There’s something weird going on in cable-TV land. Something way, way off-script – in comparison to your standard “girl power”/”men are the source of all evil” TV fare.
Discovery ID is TV’s fastest-growing network. “ID” (as the network calls itself in short-hand) offers in their latest roster 37 shows, a mix of reality-TV and true-crime re-enactments which one reviewer uncharitably describes as “melodramatic, campy, and even cheesy.” Discovery, whose audience is mostly female, bills itself as “America’s favorite guilty pleasure” and in its programming guide calls its viewers, which at the moment number close to 800,000, by the cheeky denominator “ID Addicts.” In their line up, which includes shows such as “Pretty Bad Girls,” “Fatal Encounters,” “Wives With Knives,” “Frenemies: BFFs Gone Bad,” the second most popular offering – and among the top 30 in ad-sustained primetime shows – is Deadly Women, a re-enactment show featuring in each 30-minute weekly episode three woman-perpetuated homicide cases.
Deadly Women, with 273 cases in 91 episodes to date – a new one appearing each week and rebroadcast on a revolving basis – is racking up an impressive body count. 61 of these murderesses are serial killers, a category of female criminal still widely, and incorrectly, believed to be less common than the male counterpart. Yet there are, in fact, over 700 known female serial killers, according to our own independent research.
Deadly Women, along with other sensational ID offerings that splash lurid stories of predatory women across the screen, provides, in its idiosyncratic and not-quite-respectable way, a rare relief from the standard politically correct TV-narrative of “woman as perpetual victim” and “woman as empowered heroine.” As ID itself tells us: “Deadly Women fuses bone-chilling story-telling, sumptuous period drama and forensic fact in a bid to explore history’s most alluring female killers.”
Fact is, Deadly Women, in all its low-brow glory, is an oasis of non-feminist storytelling.
Does this sound like hyperbole?
Just take a look at Deadly Women’s Facebook page. It has more than 105,000 “likes.” On our recent visit to the page it showed avid real-time activity, with “2,918 talking about this.” Take a browse through the show’s promotional episode blurbs and you will find such blatant and unfashionable expressions of domestic violence as these nuggets:
- “Not every woman’s heart is filled with love and light. For these women, romance truly is dead, they possess ‘Dark Hearts.'”
- “Tonight’s Deadly Women think their desires matter more than lives.”
- “She was looking for trouble. She wanted to hurt someone.”
- “When a woman thinks her feelings are all that count, she doesn’t care who suffers. A new episode of Deadly Women tomorrow at 10/9c examines these heartless souls.”
- “Tonight’s Deadly Women are smart and cunning. These ladies think that they are ABOVE THE LAW!”
Now, these are not the sort of insights about the possibilities of female agency that those who make their living aggressively pushing “gender theory” on a passive public want us to be mulling over.
The network’s press office is not even a tiny bit shy about treating women as equal to men as potential evil-doers, as we see in their most recent press release issued July 19, 2013:
Femmes Fatales Return with a Vengeance on Season 7 of Investigation Discovery’s Hit Series “DEADLY WOMEN”
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially when she’s on a mission to murder. There’s no shortage of these tempestuous DEADLY WOMEN in season seven of Investigation Discovery’s signature hit series about women who have been driven to kill, premiering Friday, July 19 at 10 PM E/P.
While male murderers are often motivated by anger, impulse, and destruction, women usually have more complex, long-term motives. Jealousy, revenge, desperation, and greed all play their devilish hand in driving these daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives to commit the ultimate sin. Former F.B.I. criminal profiler Candice DeLong helps viewers distinguish between the emotionally-charged impulses and sociopathic intentions that lace each story.
“Sociopathic intentions”? Now, is that appropriate language to use when describing some poor victim of patriarchy driven to lash out against the burdens of millennia of institutional oppression by wielding an antique Japanese sword and slashing her sleeping husband 97 times after smothering her two sons*?
You bet it is.
The show’s hostess, the steely-eyed former FBI profiler Candice DeLong, pulls no punches in her pointed descriptions of womanly wantonness. This is a woman who has seen much and has no qualms about calling a predator a predator. Week after week Ms. DeLong serves up an impressive hard-boiled slam-down of the show’s featured women-out-for-blood, never degrading her presentation of the over-the-top of the empowered women in question with any “gender theory” woman-as-victim-and-only-victim twaddle.
Sure, this is lurid tabloid true-crime fare, not the sort of thing that would appeal to the standard AVfM reader, but it is nevertheless worth a hard look. Nearly 800,000 viewers, mostly women, are eating up this outside-the-gender-studies-box stuff with both hands and demanding seconds. These watching women are just not buying the feminist sugar-and-spice propaganda pushed at them by the standard media sources. Not one bit.
