Joe Goldberg — or Will Bettelheim — or Jonathan Moore — or whichever alias you know him by, is the anti-hero in the popular Netflix show You. Joe portrays a deeply troubled hopeless romantic who becomes hyper-obsessed with different women, and in each season, he proceeds to stalk and kill people in their names. And spoiler alert: he usually ends up killing his love interest as well. And while this character objectively does terrible, horrific things to these women and their loved ones, viewers of this show often find themselves rooting for him. Who would normally be an abusive antagonist, is a sexualized protagonist for many women watching this show due to the character’s good looks, heartbreaking childhood, and hyper-romantic motives. I have admittedly been one of these women who finds Joe to be a charismatic serial killer who I confusingly want to succeed. But what does this say about me, and most viewers, if we are rooting for a man who stalks and sexually harasses women? And what does this phenomenon engrain in our minds about the association of gendered violence and domestic abuse with romance?
Our society sensationalizes psychopaths. Think of Jeffery Dahmer or Ted Bundy — these killers have been analyzed and archived to exceed the realm of sociological research, and enter the sphere of public entertainment. I mean for God’s sake, Zac Efron starred as Ted Bundy in a movie. We’ve moved past the scientific documentary, and instead have capitalized on the public’s obsession with these men. And they’re always men. And it’s the most interesting and most televised when they’re killing women.
The mass media’s depiction of this violence against women shows a larger picture of our inclination toward gendered power. It’s the hunter versus the hunted; the dominant versus the submissive. This violence is pornographic to its core, and we’ve all been taught to sexually desire this power dynamic. That’s why Joe Goldberg has done so well as a main character. He has been erotized by women because we have been socialized to submit to a man’s sexuality at the cost of our own. And Joe, being a character who does everything in the name of love, is seen as a protector, and women have been led to lust after this sort of protection as we are the damsels in distress who need our savior. But this protection assumes physical strength and toxic masculinity. This philosophy and sexualization of power lead many women to seek abusive men and to even associate aggression with romance. It is one part of the complex reason why women stay with their abusers. And it becomes women’s subconscious fantasy to have a man like Joe, despite the seeming juxtaposition that his lovers end up dead in the show. We want him nonetheless.
The amount of content out there that adheres to this message, that aggression can be romantic, is insanely abundant. So abundant that it has further normalized the harassment women face. A plotline like You is not a new one and after the first couple of seasons, it’s not even that provocative anymore. And all of the other examples of Joe, made up and real, lead men and women alike to view abuse and violence as a natural side effect of masculinity. This is a dangerous place for popular culture to reside in. It further instills that it is mundane and even sexy that a man is physical and a woman is passive — that a man is violent and a woman is a victim. I am one of these people who have loved Joe as a main character, but I have to question my own thoughts — why do I glorify this perverted character? We should be aware that a show like this standardizes a social consciousness under an ideology of sexual power, and it puts women in danger in our real world.
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