2.1. What is consciousness-raising

Consciousness-raising as a method for developing epistemically well-founded claims about women’s oppression arose from a range of women’s discussion groups in the 1970s. By 1973, it is estimated that over 100 000 women participated in consciousness-raising groups in the U.S. alone, and many such groups had also arisen overseas (Sharpe et al. Reference Sharpe, Ginsburg and Gordon2017; Shreve Reference Shreve1989). At the time, sexism and gendered oppression were not well known or understood phenomena. Instead, women were generally seen as inherently submissive, weak, irrational, emotional, and caring, and therefore best suited for domestic labour and submission to a male head of household. Individual women would often take it as a personal failure if they struggled to conform to these expectations. As summarised in a set of consciousness-raising guidelines from 1975:

In short, the epistemic barriers to understanding the extent and nature of women’s oppression were high. Consciousness-raising groups, then, are credited with overcoming these barriers, exposing how gender norms and social practices do not map on to an inherently natural or necessary set of gender norms and relations, but instead function as harmful and oppressive tools for patriarchal control.

All consciousness-raising groups sought to fulfil two essential functions, which built on each other: first and foremost, the group should be a space where women could openly share their experiences without fear of judgement. The aim was for women to feel free to voice frustrations or grievances that would otherwise be dismissed as petty or irrational, even by the woman herself, as it was these experiences that most closely tracked the unrecognised and socially accepted mechanisms of gendered oppression (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 89). The second function of the consciousness-raising group was to cohere the testimonies of individual women once everyone had had a chance to share openly and freely. The group members would compare and contrast experiences, with the aim of understanding them in a wider context of women’s experiences. If a certain type of upsetting experience were recognisable by several group members, this would give a basis for thinking that there might be structural causes behind it; it could not simply be dismissed as a consequence of individual circumstances.

Beyond this, it varied from group to group how consciousness-raising was practised. For instance, the number of members would vary, or whether members were from different or similar social backgrounds. Topics, meeting rules, attendance requirements, meeting frequency, and whether someone chaired the discussion would also vary. Further, some groups spent a lot of time on social bonding and mutual support outside the official meetings, while others clearly separated their daily lives from the group itself. However, although individual groups varied both in constitution and method, they did their utmost to facilitate these two functions for that specific individual group in whatever way the group found worked best for them. The functions, seen together, turned out to be deeply epistemically and politically potent; by looking at easily dismissed personal experiences and reactions in context, the hidden mechanisms of gender oppression, as well as their systematic effects on women, were revealed.

Marilyn Zweig provides a description of what consciousness-raising typically looked like in her Gainesville W.L. group:

Consciousness-raising groups were radically different from normal political educational groups. The focus of the groups was not grounded in discussions about politics or shaped by explicit political aims; instead, they provided a space where women could share and compare experiences openly and freely and without fear of reproach. This is not to say that early consciousness-raising groups were formed by politically unaware women. Consciousness-raising was allegedly first practiced by a group of women in New York who already considered themselves politically radical. These women had the explicit aim to create a mass movement to end sex discrimination (Sarachild Reference Sarachild1975, 144). However, the group itself acknowledged that they themselves had a poor understanding of what women’s oppression consisted in. As retold by Alice Echols:

However, this narrative must be tempered. The radical heritage of consciousness-raising has been strongly emphasised by Sarachild in her 1975 text on consciousness-raising, at a time when the political direction of the feminist movement was subject to major power struggles between radical, liberal, and cultural feminists (Echols Reference Echols2019, 199). Moreover, Susan Brownmiller argues that consciousness-raising groups

Catharine MacKinnon further argued that consciousness-raising was not confined to groups explicitly organised for that purpose and that they seemed to have sprung up spontaneously through friendship networks, colleges, and universities, women’s centres, neighbourhoods, churches and workplaces (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 84). According to her,

Either way, whether women joined because they were already politically radical and explicitly sought to fight women’s oppression or whether they joined more spontaneously and with little express purpose, the key point is that consciousness-raising groups were radically different from standard political educational groups in two significant ways; first, most women joining consciousness-raising groups only had a vague sense that they were being oppressed and only discovered through group participation that many things they had internalised as personal failings turned out to be systemic issues facing women. Second, they did not study literature that they used as the basis for analysis of their specific struggle for emancipation. They recognised that most existing political and theoretical literature out there was written through a male lens and did not shed light on women’s oppression. They therefore looked primarily to their own lived experience for clues to understand the actual mechanisms of patriarchal oppression.

