Ronald Reagan is the reason so many millennial women love the true crime genre.
This theory started as me taking the piss in a conversation, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to fit. I do want to preface this by saying that this is not a super cereal theory, just one for the shits and giggles.
So, here's how the dominos fall:
- Pre-Reagan, divorce was both heavily male biased and required proof of wrong doing to be used. To give an idea of what this means, spousal rape was not considered to be a thing, legally speaking, when no fault divorce was introduced.
- - Sub point to that, because these women had no good option for leaving an abusive marriage, there were a lot of "accidents", i.e. "officer, he just tripped and fell head first into the wood chipper!".
- The Reagan administration introduces no fault divorce, and suddenly a lot of these women can now leave abusive relationships without having to prove abuse in court.
- Millennial women, who were primarily born after the institution of no fault divorce, grow up with the ability to leave abusive relationships without having to plot out their spouse's "accident".
Suddenly you have an entire generation of women who come from long lines of premature widows who now no longer have any good reason to be plotting "accidents", but the urge to do so is still there.
Enter the true crime genre of programming, where women can watch, in detail, the murder plots of other people, and how they were caught. This acts like a pumpkin stuffed with hamburger to a captive tiger.
It allows them enrichment by allowing them to constantly be refining a plan with out necessarily having a subject in mind, as well as still allowing them to immerse themselves in the murderous thought process without actually having to go through with it.