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On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, with exercise bands in their Duxbury basement before jumping from a second story window.

Her lawyers admitted to everything. The only thing left for the jury to decide is whether she was so consumed by postpartum psychosis that she isn’t criminally responsible. A diagnosis that Lindsey Clancy has never received. But the internet didn’t wait for a jury or medical experts. Eighteen months ago, the brain rotted digital masses reached a verdict and continue to regurgitate it ad nauseam. In doing so, they answered a second, unasked question: could her husband, a man the state’s own phone tracking data places at a CVS while his children were being murdered, actually be the real killer? The speed with which the public granted her total exculpation while casting live suspicion on him reveals a profound cultural sickness. It shows exactly how we assign moral agency based on sex. Women are treated as fragile accidents, and men are treated as inherent predators.

The Sympathy Machine

The online reaction to Clancy has been nothing short of absurd. A GoFundMe for her parents has raked in over $800,000, with another fundraiser aiming for $2 million. On TikTok, a defense adjacent fandom has emerged. Legal commentators don’t attack the woman who killed three babies, but instead bash the prosecutors as “disgusting human beings” for daring to try and convict her. The narrative is locked in. She was a “troubled soul,” a victim of her own biology and “bad medication.” She isn’t an agent who made a choice; she is a passenger in her own body.

Some of this could be medically warranted because postpartum psychosis is real but, incredibly rare. But the public didn’t wait for the medical experts. They assume incapacity as a starting premise because the killer was a mother. In our current cultural climate, a mother who kills is viewed only as a victim of her hormones, never as a person capable of something monstrous by premeditated choice.

This reflex is already crashing into the evidence. Prosecutors showed the jury an Apple Maps search Clancy used to time her husband’s pharmacy run to the minute. A psychiatrist who saw her fourteen times, including the day before the murders, testified that Clancy never appeared psychotic. Digital forensics show her moving normally through the house between the killings. It destroys the idea that she “obviously” didn’t know what she was doing.

This is infantilization disguised as empathy. 

It is particularly galling to watch so many “self proclaimed feminists” lead this charge. For a group that spent decades demanding that women be recognized as equal, autonomous adults with full agency, they are remarkably quick to deny that agency the moment it becomes inconvenient. Why are these advocates so eager to strip Lindsey Clancy of her culpability? Why do they fight so hard to shield her from the reality that she is a mass murderer who needs to be permanently quarantined from civil society for the safety of others? By denying her responsibility, they aren’t elevating women; they are retreating into the same archaic logic that once barred women from juries by claiming they lacked the agency to be held accountable. Chivalry is just the polite face of contempt. By deciding a mother cannot be the author of her own worst acts, society isn’t protecting women. It’s stripping them of their accountability to maintain a fairy tale of female purity.

Now, look at Patrick Clancy. By every piece of available evidence, he was not in the house. Yet, a huge swath of the internet has spent two years trying to frame him as the actual killer. This is a theory the Boston Globe called baseless and unsupported by any footage or records. People have analyzed his shoes, the tone of his 911 call, and whether a “real man” would have sounded more devastated.

A criminologist in Marie Claire tried to dress this up as “heightened awareness of male perpetrated domestic violence.” That is a sanitized deflection to say that in the modern West, a man is a suspect by default. Because we have decided that men are the sole and default agents of harm, any ambiguity, such as a delayed errand or a calm voice during a trauma, is read as evidence of guilt.

Patrick Clancy did not kill his children. He wasn’t even there. But the discourse spent two years trying to find a way to make it his fault anyway. The horrifying tragedy he has experienced, only to be treated as the perpetrator, is the exact nightmare lived by countless men facing violent women. This is the lived reality of the Duluth Model, a rigid and outdated framework that views domestic violence as a tool of patriarchal control rather than a human behavior. 

By insisting that men are always the aggressors and women the victims, the Duluth Model doesn't just ignore female IPV; it weaponizes the system against male victims, often leading to their own wrongful arrest or the loss of their children.

