Many of Valen’s points are valid, but she seems caught between the polar positions of “It’s a trend!” and “Nothing new here.” This leads to caveat-laden passages like the following: “Does every woman feel this way about the world of women’s relationships? Of course not. But the frequency with which these stories and sentiments have rolled in troubles me and implicates us all.” Well, certainly it implicates schoolyard bullies, online trolls and office meanies. But casting blame gender-wide is a stretch.

In another book examining women’s darker tendencies, “The Monster ­Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood,” Barbara Almond, a psychoanalyst, is intent on recognizing the worst — and reassuring women that it’s O.K.

Her book spans a vast territory, from run-of-the-mill fears about childbirth to Andrea Yates-style child murder. She argues that every mother suffers from some form of maternal ambivalence, which she defines as “that mixture of loving and hating feelings that all mothers experience toward their children and the anxiety, shame and guilt that the negative feelings engender.”

It’s an idea typically shunned, especially among today’s perfectionist mothers, with their homemade organic snacks and calibrated rounds of edifying experiences. “I believe,” Almond writes, “that today’s expectations for good mothering have become so hard to live with, the standards so draconian, that maternal ambivalence has increased and at the same time become more unacceptable to society.” Many a fatigued mom might cry, Amen to that!

But Almond’s book, while empathetic, offers little in the way of cheer­leading. Packed with jargon like “ego strength” and “object-relatedness,” Freudian case studies and postmodern readings of “Frankenstein” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” it swiftly transported me back to Gender and Sexuality Studies 111 (cross-listed, Semiotics 12), circa 1992. Almond is most sure-footed when she steers clear of social trend-spotting and literary parable, and concentrates on mothers’ enduring ambivalent feelings. Her psychoanalytic approach can be insightful, and Freud has passed so thoroughly out of vogue that certain of her dictums feel weirdly fresh. Other appraisals — including intimations that abortion constitutes some form of infanticide — uncomfortably evoke the “blame the mother” interpretations that Almond is otherwise eager to dispel.

Although most of the ambivalence Almond documents is of the nonpsychotic variety, she can veer toward the hyperbolic. Take her insistence on referring to women’s fear of “monster” children, when what she mostly means are demanding children who drive their parents to exhaustion — not quite Frankenbaby.

The reader’s receptivity may depend on her view of a story Almond relates about a woman who goes temporarily blind upon giving birth. “I now see this woman’s blindness as a primitive response to her wish to be rid of her baby,” Almond writes. “She literally could not see it.” Either that, or she’d had way too much Demerol.

Both of these books aim to puncture what the authors view as a societal assumption that women are necessarily kind, loving and lollipop pink. We uphold this lie while pretending to be shocked by the manufactured infighting on Housewives TV. Somewhere in between live actual women, probably just as conflicted and complicated as men.