Ladies, You’re Blackpilling The Menfolk

A disclaimer first: NOT ALL.

The Lindsay Clancy verdict could come as early as this week. If you have no idea what that sentence meant, honestly, just stop reading and go do something else. This case is not one you want in your head if it isn’t already. Trust me.

There really aren’t many things that are more distressing than what actually happened here. My complaining about other aspects of the Clancy saga is a bit like if somebody you loved died in a terrible car wreck and I said, “It’s a shame there was so much damage to the paint.” Still, that’s what I’m going to do.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has sparked an on and offline movement of women who see in Clancy something not just sympathetic, but martyr-esque. These women get her. They see themselves in her. They feel what they know she felt, and regard her as an avatar of the unsung stress of motherhood, and the woeful lack of attention paid to women’s struggles.

You may–especially if you are among the penis-havers–be asking yourself several things about now. Perhaps things like:

• The stress of motherhood is unsung?

• Women’s struggles receive insufficient attention?

• Other moms see themselves in a woman who shooed her husband out of the house so she could wrap exercise bands around the necks of her three children and slowly choke the life out of them one by one while they stared into the deranged eyes of the person who brought them into this world in the first place? Really? That’s relatable?

Yes to all three, apparently.

These women are organized too. They are showing up. Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility–or in layman’s terms, not guilty by reason of insanity. Clancy was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, was on enough meds to stock a pharmacy, and was, per her own reports, hearing voices.

We ought to say here: belief that Clancy did not receive adequate support for her unwellness is, on its own, reasonable. She really seems not to have.

Clancy sought help many times, had confessed to experiencing intrusive thoughts about harming the children, and even checked herself in for inpatient psychiatric care. These facts mostly form the gateway into Clancy-stanning for those planting their feet in her corner.

We ought also to say the record here is controversial. A major source point for the online fever is Clancy’s husband Patrick’s decision to take the oldest child skiing for the day after dropping Lindsay for a postpartum care intake. Because she was so heavily medicated, the program considered Linsday a bad fit, and Patrick had to return from the slopes to pick her up early. The defense highlighted this as evidence of the family’s trust in the medical system, and their belief that Lindsay would receive the care she required. The doctors having released her is, they say, proof that she was let down on an institutional level.

To the online fandom, this episode is proof of something else: Patrick Clancy being evil.

Patrick Clancy being callous. Patrick Clancy being an evil, callous Gemini, with evil, callous eyes, who maybe even Svengali’d Lindsay into killing the kids for his own sick purposes, and may even have been that voice Lindsay heard the night of the tragedy.

It’s been like that. Some people should not have access to Lifetime movies.

We’ll know the legal outcome of this disaster soon enough. If Clancy is found not guilty, she’ll be remanded to involuntary psychiatric care, though not indefinitely. Since postpartum psychosis is a generally temporary condition (they’re also saying she’s bipolar), if Clancy is judged not to pose a likelihood of serious harm to herself or others, she could be released.

Certainly, the idea of her one day walking free is morally intolerable in my view, but that’s not really what this essay is about. It’s about what the fuck?

What is wrong with these women defending Lindsay Clancy? I can understand a sincere belief that postpartum depression and psychosis aren’t taken seriously enough (I don’t actually think that’s true, but I can understand somebody thinking it is). But I actually cannot understand somebody looking at Clancy’s actions and thinking, “Same, girl.”

I’m not alone. We may be seeing the beginnings of a backlash to a backlash. The first backlash is the intense, unreturned dislike young women are experiencing these days for the coarser sex. A manifestation of that, I submit, is blaming the supposed inattentiveness of a man for his wife throttling his children to death.

This backlash though is one of men asking themselves, just as I did, what the fuck? Where is this tribalism coming from? What causes a person to look at Patrick Clancy, who returned home from a drug store after picking up his wife’s meds to find her sprawled on the yard, his three children strangled inside, and think, “I don’t like the look of him…?”

Why are women so pissed off at men? Why are they so unhappy in general? Why has the self-reported mental wellness of women aged 18-29 nosedived more than 30 points in a single decade?

It would seem an odd time for it.

Women are succeeding by every possible metric. They’re outpacing men in degree acquisition, they’re catching up in earnings, they have longer lifespans, lower rates of suicide and on the job injury/death, and significantly more attention is paid to maintaining their wellbeing (admittedly, their baselines are worse in that regard). A dedicated patchwork of laws protects them at work and at home, they’re more medicated (about 25% of women take something to bolster their mental health vs. 13% of men), and they both visit and become therapists at much higher rates (the gender imbalance in the profession is creeping up toward 3:1 in favor of women). So why the blues?

I have a theory.

Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue coined the concept of “St. George in Retirement Syndrome.” The gist is that, with no more dragons to slay, St. George gets bored and goes hunting smaller and smaller beasts, until he’s effectively swinging at flies, but with the same fervor he used for the true monsters.

What does a movement like feminism do when it starts to run out of causes? Let’s have a look-see.

I still belong to most of the online feminist groups I joined in the early teens (don’t tell them) and it would be impossible to overstate how much this type of content predominates. It’s post after post of this, and crucially, it’s been post after post of this for the better part of the last decade. (This is why I always chuckle when the proliferation of genderslop is blamed on the rise of the manosphere.)

It’s incomprehensible to me. There actually are still dragons left to slay. The preservation of Roe v. Wade was a sacred priority of feminism since before I was even alive. You might think that in the wake of its overturning, we’d have seen a surge of activist energy dedicated to the legal codification of a woman’s right to choose. Not so much, as it happened.

Not only has the legislative response from Democrats been lackluster, the community of online feminism hardly talks about it. This is the five-year Google Trends chart for the word “abortion.” The first spike you see there is from early May, 2022 when Politico reported on the leaked draft opinion from Dobbs. The next (short-lived) spike is from when the official decision was handed down, at which point there’s radio silence until Trump’s reelection, promptly followed by more radio silence.

I’m sure people still care, but it’s startling to look at a visual representation of just how little. Instead, feminist commentators are feeding each other this:

As to that first meme, I don’t think I know any women–even SAHMs–who shoulder the burden of homemaking solo. The husbands and dads I know cook, they clean, they care for the kids, and they do these things even if they’re also doing the lion’s share of work outside the home. “You should pitch in,” is not a new message. It was received.

There are just not that many dudes anymore who are sitting around watching the game, surrounded by poopy diapers, dirty dishes, and undone homework, waiting for the missus to finish dinner already so she can plop down the TV tray and see to her other duties. I’m not going to say “it doesn’t happen,” but it’s a seriously antiquated picture of household labor distribution in a typical marriage.

The image of men as inadequate shirkers is everywhere in feminist content creation, whereas the view of women as lazy mooches (equally untrue) is one you’re really only going to encounter from Andrew Tate or somebody equally as bad. I think overdoing it on these themes is corrosive.

Obviously, a man who isn’t holding up his end should have that pointed out to him. No arguments here. But encouraging this kind of scorekeeping is unhealthy. Things are different enough now from how they were in the 1950s that defaulting to the assumption that Mr. is worthless while Mrs. is holding the world on her shoulders is no longer appropriate. Nobody seems to have told this to Lindsay Clancy’s defenders, whose vibes are in pure accordance with broader zeitgeist.

And as to the second meme, do I even have to say it? You mean to tell me that having been to college makes women more hostile toward men? Heaven’s forfend! What ever could explain this mysterious, mysterious mystery?

Against this milieu of victimhood and gender grump, is it any wonder so many of the internet’s women went looking for a party to blame other than Lindsay Clancy? Is it any wonder they settled on the dick-bringer at closest proximity?

Let’s briefly check back in with my disclaimer: NOT ALL.

For real. Not all. This post shouldn’t be understood as being about women, but rather a certain type of (usually very online) woman. My feed is cultivated such that I wasn’t even seeing this trend until my friends here started posting about it, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean the pro-Clancy contingent is small. A GoFundMe for her family was up over $1 million last I checked, supportive TikToks are getting hits by the million, and the courthouse demonstrations have looked consistently well-attended.

It’s entirely possible to think two things of Clancy at the same time:

1. She was tragically failed by the system.

2. She bears ultimate responsibility for her terrible actions.

These things are not mutually exclusive, and I wholeheartedly believe both to be true. I just wouldn’t expect many men on the internet to be as discerning about who’s looking crazy right now and whose job it is to clean up that image. If men, even in tiny numbers, were giving “I see you, bro” energy to a male family annihilator, a lot of these very same women would regard it as the apocalypse.

For about two hundred reasons, we are not going to #Repeal19A over this, or any other such thing. That isn’t the danger here. The risk is just more rancor, more division, and more ammunition to be used in the gender wars (and as we’ve seen above, they’re already pretty bad). It’s a deepening of the companionship crisis. A further erosion of trust and harmony. The manosphere, the disgust young women feel for young men; these things are downstream of the overall discourse, and that’s becoming heavily polluted.

A rule I’ve observed that has too many applications in politics is that “NOT ALL” is something you have to say when it’s your group being indicted. To their credit, many women are saying exactly this. Too many aren’t though. And you can take it from a member of the gender that just had to spend 10 years apologizing for every shitty thing every cock-possessor ever did ever: it gets noticed when you don’t.

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