Jaline McCallum
English 2100

Psychological Thrillers: The Rhetoric of Attractive Males

What’s your favorite serial killer? Seems strange of me to ask a question like this. No serial killer should be anyone’s favorite. That doesn’t seem to be the case in society. Killers are glorified, sexualized, and praised even if they commit horrific acts. The purpose of this paper is to bring attention to the fact that men can often get away with being more by being attractive

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Psychological issues and people who had these issues were taboo and scary to people in the past. Now it is normalized and, at times, sexualized that they even made edits of serial killers in a romantic way on social media platforms. They are basically excusing the behavior they did
just for their good looks. The example I have of this was a TikTok video edit of Jeffery Dahmer with the Chris Brown song “ Under the influence” in the background. The lyrics contain, “You don’t know what you did, did to me, your body lightweight speaks to me” The edit contained Dahmer pushing his hair back in slow motion. We shouldn’t be portraying someone who killed so many majority black and brown people in a sexual way. If Dahmer wasn’t a conventionally attractive white man, he wouldn’t have gotten this praise or “fan club” because people would
have been focusing on his crimes, not his face. Another example of a source used was another TikTok video which showed the killer Ted Bundy and the press interviewed the female public, and many of the girls were “fascinated” by him or didn’t believe he committed these crimes.
When in fact, he did, and one of the reasons Bundy was able to lure the girls he killed was that he looked good. It’s a sad fact to say that he used his looks to kill women, and even after, his looks aided in people believing he wouldn’t kill. Often if a guy looks good or fits the female gaze,
if they do something bad, it is overlooked. I can relate this rhetoric of attractive males to Fantomina. This relates because she kept overlooking the poor actions Beau did to her because he most likely was easy on the eyes. If he wasn’t that good-looking, she wouldn’t have done all
the crazy things she did, like change her identity multiple times for him. When creating psychological thriller shows/movies, they most likely make the person attractive to appease the viewers. Examples of this is Joe from the show YOU, where the main character Joe kills multiple
people to get to the person he is in love and obsessed with; they chose Penn Badgley to play this character, whos an attractive actor. Because of this, viewers often root for Joe, overlooking the bad things he did and continues to do because of the attractive actor. I’ve even caught
myself doing this, and we sometimes can’t even help it. This is how directors of these shows and movies get us hooked because we hone in on the attractiveness. All in all, it’s important to take into account of the rhetoric that happens all around us but specifically the rhetoric of
attractive males in psychological thrillers