If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve seen an outbreak of glorified victimhood, of a grievance culture.

If you haven’t been paying attention lately, you’re probably guilty of the terrible micro-aggression of failing to properly sympathize with someone else’s perceived trauma.

And if none of that made sense to you, you’re probably better off.

According to Heather Wilhelm, writing for The Federalist magazine, this is a “cult of victimhood.”

“It is here, in sharp relief, that we see the full, absurdist flowering of the grievance culture: Just when you think people have run out of things to complain about, they start complaining about their own privilege,” she writes. “Even better, through some serious mental jujitsu, they manage to then convert that privilege into oppression.”

Ms. Wilhelm is writing about an article that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. That article is by a woman who describes how awful her life is – because she’s pretty.

“Imagine how it feels to have heads turn and all eyes on you when you are simply trying to get to where you need to be,” she pleads. “It doesn’t make me feel beautiful or sexy. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me. The scrutiny is never ending. … It’s typically just because I’m ‘pretty,’ and sometimes, it seems like that’s all society will perceive me to be.”

Oh, the pain of being beautiful.

“Coming to terms with being perceived as ‘beautiful’ wasn’t easy,” this young woman laments. “It soon became how people knew me. People seemed to forget or simply ignore my accomplishments. They disregarded the fact that I’m an athlete, I’m intelligent, and I’m incredibly ambitious. Others did not bother to look past my appearance and actually get to know me, satisfied with the kind of person I looked like I could be.”

High school was just terrible, she writes.

“I was still trying to figure out who I was for myself, while the rest of the world simply decided who I was based on my appearance,” she writes. “I went through different phases as I tried to find a way to draw attention to other aspects about me. I only wore sports jerseys and oversize T-shirts, I tried to brag and bring up my achievements during conversations so people would know that there was more to me than my looks, and when all else failed, I simply tried to blend in.”

This young woman is doing something very fashionable right now. She’s claiming victim status. She’s a member of an oppressed class – in this case, the oppressed class of pretty women who people like.

“I had to read this one a few times to make sure it wasn’t satire; alas, it is not,” notes Ms. Wilhelm. “The cult of victimhood has been growing for a while now, but it’s still a bit startling to see the pretty girl version.”

Not surprisingly, the woman who wrote the Cosmo piece is a college student. That’s where the cult of victimhood is running rampant today – because outside the bubble of academia, there’s real suffering.