Bbeing a young Woman is traumatic. Especially if you are an intelligent young woman, or a creative young woman, and especially if you have relationships with men. These relationships are sites of trauma. Pursuing them leaves you shipwrecked. To fix yourself, the first and most essential step is to tell your story. Tell your truth. Reveal all the ways the world – and the men in it – have harmed you. It is a political act. It is a feminist act. At least that’s what we’ve learned from the most popular personal essays of recent years.

Think of the tapes of women’s first-person “faith” stories that have gone viral recently. less than a month ago, The Guardian published an essay titled “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer.” American author Isabel Kaplan tells how her then boyfriend was threatened by keeping a diary, then by his literary success. She rails against the way he spoke “mockingly about the overabundance of novels about women and their feelings as well as the way women talk about feelings in general”. She writes that he called this phenomenon “militarized vulnerability”. She compares herself to Nora Ephron, one of her literary heroines, and describes her as “the patron saint of militarized vulnerability”.

The crux of Kaplan’s article is the idea that this personal story of her broken relationship isn’t just about her and her ex, but emblematic: a case study in gender roles. Kaplan explicitly states at one point that “the ability to bend one thumb at a time while appearing to stand straight is a useful, gendered skill”. She continues: “Most of the women I know do it regularly. They bend until they’re pretzels and then blame themselves for the aches.

In 2019, another viral trial – this time published in The Paris review – mapped out remarkably similar territory. Like Kaplan’s essay, CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife” revolved around a broken relationship, the denial of a woman’s needs and wants, and a woman learning to deny her own needs and wants. At its heart is a story from Japanese folklore of the titular “crane woman” – a bird that tricks a man into thinking she’s a woman by plucking out all of her feathers every night. “Each morning,” Hauser writes, “the crane-woman is exhausted, but she becomes a woman again.” For the author, this folksy, desperate avian trickster acts, like Nora Ephron in Kaplan’s article, as another patron saint of militarized vulnerability. It is the spirit that guides the essay, helping it move romantically from the individual and specific to the general and gendered universal. “To continue to be a woman is such a self-erasing job,” Hauser writes. “She never sleeps. She pulls out all her feathers, one by one.

Either way, the general response to these personal stories of pretzels, feathers, pain, and self-effacement has been adulation. On the Internet, women were quick to assign contemporary buzzwords to the pieces: “necessary”. “Brave”. “Reliable”. “Forget your zodiac sign,” said one viral tweet, “tell me what passages of The Crane Woman you immediately took a screenshot to show your therapist. In many ways, this tweet is a neat summary of the modern woman these essays seem to speak to and speak to. She is drawn to stories that explain and categorize her personality, experiences, and emotions; it is extremely online; she goes to therapy; it satirizes and values ​​therapeutic jargon in equal measure. More importantly, she connects with other women through mutual emotional pain, as well as the shared understanding that “men are garbage.”

Over the past year, a handful of critics have begun unpacking and unpacking this confessional mode of writing and the model of contemporary femininity it espouses. Most are millennial women in the creative industries themselves — the very group that should, supposedly, relate to these portrayals of smart, successful but endlessly subjugated and erased girls. Instead, a growing number of people are calling for an end to this overly simplistic portrayal of gender and relationships.

In August, journalist and author Rachel Connolly slammed Hauser’s collection of essays, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays. Connolly wrote of the collection’s tendency to eliminate subjectivity in favor of “broad generalities that don’t quite ring true – especially in statements about how women are and how they act, and therefore the form that heterosexual relationships tend to take.” Connolly returned to this subject in an article for Slate a fortnight ago, suggesting that the trend of essays like Hauser and Kaplan’s applauds “not female honesty…but female abjection”. In a patriarchal society that revels in and demands female submission, abjection is, as Connolly notes, “a highly prized commodity.”

write in The Guardian, journalist Moya Lothian-McLean has also denounced contemporary culture’s taste for narratives that frame relationships through the reductive roles of victim and villain. Labeling this kind of “romantic victimization”, Lothian-McLean wrote that these stories are also built on “radical generalities…about how men are and how they act in romantic relationships.” In these contemporary confessionals, if the women bend and pretzel, the men insult and neglect. Essentially, the unique history of the “bad relationship” necessitates a depiction of men as inherently selfish, callous, and abusive, in order to construct an image of femininity as altruistic and patient. How exactly is this gender essentialism brave, daring or politically radical?

