Kill the Kitsch: Struggle Kitsch
Kill the Kitsch: Struggle Kitsch - the aesthetic of giving up, dressed as the politics of resistance.
There's a particular strain of kitsch that doesn't hang in museums or fill McMansions. It lives in our LinkedIn profiles, our college essays, our carefully crafted origin stories. Installment II of Kill the Kitsch: Struggle Kitsch - the commodification of hardship into a personal brand.
Sarah's heart sank when she walked into the conference room. Forty percent women. Maybe even half. Her LinkedIn post was already drafted: "Still fighting the good fight as the only woman in tech..." Now what? She couldn't trailblaze in a room full of trails. Couldn't be a ceiling-breaker under open sky. Sarah needed a new angle. She scanned the room. Were any of them mothers? Perfect. "The only working mother in tech..." Welcome to the Victim Olympics, where winning means never winning at all.
Older generations fucked us over—pulled up ladders, destroyed the climate, rigged the economy. They also gave us an implicit script: every hero needs a villain, every success needs a struggle, every triumph needs trauma. They gave us a broken world and taught us that our brokenness was our brand. We learned to monetize struggle before we learned to overcome it. We grew up on inspiration porn: the single mom who became CEO, the first woman in the boardroom, the kid from the projects who made it to Harvard. These started as success stories but became instruction manuals for meaning. Every hero had an origin story drenched in adversity. Every biography started with what they overcame. We internalized the formula: no struggle, no story. No trauma, no triumph. The heroine needs her villain. The underdog needs someone's boot on her neck. And when the boot lifts? When other women flood the room? When success becomes achievable? We stop engaging.
Now we speak fluent therapy, but we've diluted the language into meaninglessness. "Trauma" means any discomfort. "Gaslighting" means any disagreement. "Boundaries" justify any antisocial behavior. "Toxic" describes anyone who expects anything from us. My boundaries, your narcissism. My self-care, your selfishness. My trauma response, your reasonable request for me to do my job. TikTok turned pain into content strategy. Watch any FYP: 'Day 47 of healing from my narcissistic ex' (2.5M views). 'POV: You're the only woman in engineering' (5M views). 'Eating disorder recovery day 892' (brand partnership pending). The algorithm doesn't distinguish between real crisis and performed catastrophe. It just knows that suffering gets engagement. Comments of support, shares from concerned friends, heated debates about whether someone's trauma is "valid” all register as success. So we compete for engagement. My anxiety versus your depression. My microaggressions versus your hostile work environment. We collect diagnoses like Pokemon cards, stack identities like multipliers in a video game where the highest victim score wins. The girl with the most compelling trauma narrative gets the most followers. The one who "centers her healing journey" gets brand deals.
Here's the kitsch cop-out we've perfected: The world IS fucked. Climate change IS real. The economy IS rigged. Mental health IS in crisis. These aren't lies—they're truths we've weaponized into excuses.
Kitsch, Kundera tells us, is "the absolute denial of shit." It excludes everything difficult from its field of vision. Victim kitsch inverts this—it's the absolute denial of success. It beautifies hardship while excluding the possibility of actually overcoming it. We've built an entire economy on this performance. The fighter needs the fight. The victim needs the villain. The overcomer needs something to overcome. So we ensure it never ends. The feedback loop is perfect: Express victimhood, receive validation. Document struggle, gain followers. Perform fragility, get accommodations. We're performing resistance for an audience that applauds our stagnation. This is kitsch at its most insidious: pre-packaged struggle that provides all the meaning of adversity with none of the growth. It asks nothing of us but to keep failing photogenically. To keep being the only one, the first one, the broken one who's "still fighting." We're not just digging our own graves anymore. We're franchising the operation. Livestreaming from six feet under, hashtagging our headstones, building ladders that only go down. Each shovel of dirt gets more engagement than the last. The Only Woman in the Room isn't breaking the mold. She is the mold. Mass-produced individuality. Industrial-strength oppression. Struggle kitsch.
The saddest part? Point this out and you become the villain they need. Another oppressor to resist. Another reason they can't succeed.
