Shanda Gimson’s bedtime routine starts out pretty ordinarily: She turns off the lights and gets comfortable in bed. But then, Gimson presses play on her favorite true-crime podcast. Soon enough, she knows, she’ll be fast asleep.
“It was never something that came off as scary to me,” Gimson, 31, says. “It was always a sense of comfort.”
Spend time on TikTok and you’ll find women who like dozing off to stories about stalking, kidnapping and murder. Of the top-ranked podcasts on Apple and Spotify, true crime is the most common topic, according to Pew Research Center data. Among regular listeners, women are more than twice as likely than men to opt for the genre.
True crime’s appeal to women isn’t new, says David Schmid, an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo who studies pop culture and crime in the media.
“Much earlier in the 20th century, when people started to realize a majority of crime fiction readers are women, it was met with a similar kind of surprise and shock,” he says.
It makes sense, Schmid adds: Women are more often than men the victims of violent, intimate crimes. At night, he notes, true-crime content can also give the effect of “ghost stories,” a narrative people regularly associate with bedtime.
“The narrators for true crime, their voices are always unique in that they have a calm, comforting voice whenever they’re narrating,” says Gimson. “I find that easier to fall asleep to than if I’m listening to an upbeat podcast.”