2.2. Consciousness-raising as an epistemological method

In what follows, I rely on a large range of evidence about consciousness-raising as it was practised within the second wave feminist movement to identify tried-and-tested best-practice principles. This allows me to theorise past the fact that individual consciousness-raising groups could be wildly different, both in terms of memberships, topics discussed, and ways in which the discussions were moderated.Footnote ³ I show how following these principles constitutes a reliable epistemic practice that allows us to access standpoint-specific knowledge about injustices that are otherwise shrouded in layers of ideological distortions, both for victims and non-victims. It is important to note that while not all consciousness-raising groups followed all these principles, it seems that these are all principles that ensure epistemic rigour, and the more of them that are followed, the better, from an epistemic perspective.

The first principle of consciousness-raising is to examine experiences and reactions and let them speak for themselves without further comment or analysis. By focusing on communicating how experiences were felt, rather than immediate interpretations of them, consciousness-raising can provide an entry point into understanding these experiences, their causes and implications, beyond the prevailing stereotypes, norms, and social scripts. For instance, in a sexist society, women appear submissive, as they usually have little option but to conform to the gender roles that are imposed on them. By virtue of this behaviour, it is taken for granted that women are inherently submissive and that insubmissive women are defective as women. However, women may experience their submissiveness as strangling, rather than as a natural expression of who they are (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 86). Thus, it is only from investigating what it is like to be a woman in a certain society that allows for a tension to be revealed between the way things appear to us and whether this is how they inherently must and should be.

Secondly, the consciousness-raising process actively aims to focus on negative experiences that are usually overlooked or dismissed, or experiences for which there is not an adequate conceptual framework through which to make sense of them. MacKinnon describes how, in second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups, ‘[e]xtensive attention was paid to small situations and denigrated pursuits that made up the common life of women in terms of energy, time, intensity, and definition – prominently, housework and sexuality’ (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 87). By taking these kinds of experiences of upset or discomfort seriously and as a potential wrong, this makes it possible to investigate what social dynamics that we accepted without question and to ask whether this blind acceptance in fact plays a part in obscuring injustices and oppression (Ibid, 121).

The third principle is that the group must be of a character where free and vulnerable testimony can be given. Thus, the group must work to be a space where the individual members are comfortable disclosing things about themselves that they have not previously talked about. This is why it is essential for the group itself to be self-reflective about its internal dynamics and whether all members feel able to participate on equal footing. The 1975 consciousness-raising guidelines therefore suggested a variety of ways in which meetings could be moderated in order to ensure equal participation without forcing anyone to speak when they were not ready (Sharpe et al. Reference Sharpe, Ginsburg and Gordon2017). Consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s were therefore also usually selective about how many members they let in and how they fit within the overall group. Men were, of course, excluded. This helped women free themselves from their social conditioning to compete for male attention and approval, to be passive, to get intimidated, or to support men’s version of reality (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 86). Moreover, spending significant time and energy building trust within the group is essential to ensure equal and honest participation and to counteract differences in personality and social power. This is often a major challenge. Pamela Allen observed:

Intentional and ongoing efforts are therefore required to create the right group dynamic, both in terms of who is let into the group and how the members get to know each other, relate, and talk.

Fourth, although experiences are taken seriously, non-judgementally, and as a starting point for consciousness-raising, the group cannot simply assume that the experience itself yields knowledge about the world. Experiences, our reactions to them, and our interpretations of them, are all shaped by larger social forces, such as social conditioning and mainstream social narratives. This explains, for instance, how a woman might blame herself for being raped and either downplay the experience to herself or be deeply shameful about it. These are reactions that fit a larger misogynist and rape-apologist culture and which prevent women from seeking justice. The consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s were interested in both understanding the extent to which women had experiences, such as being sexually violated, and how women tended to react to these experiences. This way, they learnt that while rape is often perceived as a deviant crime that a sufficiently alert woman should be able to avoid, it is actually a horrifyingly common experience across all ages, races, and social classes (Brownmiller Reference Brownmiller1999, 197–200). Moreover, they better understood the social mechanisms that prevented women from seeking justice. What they did not want to do, however, was agree with the conclusion from the individual testimony ‘I was raped, and it was my fault’.

Thus, once all individual testimonies have been given without comments or judgements, the fifth principle requires the use of the collated testimonies as the starting point for a rigorous and critical empirical and conceptual investigation that aims to uncover the following:

1. 1. Whether the experience constitutes a potential phenomenon in its own right, by virtue of being shared by many members of the consciousness-raising group.

2. 2. Whether the phenomenon itself and/or its consequences track genuine harm done to members of that group.

