I like this chart. It’s a good chart!
The most common explanation for the decline of serial killers is better forensic science. That narrative serves a pro-police view not entirely rooted in reality; come on people, stop watching NCIS. Most forensics “science” is bullshit. And even DNA evidence is better at excluding than implicating people. Homicide clearance rates have fallen from 90 percent in the 1960s to 50 percent today.
Surely police work plays some role, but there are other factors: the Internet makes sex work safer by allowing women to vet clients better. In addition to DNA tech advancement, we’re self-surveilling 100% of the time thanks to our iPhones, so it’s harder for killers to stay under the radar.
“It’s also possible a potential serial killer is satisfied by the Internet,” Thomas Hasgrove, a journalist and founder of the Murder Accountability Project, told me. “Guys looking for an outlet … there might be that, porn may have helped.”
“There are snuff films,” he added.
“Are … are they real?” I asked in horror.
“I hope not,” he said.
***
“The zipless fuck,” wrote Erica Jong in 1973, “is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.” In the 1970s, a narrative grew out of the counter-culture that post-War values constricted both men and women sexually—and as people—and that cultural changes in the 1970s freed them: women to pursue career advancement and personal fulfillment—like men. Have sex like men. Smoke and drink like men. The alcohol and tobacco industries were happy to oblige. So were men. Turns out, the “zipless fuck” is not rarer than a unicorn.
The dark-side of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1970s is the sexism. At the time, feminists raised questions about exactly who was raising all the children produced by “free love.” The political social movements of the 1970s were often led by horny men. The "only position for women in SNCC is prone,” Stokely Carmichael cheekily said. Feminists who fought back were deemed awful moral scolds, ruining fun in the bedroom and the boardroom. Andrea Dworkin is practically depicted as carrying machete around to hack off male genitalia.
An endless spate of films gloried in everyone’s newfound sexual freedom, from high-brow fare like I Am Curious: Yellow, to Debbie Does Dallas, becoming a way to signal how forward-thinking and liberated you were about sex. As the decade progressed, what may have started as an equitable, mutual sexual liberation, in the best possible scenario, got dark. Another iconic film? 1972s Last Tango in Paris?Bertolluci and an elderly Marlon Brandon conspired to anally assault his young co-star. In Manhattan, Woody Allen dates a 17-year-old and his friends in the film view it as a charming quirk.
The Playboy mansion doesn’t offer women a whole lot, except for unrealistic, and also kind of gross, beauty standards: blonde plastic dolls. A documentary about Hugh Hefner following his death depicts him as an abusive psychopath. A certain kind of extreme, shock sexuality, became entwined in values like the First Amendment, in the case of the People vs. Larry Flynt. I’m happy Flynt helped defend the First Amendment, but also, Hustler is disgusting.
But by the time I was a teenager in the late 1990s, women’s sexual identity seemed like a choice between boring moral scold “family values” loser or fun-and-sex-having “Cool Girl!” On team “moral scold,” you had the unattractive team of fun-hating, ugly feminists and the everything-hating Moral Majority. On team “cool girl,” you had adventures, fun, Anais Nin, Simone de Bouvior, On the Road, jazz, Woodstock … I mean, come on.
Reality, however, didn't quite match up to teenage daydreams. The “sexually liberated” Boomers aged into old men who seemed to view the workplace as a sexual hunting ground. Not to namedrop, but Tom Hayden said gross things about my then-22-year-old friend’s boobs when she was trying to interview him. By that time his nose had alcohol-shriveled into some kind of exotic tree fungus, but he still felt comfortable commenting on the breasts of someone who could be his granddaughter. Our boss at a progressive journalism website almost exclusively hired conventionally attractive women, mostly in their 20s. “It’s like the United Nations of hotness!” we used to joke about the fact that on staff were: a beautiful Colombian-American woman, a beautiful Jamaican woman, a beautiful blonde woman, a beautiful Lebanese woman …. “You don’t have to be attractive to work here, my boss once told me … it just really helps.”
Free love!
I spoke with a woman who’d worked for Rex Hauerrman, the prime suspect in the Gilgo beach killings. Let’s just say she finds it … chilling, that his victims were her age—25—and of slight build, like her. And that other women in that office could also be described in this way. “You could not pay me to be 25 again,” she says. I concur.
Indeed. The so-called "sexual revolution" was, if anything, too half-assed and incomplete as it were. And way too androcentric as well. The more things change, the more they stay the same, at least as far as sexism goes. Since the 1980s, America has been stuck in a perpetual limbo and purgatory in terms of sexual politics, glossed over with the euphemism of the "culture wars".
I know it was only a throwaway sentence, but I am married to a Stokeley Carmichael prone-joke truther, so it is my duty to pop up in the comments and tell you that the collective memory has gotten this wrong since the beginning. He was on the women's side in SNCC and when he made that joke, he was ventriloquizing men who were against the feminist caucus (as well as making fun of how much young people had sex on their minds). And it was funny, and everyone laughed, and then somehow it got twisted around so that it was him that was saying it, and it was some kind of turning point, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Women had positions of power in SNCC, and in 1964, long before the usual timeline, the movement to organize women separately had already gone through a strike in the spring, meetings in the summer, and a white paper in the Fall before this joke ever happened at an evening hang out.. Also while I'm here all this was led by black women.
Ok I have fulfilled my duty. Sorry about this overweight footnote!