‘Does this hurt?’: feminism,pain and the problem of reification

Feminist debates around sex have often revolved around the vexed issue of whether it is possible for women to achieve genuine pleasure under patriarchy. Whilst so-called ‘pro-sex’ feminists in the 1980s and 1990s emphasised that pleasure under patriarchy was both possible and something to be strived for, if only women were allowed the freedom and opportunities to pursue it, others took a much more pessimistic view. Even if women claimed to be having pleasurable sex with men, this was not a cause for celebration. At best, it showed women's resourcefulness and adaptability in tough times; at worst, it betrayed a false consciousness difficult to root out because it understood as ‘women's pleasure’ what under feminist eyes would quickly be revealed as the enforced acceptance of pain.

In some versions of this ‘sex-negative’ feminism, the entire debate around ‘pleasure under patriarchy’ is seen to rest on an ontological mistake. When women say that they experience sexual pleasure with men, what they mean by ‘pleasure’ is actually pain: ‘Women … are turned on by being put down and feel pain as pleasure. We want it; we beg for it; we get it’ (MacKinnon, 1987: 159; emphasis mine). For Catherine MacKinnon (1989: 339f), to ‘feel pain as pleasure’ is not to be a masochist, because this would mean that all women are masochists – a generalisation she expressly does not want to make. ¹ Rather, it is to make an ontological mistake about the nature of one's subjective experience: to feel as y what is in fact x. As I aim to show in this article, in order for such a mistake to be possible, pain must be assumed to have an objective existence regardless of whatever the subject is experiencing. More generally, there must be affective truths which do not depend on being felt by anyone.

In contrast to MacKinnon's insistence that women are often wrong about the nature of their subjective experience, there are other important traditions of feminist theory and practice which emphasise the political importance of seeking objective truths in women's first-person experience. Notably, the practice of feminist consciousness-raising (FCR), first developed in the 1960s and 1970s by US radical feminists, claimed that ‘women's feelings’ were a more epistemically reliable basis for feminist struggle than third-person knowledge produced about women. While the MacKinnonite feminist subject is called upon to align her feelings with feminist truths about her situation, FCR was, at least initially, about allowing women's feelings to shape and direct the outlines of feminist struggle.

Yet with its growing popularity, some of the initial founders of FCR began to resort, like MacKinnon, to what I call below a ‘detectivist’ theory of subjectivity, which posits that women can be wrong about ‘detecting’ their feelings within themselves in the same way that they can be wrong about ‘detecting’ a familiar face in a crowd of unfamiliar ones. This, I argue, leads to a self-defeating tension, whereby women's first-person authority can be considered a valuable source of feminist knowledge only insofar as there is nothing epistemically unique about first-person knowledge compared to third-person knowledge.

In the final section of the article, I show how this tension continues to manifest in contemporary feminist debates around sex and pain. Despite the widespread acceptance, since the late 1990s, of a ‘sex-positive’ feminism which rejects MacKinnon's claims about women's false consciousness of their own experience and oppression, I show that MacKinnonite assumptions continue to persist in the shape of an implicit detectivist understanding of women's relationship to their own pain. Just as detectivism was self-defeating for FCR, I argue that it also undermines recent feminist attempts to politicise women's pain against the liberal depoliticisation of sex.

In rejecting a detectivist view of subjectivity for feminism, my aim is not simply to reiterate the importance of taking women at their word. Nor do I want to deny that the ability of oppressed groups to feel and recognise pain emerges under, and is configured by, contingent historical, social and political conditions. My argument is that a feminism which works, either implicitly or explicitly, with a detectivist understanding of pain is a feminism alienated from the political and epistemic value of first-person testimony and therefore from significant moments in its own history.

As I explain in the section that follows, I take a detectivist understanding of pain to be one in which there can be a gap between ‘being in pain’ and ‘feeling pain’. This gap exists if we assume a detectivist theory of subjectivity in which the subject is taken to ‘perceive’ her internal states in the same manner as she perceives external objects (see Finkelstein, 2008). I could therefore be in pain, but not notice it, in the same way as I might fail to see a pigeon flying over my head and not notice it until it is too late. In the second and third sections, I show how detectivism has foreclosed, and continues to foreclose, the radical horizon of a feminist politics of pain.

Pain, subjectivity and reification

MacKinnon's claim that women have been conditioned to mistake pain for pleasure entails a particularly strong version of the ‘false consciousness’ thesis. Feminists could think that women can be wrong about their best interests, without thereby making the additional claim that they can also be wrong about their feelings. For instance, if I told you that you are wrong about what is best for you, you might – quite rightly – tell me off for patronising you. But if I told you that you are wrong when you say that you are not actually in pain, you would, again justifiably, up the charge and accuse me of gaslighting you.

False consciousness implies a view of subjectivity which treats a subject's interests and feelings as objects that can be separated from the subject. In order for your interests and pains to be the kinds of things that you can be wrong about, I must take you to be sufficiently detached from both such that I can then treat them as objects in an epistemic inquiry which I am both able and entitled to run on your behalf. That it seems worse to do this with ‘pain’ than with ‘interests’ is because making someone doubt their pain is to make them doubt the kind of thing in whose very nature it is that we don’t have doubts about it (e.g. Scarry, 1985: 4). Phenomenologically speaking, feeling pain is generally taken to be immediate in a way that ‘interests’ are not – we don’t tend to question whether we are in pain whenever we are actually in it.