Patrick Clancy is the poster child for this institutional blindness: a man stripped of his status as a grieving father and recast as a villain, simply because our culture cannot conceive of a world where a woman is the monster and a man is the victim.

It is pure misandry.

It is the mirror image of the infantilization granted to Lindsay. It is assigning culpability by category rather than by evidence.

The Doerman Contrast

Compare this to Chad Doerman. In June 2023, this Ohio father shot his three young sons one by one. He pleaded insanity, citing “serious mental illness.” He eventually pleaded guilty and got life without parole.

There was no viral sympathy campaign for Doerman. No $800,000 GoFundMe. No TikTok fandom calling him a “troubled soul.” No effort to find a third party to blame. The public verdict was instant: monster.

Both parents killed three children. Both defense teams used mental illness. One received a fundraising apparatus and a protective shield of “biological tragedy,” while the other received consensus contempt and a prosecutor who didn’t feel the need to explain why the death penalty was on the table. The public didn’t wait for the facts to diverge. They diverged the moment the public learned the killer’s sex.

This is but one demonstrated argument that women receive a systemic benefit of the doubt that men are denied. We have comparable facts and wildly different public dispositions.

None of this requires us to decide Lindsay Clancy’s guilt because that is for the jury. But the online frenzy reveals a verdict on our own culture. We still process violence through the lens of gender before we look at the evidence. We extend automatic grace to women and automatic suspicion to men, and we have the audacity to call these instincts compassion.

My original post:

“All societies that have survived have survived based on their ability to prepare their sons to be disposable, in war and at work – and therefore as dads”

I think most of us here have, at some point heard this quote from Warren Farrell about male disposability. I wanted to talk about this quote because I want to expand on the war part of his analysis.

One of the unfortunate facts of history is that there’s always gonna be some asshole who will ransack and pillage your tribe/city state/kingdom/country if they can. This means that a society which is either unable or unwilling to defend itself through violence will, at some point, become a target for that asshole and be destroyed. The idea of “defending your country” has obviously been used throughout history to justify fighting wars that are, in fact, not defensive, but it remains true that having a fighting force able and willing to commit some violence has, thus far, been necessary to maintain the existence of large scale societies.

It will come as no surprise to any of you that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who are expected to both carry out that violence, and risk having it carried out on them.

Violence is, therefore, a burden imposed on men by societies, in much the same way that child-rearing and domestic labor are burdens often imposed on women.

All of these things have to happen. In order for a society to function, violence must be used to defend and deter against more violence, food must be cooked and served, homes cleaned, children raised, etc.

The thing is though, these gendered burdens are not treated with equal weight by feminism. As usual, they are pretty good at identifying the gendered burdens of women, but fall short when it comes to male burdens, such as violence. When they do acknowledge those burdens, it’s only ever within the context of patriarchy, which they will be sure to remind you was built up by other men (essentially the “black on black crime” argument but for men’s issues)

You see this burden at all levels of society too, a man encountering someone being physically attacked in an alleyway, for instance, is generally expected to use violence to intervene, especially if that someone is a woman. A woman, however, would never be called a coward or weak for running away from that situation.

Some women also feel they have the right to use their male partner as a physical threat or weapon against others - as an 8th grader, I was asked by my then-girlfriend to beat another boy up because he insulted her at a football game. I didn’t, because that’s stupid and wouldn’t help anything, but it still stuck with me.

There’s also this idea that, in general, a man should never run away from a fight, whatever fight that may be. You can see this in the trope/stereotype of the dad who finds out his son ran away from a fight and is utterly disappointed and ashamed of him, even to the point of disowning him.

The higher propensity for men to be violent criminals happens because some men take on that burden of violence that was drilled into them as a child, embrace it like the wire mother, and end up directing their violence towards people who don’t deserve it, usually other men.

Male violence is not a reason to hate men, it is, like all gendered roles and expectations, a burden imposed on us by the ruling class.”

Surely no one has reported it right 🤔? Seems like these social platforms really take misandry seriously!