Clarissa's Blog

There is a clear line from the Manson murders to Lindsay Clancy. The female murderers in the Manson case did not get off but were given lighter sentences and then were coddled and lionized in prison, while a dude who wasn’t even at the scene of the crime was punished much more harshly.

I have zero sympathy for Charles Manson. He was a nasty, scuzzy piece of trash. But the women who killed Sharon Tate and the other victims were completely guilty of those murders. All of this incredible rubbish about brainwashing and mind control is the equivalent of today’s debates about how Clancy did it because she was let down by the universe.

Identical arguments were rolled out during the Manson trial and the Clancy trial. “The women are not guilty of this murder because they didn’t commit another murder before committing this particular murder. She was a beauty queen before becoming a killer. She was a good mom.” Nobody ever applies these arguments to men.

The underlying idea is that women cannot be violent unless some man broke them in one way or another. Mind control, drugs, brainwashing, pills, all sorts of excuses are invented because people can’t get it through their heads that women can be just as violent as men.

This is why getting attached to a narrative of sex-based differences in behavior is dangerous. It’s so cute, haha. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, until you can’t put a mass murderer in jail because everybody took this narrative seriously. People have heard their whole lives that women think and act in a way that is so dramatically not like men’s that they sincerely don’t understand why they should apply the same legal standard to men and women in court.

The same people who are complaining about the verdict contribute to it daily by supporting this utterly moronic, socially destructive “men are from Mars” mentality.