikely phrases or memories that more fully realise a relationship or event. People describing their own pain transfigure into clean tight lines illustrating event and consequence (“I was still angry, but I reasoned that I only had one mum”). The Greek phrases feel much weirder, aided by temporal distance and in some cases archaic translation: the Furies from The Oresteia, spirits of women who exist as a proto-judicial force punishing those who harm others or “take a false oath” (The Iliad), call Orestes a “wet nerve / in the fires of suffering / a mouth for screams”.
True crime is broadly supportive of the idea that evil is real and exists, and that policing and carcerality are its singular redress; as Andrea DenHoed has written: “the stories we tell about crime and how to stop it prop up a system that is often as much about maintaining fantasies of social order as it is about implementing real justice.” As true crime’s audience is primarily women, a feminist ethos has been wrangled from it purporting that an embrace of perpetual female victimhood is an appropriate response to endemic levels of gendered violence. This idea’s advocates claim that to consume true-crime content is both to prepare oneself for inevitable violent attack and to assuage anxiety by participating in a community, often expressed through advocating (however vaguely) for longer and stricter sentencing (“there needs to be a shake-up of the justice system, so these brutes don’t get away with it”).
No doubt some of this is true – it is helpful, when you’re anxious, not to feel alone – but true-crime enthusiasts emphasise the seemingly socially remediable side-effects at the expense of discussing the appeal of the material itself; in other words, the pleasure of hearing about people being hurt and killed. Entertainment can be physiological: the shock of morbidity, the sick apprehension of the way in which one’s own body can be flayed or taken apart, touching the barest edges of what it feels like to know, intellectually, that someone wants to kill you, as well as, of course, imagining what it would be like to kill someone yourself: another “fact” always and misguidedly assumed is that the female listener should identify only or primarily with the victim. Georges Bataille wrote, “The domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation” and there’s a distinct sexual charge here, in the imaginative assumption of identity and how that lets you play with power, as well as in the focus on innards, skin, hair and fluids.
The bare facts are that the home is where most murders happen, that most murderers are known to their victims, and that one in three women and one in four men have experienced domestic violence. The home is a place of concentrated and confused sexual energy, and it generates its own insane codes and intolerances that spread from person to person. It allows perpetrators of violence not only to hide their behaviour but also to subsume it into the functioning of the family, to threaten – often correctly – that to expose the horror is to destroy the family. Ritual is required for its maintenance: cooking, cleaning, fixing, attending-to. The magazine becomes the ritual object that contains these ideas, as well as functioning as a totem: it’s brought into the home like an inoculation, realising and dispersing the spectre of domestic violence through its being voluntarily welcomed into the space it threatens to destroy. The stories are interspersed with advice on maintaining the home and images of reader’s husbands, children and grandchildren: on page nine, a debate rages about whether it’s acceptable to wear pajamas on the school run; on page ten, a woman describes being sexually abused by her stepfather, a town crier. In his psychoanalytic reading of Greek tragedy, academic C. Fred Alford wrote that, “ritual is about restoring the breached boundary”; the threshold can be ceremoniously breached and restored by the magazine skipping over it each week, by the domestic being broken and repaired by the editors’ intelligent contiguity.
