![]() I’m not oblivious to violence against women, on the contrary, I am intimately familiar with it. In August, my friend Sam tweeted that true crime “is so obviously designed to make you buckle in terror whenever you leave the house.” He was immediately inundated with quote tweets claiming that of course a man couldn’t understand the threats women face on a daily basis, the tweeters either ignoring his profile picture or unaware that Black men in America face a much higher risk of victimization. Pointing this out doesn’t always go over well. Most of the audience and the hosts themselves are female, and most cases covered by true crime podcasts are about women. But listening to true crime podcasts, you would never suspect this. And in the U.S., men are far likelier to be homicide victims than women. You are more likely to die from heart disease or a car crash than you are from being murdered. Even with the spike, murder rates are a third of what they were in the ’90s. With the exception of a spike in murders in 2020 that coincided with Covid, major crime has been steadily decreasing for 18 years. I say this as someone who’s been obsessed with the genre since watching Paradise Lost and learning about the West Memphis Three: it’s time to admit that true crime has rotted our brains. My breaking point came when Newsweek, a magazine with 3.4 million Twitter followers, reported that an internet sleuth had discovered “disturbing” footage of Brian Laundrie, then a suspect in the death of his fiancé, reading the novel Annihilation and provided it as proof he had murderous intentions. She was driving a black Mercedes-Benz, the post continued was it possible she could be scouting the place to rob later? The comments agreed that it was highly suspicious no one pointed out that most thieves would probably not case a neighborhood in a Mercedes with a clearly visible license plate. “I’ve watched way too much Dateline.” Later, while checking Twitter, I ran across a Nextdoor post detailing the saga of a woman who rang someone’s doorbell and asked for a Band-Aid. “Please be careful,” another friend said. And they’re right - this whole thing is “radioactive.I was having outdoor drinks with my girlfriends when one of them mentioned her plan to do some solo backpacking in the Pacific Northwest. Is that one of Joseph Smith’s many child brides I hear whispering to me from the beyond to look inward instead? No, that’s just LDS supergroup Imagine Dragons still playing on my “BBQ Tunes” playlist. But as the evidence continues to pile up, I’m afraid we’ll need at least another 4 days off to crack this particular case. So I can understand why the quotidian follies of a group of Utahns are now capturing national attention. I was raised secular in the Midwest, but I spent 2019-2021 in Utah right as TikTok was gaining traction, and I grew obsessed with many of these contoured, bikini-wearing, Chanel-toting LDS girlies - people like Rachel Parcell and pretty much anyone who is part of the Hawaiian Mormon contingent. I’ve long been fascinated with the seemingly thriving community of Mormon swingers in Salt Lake City (or, as avowed NON-SWINGER Whitney Rose pronounces it on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, “swing-GERS”). One implicated couple, Selver and Victoria Zalic, spoke their piece, but seem a bit miffed to not be included more in the hoopla. Meanwhile, various other tangentially aggrieved parties are pissed as hell and making content. Part of the livestream has been reposted by the TikTok account taylorpauldivorcetea: She also alluded to the involvement of another couple in their tight-knit community who was now allegedly getting a divorce in the fallout of the incident. Then, in a livestream which is no longer fully available but excerpted by Pop Crush, Paul went on to explain that she had gone too far in “hooking up” with a friend, a man married to a woman who was “swinging” with Paul’s own husband Tate. This is further elucidated in this thread on the Subreddit MomTokGossip. “Soft swinging” among Mormons is part of a longer tradition of justifiable skirting of church chastity rules, including “soaking” or “docking,” which entails consensual sexual penetration without thrusting. Paul had previously explained that she and her husband were “soft swingers,” which they defined as basically having an open relationship with no extramarital penetration. What would happen to the kids Indy and Ocean? And her marble kitchen island? This, of course, shattered the image of domestic bliss and physical/emotional fitness she had cultivated on her page.
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