Seduced by a Serial Killer

The paradoxical female desire for Joe Goldberg

What is wrong with you?

Joe Goldberg, stalker, assassin, and protagonist of the You series on Netflix, poses this fundamental question to the female sex. After five years of romance and homicide, Joe lies in his cell, reading letters of adoring women who continue to love him, despite all his murder convictions. Or perhaps, because of them.

So we should ask ourselves, what is wrong with us women? Joe, a New York librarian, finds a new female character in every series whom he adores, akin to Dante’s Beatrice, but who, in most cases, ends up killed by him. Joe is the prototype of the toxic lover: controlling, manipulative, and, ultimately, a serial murderer. Yet, notwithstanding his record, Joe was loved, idealized, and romanticized by millions of female spectators. A post from The Single’s Woman claimed, “He be killing people & still be able to text back.” The Single’s Woman further asked her readers: “Raise your hand if you want a love like the one of Joe Goldberg.” Almost five thousand women responded with a “yes”. In its first month, You attracted 40 million viewers, and was renewed for four more successful seasons. It was, however, a series impacted by controversy over the romanticization of its homicidal protagonist. Joe was too lovable to be a villain; too much of a prince to be cruel. Even the actor playing the protagonist, Penn Badgley, felt uncomfortable with the popularity surrounding his character.

So, what did women love about Joe? The series touches on a fundamental paradox. The love that Joe held for his female characters: Beck, Love, Marianne, Kate, and finally, Bronte, is toxic. A love that controls, surveils, and kills anyone who poses a threat to the beloved object, which he perceives as his own, from disrespectful exes to inconvenient friends. The façade, beautiful though it is, can’t be sustained, and the women discover who Joe is. Most want to turn him in for his crimes, so Joe is “forced” to kill them. Joe demonstrates little remorse: the women he idealized are instantly devalued for their perceived betrayal, for not understanding his true nature and intentions to protect them.

Joe wants to be accepted for who he is, but only if that allows him to remain a “hero”, albeit a dark one. Love, the only partner who is also a serial killer, who truly mirrors him, frightens and repels Joe, not just because she forces him to look at the worst parts of himself, but because she takes away his role as savior: axe-wielding murderous wives rarely need rescuing. Even Kate, a powerful, billionaire CEO and dominant figure, fascinates him only until she denies his deepest need to feel useful with his murderous instinct. Yet, the male spectators are often drawn to these powerful women: Love, the BPD-killer character who oscillates between sweetness and insanity, and Kate, the cold, rational CEO. Therein lies another male, paradoxical desire: rising to the occasion of a woman who can challenge them.

Yet, until the moment Joe’s character is unveiled to the blinded female protagonists, that toxic love doesn’t hurt. To the contrary, it’s good for them. The women who are oblivious to his true crimes, are happy to be rescued by Joe. Beck is finally understood as a writer, Love finds her killer soulmate, Marianne feels at peace from years of personal turmoil, Kate finds refuge from a toxic family, and Bronte fulfills her dreams of becoming someone besides a dental assistant. The provocative message behind You is that it portrays a masculine figure who is dangerous at his core, but that danger is constructed in such a way as to guarantee their happiness. Joe kills, but he protects. He controls, but he reassures. Joe provides order to the chaotic lives of the women he loves. He “improves” them, at least for a while. And that “for a while” is what causes the circuit to end: until Joe is discovered for his crimes, he appears as the perfect prince. He’s considerate, intelligent, cultured, devoted, gentle, filled with attention and protection. He does all the things that women desire in a man who loves them unconditionally.

You confronts us with a closed circuit: it shows how behaviors we define as toxic in the abstract, such as control, surveillance, jealousy, and idealization, can appear as romantic when embedded in a well-crafted narrative. In an era where even minor deviations from “healthy” norms are enough to label someone as “problematic”, where men are shamed as “simps” for pursuing women, You disarms us with the power of a paradox: it makes us empathize with a killer-stalker, as long as he's acting in the name of love. And that’s exactly where the discomfort kicks in: we can’t help but question just how fragile, and negotiable, our moral compass really is.

As much as women may ethically resist this urge, they desire a man who looks at them, who sees them for who they are, and who remains devoted to them fully, activating an ancient reflex in the female psyche: feeling special, chosen, and secure. You exposes a dilemma that our feminist ideology has been unable to resolve without a degree of embarrassment: The female need for protection. Joe satisfies this desire, and that’s why women find him so appealing in an era where they’re forced to protect themselves. The female desire for protection is neither a fault nor a flaw. It’s a biological inheritance that is hard for us to admit, because it means conceding that the female body is more vulnerable, more exposed, and less armed in the face of danger than that of men. This natural truth is now denied because it could be used to justify the patriarchy. Yet, denying this primordial female need for protection leaves us without the ability to fully express ourselves: How do we admit our need to feel protected without declaring that we are, indeed, more fragile?