Another personal writing published in The Guardian this year revealed the regressive core of many modern personal essays. The article, by journalist Phoebe McDowell, revolved around her “shock and confusion” at her then-boyfriend’s revelation that they were trans. In its first-person narrative, the experience of a person coming to terms with their own gender identity is somehow transformed into a kind of domestic violence. Throughout, McDowell not only centered his own experience, but misinterpreted his ex-partner and displayed clear anger and revulsion for their transition — going so far as to wish them infertility. “If I can’t have her baby, then no one should be able to,” McDowell wrote. This is where the reductive gender essentialism at the heart of these popular personal pieces really leads: to a transphobic moral panic that is based on the idea that cisgender women are uniquely and naturally vulnerable.

Because this type of faith-based narrative is so popular, attempting to critique or dismantle it can be tricky. To discuss this, it seems necessary to clarify that these are not stories of abuse. Yes, these are usually stories that involve a romantic partner who cheats, lies, or is casually dismissive and mean. These are stories of bad relationships, where at least one of the people involved feels unsupported and unloved. But they are not, despite how often they are received, “#Me too stories”. In this age of trauma and testimonials, these things seem to have become confused. This was decisively proven when, after the publication of his Guardian article, Lothian-McLean was condemned as an apologist for social media abuse. His apparent crime? Simply suggesting that feminists should work from the belief that men, and the patriarchal society that privileges but also devastates them, can change.

write for the new yorker in January – in a trial that went viral – critic Parul Sehgal described the prevalence of “traumatic plot” in fiction and non-fiction, and that “to question the role of trauma, we are warned, is to oppress”. She quotes writer Melissa Febos, who suggests in her book Bodywork: The Radical Power of Personal Storytelling that anyone skeptical of trauma stories replicates the “classic role of the abuser: denying, discrediting and rejecting victims in order to avoid involvement or loss of power”. The problem is that new knowledge of trauma theory and the language of abuse in a wider culture has led to its application to situations and relationships that – while undoubtedly upsetting – are both consensual and more complex than a strict division between the roles of “perpetrator” and “victim” allows. Millennials were raised on the intertwined ideas that “your trauma is valid, your feelings are valid, your experience is valid” and “the personal is political”. Yet the radical roots of these principles seem to have frozen into a single script that encompasses all kinds of relationships of anxiety and abuse. An easy line is then drawn between the villain and the perfect victim – the one who bends like a metaphorical pretzel and plucks like a mythical bird.

It also does a disservice to the complex and varied nature of trauma and abuse to applaud these narratives. Because if someone’s experience – or their reactions to that experience – deviates from the script, they tend to be rejected. Just look at Johnny Depp’s libel lawsuit against Amber Heard this year, the actor sued his ex-wife for damaging her reputation by alluding to domestic violence in their marriage in a newspaper editorial. Hordes of people flocked to mock and discredit Heard’s testimony, despite the vast amounts of evidence in his favor and Heard having already won a trial in the UK which found it to be “substantially true” that Depp could be called a “wife beater”. In the opinion of many Internet users, Heard did not play the role of the injured woman to their expectation and taste.

When “relativity” is the dominant rubric used to judge and praise contemporary writing, and when it largely revolves around women’s capacity to experience trauma and degradation, it should make us wonder about the types of suffering we are meant to sympathize with. Why, for example, are so many of today’s sad girls and unsympathetic women traditionally attractive, young, cisgender, and white? Does clinging to a narrative of perfect, pretzel victimization help conceal power structures that, in fact, give these women considerable influence and personal agency?

Ultimately, the prevalence of the tortured white girl trope in contemporary culture suggests that sadness and suffering are what make these women valuable, interesting, and worthy of attention. That the traumatic confessions of pretty young white girls are lucrative. Looking at book deals and the semi-influencer status given to viral faith-based writers in the modern moment, it seems that “weaponized vulnerability” is less accurate than “monetized vulnerability.” What is clear is that this is a trend that, in the future, needs far fewer patron saints.