From Princess Diana to Caroline Flack: the unhealthy obsession with female pain | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
“Women are born with pain built in”: thus begins a celebrated speech in the BBC comedy Fleabag, spoken by Kristen Scott-Thomas’s character, Belinda. It is predicated on an old, old idea. In Genesis, the pain of childbirth is doled out to Eve from God as a punishment. To tolerate such pain is saintly, the “natural” – or more accurately, unmedicated – birth movements inform us. Tell that to all those women who beg for epidurals and are denied them.
Women experience pain as the everyday result of their biological processes; when that pain is not so everyday, it. And yet the wounded woman remains a powerful cultural myth: she is beautiful, she is on the verge. She is pale and wan and suffering and gorgeous (and often, as ). She is Anna Karenina and Sylvia Plath and Cathy Earnshaw and La Bohème’s Mimì. She appears in art and cinema and literature and music. She is also a mainstay of tabloid media. She is Peaches Geldof and Amy Winehouse and Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe and Paula Yates and now, heartbreakingly, . The beautiful, wounded woman is falling apart before our eyes and it is titillating. She is, to use modern parlance, a “hot mess”.
