Summary

In this essay, Leslie writes about female wounds and pain in life, art, and popular culture. Wounded women are everywhere: in Anna Karenina, La Boheme, Dracula, the work of Sylvia Plath, and more. The archetype of the wounded woman has been romanticized but the pain is still a present reality. Leslie asks how we can talk and write about female pain without glamorizing it and explores thirteen examples of various kinds of female pain in this essay.

Wound #1 is about Leslie's friend Molly who wanted scars as a child and was mauled by a dog twice. Wound #2 is about the cultural tendency to dismiss and criticize people who self-harm by cutting because it is seen as performative rather than felt pain. Wound #3 is about anorexia and eating disorders. Starvation is pain and it is a way of trying to...