Another way of making this point is to say that MacKinnon's view amounts to a reification of both pain and the subject-in-pain. There are different ways to approach what we mean by reification. One starting point might be the example of racialising reification offered by Frantz Fanon (2008) in his Black Skin, White Masks. As he points out, the white gaze perceives the black person as a fixed object whose racial properties are both ontologically prior to, and independent of, the white gaze's perception of it: ‘the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye’ (Fanon, 2008: 89). This in turn obscures the work of whiteness in producing the very idea of this ontological priority as an effect of its racial, cultural and political domination over non-whites. Reification, in this sense, refers to the ontologisation, or naturalisation, of racial attributes that are themselves the contingent product of colonial and racist histories: ‘The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’ (Fanon, 2008: 90). As long as racialised people are fixed in their racialised being, the white gaze can continue to see the racialised features of non-whites as if they are simply given ‘in nature’. ²

More generally, we might say that reification consists in a detached mode of relating to some particular entity in which that entity appears as ontologically prior to, and separate from, the subject. It means treating ‘one's perceptual field … as a field of objects from which one remains strangely distanced and toward which one acts instrumentally’ (Butler, 2008: 98). ³ As a result, what one perceives ‘in one's perceptual field’ are not dynamic, particular entities but rigid objects abstracted from their historical conditions of emergence and therefore available for detached epistemic inquiry. In the most politically egregious cases of reification, as in the one Fanon describes, this entails reducing subjects to the status of fixed objects-to-be-perceived, rather than recognising them as dynamic subjects with their own complex, historically emergent subjectivity.

Of course, for our purposes, the kinds of entities that concern us are not external, but internal to the subject: feelings like pain, or pleasure. To say that feelings are ‘in our perceptual field’ requires making the additional claim that we come to know our feelings by perceiving them, similar to how we might perceive external objects. Crucially, therefore, the reification of internal states means something more than the reification of external objects: it requires and entails that ‘one's own self becomes reified’ (Honneth, 2008: 73). Finkelstein has called this kind of self-reification ‘detectivism’: the view that ‘I am able to state my own thoughts and feelings … thanks to a cognitive process by which I have detected their presence’ (2008: 9). For an example of what Finkelstein calls ‘old detectivism’, consider the following quote by Bertrand Russell:

When I desire food, I may be aware of my desire for food; thus ‘my desiring food’ is an object with which I am acquainted. Similarly we may be aware of our feeling pleasure or pain, and generally of the events which happen in our minds. This kind of acquaintance, which may be called self-consciousness, is the source of all our knowledge of mental things (Cited in Finkelstein, 2008: 12; emphasis mine).

For Russell, pain is an ‘object with which I am acquainted’ and therefore not dissimilar to physical objects with which I make acquaintance through touch or vision. Yet he also concedes that our acquaintance of internal states differs in important respects from our acquaintance of external objects. An important difference between the two is that, unlike the ‘outer sense’, which is eminently fallible, our ‘inner sense provides us with perfect knowledge of inner objects’ (Finkelstein, 2008: 12). However, as Finkelstein shows, this ‘old’ formulation of detectivism runs into the problem of postulating an inner sense that is ‘supernaturally reliable’ (2003: 13), leaving it unable to account for the fact that we don’t have infallible knowledge of our internal states. Unless you are a dualist, the mind introspecting itself is, like the body, prone to breakdowns and glitches.

Russell's subsequent articulations of detectivism (‘new detectivism’) have tried to respond to this objection ‘by construing our awareness of our own mental states as involving a species of ordinary, garden-variety perception’ (Finkelstein, 2003: 17). This means that we are as fallible in perceiving our internal states as we are in perceiving external objects – a claim that avoids having to deal with the uniqueness of first-person authority by simply ruling it out altogether.

We already encountered a version of detectivist first-person fallibility with MacKinnon's claim that women are often wrong about being in pain. According to Finkelstein, undermining first-person authority in this way means accepting the detectivist claim that there is nothing, epistemically speaking, unique about our relationship to our own feelings. For Axel Honneth, giving up on the uniqueness of first-person experience is tantamount to positing a self-reifying subject who relates to her mental states ‘as given, thing-like objects’ (2008: 73) which she can either be right or wrong about perceiving within herself. For this subject, pain is not an immediately felt subjective experience, but an object to be discovered within herself. Moreover, at least for the ‘new’ detectivist, this process of discovery proceeds by inference: I know that I am in pain by making an inference about my current internal state, based on past experiences of similar states and other available information. Since reasoning by inference is fallible, it follows that pain is the kind of object that I can be wrong about (not) perceiving within myself, in the same way that I might be wrong about perceiving a horse in the distance galloping towards me.

Thinking about the subject's mental life in this way has important implications, both for the clinical setting and for a feminist politics of pain. In search for a reliable diagnostic tool, clinicians, for example, have long tried to find objective measurements and criteria for pain. This has often involved reasoning along the following lines: if the pain is 7 out of 10, then it is most likely condition x rather than condition y, which has been known to correspond to a 3 out of 10 on the pain scale. This kind of reasoning is based on the tacit idea that pain itself is objective and that it can therefore be measured objectively. The hope is that being able to systematically translate subjective pain experiences into objective measurements would eliminate some of the unreliability and instability of first-person testimony, allowing doctors to make inferences about the patient's pain that are independent of how the patient describes it (Boddice, 2007).

The objectivist view of pain, as we might call it, is largely indebted to a Cartesian biomedical model, which postulates a clear correlation between pain and injury (Bourke, 2014). This model is often illustrated by the image of a person who burned their foot by putting it too close to a fire. Descartes thought that burning causes pain because particles from the fire enter a dedicated pain ‘pathway’ inside the body which leads directly from the site of the injury to the brain. On this view, pain is simply the body's mechanical response to an external entity entering, or otherwise damaging, the body; this mechanism works just as ‘pulling on one end of the cord, one simultaneously rings a bell which hangs at the opposite end’ (Descartes, 1997: 21). Assuming a direct causal relationship between pain and injury or bodily damage in turn allows doctors to infer the intensity of the pain from the intensity of the damage – regardless of how the pain is experienced by the patient. By the same token, patients can be wrong about their own pain when they make a bad inference: for example, by claiming to be in excruciating pain in the absence of any significant damage or injury; or conversely, by claiming not to feel any pain at all when the injury is significant.