This question is confronted in another HBO series that has garnered success: The White Lotus. In the first season, Nicole, a successful executive, mother, and wife to the less accomplished Mark, finally finds her husband sexually attractive when he saves her from an aggressor. “You’re my hero,” she says. In that moment, Mark is able to find strength in her words, a vitality and potency that had been taken away under his perceived inferiority. He begins beating his chest like a primate. The immediate comedy in this farcical display of masculinity gives way to a quiet, unsettling truth, admitted through clenched teeth: Our female need to be supported, heard, and to not have to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders.

The female need for protection isn't merely biological. It finds its root in the heritage of Romanticism. Heathcliff, in Emily Brontë’s Withering Heights, is a violent and uncompromising lover who chases the woman he loves even after her death. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that the last woman Joe loves, the only woman who was able to outsmart him, is called Bronte.

The archetype of the dark prince, the predator who is in love, the wolf who growls at whoever comes close, but who allows the woman he loves to touch and nurture his vulnerability, is seductive. The promise is that the man can be a monster with the rest of humanity, and only tender with you. But, it is precisely here that Joe in You betrays us: He appears as the ideal partner until you try to turn on him. If you do, he will direct that ferocity at you. He doesn’t offer us an agreement: He decides for us. He loves us “for our own good”, he kills “to protect us”, and in the end, he only leaves us two options: submit or die.

Another layer to this story feels even more unsettling: our familiarity with the monster. Not the gothic monster, deformed and repugnant, but the polite, handsome, humorous, and kind one. The one who reads Virginia Woolf, who listens to Nina Simone, and who prepares breakfast for you in bed. He tells us about his nature, but in a way that we find understanding, perhaps even erotic, in seeing what is bad justify itself so eloquently for love. This is a weakness that women don’t readily admit, but it finds expression in the true crime boom. Instances of horrific misogynist violence become stories to consume with fascination; a yearning to confront oneself with male brutality and to understand it. They’re fascinated by men who destroy, but only if they’re explained with a grace that justifies the character. This is where You catches women in their fallibility. Joe is narrating his story, so he looks us in the eye and tells us: “I know how to speak to you. I know how to make you feel safe. I can be different, just for you.”

Beneath it all, there’s one final truth, simpler, and more disturbing: Joe is handsome. And beauty has always been the most forgiving ethical pass. This foundational skew in human perspective is not new. “The beautiful” and its close interrelation with “the good”, permeates Plato’s work. Two millennia later, Schiller wrote, “Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty”. Nor has this been the subject of solely philosophical inquiry: a study found that, “Physically attractive persons assumed to possess more socially desirable personalities than those of lesser attractiveness.” We’re inclined to justify what is beautiful, to believe it must be good, or at least redeemable. If Joe were ugly, crude, or unpleasant, his character wouldn't have worked. But with his beauty, his violence walks through an open door. Beauty suspends judgment. It makes us stay. It makes us hope. And You knows this all too well: It uses it, deceives us, and then asks us to answer for our complicity.

The success of You lies in this paradox. In how easy it is to confuse love with possession, care with domination, dedication with dependence, and beauty with goodness. The series fulfills these contradictions with an entertaining journey, and here lies another controversy. You is filled with scenes that force us to close our eyes, gruesome moments that, at the same time, keep us glued to the screen until the end. We lose the game of the series because we begin to empathize with Joe. The ending of the narrative was suddenly turned “politically correct”, with the villain being locked in jail and his female victims finding renewed power and independence. But this moralizing ending was precisely what led so many spectators to feel unsatisfied. The series made us love Joe, only to contort itself at the last moment to make us feel shame for doing so.

The finale was a desperate attempt at infusing Joe’s story with a moral message. Joe becomes unmasked, and the proper “order” of things is restored. Beck, his first victim, who found posthumous success as an author, is redeemed. Her book, we are told, becomes even better without the ending Joe had crafted to avoid prosecution for his crimes. The series asks us to accept that the relatively ordinary Beck is the better writer, despite Joe having been portrayed as a literary genius until then. His talent is stripped away because portraying a profoundly intelligent serial killer would be “wrong”.

This ending left many spectators feeling disappointed and confused. Disappointed because the appeal of You was never to chastize or lecture the viewer with morality, but rather, to make us indulge in the narrative without guilt, as we’re left wanting more. The series placed a mirror in front of us: If Joe had been real, would we have fallen for him? How many of us would have been able to outsmart him? Are we wrong for thinking that, at some point, we would have wanted Joe’s devotion? Are we flawed for wanting a man who makes us feel secure?

With Joe in jail and his last girlfriend depicted in a flowery dress walking defiantly through the streets of Manhattan with the sun in her eyes, we’re provided with all the “right” answers. But this is what we dislike, because what we enjoyed most was how the series revealed the questions we were seeking to answer about ourselves.

Silvia Bignami is a painter and former journalist at La Repubblica.

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