These “ID Addicts” may not be approaching this material with a rigorous “cultural critique” mind-set, yet they are nevertheless profoundly aware of a gaping disconnect between reality and ideology (a false reality) that most people of a more intellectual cast delude themselves into embracing. Politically correct utopianists, convinced that they have the power to construct a superior future by means of their overbearing “planning” schemes, are terrified to face the fact that the message hawked everywhere (and at all times) in our culture – in our schools and in our media – by the gender ideologues, is a bold-faced bloody lie. It might sound bizarre, but the fact is that your typical “ID Addict” gal has her feet placed more formerly on the ground than any typical gender-theory-addled university professor from any English, or Sociology, or Gender Studies department.
Deadly Women’s viewership is certainly going to grow – and there is certainly no shortage of cases of wanton woman-perpetrated violence to select from. There are more and more women (who, perhaps, shall be ridiculed by high-falutin’ eggheads as tabloid addicts) that are saner, more credible witnesses to the reality of women’s agency and responsibility for their own actions than a smugly politically correct population drunk on the Kool-Aid of official “gender” dogma. Perhaps a long sit-down in front of a run of Deadly Women episodes ought to be Step One in a 12-Step program for these Kool-Aid-on-the-brain ideology-lushes.
Homicide is far from the only way to destroy a life. Yet murder cases are among the best-documented varieties of anti-social incidents, thus homicide cases provide us with a window into the souls of those who lash out at others. Sociopaths do not always act directly; indeed, proxy violence – using others to do violence, the manipulating of courts to destroy others, the use of children to mentally torture a co-parent, the deployment of false allegations to destroy another – is an area of sociopathic behavior that finds favor with hate-filled females. This type of “relational aggression” is harder than direct aggression to identify, document and describe. So the more accessible stories of murderesses help us see the female sociopath mind-set in a more general way.
In such a “bad women project” as Discovery ID offers in Deadly Women – and so many other reality-based TV productions – you will find a great deal more accuracy with respect to the psychology of the relations between the sexes than you will find on such conformity-porn middle-brow organs of social engineering orthodoxy as The Good Men Project, a “respectable” publication that out-cheesies Deadly Women by a million miles. Deadly Women is worth a look-see and is most certainly worth further discussion within the likewise-growing Men’s Human Rights Movement.
Discovery ID, a $11 billion Godzilla of a media empire, is on a rampage, stomping unceremoniously all over the sacred cows of the “gendered” landscape. And for this, if for nothing else, ID deserves a hearty top-of-the-lungs “Brava!”
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NOTE:
* This description refers to Deadly Women, Season 14, Episode 73, “Death Benefits,” premiered November 16, 2012: “Manling Williams enjoys her freedom, finding life as a wife and mother too confining, but does not want the financial strain of divorce. Despondent after her extramarital affair ends, she turns to murder, smothering her two young sons with a pillow and slashing her husband, Neal, 97 times with his prized Japanese sword” (Wikipedia). The crime took place Aug. 7, 2007 in Pomona, California. She was sentenced to death.
SOURCES:
Sara Bibel, “Investigation Discovery Announces 12 New Original Series Including ‘Wives With Knives’, 22 Returning Series For 2012-13 Season,” Press Releases April 5th, 2012
Investigation Discovery Continues Record-Setting Pace with Best November in Network History & Reaches 80M HH Mark – America’s fastest growing network, Investigation Discovery (ID) garnered its best November in network history, capping off its 43rd consecutive month of year-over-year prime gains among HH, P25-54, W25-54 and P2+ delivery, the longest current streak of any ad-supported cable network. ID has also reached the 80M HH mark, according to the Nielsen Universe Estimates for December 2012.
“Friday’s Cable Ratings & Broadcast Finals: CBS Tops Viewers, ABC Leads Demos,” 10/07/13, By The Futon Critic Staff – (TFC) select cable Nielsen ratings (national numbers for Friday, October 4, 2013) Here are the highlights of 30 ad-sustained programs that aired in primetime on the broadcast and cable networks last night.
Deadly Women (10:00) – ID
0.791 million viewers, #29; 0.343 million adults 18-49 (0.3 rating), #28 http://www.thefutoncritic.com/ratings/2013/10/07/fridays-cable-ratings-and-broadcast-finals-cbs-tops-viewers-abc-leads-demos-279511/cable_20131004/#qyAamh7O545rFL5B.99
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