A genre with a unique lens on gender issues, True Crime, finally starts to examine the costs of gender norms.
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True crime writing isn’t famous for its impeccable gender politics. Think of how male criminals (e.g. the late Mark “Chopper” Read) have been glorified and women law-breakers demonised. Or how women who are victims of crime can be stereotyped as either virgins or vamps.
Two new books, Mark Morri’s Remembering Anita Cobby and Martin McKenzie-Murray’s A Murder without Motive, offer a fresh approach to the true crime genre. Both were published in early 2016. Both have been penned by male journalists. Both focus on men who find themselves involved (albeit in different ways) in murder cases where the victims are women.
The “Anita” in Morri’s title is Anita Cobby, a Sydney nurse who was gang-raped and murdered in January 1986. The book discusses the experiences of her husband, John Cobby, who was estranged from his wife at the time of her death, and who has (until now) purposely eluded media attention.
This was a world where young men were encouraged to flaunt their “virility”, and women existed “for sex, acquisition, bluster”.
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Morri met John around the time of the murder, and the two men developed a rapport. In conversation with the author, John describes the grief and horror that overwhelmed him in the wake of Anita’s death. He tells of trying to escape through alcohol and overseas travel and the homicidal fantasies he continues to harbour about taking revenge on his wife’s killers.
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In A Murder without Motive, McKenzie-Murray addresses the murder of young Perth woman, Rebecca Ryle. In May 2004, Ryle was strangled to death by James Duggan, a man she had just met at a local pub. In the ensuing trial, no motive could be established for his actions (hence the book’s title).
The author was tenuously connected to the victim. He grew up in the same suburb as her, and his brother once personally knew Duggan.
McKenzie-Murray reflects on the “strains of misogyny” that could be detected in the milieu in which they lived. This was a world where young men were encouraged to flaunt their “virility”, and women existed “for sex, acquisition, bluster”.
Both books cast a critical eye on a toxic strand of masculinity.
It’s an eye that has been missing from many true crime books. Two such examples were the books Blood Stain (2002) and The Vampire Killer (1992), which reproduced crude and misogynist feminine stereotypes.
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In both Morri and McKenzie-Murray’s books, the male protagonists are constrained by prevailing codes of masculinity. In A Murder without Motive, for instance, McKenzie-Murray recalls his teenage participation in a blokey, boozy culture.
John Cobby and Mckenzie-Murray confront the excesses of toxic masculinity, seeing it as the lethal social construct it is – not something glamorous or natural.
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Still, throughout the book, he demonstrates the ability to stand back and evaluate this harmful culture. The book’s broader aim is to provide a nuanced perspective on the Ryle case. McKenzie-Murray explicitly distances himself from “popular treatments of criminality”, which (he says) are “salacious and vampiric” – and, I would add, frequently sexist.
In Remembering Anita Cobby, we read that John kept his late wife’s murder “locked up inside for thirty years.” Anita’s death became “like a dirty little secret.” A key tenet of some masculinities has been an inability or unwillingness to express emotions, especially those (such as grief) that imply vulnerability.
Yet, John Cobby and Mckenzie-Murray confront the excesses of toxic masculinity, seeing it as the lethal social construct it is – not something glamorous or natural.
Hopefully, their work will influence other true crime writers, resulting in more nuanced gender perspectives.
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Morri’s book is less overtly concerned with gender politics. Nevertheless, he does quote “Miss X” (the unnamed woman who obtained a confession from one of Cobby’s killers, John Travers) as saying that she reported Travers to police because of his “behaviour towards women”. “Miss X” was married to Travers’ uncle at the time of Cobby’s death. Morri never specifies what exactly Travers’ “behaviour towards women” entailed, though we can assume that this behaviour was derogatory.
Of course, it should not take a dead woman for men to recognise that masculinised brutality is unacceptable.
But Remembering Anita Cobby and A Murder without Motive are important because they depict men who confront and abhor a culture of misogyny. Hopefully, their work will influence other true crime writers, resulting in more nuanced gender perspectives.
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Jay Daniel Thompson, Sessional Lecturer, Victoria University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
“A genre with a unique lens on gender issues, True Crime, finally starts to examine the costs of gender norms.”
…through yet another narrow lens.
Read Tom’s words. When we define toxic as a detriment to those watching the man lay of the floor choking and vomiting, we are doing it wrong.
As a novelist, we use gender stereotypes of all types because our brains work in stereotypes. By mentioning, “His menacing grin”… we tap into a stereotype that is inside of ‘most’ of us. Creatives use ‘typecasting’ for every part of the entertainment industry. Without these gender and people types there would be no novels, movies or entertainment. So I’m lost at the idea that we must eliminate the masculine binary? If we did that we would eliminate the feminine binary. What is left for us to describe emotions or characters?
Agree. Where we go wrong (in my humble opinion) is in defining such gender types, when we envision them as a function of of good or evil, the masculine heralded as the negative, the feminine as the victim of such, We tend to paint a much broader picture then we intend to, as the reader, being inundated with such will, eventually absorb such as absolute truth: fiction becomes fact in the mind of the beholder. My question would be why “her menacing grin” is not inclusive. Just as we are currently attempting to be inclusive of women in the role… Read more »
“He tells of trying to escape through alcohol and overseas travel and the homicidal fantasies he continues to harbour about taking revenge on his wife’s killers.”
Seems to me the root cause wasn’t an inability to seek help, but a failure in the masculine role of protector. Yet, that will never be addressed as part of “toxic masculinity” as it provides a service for society especially women. Toxic masculinity concerns itself with only those things toxic to women and toad smaller extent society not those things toxic to the men themselves. That’s why we have MGTOW.