Jonathan: I'm going to provide some context for what happened this week, which is the genesis of this zeitgeist idea.
Lindsay Clancy was in the news, and there was a lot of arguing about it on social media. Allie Beth Stuckey jumped on the story, and it created a lot of conversation, feedback, and rage.
Lindsay Clancy is the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three children in her basement in January 2023. She has admitted to the killings. Her defense centers on postpartum psychosis and overmedication. Prosecutors are arguing intentional murder. The trial is continuing this month in Plymouth Superior Court.
There are corners of TikTok saying her husband is the real killer who framed her, and the way the content pipeline works makes the theories feel natural.
A lot of women are coming out saying, “I feel for Lindsay Clancy because I've had postpartum depression too. I know how crazy it made me, so I feel for her, and I just want to give her a hug.” That's what I'm seeing a lot of.
Thomas: But she killed three kids.
Jonathan: She killed her own kids. Those are two separate things. Killing three kids is different from killing your own three kids, one at a time, with the others in the room watching their siblings get strangled.
At that point, I don't want to hug this person anymore. It doesn't matter how crazy you are.
Thomas: Let's follow this pipeline, where women are excusing a woman who killed her children one at a time, in front of the others, where they had to watch their siblings get strangled. In an earlier era, this would have been considered the most horrific act imaginable, and nobody would be justifying it.
Jonathan: They would be terrified of saying that.
Thomas: In fact, probably some of you, while Jonathan was telling the story, were justifying her, because you've been affected by this cultural phenomenon.
Jonathan: Yeah, you're like, “I feel so bad for her.” The problem is we don't feel things for people who have died.
Does fiction train us to excuse women's evil?
Thomas: And a lot of it is fiction planted. This philosophy of rejecting moral clarity, where there's no such thing as right or wrong, sin or evil came from fiction where there’s just trauma. The villain isn't evil; he or she has just experienced trauma.
It gets particularly distilled for women, where women are never held morally accountable for their evil actions. The evil actions that women do are always the fault of the men in their lives, not the women themselves.
We see this a lot in fiction. The most classic example is Wonder Woman 1984, where Wonder Woman causes a man to be possessed by the ghost of her boyfriend, who then controls this man's body, and she sleeps with this man, who is in no way consenting. This was presented as a moral good in the film, and most filmgoers didn't have a problem with it because she was a woman.
Jonathan: A lot of people did have a problem with it.
Thomas: A lot of people did, but I'd say most didn't. It became a common critique of the film, for sure.
Jonathan: In the movie, they changed the actor. Initially it was the guy possessed by the spirit of Steve Trevor, but they switched to Chris Pine. Because people weren't looking at the face of the guy who was possessed, they were looking at Chris Pine, her love. That helped people get past the fact that this was rape.
Thomas: That's just one example. There are many, one of which we may get to in an upcoming members-only episode, but we're not spoiling anything yet.
You see it with Harley Quinn in the Birds of Prey stories too. She's constantly killing people and destroying things and causing all kinds of harm and mayhem, but she never faces consequences.
She's a harmed and confused person. It's really the Joker's fault. The moral responsibility lies with the man, not with the woman. Women can't have moral responsibility, she's just a victim.
Jonathan: Which is part of why we like Batman so much, particularly the Arkham storyline in the video games. He cares about the trauma, but that doesn't change the fact that he's going to punch you in the face and put you in jail.
What is crime fatigue?
Thomas: People are getting fatigued by this moral system because more people are becoming victims of crime, and they're relating to the children who got strangled rather than to the perpetrator.
It used to be that everyone sympathized with the criminal, thinking we're treating criminals too harshly, and the result was that crime went way up.
This is an ebb and flow that happens in society. We get strict on crime, then lenient, then strict again. Right now, we're getting stricter. Crime rates are down across almost the entire country because people are starting to associate with the victims.
One of my top mentors in high school was my choir teacher. Choir was a big part of my social life as a homeschool kid since I didn't go to a normal school, so most of my social encounters happened through homeschool choir. We had a choir president and vice president, student council type stuff, through choir. I was also in the ensemble group, a handful of students who traveled and sang together, kind of like a glee club for college kids. That director was a big mentor of mine. She mentored me all through high school and even a little in middle school. I did the summer musicals too, which had a big impact on my life.
She was murdered. When she was murdered, it changed my view of murderers generally, because I really associated with the victims' families, and I was genuinely angry that the prosecutor in Travis County did not pursue the death penalty for the men who murdered her, despite the fact that they were eligible.
In Texas, it's difficult to be eligible for the death penalty. Killing someone isn't enough. You have to kill somebody and do other bad things at the same time, or kill multiple people. I won't go into the details of what happened. It was really bad. Murder is never not bad, but there are degrees of it.