Unable to explain the existence of pains that either appear to have no direct physiological cause or in which the pain does not seem proportional to the cause, the Cartesian model would simply assert that such pain does not constitute ‘real’ pain. This limits its usefulness in a clinical setting in which such cases occur with some frequency (see: Bourke, 2014). To this day, scientists have struggled to find reliable patterns between the way in which the pain presents and what seems to be causing it (see e.g.: Corns, 2020). Patients experiencing a heart attack have, for example, described their pain as anything from a ‘choking sensation’, a ‘sudden and sharp pin-prick pain’ or an ‘occasional dull ache’ to ‘indescribable’ (Bourke, 2014: 144f). Although the pain undoubtedly tells both the person and the doctor that ‘something is wrong’, its usefulness as a diagnostic tool is consistently frustrated by the complex nature of pain itself. The same person might suffer from the same disease twice and report very different kinds of pains; a patient might not feel any pain at all despite having incurred significant external injury or internal damage.

Indeed, recent trends in pain scholarship and research lead away from the Cartesian model, towards a ‘biopsychosocial’ model of pain which assumes that pain is irreducibly subjective (see: Boddice, 2007). ⁴ Translating this into a clinical setting would mean that the patient's first-person testimony is epistemically privileged over any inferences the doctor might make based on the information available to her. Not only can the ‘subjective element of pain, with all its metaphors and imprecision’ (Boddice, 2007: 97), not be eliminated or neutralised; that very subjective element comes to be seen as constitutive of pain. The appropriate object of treatment is therefore not the pain that the medical profession would attribute to a certain injury or condition, but pain as it is configured and experienced by the subject-in-pain. This is not just a matter of clinicians humouring their patients, but of their recognising that pain which is subjectively felt, but without apparent physiological cause, is real pain and deserving of treatment on account of being as real as pain with an immediate physiological cause.

For our purposes, we can understand the difference between the biomedical and the biopsychosocial model in terms of reification. This allows us to build a case against a detectivist understanding of pain, adding to its specific clinical failures the political issues at stake in its deficient understanding of subjective life. In the biomedical model, pain is maximally reified because it is treated as an object that the subject cognitively apprehends within herself, based on what she can infer from the physiological processes that are happening inside her body. Since these physiological processes happen regardless of whether the subject notices them, a third party could theoretically infer that the person is in pain even when she herself does not feel pain. This might occur, for example, when someone, in the moment of a serious accident or injury, does not feel pain because they have more pressing concerns to attend to – such as: ‘How do I get away from here? Did anyone else get injured?’. A bystander in this situation might plausibly infer that the victim of the accident or injury is in serious pain, based on their observation of the event. Similarly, MacKinnon (see: 1989: 338) might infer from women's performance in porn that they must be in pain. On the biomedical model, both MacKinnon and the bystander would be right to make this inference, even if the pain they are inferring is, in that moment, not actually felt by the person in question.

By contrast, on the biopsychosocial model of pain, pain is not ‘an immediate and monochrome physical experience, a baseline of reality’ (Harpham, 2001: 208), but a ‘combination of sensations, dispositions, cultural circumstances, and explanations’ (Harpham, 2001: 208). On this view, there is only pain insofar as there is a subject who feels pain: ‘Being-in-pain requires an individual to give significance [to recognise] this particular “type of” being’ (Bourke, 2014: 5). Conversely, there is no pain if there is no subject who recognises herself to be in pain: feeling pain is both necessary and sufficient for being in pain. This formulation counters the reification of mental life implied in the biomedical model. Pain is here not an object that the subject ‘detects’ within herself, where both the object and the subject remain fixed, but a particular way of being a subject. When we talk about subjects as being in pain rather than as having pain, we reflect this irreducibly subjective dimension of pain: being in pain is a shorthand for the subject being ‘in the way of pain’. ⁵

As we saw above, the biomedical model upholds the ontological division between the subject who cognitively apprehends pain within herself, and the object ‘pain’ which is being apprehended. This has important political implications. If the object pain is ontologically prior to the subject's awareness of it, then people are wrong about their subjective experience whenever that awareness fails to track this prior ontological reality. For a feminist politics of pain, this means that women and other marginalised groups can be said to be in pain even when they do not feel pain. Diagnosing this ‘false consciousness’ then becomes the basis for the prescriptive claim that women's subjective experience ought to be aligned with the internal objects of pain that exist inside them regardless of whether they are felt.

In MacKinnon's work, this process of alignment is described as the overcoming of ‘dissociation’: women who don’t ‘fee[l] pain, including during sex’ (1989: 338), must come to realise that they actually are in pain. Since, in her view, pain is assumed to be ontologically prior to women's experience of pain, the alignment is always directed towards something presumed to already be there, even when its existence is not (yet) felt. The narrative of feminist alignment thus implies a detectivist story of discovery: you discover something that is already there, but which you were not aware of previously. In the following section, I further explore what is at stake politically in these detectivist commitments, by considering how detectivism has haunted the theory and practice of FCR.

Feminist consciousness-raising and the problem of detectivism

To see how and why feminists have resorted to detectivist assumptions about pain and subjectivity, it is worth considering the different ways in which proponents of FCR have configured the relationship between feminist politics and women's internal life. Since detectivism understands the first-person relationship to internal states as analogous to the cognitive process by which we perceive external objects, its unique political promise lay in its ability to move ‘feelings’ from the mysterious realm of subjectivity into the domain of a stable, empirically observable objective reality. Detectivism, I will show, offered a possible – but ultimately self-defeating – interpretation of what Katie Sarachild, co-founder of the first FCR groups, formulated as the central ethos of FCR: that ‘[e]verything we have to know, have to prove, we can get from the realities of our own lives’ (1979: 145).

