Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three children. She has confessed to the killings, but has pled insanity. Her defense argues that she had been suffering from an extreme case of postpartum psychosis and was hearing voices in her head telling to kill her kids.
The Internet is, of course, very interested. And the way particular social media platforms and groups are participating in the discourse illustrates again one of the most important things anyone can realize about the modern Internet:
It’s a place where each sex is learning to loathe the other.
TikTok has become a hub for people, mostly women, to show support for Clancy. The idea is that postpartum depression and psychosis are real but not taken seriously by many (mostly men). A certain block of women on TikTok see Clancy as a symbol for unappreciated maternal struggle. They empathize with Clancy’s mental struggles (she was on a shocking number of antipsychotic medications when she strangled her children) and believe that, however horrible the outcome might have been, Clancy is first and foremost a victim, both of biological illness, and of a medical, political, and sexual system that ignored it. In the words of one woman who spoke to NBC:
“Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up,” said April Vincent, a 52-year-old paralegal from Providence, Rhode Island. “We’re scared because nobody takes us seriously. Nobody wants to hear us and really we just need to be heard. I’ve been dismissed plenty of times.”
TikTok is chock full of pro-Clancy content. Users have donated close to $1 million for her defense fund. There are also viral trends currently in which women will demonstrate their own postpartum symptoms as a way of making the point that Clancy’s illness must be taken more seriously. One viral video shows a woman throwing things and screaming in her home, “to help emotionally regulate.”
TikTok’s therapy culture content is well-documented, to the point that even mainstream therapists and psychologists worry that users who consume a lot of TikTok content are probably getting a ton of bad advice. Prevalence of therapy culture content tends to correlate with gender demographics when it comes to apps. Websites and community apps tend to skew male, but TikTok has a percentage of regular female users comparable to that of Facebook. Notably, the most female-heavy social media app, Instagram, likewise features a lot of mental health and therapy culture content. In other words, social media algorithms tend to pair mental health content and female user base together. One tends to be evidence of the other.
One of the biggest challenges facing younger Americans right now is that life has not only migrated online, it has migrated away from “social” online spaces. When I first got on social media in the late 2000s, the main reason anyone did that was to see what their friends posted. This is not how Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha uses the Internet. Instead, online life has become content-driven. Younger guys and girls use the web for watching videos, listening to podcasts, following influencers and brands, etc. This is a big shift, not only because it reduces overall social interaction, but because it places men and women in content “silos” that are algorithmically curated in gendered ways.
In other words: the “female internet” and the “male internet” are now very real, very active, and very different sources of information and opinion.
The Clancy trial and discourse around postpartum mental illness illustrate both of these content silos. Matt Walsh’s primary platforms are X and YouTube, both of which skew heavily male. In the last week or so, Walsh has been posting increasingly absolutist takes on postpartum depression and mental health, rebuking Clancy’s supporters and suggesting that the mental ailments they complain about don’t even exist.
You can see how the heavily gendered dynamics of social media work in real-time. When women log onto Instagram and TikTok, they see a sizable helping of mental health related content, which feels honest and relatable. Pundits like Walsh appear aggressively ignorant and insensitive, especially if compared to all the people in the videos talking about their own struggles with mental health. Meanwhile, when men log into YouTube and X, they see viral posts of women throwing things and screaming in a very performative way. What’s more, influencers on X and YouTube can be quite good at scanning the entire Internet for the very worst examples of feminism and therapy culture, and these clips tend to be what floats to the top of the algorithm. They don’t resemble the content that the women are watching on Instagram or TikTok, just like most husbands or pastors are not thinking about these issues like Matt Walsh is.
In the end, both sexes think they are seeing how the other one thinks. And they don’t care for it.
The Web’s disembodied nature means all of us lose an important connection to reality when we encounter the world through the Internet. None of us are just “users” in the abstract. We have opinions, relationships, duties, experiences, memories, beliefs, loyalties, etc. And all of those things are inflected by our gender. I have no experiences as a daughter or a wife. I have experiences of knowing and seeing daughters and wives, from the perspective of a man. To know the real me, you would have to know me as a man with these realities, not just a user who posts.
But the Internet repositions us as consumers and posters. Our “self” is abstracted from our embodied life. We post, therefore we exist. We “like,” therefore we believe. This de-gendered, decontextualized way of encountering the world doesn’t make us more likely to be patient with others. It makes us more likely to see things in the starkest, most simplistic terms. Those who post like me are like me. Those who post unlike me and are unlike me. And since the algorithms of social media know that anger is most profitable online emotion, they bombard us not only with the constant sensation of people “like and unlike us,” but with the feeling that those unlike us are our enemies.
Men and women are different. Their differences can either blossom into mutual sympathy and complementarity, or stagnate into alienation and suspicion. Meaningful relationships, marriage most of all, are the only way men and women can truly accept and even be thankful for their differences. But as modern society loses those relationships, as people become less willing to date, marry, and grow old with the opposite sex, it is losing not just family formation, but empathy formation. Men and women resent each other because as they stand next to one another in the digital age, they are not embodied persons encountering the true other, but disembodied users sorted into respective echo chambers.
It’s not that men do not care about mental health. It’s not that women do not believe in personal moral agency. And it’s not that holding people accountable for their actions is intrinsically “male” and empathizing with suffering people is intrinsically “female.” Nevertheless, men and women come to the world with particular (embodied) instincts that can and frequently do force a particular preference. Those instincts can meet without colliding, but only in the context of relationship, rather than content production.
We’re on the threshold of a vicious cycle. Men and women are declining relationships with each other, which means they are more likely to be suckered in by the algorithmic gender silo. But the more they take in a biased, imbalanced view of the other, the less interested they are in relationship. Christians should eagerly want and work for this cycle to stop. And that means being conscious of the ongoing formative effects of digital life.
"What’s more, influencers on X and YouTube can be quite good at scanning the entire Internet for the very worst examples of feminism and therapy culture"
You see the same dynamic in other places, everywhere from politics to media criticism. The term I've seen used for it is "nutpicking," and it's one of the most pernicious forms of clickbait, because it takes some rando who 90% of the people on their side would think takes it too far and presents them as being a representative of that side.