America’s Obsession with Dead Girls

In America, the dead girl is everywhere. She’s on the evening news, in the true crime podcast your friend listens to, in the Netflix series your neighbor binges. She is always young, always desirable, always silent. ​​This country consumes female victims, turning their suffering into entertainment as a way to experience danger and violence indirectly. Even in death, women still face objectification and dehumanization. 

On true crime shows, the term “dead girl trope” covers it. Documentaries and podcasts rarely care about the lives of the women left behind. What’s sold is the girl herself: usually white, “innocent,” someone who can be shaped into an archetype. She’s the cheerleader, the babysitter, the prom queen. 

Many true crime shows ignore context. They ignore deeper issues like systemic gender violence. They rarely explain why these crimes happen, opting to just show the violence. These shows often disregard that most real danger is hidden inside of homes, not in strangers. Studies show that most women in the United States are killed by men they already know, with over half of female homicide committed by an intimate partner. Fearmongering sells because it feels dramatic, even though it distorts the truth.

True crime formats thrive on fear by emphasizing gore. They use close-ups of wounds, blood, bruises, other visceral images which turns crime into voyeurism. 

The sexualization of female victims pushes this obsession further. These shows highlight sexualized images of dead girls by lingering on their bodies and even showing nude images. Critics call it crime-porn. Scholars describe how female victims often appear nude in crime scene photos, while male victims rarely do. Dead women serve as erotic spectacle to be devoured.

However, this fetishization is often selective. Race and class determine which victims get reported on. To sell a story they need to find the “perfect” victims to monetize and exploit – missing white woman syndrome explains this well. Black girls and women go missing every day and their names are barely mentioned in media. Indigenous women vanish from reservations with almost no national coverage. The FBI estimates that in 2020 alone, nearly 5,600 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing, yet few of these cases received media attention. But when a blonde girl disappears on a road trip, her story goes national. Desirability and racial bias filter who gets mourned in public, who gets remembered, and who gets ignored.

The media treats victims as “ideal.” The “beautiful dead girl” draws more attention, because this is somehow more tragic. Popular media examples of this include Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks or JonBenét Ramsey. These cases sell, especially the ones about children and young girls. They sacrifice the victim’s personhood for narrative appeal.  

Netflix pushes this obsession with shows like You, Dirty John, and Making a Murderer. The platform treats women’s deaths as entertainment, packaging murder as bingeable content. Viewers click and each time, the female victim is reduced more until she is no longer human at all. Podcasts, the documentaries, and “Dateline” episodes, push out content exploiting the victims' private lives for ratings. They dissect personal details, diary entries, text messages, turning their stories into cliffhangers and season finales. America does not grieve these girls. It debates their choices, criticizes their behavior, and then sells their deaths for clicks and profit.

These dead girls serve as cautionary tales. Every news segment and true crime episode teaches the same lesson to women: don't go out alone, don’t trust strangers, don’t live your life, because if you do, you might end up in the next hit episode.

America does not care about women. It cares about dead girls because they don’t resist and they no longer exist. These crimes are framed as isolated tragedies rather than the deeper systematic problems. The fixation on the shocking story avoids the harder work of prevention. A body makes a better headline than a statistic about abuse rates. 

America is obsessed with dead girls because a dead girl cannot talk back. She is forever voiceless and available. Her body becomes a symbol of purity lost, while her humanity disappears.