3. 3. Whether this harm is caused by unnecessary or arbitrary power imbalances between social groups.Footnote ⁴

4. 4. The discussion group itself biased in some way? Is there, for instance, a hierarchy within the group that weighs the importance of certain things and not others? Are there some voices that are taken more seriously than others?

This rigorous investigation is then used as the basis for developing a conceptual framework that adequately expresses what the phenomenon in question consists of, making it communicable and thus possible to politically contest. For instance, sexism itself was coined as a concept through this kind of consciousness-raising process, as were concepts like sexual harassment and marital rape (Shreve Reference Shreve1989, 14).

A final, and crucial, principle of epistemic rigour is that consciousness-raising groups need to acknowledge that the process is not fully completed just because each principle outlined above has been met. Pamela Allen stresses how each builds on the other, and not necessarily chronologically. It is therefore worthwhile checking and re-checking whether the analysis actually reflects the experiences under discussion and whether the experiences under discussion have been communicated in the way intended by the testifiers. Consciousness-raising is never a perfect or completed process; it is ongoing, and the members need to be aware of this in order to display the appropriate levels of self-scrutiny (Allen Reference Allen1970, 39). Biases can enter at all levels of discussion, and all levels of discussion influence the other levels. In short, I take it that in following all these principles of best practice while staying self-reflective and self-critical, consciousness-raising makes it possible to unearth and recognise knowledge about injustice and oppression that we would otherwise be conditioned to ignore or lack the hermeneutic framework to express. Anecdotally, this is what seemed to happen when consciousness was employed as a tool for second-wave feminists.

3.1. The objection

Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in Reference Crenshaw1991, is the idea that social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. For instance, women of colour experience sexism differently from white women, and they also experience racism as different from men of colour. This is because racism and sexism interplay in various and unpredictable ways for any individual instance of discrimination (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, 1244). As an example of this, the rape of Black women in the US is treated much less seriously within the media and in the courts, as they face the racist stereotype of always being sexually available. In contrast, there is much sexist cultural paranoia about protecting white women’s sexual purity (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, 1268–75). In short, a failure to understand intersectionality leads to a blindness to the kinds of injustices that exist and the variety of ways in which they play out and compound each other.

Second-wave feminism and consciousness-raising as a method have been under fire for failing to take an intersectional perspective in their analysis of gender (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Brownmiller Reference Brownmiller1999). Indeed, many second-wave feminists could be accused of outright racist behaviour and attitudes. For instance, they often failed to communicate with non-white activists, as they were not deemed to have the right feminist credentials according to the standards of white feminists (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, 1262). Moreover, Angela Davis shows how many second-wave feminists in the anti-rape movement invoked the racist myth of the Black rapist (Davis Reference Davis1983). Further, downplaying the importance of race and class mattered strategically to radical feminists who sought to challenge the left’s penchant for privileging class and race over gender (Echols Reference Echols2019, 10). This also had the effect that the integral role of race and class in understanding gendered oppression was downplayed, misunderstood, or overlooked.

Moreover, it is a fact that most consciousness-raising groups consisted of white, middle-class women. One explanation for this is that this demographic often was excluded from the workforce, and usually took on the role of housewife once married. They therefore often had some time on their hands during the day, and some relative freedom in terms of how their time was spent. It was therefore easier for them to regularly attend consciousness-raising groups. Women of colour, working-class women, and immigrant women rarely had the time to participate, however, as they were part of the workforce, and often had to work several jobs to make ends meet in addition to taking care of their families. Moreover, being more vulnerable, they were often less comfortable sharing intimate details about their lives, especially to women of a dominant race or social class (Breines Reference Breines2006, 94).

In addition to the circumstantial barriers, there was an implicit incentive intrinsic to the consciousness-raising group of only considering one’s own experiences in the context of women who were of a similar background. This is because a socially homogenous group made it easier to foster a flat group hierarchy, and it made it easier to spot group-wide patterns than if the group members’ experiences were complicated by other factors, such as race and class. Winifred Breines attributes the success of early consciousness-raising to the fact that it was based on the participation of like-minded women who were all college-educated, white, and middle class. In addition to shared histories, their common culture facilitated closeness, mutual understanding, and common cause (Breines Reference Breines2006, 94). Further, the focus on spotting commonalities within the group could also mean that crucial points of difference between the members might be played down. This tendency was reinforced by the intention of establishing a common cause within the women’s movement (Echols Reference Echols2019, 89–90).