Society is going through this as crime gets worse and more people become victims of it. We've mentioned this before with vigilante characters. They come and go in popularity. When crime is high, people root for vigilante characters, and when crime is low, they don't. Fictional characters become more vigilante when crime is high and less vigilante when crime is low.
Do we apply different moral standards to men and women?
Thomas: There's a gender piece of this we haven't fully teased out. You may be contributing to the problem by not holding the women in your stories to the same moral standard you hold the men to.
It's quite common in novels for women's bad behavior to be excused by the trauma they've experienced, while men's bad behavior is not. Over time, the result is that women in our civilization become less virtuous than men, because different standards for men and women have an impact.
That's really harmful over time. Roman history gives us a glimpse of what happens when female virtue drops too low. It can be very bad. High virtue standards are good, and they should be high for both men and women. That's what I'm advocating for.
Jonathan: Females are the brakes on males. I recommend young men get married, and get married young, because it turns you into a balanced man. It puts the brakes on you.
Before I got married, I was more like a weapon than anything else, designed to destroy stuff. My wife has helped me become more of a builder. But she's a virtuous woman. If I don't have a virtuous woman, if all I have is a woman who does whatever she wants and then blames trauma, that goes all the way to, “I had a hard day, so I'm not doing anything.”
Thomas: It goes all the way to AI. There’s a video game AI Test. You prompt an AI like ChatGPT or Claude and say, “My boyfriend is playing video games for four hours a night after a hard day at work.”
Then you say the same thing about a girlfriend instead. For the boyfriend, the AI says that's very irresponsible of him. For the girlfriend, it says it's important for her to relax after a hard day. She needs her own space.
It's a completely different moral standard. The only word that changed is boyfriend versus girlfriend, and that's a result of the training data, probably also the reinforcement learning, but mostly the training data.
The AI has ingested all this modern media where women aren't held to the same moral, responsibility, ethical, and virtue standard that men are. That has real knock-on effects for all of civilization, and it's something you can do something about very simply, because no one will notice if you hold women to the same moral standard, since that's the normal way. Moral systems apply universally. I can't think of a moral system that doesn't.
Has morality always applied to everyone equally?
Thomas: There have been moral systems that applied differently based on social status. For example, if you were an aristocrat, it was different.
In ancient Anglo-Saxon society, if you murdered someone of a lower station than you, you only had to pay a weregild to their family, which was a payment for a dead person based on how high their status was. A noble who killed a freeman paid more weregild than if he killed a slave.
Weregilds persisted. We made the Germans pay weregild after World War I. That term has stuck around in the language. Jim Butcher used it in one of his Dresden Files books.
You'll occasionally see that, but I can't think of many other examples, except that sexual ethics have historically been applied differently to men and women.
What is body count culture?
Jonathan: The body count culture says that it doesn't matter what a woman’s body count is; they're just a girl out there having fun, but guys say the body count matters.
Thomas: This is a big cultural shift, because I don't know that guys used to care about body count. Even that language, body count, is a relatively new term, a Gen Z term.
I'd guess there isn't a single Gen Zer unfamiliar with the phrase body count, because it's become a core status driver, and it's inverted. A common slur women use against Gen Z men is incel, short for involuntary celibate, meaning your body count is zero. Men use a slur against Gen Z women for a high body count. There are various updated versions of the old word hussy.
There's also this concept that women lie about their body count. Whatever they say is their body count, you probably multiply that by three to get the truth. If a woman says her body count is three, she really has nine.
This is a big shift, because Boomers didn't calculate this. It wasn't a core determinant. You went into a relationship as a blank slate, and your past shouldn't matter. That's my understanding of the mainstream Boomer ethos. It's probably a little different on the religious edges.
Jonathan: Women have done this body count thing for a while, and with feminism, there's been a great divide between men and women in terms of value. Now men are starting to devalue women again. We're actually getting a regression of Western values, which have historically elevated women.
Young men are saying, “You're calling me an incel because I don't make $500,000 a year and I'm not six-foot-four, so you won't give me a chance at all? Fine, I don't think you're worth anything either.”
Thomas: Feminism went to war with chivalry for a generation or two, and now there's a hostility where some young men have a very low opinion of women. The romantic gestures of chivalry aren't just gone; there's real hostility and antipathy.
Jonathan: Young men are starting to think, “If you're going to be with me, there are demands you will perform.” It's a regression back to a time of actual misogyny and bigotry, where women aren't valued. Suddenly it's, “I traded four cows for my wife, now she's going to do everything, and I'm going to get more wives too.”
Is the perceived value of women rising or falling?
