What we are witnessing is not criticism, commentary, or cultural analysis. It is fixation, dressed up as expertise and laundered through faux respectability.

At the point where complete strangers feel entitled to psychoanalyze a woman from a still photograph, diagnose her as “unhinged,” “sociopathic,” or “deranged,” and scrutinize her posture, neck angle, facial expression, or physical presence as if it were forensic evidence, the subject is no longer her behavior. The subject is the obsession of the people doing the scrutinizing.

This pattern is familiar. It begins with “etiquette” and “body language,” disciplines vague enough to be weaponized and subjective enough to be unfalsifiable. It escalates into moral judgment, then into character assassination, and finally into outright dehumanization. Pseudo-experts are wheeled out to give legitimacy to what is, at its core, resentment. Anonymous accounts amplify the rhetoric until cruelty is reframed as analysis and harassment is excused as opinion.

Notice the moving goalposts. She is criticized for standing too tall, too straight, too confidently. For not smiling enough, for smiling incorrectly, for existing without apology. She is accused of being controlling, calculating, arrogant, threatening, superior, and simultaneously desperate for attention. No standard is ever met, because meeting a standard is not the point. The point is discipline. The point is to signal that a woman who does not perform deference on demand will be punished for it.

This is not about monarchy, protocol, or tradition. If it were, the rules would be consistent. They are not. It is about power and hierarchy, and the discomfort that arises when someone refuses to shrink herself to make others comfortable. Confidence is recast as aggression. Poise is reframed as pathology. Autonomy is interpreted as defiance.

The racialized and misogynistic undertones are not subtle. The language shifts quickly from “analysis” to tropes historically used to justify the policing of women’s bodies, particularly women of color: exaggerating normal behavior into menace, reframing dignity as arrogance, depicting self-possession as a threat that must be neutralized. When people feel comfortable calling this a “media lynching,” they are not being hyperbolic. They are naming a dynamic in which relentless scrutiny replaces reason and repetition replaces evidence.

And the irony is unavoidable. The same commentators who accuse her of obsession are the ones dissecting her every movement, refreshing timelines, producing endless commentary, and mobilizing outrage over a photograph. If a person truly held no power, they would not inspire this level of fixation. Indifference does not require microscopes.

This is not a debate about posture. It is a case study in how public women are punished for visibility, how “expertise” is used to sanitize cruelty, and how resentment masquerades as cultural critique. The obsession says nothing about her character. It says everything about the need, in some quarters, to see a woman put back in what they believe is her place.