Thus, not only were most second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups broadly internally homogenous, but they also downplayed the importance of race and class and focused their attention on the commonalities that could be found between members. Moreover, the majority of groups consisted of the same demographic of college-educated white and middle-class women. For all of these reasons, insights about intersectional discrimination are claimed to be lost on consciousness-raising groups, perpetuating the harm done to those standing at the intersections of a range of different kinds of oppression. No wonder, then, that consciousness-raising is treated with suspicion by anyone with intersectional commitments.

3.2. Reply to the intersectionality objection

It is certainly legitimate to critique many strands of second-wave feminism for promoting racist ideas, for failing to recognise the intersectional dimensions of sexism, for advancing an overwhelmingly white feminist agenda, and even for spouting racist ideas. However, in what follows, I show that the racism and the white middle-class focus of the second wave women’s movement cannot be primarily attributed to the consciousness-raising process.Footnote ⁵ In so doing, I show that the criticism of consciousness-raising as incompatible with an intersectional understanding of oppression is an oversimplification of consciousness-raising, both as it happened historically, and as in its idealised form. Further, I show that although many consciousness-raising groups during second-wave feminism failed to understand and incorporate intersectional insights, intersectionality and consciousness-raising are not inherently incompatible projects. Indeed, intersectionally sensitive consciousness-raising is both possible and desirable.

Although second-wave feminism suffered from racist and white middle-class biases, it is far from clear that consciousness-raising itself prevented an intersectional understanding of women’s oppression. Indeed, consciousness-raising was not only recommended to women of colour (Sharpe et al. Reference Sharpe, Ginsburg and Gordon2017); it was also used as a tool to understand their specific oppression at the intersections of sexism and racism (Roth Reference Roth2003, 91). This is exactly what the Combahee River Collective did. The Combahee River Collective was a group of mostly queer Black women who had been active in the civil rights movement and within the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s but felt that both were failing to adequately represent them. They observed: ‘there was no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening’ (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 17). Through a process of consciousness-raising, they explored the cultural and political dimensions of their experience and developed new terms and concepts.

The group identified many distinctive ways in which women of colour are discriminated against, neither of which were recognised by the civil rights movement nor the feminist movement at the time. The civil rights movement tended to see the struggle of Black women as identical to the struggles of Black men; the feminist movement often failed to ignore the ways in which race complicated the ways in which sexism plays out for women of colour. For instance, the collective discovered that since they were all considered smart, they had also been considered ugly, as a way for Black men within the civil rights movement to disregard their opinions, needs, and demands should be attended to. The group thereby coined the term ‘smart-ugly’. This term expressed the ways in which Black women were forced to develop their intellects at great cost to their social lives (Combahee River Collective 1977/2014). As a result of these kinds of analyses, it has been argued that the Combahee River Collective, through consciousness-raising, developed an understanding of intersectionality prior to this becoming a mainstream academic term for conceptualising the ways in which different and multiple forms of oppression may combine to produce a novel type of oppression (Taylor Reference Taylor2017).

Thus, from a historical perspective, the lack of intersectional insight within the second wave feminist movement cannot simply be attributed to the consciousness-raising process; indeed, consciousness-raising was in some cases used as a tool to arrive at intersectional insights (though this was a rare occurrence). As a result, consciousness-raising and intersectionality do not obviously appear incompatible when digging deeper into the history of the second-wave feminist movement. This conclusion can be further strengthened by a closer look at the mechanisms of consciousness-raising itself. The key conceptual concern with consciousness-raising as a tool for intersectional analysis is that there are perceived epistemic benefits to groups being socially homogenous and that consciousness-raising encourages groups to identify commonalities over differences. This homogeneity has stated epistemic benefits in both encouraging openness within the group, and making it easier to spot patterns within the members’ experiences. However, in what follows, I show that there is no reason why consciousness-raising groups necessarily need to be homogenous or that they have to trade off the potential epistemic benefit of internal homogeneity for intersectional insights.

First of all, part of the problem of homogeneity for the second-wave feminist movement was not that the groups themselves were internally homogenous, but that most consciousness-raising groups consisted of largely the same kinds of white middle-class women. Thus, the focus was only on one kind of oppression, rather than on intersecting kinds. However, there is nothing inherent to the consciousness-raising process that prevents the consciousness-raising of more fine-grained subgroups that experience layers of intersectional oppression and for there to be a larger diversity of consciousness-raising groups in general. This is indeed the lesson from the Combahee River Collective. It showed that through internally homogenous groups differently constituted from the mainstream, it was possible to arrive at intersectional insights. Thus, while it was necessary for white women to separate from men in consciousness-raising, it was also necessary for Black women to separate from white women if they were to do consciousness-raising well and on their own terms (Roth Reference Roth2003, 147). It was easier to foster intimacy and productive group dynamics and to arrive at a shared understanding of previously unspoken phenomena when the members’ experiences were not worlds apart. Thus, intersectionally minded groups also benefitted from some level of internal homogeneity.

