Dr. Coltan Scrivner

I think also most true crime stories focus on a stranger that does something bad to, in many cases, a woman.

And so those stories probably resonate with women

again, on average, a bit better than they do with men because the victims are often women.

And it's a scenario that, while not very common in the grand scheme of things, if it's going to happen to someone, it might be a bit more likely that it would happen to a woman than a man.

and a man is coming towards me i'll walk to the other side of the road just by pure instinct even though the that man's probably not a danger to me it's just been embedded in me why do we do that well some of that is like you said cultural in the sense that if you grow up hearing cautionary tales you tend to heed those as an adult as well um some of it has to do with the stories that we do consume right the stories we consume are often uh men who are harming women uh if you look at

if you look at actual deaths across history, probably men have died a lot more than women at the hands of violence, but it tends to be at the hands of people that they don't, you know, in war or other kinds of things, rather than in their own home or in their own neighborhood.

And so I think some of that has to do with the stories we tell each other.

Some of it has to do with the reality of what happens.

Some of it has to do with, again, if you look at

throughout history, especially, you know, if you look at the average, say, size of a man versus a woman or strength of a man versus a woman,

most men are physically larger, physically stronger than women.

And so there's a bit of a physical disadvantage there if you were to get into some kind of alteration, right?

I mean, that's why we have weight classes when it comes to things like boxing or mixed martial arts.

It's why we tend to split men and women's sports in more physically violent sports in particular, right?

And so I think there is a bit of a, just a biological or natural sort of,

difference between the average size of a man and the average size of a woman.

Yeah, well, that's really interesting that you bring that up because those sort of, if you see, when you see women as the perpetrators in a true crime story, it often involves poisoning, right?

It involves a bit more of a like... Hansel and Gretel.

Yeah, yeah, it has more of a surreptitious kind of, yeah, witches in general, right?

Or a bit more of like a surreptitious kind of violence where they poison something or they...