A women, gender, and sexuality studies professor at Florida Atlantic University says infamous serial killer Ted Bundy is yet another example of “white privilege.”
Professor Jane Caputi, whose research speciality is contemporary American cultural studies (which includes “popular culture, gender and violence, and ecofeminism”) recently told Oxygen.com that Bundy “has been wrongly mythologized — largely due to his ‘white male privilege.’”
“[Bundy] never got into the law school he wanted to,” Caputi said. “He was a nose-picker, a nailbiter, not well liked as a child, he tortured frogs — his own opinion of himself preceded everything and the media did just buy that.”
[Caputi] doesn’t buy into the suave, sophisticated, charming “boy next door” portrait of Bundy that’s been constructed by the media she said — and which has captivated imaginations — for more than four decades.
Caputi, who has wrote about Bundy in her 1987 book “The Age of Sex Crime,” believes Bundy’s perceived suave demeanor was actually white privilege in disguise.
“He’s the very picture of — overtly of — innocence but on the underside of that he’s the very picture of the criminal enterprise,” she explained.
She specifically cited the unusual luxuries Bundy was afforded during his trial and incarceration, such as minimal prison library supervision, which led to two botched jailbreaks.
“[Bundy] escaped twice,” Caputi added. “He escaped the first time by jumping out the window because he was left unshackled and unsupervised. And at this point is suspected of killing how many women? So that’s white male privilege.
“The Age of Sex Crime” is described by Caputi in the book’s preface as “a feminist analysis of the sexualized serial murder of women by men in modern Western society” … a “political analysis and demythicization of this most extreme form of patriarchal violence.”
The professor’s comments come in the wake of similar remarks by actor Zach Efron, who plays Bundy in the new Netflix biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.
“The fact is that this movie really happened,” Efron said. “The fact is that the whole world, literally, all the media, everybody, was capable of believing that this guy was innocent. Talk about white privilege, talk about white… whatever.”
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IMAGE: Mike Licht / Flickr.com
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