Second, it was nowhere stated that a well-functioning consciousness-raising group had to be as socially homogenous as possible; indeed, some groups strove to establish a diversity of perspectives within the group and saw this as more epistemically beneficial than social homogeneity. Moreover, some level of internal homogeneity does not require that differences internal to the group must be downplayed. Indeed, Pamela Allen argues that differences should be explored as much as similarities within the group, as these are also deeply epistemically informative in understanding the scope and mechanisms of the oppression under discussion (Allen Reference Allen1970, 36). It is not epistemically or politically beneficial to conclude that there are commonalities internal to the group where there are none. Indeed, consciousness-raising groups have often been spaces in which strong or determinist group-based identities have been challenged, as group members have been gathered together based on commonly held group stereotypes to which they are all victims and which they together scrutinise and debunk.

It may instead seem that the encouragement to focus on commonalities rather than differences came from outside consciousness-raising groups and had to do with the political strategies of the second-wave feminist movement, rather than being a core principle of consciousness-raising as such. Simply, the key point of consciousness-raising is that it is epistemically valuable to gather people who happen to share experiences of oppression qua perceived membership of the same social groups and away from members of dominant social groups. This allows for both genuine similarities and also significant previously undetected and unacknowledged differences to come to the surface. Sometimes this is best done in a setting where a variety of voices are represented, whereas other times it might be more beneficial to the group to zone in on the shared experiences of a smaller subset of people who need to focus in on the intersectional particularities of their shared experience, as was the case with the Combahee River Collective. Thus, if similarities are arbitrarily emphasised over differences within a group, this must be described as badly conducted consciousness-raising, where achieving political goals, such as establishing a cohesive movement, is given priority over establishing a genuine analysis of oppression.

Third, it has been recommended in several places in the literature on consciousness-raising that once the groups have gotten past the point of sharing and comparing experiences and reached the stage of analysis, it is beneficial to instigate regular cross-group communication (Allen Reference Allen1970, 41). This is another check and balance to counteract the negative epistemic effects of homogenous discussion groups once the epistemic force of similarity has been harnessed. The groups need to develop a robust sense of whether their analysis holds beyond the members of the individual group in question. Exactly how this is best done, however, is an open question. It is not clear that feminist consciousness-raising groups during the second wave were successful in developing a robust system of cross-group communication, and certainly the majority of consciousness-raising groups that cropped up during that time seemed to be similarly constituted. The ideal scenario, however, is for consciousness-raising groups representing a large variety of oppressed and intersecting identities regularly coming together to compare and contrast their understanding of their own oppression.

Thus, at least conceptually speaking, the consciousness-raising process is not incompatible with arriving at intersectional insights both within individual groups and through cross-group communication; indeed, it might facilitate it. The key is to put stopgaps in place to ensure an intersectional perspective, such as consciousness-raising groups based on people’s experience of being members of several oppressed groups, facilitating equal participation, disincentivising a focus on similarities over differences, and inter-group communication at the level of analysis.

4.1. The objection

The men’s rights movement has been around since the 1970s, originally as a branch of the second wave feminist movement that sought to explore the ways in which men are also disadvantaged by being confined to strict gender roles. Indeed, this was done through male-only consciousness-raising groups (Bates Reference Bates2020; Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021). By the 1990s, however, men’s rights activists (MRAs) had let go of their affinity with the feminist movement and primarily focused on criticising institutions they believed discriminated against men (Nagle Reference Nagle2017, 79). In more recent years, the men’s rights movement has taken a new course, developing on anonymous online messaging boards like 4Chan and 8Chan (Nagle Reference Nagle2017, 80; Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, 28; Czerwinsky Reference Czerwinsky2024, 198). Notwithstanding the fact that men’s rights groups originally grew out of second-wave feminism and related consciousness-raising practices in the 1970s, it also appears that contemporary MRAs borrow the language of feminism not only to portray harms against men (Nicholas and Agius Reference Nicholas, Agius, Nicholas and Agius2018) but also to express the idea that feminism has gone too far and that men are actually the wrongfully oppressed gender (Ging Reference Ging2019). This larger community, often dubbed ‘the manosphere’, has manifested in the formation of many groups online, including pickup artists (PUAs), MRAs, and incels (Glace et al. Reference Glace, Dover and Zatkin2021, 288–9). Incels in particular appear to emulate consciousness-raising to develop a highly specific and particularly systematic misogynist worldview. I will explain how this is the case in more detail below.

