Recently I have found myself wondering about the prevalence of rough sex in new fiction written by women. It’s viscerally present in You Know You Want This, the new short-story collection by Kristen Roupenian (who shot to fame last year with Cat Person, published in the New Yorker): I found some of the scenes so unpalatable that I had to keep putting it down. They (spoiler alert) include a woman strangled to death as part of a sex game; a man who imagines his penis is a knife when he has sex; and a woman who says to the guy she is sleeping with: “I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can. After you’ve punched me, when I’ve fallen down, I want you to kick me in the stomach. And then we can have sex.”

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Now, my personal discomfort with the sexual content is no comment on its quality – fiction that never challenges us isn’t good fiction at all. Each reader can make up their own mind about how good the work is. But what is interesting about this rough sex is what it tells us about the current cultural moment. It is supposed to be edgy and transgressive – in You Know You Want This, it feels deliberately put there to shock – and yet it’s everywhere. More often than not it is women writing it and female characters desiring it, and frequently those characters are using sadomasochistic sex as a way of processing their own trauma. The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have shone a light on abuse and harassment, so it’s no wonder a new generation of women are exploring how that manifests itself in sexual relationships.

In Sally Rooney’s much-lauded Normal People, the heroine Marianne brings the legacy of the abuse she has suffered at home into the bedroom:

“Will you hit me? she says.

For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath.

No, he says. I don’t think I want that. Sorry.”

It also features in Rooney’s 2017 debut novel Conversations with Friends, where Frances, another self-loathing, self-harming heroine asks a man to hit her while in bed: “I felt I was a damaged person who deserved nothing. Would you ever hit me? I said. I mean if I asked you to.”

And in Roxane Gay’s 2017 short-story collection, Difficult Women, the female characters are beaten, raped and strangled. Again, trauma is a factor:

“‘Hit me,’ I said. I begged. I grabbed his hand and curled his fingers into a fist and held his fist to my breastbone. I said, ‘Please, if you love me, hit me.’”

It has become a common narrative device and not one limited to literary fiction, as Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrates. That book was heavily criticised for equating a predilection with BDSM with a traumatic childhood, and indeed these are associations that have dogged the BDSM community for many years. Pamela Stephenson Connolly wrote for this newspaper that “BDSM, played in a safe and consensual manner, is not proof of mental or physical illness, essential badness or emotional damage from trauma or abusive parenting.”

This line of thinking has been noted in Rooney’s work. Normal People’s “portrayal of the complexities of submission, dominance and consent can never quite shake the suggestion that Marianne is somehow abnormal, or damaged,” wrote Helen Charman in the White Review, suggesting that there was something “Victorian” in the narrative desire to pathologise her. Others, perhaps partly because of her Irishness, have sensed the remnants of a religious morality in Rooney’s writing about sex.

However, some women do draw a link between rough sex and trauma. Gay has written extensively about her own rape and its legacy, including fantasising about her attacker. A young woman I interviewed, who asked not to be named, told me of her own rape: “As gross as it sounds, I used to search for almost identical scenes in porn as it was the only thing I could get off on, even though the experience itself was horrendous.”

These are these women’s truths, their lived experiences. No wonder they are cropping up in writing. My own novel has a scene in it of (non-consensual) choking during sex, something many of my female friends have encountered. They cite the transactional nature of dating apps and hardcore porn as factors.

But, despite a recent outpouring in writing, it’s been going on for much longer than that. The use of rough sex in fiction is undoubtedly influenced by Mary Gaitskill, whose excellent collection, Bad Behaviour, came out in 1988 (I was a year old when it was published, and – reading it as a teenager, I marvelled at just how weird sex could be). It remains the gold standard: nuanced, funny, genuinely transgressive, unapologetic, complicated.

In a recent New Yorker interview, Gaitskill was asked about the relationship between love and torture, and she replied: “Love can be a deep feeling, so it becomes connected to other deep feelings, especially but not only sexual feelings. Deep feelings can be tangled together at the roots, and some of them are not always benevolent.”

This is a notion that Gaitskill has explored extensively in her work, which tackles gender power dynamics as well as the alienation and disillusionment of advanced capitalist, urban societies. Her women are not rag dolls or victims or voids to be filled – Gaitskill’s heroines live and breathe, they are complex, and funny. Even when a female character is tied up, debased and degraded she is, as author Suzanne Rivecca writes, “still ambivalent, still at war, still parsing the ludicrousness of it all in her head. She is still, in short, inescapably herself.”

The brittle humour of Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator in 2018’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation comes close to this, but she is one of the few recent writers who has successfully mastered that tension. Nihilistic, tragic, self-hating female characters with mental health issues are more common. Is this where we are at? Fiction needn’t reflect real life, except much of this new wave is being treated as though it does. “Sally Rooney gets in your head,” the New Yorker tells us; many thought Roupenian’s Cat Person was a personal essay.

Gaitskill released Bad Behaviour at a time when the power dynamic between men and women was shifting, and the fallout is funny. The sex was sometimes dark, but the tone was wry, and the women sharp: “You have really disappointed me,” a would-be masochist tells her lover in the short story, A Romantic Weekend. The man, in turn, is frustrated by her “somethingness”: “With other women with whom he had been in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that made it easy for him to get inside them and once there, smear himself inside their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his.”

In the end, for Gaitskill, no one – man or woman – comes out well. That’s what makes her stories so good. One wonders what has happened in the intervening decades that so many modern heroines seem as empty and broken as Gaitskill’s pervy men want women to be. They’re no longer putting up a psychological struggle. They’ve internalised it, they want it, even. That’s not to say that some of this writing isn’t brilliant at times, or even important; but nonetheless, I find myself craving a bit more of a fight. Instead, the reader is left feeling bleak and tawdry, as though the battle has been lost.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author