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I like your thesis but I would like to quibble with something else.
Maybe I live under a rock, but I've only seen TheMotte and X (because that's where I hang out) claim women are excusing this. Does excusing mean they buy the postpartum psychosis story? Is this that widespread? Where? I worry we're reacting to especially crazy online women and fairly normal women are like "LC be guilty".
(I do think MA law is peculiar enough that if you apply it strictly enough Clancy had a strong case, and that's probably more MA's fault than women in the jury, but I don't expect most supporters to argue these points)
If you look at the poll below, more women would convict Clancy than exonerate her, and of those would would exonerate her not all are necessarily just using arguments as soldiers to get a sister off.
The above being said, I suspect there is a big gap cohort wise. Given republicans support her being guilty more than democrats, I suspect the numbers for democratic women are more pro-Clancy. Similarly, I bet older women due to being more conservative probably are also more anti-Clancy than younger women.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you add everything up, the younger, and especially single, PMC women who make up so much of the filter bubbles of the people here may be very pro-Clancy and give people the false impression that “women support Clancy”.
Interestingly, I saw a lot of suggestions from the right (clearly influenced by the juror interviews) that the main pro-Clancy constituency is older leftist women. If true, I can think of a lot of reasons this might be so: more time since they've been children themselves, sour grapes about not having had children, in the generation most influenced by Ehrlichian antinatalism, uh, "witch archetype"...
Older women do not have a partisan fertility gap.
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Yeah I think the Motte is missing a bit on this most of Lindsay's supporters want her to be committed to a mental hospital. On the face of it's not that big a deal, the steelman would be this is a woman on a huge cocktail of psychiatric drugs, who had just been committed to a mental hospital and because she was extremely mentally ill killed her kids. I mean on the face of it strangling your kids with exercise bands is not terribly sane. Now I don't think she was legally not guilty by reason of insanity but I don't think it's crazy to think she was. I do think it's crazy to form a "fandom" and donate to her defense.
Also the real crazy women are saying the husband did it which is surprisingly wide spread. I feel like this has been ignored on the Motte because it doesn't fit the narrative of women excusing child murder and rather gets to the heart of the issue which is white feminist misandry and entitlement, with huge amounts of ingroup favoritism and women are wonderful dolloped on top.
It almost seems like it's their...motte and bailey.
I think the real bailey there is that women feel like men dismiss their inner experiences too readily, be it their feelings, physical pain, mental health... And that what Lindsay did is the loud scream of despair that cannot be ignored that they wish they could do (not the deadly result, in most cases, but doing SOMETHING that forces men to take notice of their inner experiences). And it pisses them off that men are trying to "sweep it under the carpet" as just the criminal acts that criminals do.
Uh, welcome to the human experience?? Claiming it's more common for women to have their inner experience ignored and dismissed, than it is for men, is an absolutely deluded stance from these people.
It's particularly egregious to make Clancy a figurehead for this fight, when she was so well resourced.
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She garners enough sympathy to have had 1 million USD raised, to be featured by Oprah Winfrey and for news broadcasters to have tried to character assassinate the holdout juror. Media coverage has also been broadly sympathetic.
That still could be a relative minority of women overall, but it does seem to express a tendency. Sex differences being distributional rather than discrete is also something to keep on mind I suppose.
Indeed, this poll puts the men-women delta at 10%: https://yougov.com/en-us/daily-results/20260908-75734-4
Weird that political affiliation seems to be the most significant predictor.
Going from male to female is 51g-15ng to 41g-26 ng, -10g +11ng
Going from Republican to Democrat is 61g-13ng to 34g-31ng, -27g +18ng
I didn't think this was really a two-party-politics thing, but I guess what isn't these days.
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For one, I found the interviews with the female jurors unsettling. Presumably, they are not exceptionally selected. I agree we all should discount crazy online opinions we hear.
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