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I realize that a lot of you probably haven't seen it, but that's not terribly important. Here's the IMDb link. If you want to see it, it's probably been uploaded half a dozen places, but I won't provide a link, because that would probably violate the board regs.
Anyway, Patricia Arquette, who is a pretty decent actress, and someone I've liked since she did Beyond Rangoon in 1995 plays a woman who has been a working prostitute for 25 years, since she was 19 or 20 years old.
I don't need spoiler alerts, because I won't give away anything that doesn't happen before the first commercial: anyway, she is being pursued by a on-and-off regular, who has done what Americans call "gone postal"; he has become violent after a number of stressors, including being fired.
The man goes to see the prostitute, and they are both caught on a camera, then she is identified, and brought in by police to inform on the man. Afterwards, she is offered police protection, because they believe she will be a target, but she brushes them off, saying that she's been taking care of herself on the streets for 25 years, and the fact that she has survived that long demonstrates that she's got better instincts than the average woman working the streets, and anyway, it's Saturday, and she makes most of her money for the week that one night.
I thought about a similar thing going through the heads of each of the victims of JTR. The first four (counting Stride, for the sake of argument), had survived longer than a lot of people in the East End, and MJK had a reputation for a certain amount of bravado. She also was either a person who relished risk, going off to Paris with people she didn't know well, and such, or if those were just stories, then she at least had an ideal of herself as someone who took risks.
Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I remembered research I've read, demonstrating that people are very bad as estimating their own level of expertise. None of it focused on prostitutes identifying men who were threats; it mostly had to do with people guessing their scores on tests relative to other people-- their percentile score, in other words, and also, there was a paper published by two people named Dunning and Kruger, resulting in the naming of the "Dunning-Kruger effect." It basically states that the less you know about a topic, the less you are aware that you are ignorant, and the less you will be able to seek opportunities for correction. Since there really isn't a standard, or even baseline, for "being aware of the dangers presented by psychopaths, while working as a prostitute," no one can really be an expert on it, but you can see how someone could think that they know a lot more than they really do know.
Since I've heard people express disbelief that there were women still working the streets after the first couple of murders, I thought I'd post this.
Anyway, Patricia Arquette, who is a pretty decent actress, and someone I've liked since she did Beyond Rangoon in 1995 plays a woman who has been a working prostitute for 25 years, since she was 19 or 20 years old.
I don't need spoiler alerts, because I won't give away anything that doesn't happen before the first commercial: anyway, she is being pursued by a on-and-off regular, who has done what Americans call "gone postal"; he has become violent after a number of stressors, including being fired.
The man goes to see the prostitute, and they are both caught on a camera, then she is identified, and brought in by police to inform on the man. Afterwards, she is offered police protection, because they believe she will be a target, but she brushes them off, saying that she's been taking care of herself on the streets for 25 years, and the fact that she has survived that long demonstrates that she's got better instincts than the average woman working the streets, and anyway, it's Saturday, and she makes most of her money for the week that one night.
I thought about a similar thing going through the heads of each of the victims of JTR. The first four (counting Stride, for the sake of argument), had survived longer than a lot of people in the East End, and MJK had a reputation for a certain amount of bravado. She also was either a person who relished risk, going off to Paris with people she didn't know well, and such, or if those were just stories, then she at least had an ideal of herself as someone who took risks.
Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I remembered research I've read, demonstrating that people are very bad as estimating their own level of expertise. None of it focused on prostitutes identifying men who were threats; it mostly had to do with people guessing their scores on tests relative to other people-- their percentile score, in other words, and also, there was a paper published by two people named Dunning and Kruger, resulting in the naming of the "Dunning-Kruger effect." It basically states that the less you know about a topic, the less you are aware that you are ignorant, and the less you will be able to seek opportunities for correction. Since there really isn't a standard, or even baseline, for "being aware of the dangers presented by psychopaths, while working as a prostitute," no one can really be an expert on it, but you can see how someone could think that they know a lot more than they really do know.
Since I've heard people express disbelief that there were women still working the streets after the first couple of murders, I thought I'd post this.