In a context in which feminists were anxious to distinguish consciousness-raising from group therapy, detectivism could explain why there was nothing ‘navel-gazing’ (Friedan, 1976: 163) or esoteric about studying and collating women's feelings and experiences. If done right, detectivism claimed, the study of internal states was just as epistemically respectable as the study of external objects – it was, in fact, the same kind of activity. For feminists confronted with the ideological distortions of third-person knowledge produced about women, the detectivist assumption that first-person knowledge is just a variety of third-person knowledge could be mobilised to explain why women's first-person experience should take the place of third-person knowledge: ‘Everything we have to know, have to prove, we can get from the realities of our own lives’ (Sarachild 1979: 145; emphasis mine).

Sarachild's statement was a powerful call to take women's first-person experience seriously, but it also suggested that ‘the realities of our own lives’ are something that we come to ‘know’, in the same way we might come to know the realities of other people's lives. As I argue in what follows, this framing of the theory and practice of FCR suppresses an alternative, non-detectivist reading of FCR, whereby what is being ‘discovered’ by FCR is not, as a reified understanding of subjectivity would suggest, something that was assumed to already be there. Instead, FCR allowed women to experience what FCR itself created: a political consciousness of women's shared oppression.

Radical feminist Pamela Allen (1973) has described FCR's process of collective self-discovery in four steps. First, women are called upon to ‘open up’ about their experiences and feelings, in a context where they feel comfortable and affirmed by other women in doing so. On that basis, the participants are then encouraged to look for commonalities in their experiences, realising that their individual problems are in fact shared problems. In a third step, these shared problems are analysed for the objective social and political structures that they lay bare. At the end of this process, women should be able to distance themselves from their personal feelings and experiences, by re-interpreting their individual condition in terms of the general condition facing women under patriarchy. In this way, the idea was that a collective consciousness could be forged from disparate, individualised consciousnesses, in turn paving the way for collective action: ‘Our feelings will lead us to our theory, our theory to our action, our feelings about that action to new theory and then to new action’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78).

As much as proponents of FCR wanted to base their political claims on the unique epistemic value of women's subjective feelings and experiences, they also wanted to break these feelings and experiences away from the subject in whom they originated. On the one hand, this was important to eliminate women's self-blame and individualised guilt. Once women understood that their ‘personal problems are political problems’ (Hanisch, 1969), the experiences and feelings that fuelled self-blame could be transformed into a collective awareness of patriarchal oppression: ‘Can you imagine what would happen if women, blacks, and workers … would stop blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems to me that the whole country needs that kind of political therapy’ (Hanisch, 1969). On the other hand, the idea that feelings and experiences could be separated from the individual woman and abstracted as general conclusions about women as a group was necessary to justify the raison d’etre of FCR as a revolutionary practice:

The purpose of hearing people's feelings and experience was not therapy … the importance of listening to a woman's feelings was collectively to analyze the situation of women, not to analyze her. The idea was not to change women, not to make ‘internal’ changes except in the sense of knowing more. It was and is the conditions women face, it's male supremacy, we want to change. (Sarachild, 1979: 149).

For proponents of FCR, the issue was how to justify focusing on ‘women's feelings’ without being seen as either giving up on demands for radical political transformation or playing into misogynistic tropes about women's volatile emotional life. For Sarachild, this could be achieved by reconceptualising women's feelings and experiences as symptoms not of individual pathologies but of social and political oppression: ‘We assume that our feelings are telling us something from which we can learn … that our feelings mean something worth analyzing … that our feelings are saying something political’ (1970: 78). That women have had to resort to ‘hysterics, whining, bitching, etc.’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78) is not because women are ‘hysterical’, but because feelings are women's ‘best available weapon’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78) in a context in which men insist that such feelings are both unreasonable and excessive. Women's feelings expose the truth of women's predicament against the ideological distortions of patriarchy: ‘We’re saying that when we had hysterical fits, when we took things “too” personally … [we were] responding with our feelings correctly to a given situation of injustice’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78).

FCR's foundational insight was that patriarchal domination takes root at the very heart of women's internal life. Feminists therefore did not have to rely on reading anthropological work about the behaviour of cavemen, or on collecting statistical data on domestic violence, although they did this too. Instead, they could trust that ‘patriarchy existed, quite simply, because women could feel it’ (Chu, 2019: 72). This feeling was an immediate and embodied reality; it required women only to ‘be in touch’ with themselves – ‘to let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78). Sarachild's emphasis on women's unique ability to ‘be in touch with ourselves’ suggests, as the foundation of FCR, a self-relationship that allows the subject to inhabit her internal states without reifying them as separate from herself. Men, by contrast, live in a petrified state of self-reification, desperate to master and control their feelings at any cost: ‘male culture assumes that feelings are something that people should stay on top of and puts women down for being led by their feelings’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78).

Reading Sarachild's ‘Program for Feminist “ConsciousnessRaising”’, which was based on a speech she gave in 1968 at the First National Women's Liberation Conference, the detectivist's desire to be in a relationship of cognitive mastery vis-a-vis his internal life appears antithetical to both the method and ethos of FCR. Whilst on Russell's detectivism, internal life is something that must be cognitively mastered via ‘acquaintance’, for Sarachild, women are in a unique position to expose the idea of cognitive mastery over internal states as a patriarchal ruse. Emotions are, for them, not something to be controlled, but a gateway to understanding how things actually are in the world, and ultimately therefore to revolutionary consciousness and action. ‘We always stay in touch with our feelings’, she said in 1968, and these feelings ‘will lead us to ideas and then to actions’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78).

