“Adorazione,” Patriarchy, and Dead Women

At age 48, I’m so tired of watching women die.

[Join Medium to read this for free! Or click here for the free link.]

[Content Warning — violence against women]

[Spoiler Alert — mid-season details from Netflix’s Adorazione/Adoration]

For decades, I turned to TV shows, movies, books, and podcasts about women being killed by men during my “down time.” Law & Order SVU. Silence of the Lambs. The Lovely Bones. Women, girls, and trans people of all genders at the brutal mercy of others, who fixate on them in deadly ways. How could I find this “entertaining” or “relaxing”? Our society treats obsession as a passionate form of “love,” with mortal violence as the predictable outcome.

“It’s always the husband,” society shrugs. Or, “they shouldn’t have been doing [fill in the blank].” And Netflix makes a series. Laci Peterson. Chiquita Tate. Zona Divas. A constant parade of dead women.

Image Credit: Canva

In Silence of the Lambs, the killer is obsessed with making a suit out of women’s skin, combining serial murders of women with the commercial fetishization of trans identity, unsurprising from a book and movie constructed in the 1980s. Talking about Silence of the Lambs with friends, straight men of a certain age consistently bring up “the tuck,”…