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The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism

Can We Love True Crime When We’re the Victims?

The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Sexuality, Health & Fitness

4.2903 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this week’s episode of The Waves, show producer and true crime author Cheyna Roth sits down with Rebecca Lavoie, co-host of the Crime Writers On podcast and fellow true crime author. The pair start by talking about the current state of true crime and beg Hollywood to stop making sexy serial killer movies. After the break, Rebecca and Cheyna dissect how the genre treats victims and whether criticisms of true crime are sexist.


Recommendations:

Cheyna: The pyramid scheme podcast series The Dream and the 2018 episode of Decoder Ring, Clown Panic.

Rebecca: True crime documentary Murder on Middle Beach on HBO; Season 1 of The Staircase on Netflix; and the podcast Canary from the Washington Post.

 

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas. 

Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music.

0:03.7

This is the waves.

0:05.6

This is the waves.

0:06.6

This is the waves.

0:07.8

This is the waves.

0:08.5

This is the waves.

0:09.6

This is the waves.

0:10.2

This is the waves.

0:14.1

Welcome to the waves Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and begging people to stop trying to make

0:22.5

Ted Bundy sexy. Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the things we can't get

0:28.0

off our minds. And today you've got me, Shana Roth, producer of this show, The Waves, and author of

0:33.8

Cold Cases, A True Crime Collection. Writing cold cases and especially promoting it when it

0:40.4

came out about a year ago, I honestly couldn't stop thinking about whether the book that I had

0:46.2

put out into the world was, for lack of a better word, a problem. It's a collection of 10 unsolved

0:53.4

cases ranging from mass murders to

0:55.7

heist, but it was the murders and disappearances chapters that I kept worrying about,

1:00.9

chapters about John Bonae Ramsey, Natalie Holloway and Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black

1:05.8

Dahlia specifically. And by problem, I mean, I was concerned that I was contributing to a culture that was out of control.

1:14.9

True crime has become something of an industry.

1:18.4

I mean, there's conferences, live tapings of True Crime podcasts.

1:22.1

And if you type in True Crime on Etsy, you will get more than 23,000 hits with shirts, candles, bookmarks,

1:29.5

mugs, stickers, cards, and more that say things like True Crime, Glass of Wine, In Bed

...

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