Yet already here there is a potential ambiguity about what it means to be ‘in touch with one's feelings’. On the one hand, I could be in touch with my feelings as a way of inhabiting the world as the particular subject that I am. On the other hand, being in touch with my feelings could mean that I have correctly ‘detected’ these feelings within myself; being in touch would then be synonymous with Russell's idea of ‘being acquainted with’.

By 1973, when Sarachild outlined the contours of FCR to attendees of the First National Conference of Stewardesses for Women's Rights, what was still an ambiguity five years earlier appears to have resolved itself in favour of the latter, ‘detectivist’ reading. Comparing FCR to the advance of the empirical sciences in the seventeenth century, Sarachild argued that women's subjective feelings and experiences provide a more reliable basis for objective knowledge claims. This, she insisted, was not a departure from science but a scientific method in its own right: ‘The decision to emphasize our own feelings and experiences as women and to test all generalizations and reading we did by our own experience was actually the scientific method of research. We were in effect repeating the seventeenth century challenge of science to scholasticism: “study nature, not books”’ (Sarachild, 1979: 145). With this formulation, FCR has entered the detectivist turn: it is now a ‘scientific method of research’ mimicking the rise of empirical sciences in the seventeenth century, replacing the empirical study of ‘outer nature’ with the – equally empirical – study of inner nature. FCR, in short, became a scientific practice of ‘detecting’ women's feelings and experiences, in order to arrive at truer ‘generalisations’ than books and reading could provide.

In 1968, Sarachild was still hailing feelings as the subjective force that could drive a feminist revolution: ‘let's let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us’ (1970: 78). By 1973, feelings had become the object that FCR sought to study. What had started off as an informal practice of women who met in living rooms to talk about marriage, childhood and sexuality was by then well on its way to becoming a formalised methodology, not only for organising counter-hegemonic political action but also for application in group therapy and self-help contexts (see: Ruck, 2015).

In this move towards scientific formalisation, proponents of FCR drew inspiration from other revolutionary movements, such as the Black Power movement and the Communist Revolution in China. The pamphlet based on Sarachild's 1973 speech includes, for example, the following quote from Mao Zedong's 1937 work ‘On Practice’: ‘All knowledge originates in perception of the objective external world through man's physical sense organs. Anyone who denies such perception, denies direct experience, or denies personal participation in the practice that changes reality, is not a materialist’ (Cited in Sarachild, 1979: 146). For Mao, denying knowledge derived from perception of the ‘objective external world’ is as epistemically suspect as denying ‘direct experience’. His claim, therefore, is that introspection stands on the same epistemic ground as ‘perception of the objective external world’ – a detectivist idea which could buttress FCR's ambition to being both a radical feminist practice and a scientific method. If knowledge gained by introspection is comparable to knowledge gained through ‘perception of the objective external world’, then FCR suddenly appeared less like an esoteric activity and more like a variety of normal, everyday perception – empiricism turned inwards.

Yet this move towards detectivism comes at the cost of self-reification. Consider another quote that Sarachild includes as one of the major influences on FCR, an excerpt from Ernestine Rose's 1980 History of Woman Suffrage: ‘We had to adopt the method that physicians sometimes use, when they are called to a patient who is so hopelessly sick that he is unconscious of his pain and suffering. We had to describe to women their own position, to explain to them the burdens that rested so heavily on them …’ (Cited in Sarachild, 1979: 146). Here we are again in the territory of ‘unconscious pain’: pain that is there but not felt. ⁶ What has started out as an activist practice centred on feelings becomes in this moment a scientific methodology based on what can be inferred about women's feelings from their oppressed position. The goals and methods of FCR can thus be rendered in a MacKinnonite register, whereby it does not matter whether the feelings ascribed to women are actually felt by them.

With FCR's growing success and popularity, Sarachild's initial temporality of feelings→ideas→action is reversed to become action→ideas→feelings: women need to have the kinds of feelings that feminist insights and action require. The rationale underpinning this reversal is what Chandra Mohanty has called ‘the feminist osmosis thesis’: the idea that ‘females are feminists by association and identification with the experiences which constitute us as female’ (1998: 257). In Sarachild's 1973 speech, feminist osmosis looks as follows: ‘We felt that all women should have to see the fight of women as their own, not as something just to help “other women”, that they would have to see this truth about their own lives before they would fight in a radical way for anyone’ (1979: 145). How women experience their own life is here not the starting point of FCR, but a destination that can be reverse engineered from whatever is necessary for individual women ‘to see the fight of [all] women as their own’.

Detectivism has haunted FCR from its very beginnings. The detectivist idea that we come to know our internal states in the same way that we detect objects in external reality allowed feminists to defend their political focus on subjective experience as being as respectable as the empirical study of external reality. But the more they did this, the more they also risked losing sight of the uniqueness of first-person authority – the very idea that brought FCR into being. Indeed, as Sarachild insisted in 1968, the reason that women's feelings are so valuable to feminism is that women can trust their own feelings much more than they could ever trust their perception of an external reality distorted by patriarchal ideology: ‘We’re saying that women have all along been generally in touch with their feelings … and that their being in touch with their feelings has been their greatest strength’ (1970: 78).

Finkelstein (2003: 21) offers a helpful example to explain why ‘being in touch with your own feelings’ is not the same as being in touch with someone else's feelings, or being in touch with current world events. Imagine a situation in which I tell you that a mutual friend of ours, named Ruth, is angry at her uncle. You might simply choose to accept this claim because you know that Ruth and I have discussed her relationship with her uncle at some length. But I wouldn’t think that you were being unreasonable if you asked me to give reasons for the claim I am making about Ruth's feelings. In response, I might say that she told me last weekend that she no longer speaks to her uncle, or that I saw them have a heated argument.

