“Girls Will Be Girls”

On the Lindsay Clancy trial, and the excuses women make.

A disclaimer: I typically avoid True Crime. Part of my revulsion to the genre comes from a general distaste for horror, even in fiction (let alone in real life), and part of it comes from the fact that a lot of True Crime seems to involve exonerating people who are probably guilty, whether in the court of public opinion or in, well, the court (see: everything that happened with NPR’s Serial podcast). But beyond that, my concern is that engaging with True Crime at all feels voyeuristic, almost like a type of parasocial schadenfreude. It makes me sympathize with Saint Augustine’s observation of drama in his Confessions:

“The theater enchanted me with its images of my own miseries. Its plays added fuel to my fire. What makes someone want to be made sad? Why behold doleful tragedies, vicariously experiencing what does not have to be suffered? Yet the spectator wants to feel sorrow at the stories, and this very anguish is pleasure. This seems to be wretched insanity.”

I’m worried that the more I think about this case, the more my “anguish will become pleasure”—especially since, unlike the theater of which Saint Augustine writes, this story involves real human beings: three innocent children, and their father who found them strangled to death in his home by his wife, their mother. The case is just so incredibly awful as is, and the fact that it’s become a national spectacle says something alarming about our society. As I regularly write about women, politics, and culture, engaging with this spectacle seems somewhat natural—and I’ve tweeted plenty about it, so it’s not like I’ve really been avoiding it either—but I want to be very careful here and I worry what it means that we all (myself included, obviously) engage so much with these stories.

I’ll leave this disclaimer here, and leave you to reading the essay.

—Neeraja Deshpande

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Remember Affluenza Kid? Ethan Couch, born April 11, 1997, and at the age of 16, in 2013, he killed four people in Texas while driving crossed—drunk and stoned. He also seriously injured one person in his own truck and completely paralyzed another for life. A horrible, tragic story, but one that was somehow made worse by his defense, which, worse yet, somehow managed to work: he had “affluenza,” his attorneys said, he grew up so rich, so spoiled by his parents, so devoid of boundaries, that he never had the ability to account for his own actions. He got ten years of probation and therapy at an inpatient faculty, and now walks free.

It was a twist on the classic “boys will be boys” defense of terrible male behavior, with anything from pump-and-dump schemes to outright rape (and even manslaughter) justified with “he’s just a kid,” “he didn’t know any better,” “she was asking for it,” “well, her skirt was too short.” Most of all, with: “He’s a red-blooded young man with testosterone coursing through his veins, it’s his upbringing, he can’t help it, it’s the testosterone, he has such a promising future, it’s his upbringing, it’s the testosterone, it’s his upbringing, it’s the testosterone…”

I couldn’t help but think of this story during the past few weeks of the Lindsay Clancy trial, to which I’ve felt like I’ve been made to pay attention by the sheer number of women clamoring to defend and excuse a 36-year-old woman—a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, at that—who’d strangled to death her three children—5, 3, and 8 months old—after sending her husband out to “run an errand” in January of 2023. And these women are defending her solely because she was retroactively diagnosed with postpartum psychosis during the trial, and because she tried to kill herself after killing her kids and is partially paralyzed. Some of these women are crazy TikTok sleuths, but others are basically sane women saying, well, postpartum is really hard, it’s biological, her hormones were running wild, she can’t possibly be held to account for her own actions, have you no empathy?

In short: “Girls will be girls.”

Unlike “boys will be boys,” which has pretty thoroughly been thrown out of public life in the nine years since #MeToo—and good riddance!—“girls will be girls” is not only socially acceptable, but increasingly has serious teeth, if the way we discuss hormones these days has anything to say about it.

To be clear, I’m glad we’ve become more and more aware of women’s hormones and women’s health in general: I’m a big believer in recording basal body temperature and cycle tracking (ask me about my Ōura ring!), and am more or less a stereotypical right-of-center Zoomette when it comes to things like hormonal birth control (that is to say, I think doctors overprescribe it). We now have memes about how we feel when we’re follicular versus when we’re luteal, or about how ovulation makes us lose our minds at even the sight of a baby—I don’t really remember seeing those 5-7 years ago to the extent I see them now. Bookstores today have entire sections dedicated to menopause and perimenopause. Melinda French Gates announced in June she’s donating $215 million to women’s health research, in addition to the nearly $400 million she’d already spent in the past two years. This isn’t just MAHA Twitter, this is mainstream stuff.

Great! Yes! We can finally say it! It took us long enough: women are biologically distinct from men, and we should not pretend men and women are the exact same. This has two major implications, as I see it:

1. The biological reality of our sex renders women physically vulnerable vis-à-vis men, and we need certain protections to ensure our physical safety. This seems to be acknowledged increasingly because of the whole “men in women’s sports” thing.

2. The idea that women and men are equal in dignity, if not the same in biology. Women’s biology does not make us worse or inferior as human beings, it does not make us lesser than men as far as our inherent value as human beings is concerned.

In other words, it’s possible to believe in the moral equality of the sexes (and the complementarity of sexed differences, with neither male nor female being better or worse than the other) without believing in the physical equality of the sexes. That’s certainly the position I hold.

But it seems to me, especially after watching the events of the past few weeks, that whatever is the mainstream women’s movement¹ has gotten it all muddled.