Thomas: This is a major cultural pendulum you can track going back and forth on the value of women for centuries. Women's cultural value crested about five years ago, probably around 2020, maybe 2023.
The pendulum was still high. People had a very high view of women. Crimes against women are seen as worse than the equivalent crime against a man. Disrespecting a woman is seen as worse than disrespecting a man.
Women still have higher social value. Women are currently paid more; young women coming out of college earn more than young men, and they're recruited into colleges more. There's a very high value placed on women, but the countercurrent rebelling against that has started.
It's important not to confuse direction with position. The pendulum went up for a long time and finally crested, and now it's heading down. Saying the value of women is declining isn't the same as saying the value of women is low, culturally speaking.
The value of women is still higher than it will be for the next 40 years, higher than it's been for all but a few of the last years, but it's falling, and men are starting to make more demands.
Jonathan: It's hard to articulate what I'm seeing with Gen Z. You can actually see some women trying to fix it on social media, the ones saying, “No, I would never sleep with a whole bunch of guys, I want to be there for my guy.” She's raising her own value in the market.
What's driving the trad wife trend?
Thomas: The trad wife aesthetic is another piece of this. Women are realizing that being good in bed now has a lower social value than being good in the home, or being pure, or being submissive.
For the typical Boomer woman, submissiveness carries real hostility. Across the political spectrum, there's not much respect for quiet, dutiful women. Gen Z is starting to have some breakaways, saying, “I would totally submit to a man if it meant he'd retire me from my job. I don't want this corporate job. I hate it. I'd rather submit to a husband than to my boss or a corporation. I have to submit to somebody, so I might as well submit to my husband.”
It'll be interesting to see how Gen Alpha navigates this. This affects the hostility of the gender conflict. There's more conflict between the genders now than there's been in maybe 100 years. The historical rebuttal to the gender wars is that the problem is everyone is sleeping with the enemy, but that's not the case with Gen Z. Gen Z isn’t sleeping with anybody; they're not sexually active. Their rates of sexual activity and alcohol use are both very low, and because of that, they're becoming hostile toward each other. They're not sleeping with the enemy, and they want to take the enemy down.
Why did Obsession outperform Spider-Man?
Thomas: The kinds of stories doing well right now play into that dynamic. The surprise hit of the year wasn't Spider-Man; everyone knew that would do well. It was Obsession, a million-dollar indie movie with a tiny budget that went on to sell hundreds of millions of dollars.
It outperformed movies with 10 times the budget from major studios, and the whole story is the broken relationship between men and women, featuring a toxic girlfriend and a controlling boyfriend. Boomers don't understand why it's so popular, while Gen Z says, “I feel this.”
This is the gender war captured in a story, and there's a whole generation desperate for that.
As a writer, you just need to know what team you're on, which means listening without judgment to the Gen Z kids in your life, even when what they're saying sounds crazy. If you're a Boomer, all of the talk about submitting to a husband is going to sound crazy. But that trend started with Fifty Shades of Grey. It started off as a fetish.
What's the fix?
Jonathan: There is a solution to this, and that's to punish sin in your stories. When you read the stories in the Chronicles of Narnia, there are sins and consequences. Edmund suffered trauma, but his betrayal was still punished. Digory's pride causes problems.
Thomas: At no point did the narrator excuse Edmund's bad behavior because he'd suffered from a war, his family had been bombed, or he'd had to evacuate his city. All those things would've excused him in a modern story.
Jonathan: Eustace was failed by his parents, and Aslan still ripped the dragon off of him through an extremely painful process. Jill was bullied in school, which did wind up redeeming her, but she didn't escape punishment for the kind of person she was.
Thomas: Aravis was being sold into marriage with a man she didn't love, and that didn't excuse her bad behavior either. This is a really good point, and it's part of what makes those books timeless, because moral systems, particularly the Christian moral system, are timeless. The closer you hold to it in your storytelling, the more it forces you to have immoral characters.
Jonathan: The problem with a lot of stories today is that they keep the characters flawed, when the whole point of the adventure and the suffering is to help remove the flaws.
Thomas: I did a deep dive into the theology, philosophy, and morality in my episode called The Key to Timeless Christian Storytelling: Morality. Really, it's the key to timeless storytelling generally, because it applies to Jewish storytelling and any kind of storytelling.
Every story is going to have a moral framework whether you want one or not, so it's important to pick one. The moral framework of your story is shown through actions and consequences. A book gets preachy when the actions and consequences say one thing, but the author doesn't want that message conveyed, so they add a sermon explaining why. That's the worst kind of storytelling, and it's very common right now in both Christian fiction and woke fiction. The sermons are different, sometimes the same, depending on the kind of Christian, but it doesn't work. Those stories don't work. People don't want to hear them.