Now imagine the same example, but with me being the Ruth in question. If I told you that I was angry with my uncle, it would not only seem strange if you asked me to give evidence for this assertion; I wouldn’t be able to provide any ‘evidence’ at all. Instead, I might respond something like: ‘What do you mean? I’m just angry at him’. Crucially, asking someone to give evidence for the assertion that they are angry is different from asking them to explain why they are angry: in the latter case, I could tell you about all the times that my uncle displayed behaviour which annoyed me; in the former, I would expect you to simply take it as given that I am angry if I tell you that this is the case. From this example, Finkelstein draws the following conclusion in favour of first-person authority and against detectivism: ‘There's an asymmetry between speaking about someone else's anger and speaking about one's own. I am able to ascribe mental states to myself responsibly without being able to cite evidence in support of the ascriptions. This is a central feature of first-person authority’ (2003: 21).

Following Finkelstein's example, FCR would never have become the success that it was if the individual women who came to the sessions had been asked to give evidence for the assertions they were making about their own feelings and experiences. Indeed, FCR's greatest achievement was arguably to make the case that a group based on articulating and sharing women's feelings had a different relationship to justification than, say, a feminist reading group. Unlike the things that could be learned from books, or from observing the behaviour of men, feelings were unique in that individual women did not have to justify that they had these feelings. Instead, taking these feelings as existing just insofar as they were felt, feminists were able to seek social and political explanations for why women felt the way that they did: ‘We assume that our feelings are something from which we can learn … that our feelings mean something worth analyzing …’ (Sarachild, 1970: 78). Women, the thought was, have good reasons to have the (bad) feelings they do, and by analysing and making explicit these (implicit) reasons, we can better understand women's social and political situation.

As much as detectivist rhetoric allowed feminists to defend the focus on first-person knowledge as a substitute for – ideologically suspect – third-person knowledge, it also foreclosed the radical political horizon that FCR initially opened up in appealing to the special status of first-person authority. In the previous section, we saw that modelling our relationship to our inner states on the relationship we have with external objects comes at a significant cost. In order to demystify introspection as a variety of ordinary perception, we have to give up on the special status of first-person authority, effectively reducing the complex psychic and existential relationship that we have with ourselves to a kind of ‘knowledge’ that is as fallible as our knowledge of external reality. The broad success that feminists achieved for FCR thus required them, paradoxically, to accept women's fallibility about their subjective experience – undermining the unique status of first-person authority which galvanised FCR in the first place.

By the time that MacKinnon wrote her 1987 book Feminism Unmodified, the fallibility of introspection had become firmly entrenched in the feminist modus operandi. Since women can be wrong about their subjective experience, feminism can no longer rely on ‘feelings’ but must instead search for more objective, tangible truths. It must focus not on women's feelings about men but on the indisputable reality of what men do to women. So, when MacKinnon asks, ‘what is it about women's experience that produces a distinctive experience on reality?’ (1989: 315), the answer is not that women's subjective experiences generate their own objective explanations, but that women's subjective experience is confirmed by relevant objective evidence: ‘Recent feminist work, both interpretive and empirical – on rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, prostitution and pornography’ supports the feminist insight that ‘[m]ale dominance is sexual’ (1989: 315). Once the uniqueness of first-person authority falls away and introspection becomes as fallible as ordinary perception, feminism must once again scramble for putatively more reliable sources than the experiences and feelings of the subjects it claims to liberate.

The trajectory I have sketched so far, from FCR to a MacKinnonite detectivism, is neither necessary nor inevitable. In the following section, I discuss contemporary feminist debates on the sexual politics of pain, and suggest that there is a way to acknowledge that the feelings and experiences of oppressed groups are ideologically distorted without thereby resorting to a detectivist view of subjectivity. Our experience of pain, I argue, is socially, politically and historically constituted, but this is not the same as saying that we can be wrong about being in pain. What a radical political practice like consciousness-raising allows us to do is not to ‘detect’ pain within ourselves but to bring into existence new, collective articulations of pain that will change how we come to experience our pain in the first place. ⁷

Feminism and the question of pain

The quote by Ernestine Rose that Sarachild has identified as an important influence on FCR compares the feminist's task to that of a doctor: ‘We had to adopt the method that physicians sometimes use, when they are called to a patient who is so hopelessly sick that he is unconscious of his pain and suffering. We had to describe to women their own position, to explain to them the burdens that rested so heavily on them …’ (Cited in Sarachild, 1979: 146; emphasis mine). In what follows, I show how this idea of ‘unconscious pain’ appears in contemporary feminist debates on the politics of sex. Contrary to a detectivist view of subjectivity, whereby we might be unaware of pain that we are nevertheless in, I argue that that there is no such thing as unconscious pain.

Crucially, in so doing, I am not ruling out the role of the unconscious in shaping our psychic and political lives, always thwarting our attempts to proclaim the full transparency and knowability of the self. Rather, I am defending a view of subjectivity loosely inspired by Jonathan Lear's (1990) revised Freudianism, whereby emotions are not static entities that we may ‘detect’ within ourselves, but dynamic structures which transform in accordance with the dynamic movement that constitutes our subjective life. As a psychoanalyst, Lear is committed to an idea of the subject which both privileges first-person authority in its therapeutic and philosophical orientation, and also recognises that the self never fully understands itself. The goal of psychoanalysis, as he conceptualises it, is not to gain greater ‘knowledge’ of ourselves, but to bring unconscious emotional content into conscious awareness – to develop an ‘underdeveloped’ emotion into a fully developed one. ⁸ As we come to feel an emotion that we were not previously able to feel, the emotion is ontologically transformed in the process. This counters a detectivist, reified view of subjectivity which assumes that we detect within ourselves what is already there. Instead, the very act of articulating and reflecting on our feelings, both individually and as part of collective processes of self-discovery such as FCR, brings into being feelings which did not exist before.

