Bestselling Books All Have One Thing In Common: A Woman Is Murdered

Welcome! I’m Ash BG, a toddler mum, writer, and founder of You Wanted This, a publication about modern motherhood, the mental load, and what relationships really look like after kids. I’m also the founder of Tether: The Mental Load App that helps make the invisible labour in your household visible. If you’re new here, I’m so glad you could join us. Pull up a chair. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine here.

I was pottering around one Sunday evening. All the housework was done. The meals were prepped. The washing had been put away. The kettle was on and we were ready to sit down and watch a show together—you know, that blissful couple time you get at the end of a busy weekend while little ones are sleeping and you have approximately 45 minutes until one of you falls asleep on the sofa.

While I was pottering, my husband continued watching a movie he had started earlier that week. (Movies require several sittings in our house.)

That’s when I heard it.

While standing in the kitchen pouring tea, I heard the unmistakable sounds of bones being crushed under the weight of a fast-moving fist coming from the lounge room. My blood started to boil.

It was a scene from Chopper. The one where he beats his girlfriend in the bathroom. If you don’t know, Chopper is one of Australia’s most notorious criminals and all-round violent PoS.

I stomped over to the sofa, grabbed the remote and turned off the TV.

“Enough!”

My husband looked at me, perplexed.

Shakily, I explained.

“I am sick to death of hearing violence in my house. I have a new rule. We don’t watch women being abused as entertainment.”

My husband got it, immediately. He didn’t argue and he didn’t need to be convinced. As we chatted about it, we realised how fucked up it is that to unwind at the end of the day we watch women being stalked and beaten and degraded and murdered and raped and we do it as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

We have normalised violence against women to the point where we no longer flinch at the pain of women. And I was done.

I wondered if perhaps I was overreacting. But this week I saw an article in The Guardian about how out of the top 10 bestselling fiction novels in the UK, nine depict a woman being murdered. NINE! Out of 10!

I was not imagining it. We are bombarded by violence.

It’s the naked body that turns up in the opening scene, or the slow and calculated stalking of a beautiful woman, or the mysterious lady who we know is about to meet her demise.

But here’s the thing. She is never the subject of the story. She is only ever the object of it.

Think about it.

Every time we write a book or create a movie about a violent man, it’s not about his victims, it’s about him. There are at least three films made about Ted Bundy. I would guess there are just as many about Jeffrey Dahmer. The Menendez Brothers, The Tinder Swindler, Conversations With A Killer…. we are obsessed with knowing everything about them, their past, their parents, their friends, their education. In almost all of these films and documentaries, he is the sole subject.

We’ve created an entire genre devoted to our obsession with the Violent Man.

And then we hear stats, like this morning’s news that said four women have been killed in Australia over the past three days, and we wonder why men are violent.

Four women. Three days. That's 42 women (and 17 children) this year alone who have been killed by violence in this country.

Am I drawing a correlation between the number of women killed and the type of content we, as a society, consume? Absolutely I am.

But it’s not as much of a stretch as it sounds because studies show that repeated exposure to media depicting violence against women results in desensitisation. This means that over time there is a reduction in the emotional response to seeing violent material. The fucked up part is that because we see it so often, framed around a narrative, and in lots of different formats, our brains stop measuring it as remarkable.

It essentially becomes background noise. Something we can listen to in a podcast while we cook dinner or while we drive to work.

And then there’s the fact that we know men who consume more media depicting violence against women are more likely to accept so-called “rape myths” which are false beliefs that minimise or excuse sexual violence. More specifically, these are the types of men who are more likely to think that she was “asking for it.”

These are not views that are held just by predators. These are the thoughts that could be held by your male friends, your colleagues, your brothers or your dad.

And then there are our sons. Because it wouldn’t be a You Wanted This piece without me revolving it around my son.

What would he learn by being exposed to these narratives too early? By knowing that these are the types of TV shows that his parents watch? By seeing his friends play video games where they kill people for fun?

What if he learns that a woman’s value in a story is not in who she is, but in what can be done to her?

So the new rule is this: before we start a show of any kind, we find out if there is a rape scene, if a woman is degraded, if a woman is killed by a man, or beaten by a man. And if the answer is yes, then we’re not watching it.

And, of course, it’s not like my toddler would be watching these shows with us. But it’s the act of consciously choosing, as a family, to not consume this type of content. Even if there is only a small chance he might hear it in the background, or hear us talking about it, it’s a chance I’m not willing to take.

Does this mean we have a much smaller pool of shows/movies to watch these days? Yep. Even fewer books to read. But I’m okay with that, because it means we’re being more intentional about what type of entertainment we consume. It means the background noise of my home never has to be of a woman getting hurt.

So what are we watching?

We are big fans of sharks in this household, and it’s Shark Week, so we’re watching a lot of Shark content right now.

Some people might think my two-year-old is too young to watch videos about sharks.

But I don’t think sharks are the problem.

Did you know that you have a roughly 1 in 4 million chance of being attacked by a shark? While 1 in 3 women will be attacked by a man at some point in her life.

Bears are out. Sharks are in.

We’re choosing the shark.

References:

The Guardian “Nine of ten bestselling novels feature a woman being murdered” (July 2026)
theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/14/nine-of-ten-bestselling-novels-uk-woman-murdered

Linz, D., Donnerstein, E., and Penrod, S. (1988) “Effects of long-term exposure to violent and sexually degrading depictions of women.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(5), 758–768.

Mullin, C.R. and Linz, D. (1995) “Desensitization and resensitization to violence against women: Effects of exposure to sexually violent films on judgments of domestic violence victims.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(3), 449–459.

Foubert, J.D., Brosi, M.W., and Bannon, R.S. (2011) “Pornography viewing among fraternity men: Effects on bystander intervention, rape myth acceptance and behavioral intent to commit sexual assault.” Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, 18(4), 212–231.

Hald, G.M., Malamuth, N.M., and Yuen, C. (2010) “Pornography and attitudes supporting violence against women: Revisiting the relationship in nonexperimental studies.” Aggressive Behavior, 36(1), 14–20.

Australian Femicide Watch 2026 data tracking
australianfemicidewatch.org.au

The Guardian “Family and domestic violence deaths” (July 2026)
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/22/family-domestic-violence-deaths-women-killed-australia-ntwnfb