I’m more than positive anybody reading this has seen or heard of the new Netflix series, Dahmer, revolving around Jeffrey Dahmer and the gruesome acts that he committed from the year of 1978 to 1991. The show takes you into the childhood, adulthood, and, essentially, the mind of Jeffrey Dahmer and gives watchers the chance to try to make sense to the senseless murders he engaged in. If you haven’t noticed, Gen Z has absolutely no chill when it comes to making serious situations unserious. We have a way with dark humor but, sometimes, I think we lose sense of the fact that the things we are making light of were actually dark and horrid times for those that were affected by it. Let’s take a dive into how social media has kept up with its fetish of serial killers with the glorfying of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Now that the series is trending, so many people have started drooling over the actor, Evan Peters, and have basically made light of a horrible situation that traumatized real people. We have tweets being published saying things like, “Jeffrey Dahmer would’ve gotten me,” or, “Jeffrey Dahmer would’ve had a field day on Grindr.” The jokes can go on and on for days. The real issue comes in when people fail to realize that these murders were not just reenacted for Netflix, these things actually happened and some of the families of the Dahmer victims have already come out to say that having this series be out and trending has done nothing but retraumatized them. The craziest thing is, they aren’t just glorifying the actor that plays the role, they are fiedning over Dahmer himself and this is not the first or only criminal that has been used as Twitter’s flavor of the month before.
We can look at Ted Bundy and how after Zac Efron portrayed Bundy, people began to fiend over the character. Let’s be so for real right now…THIS IS NOT OKAY! It is one thing to find the actors themselves attractive but, the issue comes when you like the actor simply because of the role that they played! By jokingly or seriously writing off someone’s crimes because of their on screen attractiveness, you are sublimally taking away from the fact that people were killed. That these victims have families that still have to deal with the loss of their loved ones every day. The last thing they need is to wake up and see that the person that is the cause for their worst nightmares is trending on social media not because they are getting the rightful recognition for their crimes, but because they are being hyped up and made out to be the next Sexiest Man Alive.
To make everything plain and simple, we are in a society where serial killers and the insensitivity surrounding it is growing in prevelancy. We, as a society, have to do more when it comes to understanding the severity of the situations we are making light of because serial killers are more than just your social media crush.