That contemporary feminists have held onto detectivist assumptions about subjectivity is somewhat counter-intuitive, given the now widespread feminist consensus that assuming women's ‘false consciousness’ is problematic and harmful. Broadly speaking, if someone says that they enjoy being hurt by their partner, or wearing high heels to work, then feminists should trust that this is so. According to Amia Srinivasan, there are good epistemic and political reasons for this trust. On the one hand, a ‘woman's saying something about her own experience gives us strong, though perhaps not indefeasible, reason to think it true’ (Srinivasan, 2021: 82). More importantly, a feminist politics that mistrusts the stated desires and motivations of oppressed groups ‘is a feminism that risks dominating the subjects it presumes to liberate’ (Srinivasan, 2021: 82). Taking these reasons to heart, contemporary feminists are mostly cautious not to moralise about women's sexual choices. In this, they are indebted to Ellen Willis and her 1981 essay ‘Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?’, which is widely considered to have inaugurated ‘sex-positive’ feminism. Willis exposed what she took to be the puritanical assumptions that ran through much of anti-sex feminism. To assume that women would happily accept ‘a spurious moral superiority [over men] as a substitute for sexual pleasure’ (2012: 6), she argued, is to perpetuate the ‘neo-Victorian’ idea that women put up with sex more than they actually want it for themselves.

As much as Willis critiqued puritanical tendencies within the feminist movement, she also distanced herself from sexual libertarianism: ‘If self-proclaimed arbiters of feminist morals stifle honest discussion with their dogmatic, guilt-mongering judgments, sexual libertarians often evade honest discussion by refusing to make judgments at all’ (2012: 12). She wanted to caution against moralistic attitudes towards sexual desire without thereby fetishizing sexual desire as a wholly private domain beyond moral or political scrutiny. As Judith Butler put it in an early essay on the politics of kink: ‘to conceive of desire as a law unto itself, “impeccably honest”, and the key to destroying repressive sexual orders, is to exaggerate the autonomy and intelligence of desire. Our desires can only be as sure and free as we are’ (1982: 173). For both Willis and Butler, desire cannot be reduced to either sexual politics or individual psyches; it is neither fully determined by power relations nor simply a question of ‘arbitrary tastes’ (Willis, 2012: 12).

Willis’ ‘Lust Horizons’ was published one year before the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, ‘Between Pleasure and Danger’, which for many marked the beginning of the feminist ‘sex-wars’. In her introduction to the essay collection that came out of the conference, Carole Vance echoed Willis in her insistence on a dialectical understanding of heterosexual ⁹ women's sexuality under patriarchy:

The tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure is a powerful one in women's lives. Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency. To focus only on pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women's experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live (Vance, 1985: 1).

In emphasising the irreducible tension that exists in women's sexual lives, between possibilities for pleasure on the one hand and negotiations of danger on the other, Willis and Vance's articulations of sex-positivity clearly set themselves apart from a liberal sexual politics coordinated solely around consent. For them, the tension between ‘pleasure and danger’ remains in excess of whatever ‘choice’ a woman makes; it does not disappear just because she has given her consent. This makes Willis’ and Vance's work appealing for contemporary feminists who are increasingly frustrated with the chasm between the sexual pleasures promised by liberal sex-positive feminism on the one hand, and the persistence of sexual dangers on the other. For these feminists, #MeToo was an important turning point in feminist debates on sex because it managed to bring ‘sexual danger’ back on the feminist agenda at a time when sex-positive feminism seemed to have abandoned the dialectic of pleasure and danger in favour of a clear – because undialectical – commitment to ‘women's right to sexual pleasure and consent as the only boundary of permissible sex’ (Srinivasan, 2021: 36).

Katherine Angel, in her recent book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, suggests that dilemmas of pleasure and danger are alive and well in heterosexual women's lives – decades of feminist insistence on ‘sexual assertiveness and sex-positivity’ (2021: 34) notwithstanding. Commenting on a porn video shot by porn star James Deen and a female fan, she writes: ‘I don’t know Girl X's story. But in the film, I see the painful – and familiar – experience of being pulled in different directions; of having to balance desire with risk; of having to pay attention to so much in the pursuit of pleasure’ (Angel, 2021: 5). Contemporary ‘consent culture’, she argues, cannot do justice to the ambivalence of women's desires as they emerge from an ongoing negotiation of risk and pleasure; affirmative consent requires that we know what we want and are able to clearly express our desires. This is at odds with the psychoanalytic view of the subject that much of Angel's work is indebted to – a view committed to the opacity and unknowability of the subject, to itself and to others.

Moreover, Angel goes on to say, the narrow focus on the presence or absence of consent has often meant turning a blind eye to the fact that ‘much sex that is consented to, even affirmatively consented to, is bad: miserable, unpleasant, humiliating, one-sided, painful’ (Angel, 2021: 27; emphasis mine). This, she writes, is well-documented by studies showing ‘a significant gap in sexual pleasure and satisfaction for men and women; women suffer disproportionately from sexual difficulties, pain and anxiety’ (Angel, 2021: 25; emphasis mine). She cites research by sex educator Debby Herbenick, who said in a 2018 interview that ‘when women speak of “good sex”, they tend to mean an absence of pain, while men mean reaching orgasm’ (Herbenick, cited in Angel, 2021: 25).

For a sex-positive feminism coordinated solely around liberal consent, the question of pain and pleasure is relatively straightforward: pain is not intrinsically ‘bad’; it can even be ‘good’ when it has been consented to. This idea has been important in ensuring, for example, greater social and political acceptance for the BDSM community. Yet the liberal, consent-driven approach also seems worryingly uninterested in the politics of pain. It assumes that subjects have a pre-configured desire for pain that can then serve as a transparent basis for their sexual choices. How and under what conditions this desire emerges is less important than respecting the fact that people already have this desire and want to act upon it.