The name ‘incel’ is a portmanteau of ‘involuntary celibate’ and was coined in 1997 by a Canadian woman who created a website intended to be an emotional outlet for both men and women who had failed to find romantic success (Andersen Reference Andersen2023, 1082). However, by now, the incel community has developed from a small support group to an extremely misogynist subculture (Bates Reference Bates2020; Nagle Reference Nagle2017). There are an estimated 100 000 people who identify as part of the incel community globally (Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, 27). Roughly summarised, incels believe that women construct and dominate a social hierarchy where resources, such as sexual intimacy, employment, self-esteem, and power, are stratified by physical attractiveness (Daly and Reed Reference Daly and Reed2022; O’Malley and Helm Reference O’Malley and Helm2023). Thus, inceldom is founded upon feelings of inferiority and victimhood due to perceived social and physical shortcomings, which the incels believe is the reason for their inability to obtain romantic and sexual gratification from women (Ging Reference Ging2019; Daly and Reed Reference Daly and Reed2022; O’Malley and Helm Reference O’Malley and Helm2023). In addition to claiming to be below women in social status, incels also often see themselves as positioned below other men (Ging, Reference Ging2019; Glace et al. Reference Glace, Dover and Zatkin2021, 288–9). This world view is summarised as a rejection of the so-called ‘Blue Pill’. Borrowing the term from the 1999 movie The Matrix, they see the Blue Pill as the mainstream idea that men hold power over women. Instead, according to incels, the reality is that feminism is an oppressive ideology which grants women power over the sexual marketplace and puts them in a position to discriminate against incels. They take this to be an explanation as to why they are left without partners, which in turn encourages and justifies misogyny within incel forums (Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, 96; Herissone-Kelly et al. Reference Herissone-Kelly, Ronzoni, Popa-Wyatt, Deshmukh, Berškytė and Chadwick2025, 9).

The way in which incels share and analyse experiences in order to arrive at this systematic analysis of what they perceive to be oppression emulates consciousness-raising in several ways. First and foremost, they use anonymous messaging boards to share feelings and experiences. These messaging boards provide access to likeminded individuals who are likely to empathise, share, and understand their experiences (Andersen Reference Andersen2023, 1082). Users frequently comment on victim narratives with agreement, validation, or insight (O’Malley and Helm Reference O’Malley and Helm2023, 1033). Further, given the anonymous and non-hierarchical nature of the messaging boards on which incels tend to congregate, it also looks as if they are successful in providing adequate grounds for honest and open testimony about experiences and feelings that are rarely otherwise given much space in the public discourse (O’Malley and Helm Reference O’Malley and Helm2023, 1027). Together, on the basis of discussing shared experiences and feelings, the members become sceptical towards the idea that women are oppressed by men, as they identify it as a claim that is uncritically accepted within society at large but fails to explain and even obfuscates their suffering. Thus, they argue that this reveals an oppressive status quo narrative that fails to recognise the ways in which men are suffering and that this legitimises and maintains dominance over men by women.

Notably, incels focus much attention on developing the missing hermeneutic framework to express their experiences, grievances, and their analysis thereof (Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, 48). For instance, the incel community has developed a detailed vocabulary, including terms such as ‘roastie’,Footnote ⁶ ‘rapecel’,Footnote ⁷ ‘Chads’,Footnote ⁸ ‘Stacys’,Footnote ⁹ and ‘Beckys’,Footnote ¹⁰ to express how they see the world. The Incel Wikipedia page is one such attempt to explain and systematise this incel terminology and world view. The wiki was created in early 2018 and now consists of over 1289 edited pages. The wiki aims to counter inaccurate media narratives by presenting involuntary celibacy as a legitimate grievance and as rational, objective, and scientific (Andersen Reference Andersen2023, 1081–2).

In sum, it is generally agreed that incels are deeply misogynist and that they are incorrect in their core claim that men are systematically oppressed by women. This is the precise inverse of the claims made by women through consciousness-raising groups, namely that the only way to bore through narratives that obfuscated the ways in which women were oppressed by men was to focus on their shared experiences of suffering. However, it does not seem as if we can arrive at this conclusion through consciousness-raising, for here we have a process that looks a lot like consciousness-raising, which comes to the opposite conclusion. In short, the objection at hand is that it looks as if consciousness-raising is too permissive in its identification of unjust practices. It may thereby be characterised as an unreliable method for victims to form justified claims of injustice. In some cases, it may enable victims to access knowledge that would have been otherwise unavailable to them, but the likelihood of consciousness-raising groups arriving at bad conclusions seems too great. This problem has similarities with what Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (Reference Romdenh-Romluc2017) calls the ‘problem of authority’; namely that it is difficult to separate out groups that are poorly understood but whose hermeneutic framework we reject because it is harmful or incorrect (such as incels) and groups that are poorly understood because we hold genuinely unjust prejudices against them (such as women).

