HOMOCIDE IS NOT ROMANTIC!

Violence Against Women is not Art

In only the last week, rising star D4vd’s career has collapsed almost as quickly as it took off. The Romantic Homicide singer is facing serious allegations after a decomposing body was discovered in an impounded Tesla registered to him in Lake Elsinore, California.

Though his involvement remains alleged, online speculation has been relentless. Fans and critics alike have begun combing through his lyrics, pointing out the ways violence and control are framed as romantic gestures — and questioning whether the line separating his art from confession was ever really there.

The body in the car was soon identified as Celeste Rivas Hernandez, a fifteen-year-old girl who had vanished in April of last year. At a candlelight vigil yesterday evening, neighbours remembered her as “a sweet child.” The community mourned a life taken too soon, underscoring the unbearable truth: Celeste was not only a beautiful young woman; she was a child.

Her story is not just an absolute tragedy. It is also a mirror — reflecting how deeply violence against women is woven into our cultural imagination, and how easily art has been used to reframe that violence as romance.

I write this essay in memory of Celeste; who’s life was her own.

***

The tension between romance and violence is a historical one.

In literature, it is often risk that makes the romance. Think Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: it is Heathcliff’s danger that makes him so alluring. Through this female authorship, love is intensified by its darkness — it insists that intimacy, to be truly engaged with, demands a degree of surrender. Brontë does not frame Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship as aspirational, nor does she cast love’s transcendent nature as positive. Instead, she leaves it to the reader to decide whether their inability to escape one another is beautiful or horrifying.

Dark romance is a staple of Gothic literature, and what makes it different through the female gaze is that love is explored as a concept rather than a spectacle. Women are not reduced to objects but are the subjects of experience, with agency over desire and pain. Love can be dangerous, risky, even traumatic — but through this lens, it is not intrinsically synonymous with violence, even when a woman’s experience of love can feel violating.

Contrast this with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, one of the most infamous examples of how the male gaze can weaponise the overlap of romance and violence, and we have a story that is as disturbing as its misreadings.

Humbert Humbert narrates a story of love, but it is, in reality, a predatory fixation on a child. The violence is emotional, psychological, and sexual, yet the male narrator frames it as romantic passion. Dolores Haze (Lolita) is not a participant of love — she is silenced, refracted through Humbert’s obsession, and transformed into an object for his self-styled “romance.”

That distinction is everything. Cathy suffers love’s risk because she chooses it, however destructively; Humbert imposes “love” on Dolores by violating her innocence and denying her voice. Brontë interrogates intimacy’s danger; Nabokov dramatises how easily the male gaze can romanticise harm.

In today’s society, Lolita continues to be misunderstood. Its title has become shorthand for sexual precocity, its critique flattened into fetish. What should expose the horrors of Humbert’s perspective is often re-circulated as aesthetic: “Lolita fashion,” “Lolita vibes,” even pop lyrics that borrow its language of transgression. This is precisely the danger of male-authored violence dressed as romance — the framing makes it appear desirable.

D4vd’s breakout track, Romantic Homicide, crystallises how violence and romance continue to collapse into one another under a male lens. On the surface, it is a song about heartbreak — a wounded lover who feels annihilated by betrayal. Yet the very title pairs “romance” with “homicide,” transforming the act of killing into a metaphor for love’s intensity.

This is not Brontë’s formulation, where love is dangerous because it requires surrender. Nor is it an exploration of mutual risk. Instead, it resembles Nabokov’s Humbert: violence reframed as devotion, female absence or silence converted into a canvas for male anguish. In Romantic Homicide, the beloved’s perspective is missing entirely. The song is not about two people navigating the peril of intimacy; it is about one man narrating his own pain so absolutely that the woman’s existence collapses into symbol.

This is the essence of the male gaze’s distortion: a girl’s life, or death, becomes raw material for a man’s art.

What Cathy and Heathcliff share in Wuthering Heights is a mutually destructive attachment; what Humbert imposes on Dolores in Lolita is predation dressed as passion; and what D4vd stages in Romantic Homicide is love reimagined through annihilation.

This same tension is so culturally ingrained that it surfaces even in seemingly harmless artistic expressions — take stage magic, and the cliché of the “glamorous assistant.” The magician’s art depends on her entrapment. He locks her in a box, saws her in half, makes her disappear. She is the body upon which his mastery is demonstrated, the vessel for his performance. Her beauty and silence make the illusion work, but her subjectivity vanishes. The spectacle is his genius; her role is to endure it. Magic is something done to her, just as love, under the male gaze, so often becomes something done to women – like an act of violence.

