Once You See It, You Can't Unsee It: A Follow-Up Essay to "Dead Girl Society"

This essay discusses sensitive topics, such as harm, un-aliving, self-unaliving, abuse, and other potentially triggering material.

This essay is a reflection on a story that I recently published, an episode of This Content Will Be Disturbing called “Dead Girl Society.” The premise of the story is that there is a fictional company that enables young women to control how they are remembered in life, instead of waiting for their highlight reel after death.

In this story, the app romanticizes the notion of “the beautiful dead girl.” The system that exists in the story is very competitive and exclusive, deeply embedded in society, and favors women who play the “dead girl” part better than their peers. The women need to agree to the terms and conditions, but the app then takes their voice and image to perpetuate the image the Dead Girl Society has curated. All media is filtered through their lens for the rest of the person’s life.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story is that the young women are aware of this system and their place within it. The main character, Anna, has practiced to be the perfect “dead girl” and has willingly - and even excitedly - accepted the consequences of making herself one. She is curated, she is popular, she is sought after. But, is she really herself any longer?

While my work is clearly exaggerated and satire-horror, it’s not that far of a stretch from reality. It was not that long ago that the world watched in horror as a long-embedded system of abuse was brought to light. A lot of us have also grown up with narratives of dead and missing women all over - the news, true crime documentaries, in movies, on social media.

And, while the social media critique runs deep in the story, it all points back to this: people have long aestheticized dead women. I didn’t realize initially how long until I started researching for this story. And, once you see it, it’s something that you can’t unsee.

So, I kept - and still do - keep circling the question: why do we aestheticize dead women? Why are we so fascinated that we can’t stop looking?

Is the draw of beautiful female corpses something cultural, exploiting women’s suffering by reducing them to something sexual, an object? Is it something so dark as to say that the most beautiful woman is one who can’t be a problem? Or, is there some weird psychological trigger that responds to the juxtaposition of beauty against the barren landscape of death?

To try to understand why this keeps coming back across societies, I tried to find some answers in history.

One of the first examples that comes up, almost immediately, is Sir John Everett Millais's painting, “Ophelia.” The painting is based on Shakespeare’s character in Hamlet, and still has current-day relevance, as it recently served as an inspiration for an episode on the show, “The White Lotus.”

When I look at the painting, I see a woman. She’s young. She’s beautiful. She is dead and floating. Her pose is not violent or distressed, she just looks…peaceful. I’m struck by the contrast of death against blooming nature. To me, it’s almost to say that beauty begets beauty, even in death.

Another example comes from the goth-master himself, Edgar Allen Poe. He famously wrote, “The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" in his essay The Philosophy of Composition. This quote was an underpinning of my social media lore this week surrounding the release of “Dead Girl Society,” on Instagram.

Somehow, even in the age of AI and technology, almost 175 years after his death, this quote still feels relevant. Turning on the news, or turning on a crime documentary, will show how beautiful women are described, focused on, and sensationalized in these contexts.

Probably one of the more disturbing examples I came across during my research was the photo of  “The Most Beautiful Suicide,” which is still talked about today. A young woman, Evelyn McHale,  jumped to her death in 1947 from the Empire State Building. Her body was immortalized for the world to see by a nearby photographer, and the photo was then later published as “The Picture of the Week” in Life Magazine. The photo then went on to inspire Andy Warhol’s work, Suicide: Fallen Body.

But, I have to ask myself: why was someone’s tragic death and fallout from a mental health crisis published for the world to see, and then deemed beautiful and peaceful?

Lastly, probably the most famous instance I uncovered was in Elizabeth Short’s murder. She was known as The Black Dahlia. When I researched this example, I realized how sensationalized her death was, with gruesome details of the murder published. It is particularly disturbing considering the context of the time, the 1940’s United States, with their more rigid morals and strict standards of violence and sexuality. During my research, I actually had to reframe here. I realized that I didn’t know her actual real name, but only knew her as “The Black Dahlia.” The nickname, in a sad way, replaced her true identity, her suffering, and her life.

I believe that this fascination with the “Dead Girl” extends into treatment of dead women in the news and in true crime. In some true crime documentaries, the appearance of the victim is repeatedly focused on and repeated. This isn’t true of all true crime, but it shows up often enough that I can’t ignore it. The details are sensationalized. It draws attention away from the victim and who they were. Sometimes the photos are distributed through social media which further sensationalizes it. And, it pays. It gets clicks, views, retention, book deals, and movies. Some handle it with humanity and empathy, others don’t.

After all of this, I don’t think I have a better understanding of why this theme of the beautiful dead girl keeps coming up. Is it actually women trying to take control of the narrative of something that women are at disproportionate risk of (violence and murder) by romanticizing it? Or is it something so mundane that it keeps people talking and it pays?

Because at some point, it stops being something we’re shown.

And starts being something we participate in, whether we mean to or not.

And so, I keep coming back to the same question.

Why do we keep watching?