You know the woman.
She has 450,000 followers and a perfectly lit kitchen.
She talks about the invisible labor women perform every day. She talks about the mental load. She talks about how mothers are expected to remember the dentist appointments, buy the birthday presents, schedule the physicals, pack the lunches, notice when the toilet paper is running low and somehow know that Tuesday is “wear red for spirit week.”
And you know what?
She’s often absolutely right.
She says women shouldn’t have to carry everything.
She says mothers deserve more support.
She says women shouldn’t have to make themselves smaller to make everyone else comfortable.
She talks about workplace inequality, the pressure placed on mothers, unrealistic expectations of female perfection and the absurdity of expecting women to simultaneously have successful careers, spotless homes, emotionally regulated children and immaculate eyebrows.
And I’m nodding along.
Yes. Exactly.
And then she gets to politics.
Suddenly, the woman who just spent ten minutes explaining that women are complex human beings becomes remarkably comfortable reducing roughly half the country to a caricature.
Republicans are stupid.
Conservatives are hateful.
Trump voters are immoral.
Anyone who disagrees with her worldview is either ignorant, selfish, bigoted, or apparently suffering from some mysterious deficiency of empathy.
And there it is.
The contradiction.
Because apparently the lesson is:
Don’t stereotype women. Unless they’re conservative.
Don’t reduce people to political labels.
Unless the political label is Republican.
Don’t assume you know someone’s life.
Unless you can infer their entire character from the candidate they voted for.
Don’t judge people.
Unless you’re judging the people who deserve it.
And somehow, this is presented as compassion.
The mental load apparently has a political party
Here’s what fascinates me about this particular brand of influencer.
She will tell you that women are exhausted because they’ve been conditioned to monitor everyone else’s emotions.
Then she’ll spend three hours monitoring the moral failures of strangers on Facebook.
She’ll tell you that women shouldn’t be expected to perform emotional labor for everyone.
Then she’ll demand that everyone around her demonstrate the correct emotional response to every political event.
She’ll tell you that women should be allowed to define themselves rather than being defined by other people.
Then she’ll define millions of people she has never met as selfish, racist, hateful, stupid or dangerous based largely on their politics.
She’ll criticize the patriarchy for creating rigid hierarchies of human worth.
Then she’ll create her own hierarchy:
People who think correctly.
And everyone else.
That isn’t feminism.
That’s tribalism wearing feminist jewelry.
And this is where the psychology gets interesting
I’m not interested in diagnosing some random woman on Instagram with narcissistic personality disorder because she made a smug political reel.
But there are legitimate psychological concepts that help explain this behavior.
One is moral grandstanding: using moral language partly to establish status, prestige or social standing.
Researchers studying moral grandstanding have found that status-seeking motivations are associated with greater political and moral conflict, and that prestige-motivated grandstanding is associated with ideological extremity and affective polarization.
In other words, sometimes the point of a moral statement isn’t merely:
“I believe this is right.”
It can also communicate:
“Look at what kind of person I am for believing this.”
And social media is practically engineered for this.
Post something nuanced about the difficulty of balancing motherhood and a career?
You might get 200 likes.
Post something about how your political opponents are horrible human beings?
Now you’re getting comments, shares, applause, outrage and people tagging their friends.
Research on social media and morality suggests exactly this kind of dynamic: morally and emotionally evocative content is especially good at capturing attention, while social media can amplify outrage, status-seeking and conflict between groups.
So the platform gradually teaches people something.
Nuance gets polite applause.
Outrage gets engagement.
And engagement feels an awful lot like validation.
The hero complex
Then there is the temptation to become the hero of your own content.
Every story needs a villain.
The exhausted mother needs an oppressive husband.
The enlightened woman needs the ignorant woman.
The feminist needs the misogynist.
The compassionate person needs the hateful person.
And the politically enlightened influencer needs the Republican.
It creates a wonderfully simple story:
I am fighting injustice.
And if I’m fighting injustice, then anyone opposing me isn’t simply disagreeing with me.
They’re part of the injustice.
That is an extraordinarily comfortable psychological position.
Because once you have cast yourself as the hero, you don’t have to examine yourself nearly as closely.
Your anger becomes righteous.
Your contempt becomes courage.
Your certainty becomes intelligence.
Your inability to tolerate disagreement becomes “having boundaries.”
And your political tribalism becomes “knowing where I stand.”
But here’s the hypocrisy I can’t get past
If your feminism teaches that women deserve to be seen as individuals rather than stereotypes, then apply that principle universally.
If motherhood has taught you that people’s lives are complicated, assume other people’s lives are complicated too.
If you believe women deserve grace for imperfect choices, perhaps extend some grace to the woman who voted differently than you.
If you believe people should be judged by their actions rather than assumptions about their identity, don’t assume you know the character of millions of strangers because of their political affiliation.
And if you genuinely believe empathy is important, don’t make empathy something you reserve exclusively for people who already agree with you.
Otherwise, what you’re practicing isn’t empathy.
It’s affiliation.
And conservatives do this too
Before anyone starts congratulating themselves, let’s be clear:
Conservatives have their own version of this.
The Christian who constantly talks about loving thy neighbor while treating political opponents as enemies.
The “family values” guy who thinks every liberal mother is destroying America.
The person who talks endlessly about personal responsibility while making excuses for his own side.
The person who demands free speech until someone says something he doesn’t like.
The difference isn’t that one political tribe is uniquely hypocritical.
The difference is that we are exceptionally good at noticing hypocrisy in our opponents and exceptionally creative at explaining it away in ourselves.
That’s the real problem.
Maybe the question isn’t “Are you a good person?”
Maybe the better question is:
What do you need other people to believe about you?
Do you need to be the smartest person in the room?
The most compassionate?
The most enlightened?
The most oppressed?
The person who “gets it”?
The person brave enough to say what everyone else is afraid to say?
The person on the right side of history?
Because social media gives us an unprecedented opportunity to construct a public version of ourselves and then invite strangers to applaud it.
And once your politics becomes part of your identity as a good person, changing your mind becomes much harder.
You’re no longer defending an opinion.
You’re defending yourself.
That’s why political disagreement can feel so personal.
If I say your policy is wrong, that’s an argument.
If you have convinced yourself that your political beliefs are evidence of your compassion, intelligence and moral character, then disagreement can feel like an attack on your identity.
And suddenly, the person who disagrees with you isn’t merely wrong.
They’re bad.
Research on online moral discourse suggests that people routinely overestimate how much outrage and hostility exists between opposing groups, which can make the political world look even more divided and hostile than it actually is.
So maybe we should be suspicious of anyone—left or right—who seems to require a villain in order to establish their own virtue.
Especially when that villain is always someone else.
Because there’s a peculiar kind of arrogance in saying:
“I don’t judge people.”
while spending half your feed explaining why the people on the other side are terrible.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is this:
Maybe some of the people shouting loudest about being good aren’t actually trying to make the world better.
Maybe they’re trying to make themselves feel better about who they are.
And those aren’t always the same thing.
