It's Not Just Because He’s Hot: Luigi Mangione and Media Misogyny
Characterising Luigi Mangione’s supporters as women who find him attractive regardless of his alleged violent actions reads as an attempt to avoid having this complex discussion.
Lilac Carr, BA Politics and International Relations, National News Editor, 03/02/2025
Much of the mainstream media appears to be in a sense of bewilderment over the popularity of Luigi Mangione as a cultural figure following his alleged shooting of the (now former) private healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson. Several commentators seem to place most of the blame for his popularity on a mixture of social media and the fact that Luigi is generally regarded as conventionally attractive. In differentiating between the online popularity of Mangione and the two men who attempted to kill Donald Trump last year, Fred Skulthorp for the New Statesman surmises that ‘neither were as good looking or as well read as Mangione.’ The fact that the HealthCare CEO shooter’s assassination attempt was actually successful, unlike the other two figures mentioned by Skulthorp, strangely appears irrelevant to him in explaining the difference in their popularity.
The media’s reaction to Mangione’s popularity reeks of anti-intellectualism and misogyny. In a Newsweek article by Monica Sager, the writer outright states that Mangione is popular ‘because of his looks.’ A later quote by serial killer expert Enzo Yaksic betrays the patronising nature of this assessment: ‘Since women are the primary audience of true crime programming, it is unlikely that they are unaware that attractive men can and have perpetrated some of history’s most heinous acts.’ The equivalence made between women enjoying true crime (enjoyed specifically because the women who consume it understand the behaviour described to be heinous) and people (characterised by the media as women) explicitly supporting Luigi Mangione, is absurd and extreme in its oversimplification of the emotional and/or political dispositions of both groups of women.
There is no denying that many people who are sympathetic toward Luigi Mangione and his alleged murder have been vocal about finding him attractive. But to suggest that Mangione draws support simply because he is attractive is an insulting mischaracterisation. Whether you agree with the people who sympathise with Mangione or not, such an assessment obfuscates the fact that the people who defend him or support him have complex reasons for doing so. These reasons are based on differing understandings of what counts as violence, political violence, and whether certain kinds of violence are more acceptable than others. Rather than support for Mangione deriving from his attractiveness, expressions of attraction to Mangione are ways of staking a particular position in this discussion.
Characterising Luigi Mangione’s supporters as women who find him attractive regardless of his alleged violent actions reads as an attempt to avoid having this complex discussion. This is not a case of government officials opposing all kinds of violence: days before he condemned Luigi Mangione as a ‘terrorist,’ NYC Mayor Eric Adams publicly defended Daniel Penny, who choked homeless man Jordan Neely to death on the subway, as ‘doing what we should have done as a city.’
Many have come to characterise the behaviour of private health insurance companies, whose refusal of claims result in countless Americans unnecessarily losing their lives, as profoundly violent. And yet, these deaths seem to be deemed perfectly acceptable by much of the media and government (or at the very least, entirely incomparable to the alleged murder committed by Luigi Mangione). Pointing to Mangione’s attractiveness to justify his popularity distracts from the actual explanation, which lies in an extreme amount of physical and mental suffering, grief, and death, for which many Americans hold healthcare insurance companies directly responsible.
If the media and government officials actually cared, as they should, about preventing all forms of violence, and not just forms of violence which affect those whose lives they appear to think count more than others’, they would seriously engage with these questions instead of tapping out of the conversation through the emergency exit door of misogyny.