In what follows, I reply to the bad company objection distinguish between cases of genuine and superficial forms of consciousness-raising. However, I do maintain that there might always be some difficulty in distinguishing between good and bad cases of consciousness-raising, given the epistemic weight the process puts on experience and the ways in which marginalised groups remain marginalised because we are conditioned to not take them seriously. This sometimes makes them hard to distinguish from groups we should not take seriously, but for good reasons. However, this is a risk that can be mitigated.

4.2. Reply to the bad company objection

A first reply in defence of consciousness-raising against this charge would be that it is an empirical question whether incels meet the criteria for genuine consciousness-raising. There are several disanalogies: first of all, in contrast to standard consciousness-raising groups, incel forums are often huge, with active members in the thousands.Footnote ¹¹ Consciousness-raising groups, on the other hand, make a point of being relatively small (between five and fifteen members) in order to foster trust, intimacy, and equal participation. Moreover, incel forums, by virtue of being large and individual posts easily drowning, have developed a self-reinforcing discourse that privileges certain kinds of testimonies over others. Thus, much of what occurs within incel spaces is deliberately provocative and shocking (Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, 5). In other words, the focus is far from sharing honest testimonies, although this happens too.

The most crucial disanalogy, however, is that although incels might share and collate open and vulnerable testimonies tracking genuine harm, their process does not emulate the rigorous requirements of consciousness-raising at the level of analysis. Instead, incels seem to assume that their experiences yield direct knowledge about the world, and they therefore fail to engage in rigorous and critical discussion that also seeks to uncover larger power structures as well as their own biases. For instance, although incels seem to actually rely on empirical studies to back up claims about sexual hierarchies and the importance of looks, they often misinterpret them or take them out of context (Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, ch 3). Indeed, according to Lisa Sugiura, the incel sense of victimhood is largely based on perceived adversity, discrimination, or mistreatment and has more to do with unrealistic expectations and a sense of entitlement about how their lives should be in accordance with the promises afforded to being male. For instance, some incels are not actually celibate but aggrieved that they are unable to engage in relations with the women they perceive to have a high SMV (Sugiura Reference Sugiura2021, 27).Footnote ¹² Further, incel forums function as echo chambers; any sort of critical scrutiny or discussion is met with ostracism from the community. While it was a benefit of consciousness-raising groups that they offered some protection from mainstream perspectives and narratives, critical discussion was encouraged, and inter-group exchanges were desired. Incels, however, discourage both internal and external critical engagement. Either you are with them or you are against them (Herissone-Kelly et al. Reference Herissone-Kelly, Ronzoni, Popa-Wyatt, Deshmukh, Berškytė and Chadwick2025, 18).

Thus, it seems that instead of carefully and critically exploring the nature of their frustration, incels use their pent-up anger towards women who have rejected or ignored them to set up a false dichotomy between female and male emancipation, as if it were a zero-sum game. As a result, they fail to entertain the idea that much of the suffering they describe could potentially even be caused by exactly the same power relations that women are working to free themselves from, such as unachievable beauty standards and binary gender roles that are restrictive for everyone. Instead, they operate with terms such as ‘Chads’ and ‘Stacys’, which seek to explain and legitimate a simplistic and restrictive view on gender roles which they take to be immutable (Menzie Reference Menzie2020). I am not claiming here that consciousness-raising done well never reveals conflicts of interests between various social groups. Instead, my claim is that consciousness-raising pushes us to be critical about the narratives about our experiences that we gravitate towards. No experience of discontent, or a pregiven narrative about this discontent, should immediately be taken at face value as a claim about injustice.

That there is a disanalogy between consciousness-raising and incel forums does not address the bad company objection as such, however. In order to do this, I will provide the stronger reply that if the MRA groups in question did undergo genuine consciousness-raising, there would be less cause for disagreement about which groups have legitimate claims to injustice and in what instances. As established, groups who undergo thorough consciousness-raising do not simply get to name any discontent they experience as unjust. Instead, consciousness-raising ensures that experiences of injustice that are often overlooked are more likely to be picked up on, as it is a process intentionally non-judgemental about what social phenomena might count as unjust. Thus, the systematic nature of incel grievances is due serious investigation on this framework. The discovery of a previously unidentified systematic harm should prompt a deeper investigation into the power relations and social mechanisms that produce this experience.

