In the time we live in now, inundated with technology, chaos, news, memes, sex, drugs and anything else you could ever want twice, it’s hard to have prevailing themes in culture. Of the few that one can name: K Pop, politics, Trap Music, superhero movies and true crime, there is one that captivates our culture to a disturbing degree and hurts the minds of anyone more than it could ever help. All of it, mind you, is under the guise of education.

True crime programming, let me be clear, is porn. It is, of its very nature, skewed and perverted distortions of the human mind. People look at people like Ted Bundy and see a man who, bafflingly, does not look like what they think a “serial killer should be.” He’s handsome, charming and kind. The problem is, looking at his actions, his mind and his personality does no service to one’s understanding of the world. People view shows like “The Ted Bundy Tapes” on Netflix, and think they’re learing about the human psyche and history, but they’re really giving attention to the worst people imaginable.

The world should not set its understanding of entertainment to be the exploitation of real, dead people, by serial killers. When we watch these shows and study true crime so religiously on Netflix, we’re on the side of those extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile people that we obsess over under the guise of hatred.

When people say that Ted Bundy looks normal, we’re taring our expectations of society to match serial killers. They’re the normal. Because someone, once, heinously killed so many people and looked normal, now anyone could be a serial killer because they look “normal.”

True crime makes real events that have irreparably hurt people entertainment, they’re fun pulpy trash that you can binge and watch just like any other show. We’re padding the egos of the evil people. We’re glorifying and glamorizing the perverse. We don’t remember the names of any victims.

Name a serial killer. Jim Jones, Edward Speck, Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, Gary Ridgway, Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper. Now try and name a single regular, sane person that they’ve murdered. I’ll wait. You can’t, right? That’s because the focus and attention is all on the killers ,those who set the furthest possible example of horror and terror. They’re the worst possible people to look at for information about how humans work. It would be like learning to become a pilot by only studying the way others have crashed. The world’s obsession with serial killers is disgusting, perverse and setting a terrible precedent for what normal people are exposed to and our expectations for and understanding of humanity.