I do think, for instance, most women defending Lindsay Clancy agree with my first point: that women and men are different biologically, and that this means women, especially in biologically vulnerable moments like those following the birth of a child, need extra care and attention. And yet on that second point, they seem to be agreeing with outright misogynists in claiming that women’s biological vulnerability renders us incapable of acting like grown adults. If they’re claiming that women can get so hormonal as to be incapable of reason and accountability, that women’s fluctuations in estrogen levels can absolve them of literal murder, how are they upholding women’s dignity? How are they not essentially insulting the feminists who fought tooth and nail not to be reduced to their hormones?

Maybe this is all, to some degree, an outgrowth of contemporary mental health culture, which takes on a sort of biological determinism and treats all human behaviors like a series of chemical reactions. But I think that biological determinism is more frequently applied by women, to women, than it is ever applied by either sex to men.

As I see it, the only difference between Clancy’s supporters and the “repeal the 19th” misogynists is that Clancy’s supporters seem to believe in something like Schrodinger’s Woman: that woman is both a grown adult and a child at the same exact time. The misogynists, of course, have resolved the paradox by assuming women are essentially children, and are to be treated like children (down to matters like the right to vote). Now, I would prefer to resolve the paradox by saying that women are grown adults, and should be treated as such, but it seems like that idea has lately fallen out of fashion among all sides.

I suppose there’s a way to deal with this paradox without resolving it: we can equalize things a bit and also treat men as grown adults and children at the same time (which, in the absence of the ability to actually repeal the 19th, is more or less what the manosphere has taken to). We can return to the days where “boys will be boys” is considered a legitimate excuse for when men do bad things, and not something that is largely condemned by mainstream culture. We can say that a man is not capable of rape if his high testosterone levels just made him go bezerk when confronted with a woman he wanted. We can lift all the guardrails off from men and enable them at their absolute worst, allow them to be physical brutes, allow them to wield their strength however they want over each other and, by extension, over the entire female sex.

To be fair, not all the arguments I saw women making in support of Clancy were even about hormones. Some were about how her now-ex husband—the one who got her a nanny and worked from home and found her after her suicide attempt and took care of her even after he realized she had strangled his children to death—how he wasn’t doing enough. Many were about how the “system failed her,” never mind the fact that she was doctor hopping and getting on different prescriptions without her doctors knowing all the drugs she was on (and as a nurse, she certainly knew what she was doing better than the average pill-popping woman). But all were arguments that no one would ever dare make for a man. Imagine that! What if a man said he just had to beat his wife because she didn’t do his laundry and that was bad for his mental health and ability to function as a husband and father? Or what if the affluenza judge’s ruling had not resulted in outcry—as it did at the time, likely what led her to resign a year later—and instead in celebration?

I know, I know, these are just simple “What if the shoe were on the other foot?” arguments. But, like, what if the shoe were on the other foot? Much of the contemporary women’s movement has refused to even consider what they would do if that were the case. Instead, the default answer seems to be, well, mental health for me, personal responsibility for thee, a.k.a., it’s fine if we do it but bad if men do it.²

Oh, and if you’re a woman who dares question any of this, you’re a fascistic pick-me. If you’re a woman who dares point out that manhating is normalized in our society, you’ll be gaslit and told no it’s not, no it’s not, no it’s not (but if it is, it’s certainly not as dangerous as misogyny, and so you shouldn’t even attempt to equate the two!). If you’re a woman who dares criticize the cult of mental health, you lack empathy. If you’re a woman who dares point out that maybe, just maybe, the normalization of seething misandry, from affirmative action to Clancy support, is leading to the rise of the very toxic and very bad manosphere, you’re giving credence to Andrew Tate’s acolytes.

What gets me about how many women have interacted with this case is that they’ve excused and enabled and participated in some of the worst forms of female evil—the devouring mother archetype, in this case, but in general the weaponization of empathy against others—as though it’s some kind of sick team sport. Either you’re on the girl team, or you’re on the boy team, and and maximizing cruelty toward the boys and making excuses for the girls is the only path to victory. Well, to those on the girl team, all I can say is that the boy team is faster, stronger, and more physically powerful, and only because of the restraining forces of civilization does not act on its worst impulses. But if the girl team thinks they and only they can cast aside civilization to try and stick it to the boy team, that their worst impulses are acceptable if it means “winning,” well, the boy team’s gloves are going to come off, too, because why wouldn’t they? And in case I haven’t been explicit enough, the physical differences between men and women mean that this ends much, much worse for the girl team than it does for the boy team.

But independent of that, my very simple proposal is this: we should not enable misandry any more than we should enable misogyny, and we should act like we are equal in dignity to men—grown adults who assume responsibility for our own actions and are capable of reason—if we want to be treated as equals in dignity to men. We should not make excuses for cruelty, violence, and all other vices when they come from women, solely because a woman is a woman. At the end of the day, our status quo of two completely different standards based on sex was always an untenable compromise, and, as the rise of misogyny is showing, one that is completely and utterly doomed.

1. I define the “mainstream women’s movement” more by social media trends and self-identification than I do by what academics and niche activists who love theory are saying.

2. Admittedly, there are some groups of men we make excuses for: homeless guys who shoot themselves up on playgrounds, criminals, etc.