Being a young woman is traumatic. Especially if you’re a smart 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 wrecked. To repair yourself, the first and most essential step is to tell your story. Speak your truth. Disclose all the ways that the world – and the men in it – have harmed you. This is a political act. This is a feminist act. At least, this is what the most popular personal essays of the last few years have taught us.
Think of the swathes of first-person, “confessional” stories by women that have gone viral recently. Less than a month ago, The Guardian ran an essay headlined “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer”. In it, the American author Isabel Kaplan relays how her then boyfriend was threatened by her keeping a journal, and then by her literary success. She rails against the way he spoke “mockingly about the glut of novels about women and their feelings as well as the way women speak about feelings in general”. She writes that he called this phenomenon “militarised vulnerability”. She compares herself to Nora Ephron, a literary hero of his, and describes her as “the patron saint of militarised vulnerability.”