As a result, consciousness-raising, as a method, has the potential to provide reliable epistemic access to facts about harmful and uneven power relationships by taking negatively experienced events, as contrasted with pre-given narratives about such events, as a point of departure. However, to arrive at epistemically justified claims, the group must still rely on further empirical investigation and analysis that employs all the relevant epistemic and social scientific tools available. Like any method, then, it is important to recognise that the research prompted by consciousness-raising is not infallible. It is possible to do a good or bad job of investigating the causes and effects of shared negative experiences identified and discussed through consciousness-raising, just as it is possible to do good or bad social science, based on the extent to which empirical data are rigorously gathered and interpreted and whether the best tools available are employed in the process. This is where incels seem to fall short but also where one could imagine that a new and better understanding of their challenges could arise, based on a rigorous analysis of their shared testimonies.

It is worth including here a brief aside on the relationship between science and objectivity in consciousness-raising, as it is not without tension. On our standard understanding of scientific objectivity, what is required is a level of distance and personal disconnection from what is being studied, so that our feelings and personal perspectives do not cloud our understanding. This is a stereotypically male manner of making sense of the world, and it is the opposite of what consciousness-raising seeks to do; consciousness-raising takes seriously the idea that personal experiences and feelings can reveal truths about the world (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 97). Moreover, on some interpretations of consciousness-raising, it is not only the case that the consciousness-raising process unearthed new facts about the world but indeed that it reshaped the very manner in which we make sense of our social reality (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon1989, 87). For instance, before there was a concept of sexual harassment, the events that we now would characterise as sexual harassment could be ‘objectively’ described in other terms, such as ‘innocent flirtation’ or ‘fun and games’, but we agree now that these are false descriptions of such a situation.

Thus, when I say that consciousness-raising needs to engage with rigorous and critical empirical investigation, I do not necessarily mean to say that this requires a level of emotional detachment and distance, or that we need to downplay the part of the consciousness-raising process that reshapes our social reality. However, I do maintain that consciousness-raising subscribes to a notion of truth that sees problems with simply taking feelings as epistemically authoritative; experience and feelings should be taken as an epistemic point of departure, but by no means uncritically so.Footnote ¹³ This is a key difference between the practices of feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s and those of online incel forums, which seem to take feelings as epistemically authoritative both for unearthing what they take to be facts about the world, and as a basis for analysis and conceptual engineering.

Herissone-Kelly and Ronzoni present three criteria for determining when we have reason to trust the rigour and genuine nature of conceptual innovations, namely that they (i) aim for equality rather than the domination of other groups, (ii) consistency rather than logical contradiction, and (iii) intra- and inter-group critical reflection. This should help in separating out a proliferation of catchy new concepts with a dubious epistemic and political purpose from the actual meaning-making of marginalised groups (Herissone-Kelly et al. Reference Herissone-Kelly, Ronzoni, Popa-Wyatt, Deshmukh, Berškytė and Chadwick2025, 10). These are all criteria that incels fail to meet but a consciousness-raising process does meet, if done well. Herissone-Kelly and Ronzoni admit that this is not an exhaustive list or a bulletproof procedure, but it provides a way for us to assess conceptual engineering projects from hermeneutically marginalised groups not solely based on moral and political intuition.

It is worth noting, however, that within consciousness-raising, as within social science at large, the tools and methods available are subject to change as biases are detected and social scientific tools are developed. This also means that consciousness-raising as a method may at times yield conflicting conclusions, even though the same investigative tools and standards are employed. Indeed, this could well explain the many disagreements that happen within feminist circles, even if all claims are arrived at through consciousness-raising. Thus, the investigative process that consciousness-raising spurs on does not provide the ultimate answers as to exactly what injustices exist and in what ways. Instead, it provides a powerful epistemic method through which to reach such conclusions. Any disagreement arrived at, where both parties have employed equally rigorous methods to scrutinise their own experiences, could thereby be treated as cases of disagreement between epistemic peers, rather than an intractable flaw of feminism or of consciousness-raising as a method. Thus, the force of consciousness-raising is that it acknowledges how victims of injustice and oppression do not automatically have epistemically privileged access to justified claims about injustice. Instead, they have a potential epistemic advantage, which is not automatically conferred and has to be achieved. This coheres with generally accepted conclusions from standpoint epistemology (Grasswick Reference Grasswick, Matheson and Vitz2014; Wylie Reference Wylie and Sandra2004).