The tragedy, of course, is that Romantic Homicide was received by many young listeners not as a warning but as an anthem. It went viral on TikTok, soundtracking romantic edits and stylised heartbreak. Just as Lolita’s title was misappropriated as aesthetic, Romantic Homicide’s conflation of love with killing has been detached from its critique and absorbed as a cathartic expression of heartache.

In the wake of the allegations surrounding D4vd — and the death of Celeste Rivas Hernandez — the song takes on an even darker resonance. What once sounded like hyperbolic metaphor now feels chillingly literal, underscoring how easily violence against women can be framed as art, how quickly annihilation can masquerade as romance.

Art has always claimed the shelter of poetic licence: the idea that violence in song, film, or literature is metaphor, exaggeration, fiction. But when violence against women is so endemic, and when artists invite their audiences to aestheticise it, that licence is not harmless.

D4vd’s Romantic Homicide is a case in point. At his concerts, fans turned up in white shirts soaked with fake blood, imitating his music video that depicts a young woman lying in bed, soaked in blood and holding a white rose. The metaphor became costume. This is not harmless catharsis; it is a rehearsal of misogyny, a normalisation of female death as entertainment. And the fetishisation, indicated by the white rose, of corrupting the innocence of female youth.

Eminem’s catalogue provides another infamous example. In Kim, he screams lines like “Sit down, bitch! You move again, I’ll beat the shit out of you!” — a dramatisation of spousal abuse. In ’97 Bonnie and Clyde, he goes further: narrating to his infant daughter that her mother is “taking a little nap in the trunk,” after he’s murdered her. Chilling enough on its own — but chilling in a different way now, when we recall D4vd’s alleged crime: the body of a young girl in the trunk of his car.

Defenders argue that Eminem’s music is theatrical, adopting violent personas as storytelling devices. But that distinction collapses when placed against the reality: we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a world where misogyny is not marginal but mainstream, and what is mainstream is influential. Violence against women is not an abstract metaphor but an epidemic.

It was even asserted in the July 2006 edition of the Journal of Black Studies, that rap music is intentionally misogynistic because it’s commercial. Hate for women is not only painfully normalised; it sells. And any artist who feeds from that economy of violence is complicit in sustaining it.

The statistics are damning. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States. Not sepsis. Not haemorrhage. Not hypertensive disorders. Pregnant women are more likely to be killed by the men who impregnated them than by any medical complication of pregnancy. Yet in the same country — and in some states — lawmakers are pushing for women who seek abortions to face the death penalty. One of those states is South Carolina, which, in a chilling twist of irony, also ranks among the highest in the nation for pregnant women murdered. State institutions are more willing to punish women for exercising autonomy than to protect them from lethal violence.

When that is the world we inhabit, there are no instances in which glamorising violence against women in art is harmless. When art transforms women’s suffering into aesthetic, when it frames annihilation as romance, it doesn’t just reflect culture — it teaches it.

Frighteningly, this misogyny seems to overlook age.

Nabokov wrote a novel about a paedophile, but the cultural afterlife of Lolita has been one of glamorisation. A “forbidden” romance. What gets lost is that Dolores Haze was twelve-years-old. She was not Humbert’s lover but his victim — his stepdaughter; a child raped and manipulated into silence.

That is the violence of objectification: it erases age. It erases innocence. It erases the person. It transfigures a child into a sexual symbol and then markets her as aesthetic. Lolita is no longer read as a story about abuse; she is rebranded as a Pinterest board, a look, a fashion trend.

The same distortion is visible in the case of D4vd. With Romantic Homicide, discourse has circled his artistic persona, his violent imagery, the spectacle of homicide. The question of, is he a murderer? But beneath that spectacle lies a truth far starker: the victim was thirteen-years-old at the time of her disappearance. A child. If the allegations are true, Burke is not only a murderer — he is a paedophile. And yet already, online commentary seems not to stress this fact as loudly as it should. Some even debating Celeste’s age in defence of the singer.

Violence against women does not begin at womanhood. It extends to girls. To children. And the way our culture consumes art — reframing predation as “romance,” aestheticising homicide as “passion” — shows how normalised that violence has become. From Humbert Humbert’s narration, to Eminem’s murder ballads, to fans wearing fake blood to D4vd’s shows, the script repeats: women and girls are not subjects, but symbols. Not experiencers, but objects. Not children, but “Lolitas.” Muses. Victims. Bodies. Girls cut in half – by magic or otherwise.

And that is the real indictment. When a culture so consistently romanticises female suffering, when it makes spectacle out of children’s abuse, we cannot pretend that violence in art is harmless. It is part of the continuum. It doesn’t just mirror misogyny — it sustains it.

I send my deepest condolences to all impacted by the tragic passing of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, and compel us all to think empathetically about the artistic discourse that we produce and consume — because there is nothing poetic about a murdered child.