From Princess Diana to Caroline Flack: the unhealthy obsession with female pain

“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 can find itself dismissed as psychological and/or emotional. It is taken less seriously by doctors. 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 Susan Sontag noted, waif-like and consumptive). She is Anna Karenina and Sylvia Plath and Cathy Earnshaw and La Boheme’s Mimi. 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, Caroline Flack. The beautiful, wounded woman is falling apart before our eyes and it is titillating. She is, to use modern parlance, a “hot mess”.

I read Madame Bovary recently. I knew that Emma – perhaps the original hot mess – would need to be punished for her adultery, that she was indeed the blueprint for so many other punished, disobedient women. But the graphic, drawn-out, painful death scene that follows her self-poisoning with arsenic seemed to me particularly vengeful and lascivious. Was it intended to offer the novel’s contemporary readers a sort of collective, punitive catharsis?

The tabloids, which love a good punishment, have been once again condemned for their lascivious treatment of a vulnerable young woman. They hide, as they always do, behind “reader demand” as a justification for their treatment of Flack. These are the most-read stories, after all, they are just giving the reader what they want. This lets the tabloids’ own rancid misogyny, for which they must be challenged, off the hook.

Yet we cannot ignore the readers, who lap up these narratives of female pain and torment just as they did with Diana’s bulimia, or Britney Spears’s mental health crisis, which resulted in her begging a hairdresser to shave her head as more than 70 paparazzi snapped photos through the salon window. What better way to disrupt the male gaze that saw her placed in a school uniform and bunches when still a child? “I’m sick of people touching my hair,” she reportedly said. Those readers consuming these crises were, and remain, mostly women.

This fact is often used as a trump card when feminists criticise the sexist outlook of celebrity gossip and women’s magazines, when the seeming irony is really not that complicated or clever. When women are socialised to compete with one another for the attention and approval of men, to rank themselves in order of the most beautiful, they become an audience primed to consume beautiful women’s subsequent, painful downfalls. It’s the reason staff at Grazia used to call their ideal cover shot “distress in a dress”. Some of the coverline we collected for The Vagenda, the 2014 book I co-wrote about women’s magazines, included “Tragic Demi’s cry for help” and “Why it’s all over for doomed spinster Jennifer Aniston”. When you’re beautiful, your pain, its ugliness, is the payoff.

Some readers will relish a woman on the verge (some men too, particularly those who have struggled in the dating marketplace, love to see a beautiful woman punished), but others will find in it a perverse comfort that beauty doesn’t bring you everything. Until these women die or come close, they are considered fair game.

Related: #BeKind: can Caroline Flack’s final plea be more than just a hashtag?

It’s a double-edged sword, this female pain. It is titillation, until it’s too much, too real, too ugly. It becomes unpalatable; people want to look away, wincing. In Leslie Jamison’s essay Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, she writes of reading Plath at a Harvard writing workshop, and of one woman’s eye-rolling response: “I hadn’t gotten the high-brow girl-memo: Don’t Read the Girls Who Cried Pain.”

Jamison identifies a new sort of “post-wounded” woman, who, wary of accusations of overwrought melodrama, chooses a detached, ironic coolness that is currently pervasive in contemporary novels by young female writers. This makes women who do express their pain feel as though they are letting the side down. But for Jamison, the fact that pain can be fetishised “to the point of fantasy or imperative” is no reason to stop representing it, and that to do so can result in a sort of collective healing, or at the very least empathy.

Empathy was sorely lacking for Flack until it was too late. Much of her pain went publicly unexpressed, but there were hints. When Meghan Markle suggested how difficult, how harmful, she had found the press’s treatment of her since she married into the royal family, she was met with a vitriolic kickback from some tabloid readers. They had been primed to attack. Were Markle to harm herself, how quickly the sentiments of that audience would shift.

I maintain that the mass, public grief over the death of Diana came partly from millions of women empathising with her pain. But I also believe that it lay in feelings of complicity from a readership that was addicted to a diet of pain fodder. In death, the ugliness of pain is shed and these women become beautiful again. How many more women have to die before we realise that this is the most hideous thing of all?

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

• In the UK the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org