OF COURSE, AN AWFUL LOT OF THESE STORIES TURNED OUT TO BE LIES: Why the Personal Became Political for Women in 2014: Women have discovered the power of going public with deeply intimate stories.

Lena Dunham, who shot to fame in no small part for her emotional and corporeal honesty, waited almost a decade to speak publicly about her experience with college sexual assault. “Speaking out was never about exposing the man who assaulted me,” she would later explain of the decision to go public. “Rather, it was about exposing my shame, letting it dry out in the sun.” In many ways, Dunham has made the political connections to her work explicit, as when she teamed up with Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List on her book tour. Dunham has also continued work on her critically acclaimed, albeit controversial, TV show Girls, a fiction that for many feels uncomfortably real.

You’d think that National Journal’s Lucia Graves would mention that Dunham’s story about being raped by a top campus Republican named “Barry” was exploded, and that Dunham and her publisher have admitted that there was no “Barry.” (Her story about abusing her infant sister, on the other hand, which Graves unaccountably ignores, appears to be true.)

The, of course, there’s the UVA rape hoax, and the 1-in-5 campus sexual assault figure that Kirsten Gillibrand — prominently mentioned in the article — has backed away from, something that Graves also doesn’t mention. And Gillibrand’s own fat-shaming story — like Dunham’s, suspiciously non-specific, and eventually tied to a conveniently dead Democrat — seems just a little too convenient.

So when we talk about “personal stories,” maybe the emphasis here is on the “stories” part (stories as in “fiction”), rather than the personal. But Graves is right about one thing: It’s all about power.