Though one would be hard pushed to describe The Black Dahlia as a feminist tract, it nonetheless provides a horrifying glimpse into the misogyny of mid-twentieth-century American society. In his lurid descriptions of the murder of Elizabeth Short, James Ellroy presents us with a disturbing picture of a woman who hasn't just been brutally murdered, but killed in such a way that identifies her murderer as a sexual sadist.

What's even more disturbing about Short's murder is that there was almost a horrible sense of inevitability about it. As Ellroy tells the tale, Short was involved in pornographic movies, which for most feminists would be regarded as the ultimate form of female exploitation. Used and abused in the making of these movies, Short was reduced to nothing more than a sex object long before she met her violent death.

The narrator, a cop who's supposed to be solving Elizabeth Short's murder, develops an unhealthy sexual obsession with "The Black Dahlia," even going so far as to have sex with a lookalike. This reflects the author's complex, almost incestuous feelings towards his own mother, whose brutal murder had many things in common with that of Short.

The irony here is that both author and narrator share similarly retrograde attitudes towards women with the murderer himself. This is largely because they are steeped in a culture of rampant misogyny, which, if it doesn't explicitly endorse the mistreatment of women, does at least tacitly approve of it.