Thread by @HallieRubenhold

After the incident last night, when a Ripperologist at a talk I gave insisted that all 5 victims were prostitutes without having read my book, people have been asking, "why is it so important to Ripperologists that they were ‘prostitutes’?" This thread explains why...

1. The obvious reason: bad women deserve to be punished. It’s easier to dismiss the victims if you view them as less than the killer, who is often described as clever, cunning and almost ‘supernatural’. Even the recent BBC doc on the Ripper took his PoV on the killings.

‘Bad women deserve to be punished’ also helps to reinforce a traditional moral code. As much as we like to think we’ve purged this from our modern society, it’s still very much alive. @lizawilliams83 series about the Yorkshire Ripper demonstrates this was so even in the 80s.

2. The only thing Ripperology can agree on is that ‘the victims were prostitutes’. If you remove this keystone, the whole pursuit begins to crumble. Down comes hundreds of suspect theories, down comes years and years of speculating on the Ripper’s identity.

Down also comes thousands of (mostly) male egos. There’s a lot of potential embarrassment in that pile of rubble.

There is so much invested in this myth that they will do almost anything to ensure its survival, including trolling me, accusing me of doctoring the sources to fit my ‘feminist agenda’, denouncing me as a liar and comparing what I’ve done in The Five to what David Irving has done

When I listen to their rants, it occurs to me that often they haven’t even read what I’ve written or read it for its argument, not its ‘facts’. They don’t address the argument at all, or the issues I raise or the evidence I use to counter their claims. They just tell me I'm wrong

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m a woman and not part of their club. How dare an outsider who hasn’t spent decades sifting through the same material, over and over again have a valid opinion on this. There’s a lot of jealousy too.

This is why it’s so important to Ripperology that the women remain ‘prostitutes’, because without this certainty, so many other things become uncertain – their years of work on the subject, their identities, the way they see the world, or any number of other things.

The victims being 'prostitutes' is a proxy for a much larger set of issues.
And of course, I’ll be damned if any of them will be ready to admit this, or even to acknowledge it.