Dissatisfied with the sex-positive discourse on pain, some contemporary ‘sex-critical’ feminists have therefore renewed MacKinnonite arguments that far from actively desiring it, women are often expected to simply accept pain. To emphasise, for example, women's masochistic enjoyment of pain and impact play in BDSM encounters, they would argue, is to foreclose political critiques of the ways in which masochism is already gendered as ‘feminine’ and ‘female’. ¹⁰ For MacKinnon, the idea that women are ‘naturally’ masochistic serves not only to obscure the violence perpetuated under the guise of ‘consensual’ BDSM encounters; it also normalises pain as something that women must simply endure as part of ‘vanilla’ heterosexual sex.

Despite being fiercely ‘sex-negative’, MacKinnon's arguments about pain have been taken up in modified form by contemporary feminists writing in the post-#MeToo moment. For Lili Loofborouw (2018), for example, pointing out that straight women are more likely to experience painful sex than straight men has become a convenient way to move the conversation away from the liberal-legalistic framework of consent, towards the quality of everyday, consensual heterosexual sex:

Research shows that 30 percent of women report pain during vaginal sex, 72 percent report pain during anal sex, and ‘large proportions’ don’t tell their partners when sex hurts … I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies’ pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.

Although Loofborouw, Herbenick and Angel are not ‘sex-negative’, they share the MacKinnonite insight that it is impossible to neatly cordon off sexual violence as a ‘deviation’ from normal, everyday heterosexual sex. They also share with MacKinnon a tendency to use women's pain as the marker of this impossibility: women's pain is the excess of gendered oppression to be found even in consensual sex. This excess is obscured by the liberal fantasy of consent as a great equaliser on the one hand, and by the ideologically driven suppression of women's ability to recognise and express their pain on the other. Since women have been socially conditioned to ignore their bodies’ ‘pain signals’, the fact that they are not picking up on these ‘signals’ does not mean that there is no pain. Pain can exist regardless of whether it is consciously felt by the person in pain: she can be in pain even when she is not aware of it – she can be in ‘unconscious pain’.

For MacKinnon, women's manifest inability to feel pain when she thinks that they should points to something more sinister than mere ‘conditioning’. She claims that repeated exposure to patriarchal violence has damaged women's pain responses to such an extent that they no longer feel pain, even though they actually are in pain: ‘Women often begin alienating themselves from their body's self-preserving reactions under conditions under which they cannot stop the pain from being inflicted’ (MacKinnon, 1989: 338). Despite differing in their explanations of why women have a distorted relationship to pain, MacKinnon's claim chimes with Loofborouw's (2018) worry about women's inability to properly ‘attend to their bodies’ pain signals’. In both formulations, the claim about the political significance of women's hidden pain is sustained by implicitly appealing to a theory of pain in which the subject is not required to feel pain in order for her to be in pain. Moreover, the claim that women suffer from a misalignment between feeling and being in pain is the basis for a prescriptive claim that feminism must help women align their subjective experience of pain with the pain they are already presumed to be in.

Propelled by the notion that women are in ‘unconscious pain’, this narrative of alignment presupposes a ‘detectivist’ theory of subjectivity: women must learn, or re-learn, to ‘detect’ the pain that is already inside them, but of which they have, through patriarchal conditioning and/or violence, become unaware. Yet detectivism is an inadequate and ultimately self-defeating response to the liberal depoliticisation of women's pain. It renders pain as a reified object which exists regardless of being felt by the subject-in-pain. Reifying pain in this way ultimately undermines a critical feminist politics of pain, politicising marginalised pain only at the cost of falsifying the subjective nature of pain itself.

As we saw earlier, the more feminists work with a reified conception of internal life, the more ‘women's experience’ becomes detached – and detachable – from the very subject in whom this experience is supposed to originate. The more women's experience is taken out of the unique orbit of first-person authority and rendered as a reified object that we can either be right or wrong about perceiving within ourselves, the more epistemically unreliable this experience becomes. A feminism that reifies marginalised pain, therefore, renders this pain politically impotent in the very moment in which it claims to politicise it.

Crucially, rejecting a ‘new’ detectivist conception of subjectivity whereby the subject can be wrong about her own experience does not require us to revert back to the ‘old’ detectivist position, whereby the subject is taken to have fully transparent – infallible – knowledge of herself. To illustrate this, consider a modified version of Finkelstein's Ruth example. Ruth could have had an instance of what Angel calls ‘bad sex’ and not realise this until a friend asks her if the experience in question was painful for her. However, even if Ruth says yes, it does not follow that she was therefore already in pain prior to this realisation. Rather, the realisation brought into being a pain that could not exist as long as Ruth was unable to articulate it as pain – an experience or sensation only becomes pain in the moment in which there is a subject-in-pain.

This reading of Finkelstein's example allows us to conclude that feminist practices of collective self-discovery and consciousness-raising should not be understood through a MacKinnonite lens of detectivist alignment, but instead as a process of creating new feelings. We do not need to resort to the idea of ‘unconscious pain’ to make sense of the subjective transformations that FCR produced: FCR is not about discovering feelings that already exist inside us, but about feeling and articulating feelings that weren’t able to exist inside us before we articulated them.

While the detectivist version of FCR demystifies subjective life at the cost of self-reification, I have argued in this article for a non-detectivist view of human subjectivity, inspired by Lear's psychoanalytic conception of human emotions. This view allows us to situate the radical political potential of FCR in a dynamic view of the subject, whereby a change in the subject's relationship to her emotions ontologically transforms these emotions themselves. For a critical feminist politics of pain, this means that we do not need to posit a gap between being in pain and feeling pain in order to make sense of the political value of feminist mobilisations around pain. Articulating marginalised pain is not about ‘detecting’ pain that is already there; it is, more radically, about bringing pain into existence precisely by feeling it.