Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of shows talking about men: what men need to fix, where men fall short, and how men can step up. I haven’t really turned that same sort of attention toward women.
It’s time for an honest conversation. We have some things to discuss. It’s time to get your sh*t together.
Victimhood, of course, has now become the drug of choice for virtually every subgroup in the American population, and women are not an exception.
But they are not victims. Not remotely. They earn more college degrees. They have longer life expectancies. When adjusted for hours worked and time out of the workforce, they earn more than men.
So when I see women standing and protesting outside the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three young children, including a baby, I need to ask some questions, because that’s what we’re seeing now: the sense of victimhood.
There’s some empirical basis for the idea that American men are failing because they are earning fewer degrees, committing suicide at higher rates, dropping out of the workforce at higher rates, and earning less money. That’s not true of American women.
Yet many women are addicted to the idea that they are somehow victims of the phantom patriarchy. This is the only way I can explain what the hell is happening outside the Lindsay Clancy trial. I do not understand it. What are they protesting?
Lindsay Clancy’s children were the true victims because they ended up being strangled by their mother. If Lindsay Clancy was the victim of anything, she was a victim of her mental illness.
But you don’t typically have protests against mental illness. That’s like protesting cancer, heart disease, sunshine, or wind.
These are things — often bad — that happen in life. But very rarely do people gather outside a courthouse to protest an illness. Typically, when you’re outside a courthouse protesting, you’re suggesting someone has been wronged by the system.
That’s what some women have been saying over the last few days.
Lindsay Clancy, just like every other person in the United States charged with a crime, deserves a defense. I’m even sympathetic to the mental illness defense here, as I’ve made clear.
But what in the world is going on with these women making heart hands outside the trial? What are they protesting for or against? Postpartum psychosis?
I’ve seen all these tapes of women saying they’re “just like Lindsay.” If you say you are just like Lindsay Clancy, you should immediately be put into involuntary commitment.
I think that there is an underlying message.
Let’s start with the obvious. There is an underlying idea that women are victims. This has become a trend: the idea that women are, in some sort of vague way, victims of the justice system or the American system or the patriarchy.
No women in all of human history have it better than American women. A woman named Peachy Keenan wrote on X:
Why are so many women sooo 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, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer. They won: 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. Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.
This is correct.
Why are women so angry? It is not economic underperformance. It is certainly not the patriarchy. It is not a lack of education or anything like that.
Yet women’s happiness has declined markedly. According to a study from PubMed Central, female happiness declined from the 1980s through 2000 and continued to decline after that.
Here is my controversial contention: The reason why so many women in American society are so angry and so much unhappier than they were in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s is that so many women are single.
This does not mean all men are good or that all marriages are good. But when you look at the actual data, it shows that married women are much, much happier than single women. In fact, married moms are twice as likely to be very happy as single or childless women.
Studies say that the unhappiest group of women, by far, is unmarried women with children.
That makes sense. They don’t have a partner. They don’t have a spouse, somebody to help protect them, care for them, and take care of the kids.
If you look at men’s happiness, the same thing is true. Married men with children are the happiest men.
This is not a giant shock. Marriage is good for both men and women. Marriage makes people happier, and marriage with children makes people significantly happier. That is true for women, and it is true for men.
But we have an entire society built around the idea that marriage is an imposition on women and that women are suffering because of marriage, which is a lie.
Why do women get happier when they get married and then when they have kids?
Because men and women are different, which is the single most fundamental fact of human biology. Our brains don’t work quite the same way.
Women are driven by compassion. This is the driving evolutionary force in female biology. Why? Because women need to be compassionate toward children to keep the species functioning. They need to be there to feed and take care of children. A byproduct of that is that women are far more social than men.
Women have deep friendships, and polling data shows women are far more likely to turn to family and friends for support than men.
Women are people-oriented. Men are things-oriented.
This is why men also often end up in engineering, because men like machines. They like things.
Women like people. This is why women are overrepresented in places like nursing, and men are overrepresented in places like mechanics.
It’s also why, if you leave a man alone for the weekend, away from his wife and kids, the most likely outcome is that he will pop open a beer and watch football, but if you leave a woman alone for the weekend, away from her husband and kids, she’s probably going to phone one of her friends and go out for lunch.
If you take that in the toxic direction — where men don’t get married — men have aggressive, antisocial instincts. And when you channel those aggressive instincts away from family, men are wildly destructive. If you think of the worst men you know or have heard of, they are people who abandon all responsibility and then victimize everybody else. Men who are left to their own devices and are not socialized become nihilistic, aggressive, and gross, and they harm other people.
The female compassion instinct, channeled away from family, however, results in misdirected compassion, and that can mean sympathy for some pretty bad people.
Women want social connection. And when they can’t find a real social connection, if they go online and they find a fake social connection, that’s a pretty good substitute. Women are far more social creatures than men are.
What does that mean for protests?
There are two different types of protests. When men gather to protest, it’s usually for one of two reasons. Either they really, really, really believe in the cause, or it’s time to riot and loot and grab a TV.
Why do women show up to protest?
Because it is a gigantic way to hang out with other people in a situation of social confirmation. Thus, polarized men will turn toward destructive societal movements, and polarized women will turn toward ways they can demonstrate compassion through things like protest.
Which is what’s happening with Lindsay Clancy.
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