“Why are so many women so angry? They won. They got everything they wanted. Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well. They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates … they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer … they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat.”
- Peachy Keenan
TikTok videos of women sobbing and holding their babies with the phrase 'Same, Lindsay' have gone viral, with the implication that many mothers may perpetrate similar horrors.
(LifeSiteNews) — On January 24, 2023, 32-year-old Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, sent her husband Patrick to pick up takeout food and go to the pharmacy. Then, she strangled her three young children – 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan – with rubber exercise bands, slashed her own wrists and neck, and threw herself out of a second-story window. Patrick returned to find two of his children dead in the basement and his wife bleeding outside. Callan died in the hospital three days later.
Lindsay Clancy was charged with the first-degree murders of her three children, and her trial began last month in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Clancy is now divorced, paralyzed from the waist down due to her suicide attempt – and the subject of an outpouring of support that feels vaguely reminiscent of the cult following surrounding Charles Manson.
Her supporters have donated nearly a million dollars to her via GoFundMe; gathered outside the courthouse; and posted viral videos and social media posts insisting that Clancy, too, is a victim – of the pharmaceutical industry, of a society that callously ignores female struggles, of a medical system that trivializes female mental health.
Nobody denies that Clancy killed her children. The prosecution states that she “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly” rather than in a moment of postpartum psychosis; she very deliberately planned the murders by researching them ahead of time and ensured her husband was out of the house. The defense insists that the killings were triggered by a lethal combination of psychiatric medications and her postpartum struggles.
Scores of TikTok videos of women sobbing and holding their babies with the phrase “Same, Lindsay” have gone viral; the disturbing implication that many mothers are on the verge of perpetrating similar horrors provoked equally viral responses. These, predictably, range from boorish minimization of postpartum depression to genuine and justified outrage that women are willing to invoke the name of a child-killer in videos featuring their own babies.
Other viral videos feature women shrieking and breaking things to vent their postpartum pain or melting down in other ways. The videos, of course, were very carefully filmed, edited, and posted, negating the idea that they feature uncontrollable psychosis or raw glimpses of involuntary moments. In fact, the critiques of the videos are almost identical to the prosecution’s case against Clancy herself: Both the moments in the videos and the murders (allegedly) are meticulously premediated rather than spontaneous and involuntary. The resulting “debate” has been a vicious doom loop.
These videos might as well be custom-made to serve as fodder in the culture war of attrition between the sexes. Those posting them are demanding from viewers recognition of their pain, affirmation of their experience, understanding of how difficult postpartum depression is. But the very act of creating this content appears to affirm the most misogynist possible responses to the reality of postpartum depression by cynically presenting crisis porn as spectacle and inviting the world to watch.
As Samuel D. James wrote in one of the best columns analyzing the “debate” that is currently roiling the digital world, the internet is making men and women hate each other.
Several things can be true at once. It is true that postpartum depression – and indeed, mental illness in general – is often woefully addressed and badly understood. As I’ve noted many times, that is precisely why legalizing euthanasia for mental illness would be such a social catastrophe. It is also true that women viewing Lindsay Clancy’s decision to destroy her own children as an opportunity to say “Same, Lindsay” is inviting people to view them as clearly unstable and obviously dangerous to their children. Lindsay Clancy killed her babies. What do you mean by “same”?
