Written By: Ami John
16/11/25
Museo Nazionale Romano. Nymph and Satyr (Pan and Nymph). 2nd century CE, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. Marble. Palazzo Altemps, Rome.
In a museum in Rome, there is a marble group of a nymph struggling to escape from a satyr. The nymph’s face is a later restoration; the original was lost. A man, centuries after the sculpture was first made, decided what her horror should look like. I always wonder where the artist’s cruelty ends and where the restorer’s begins. Maybe that’s what happens every time women’s pain is shown to us – someone is always deciding how much of it we can bear to see.
The sculpture turns suffering into art. Her struggle is graceful, her fear composed. The scene is almost erotic, a balance between control and collapse. Even her desperation has symmetry. The satyr’s grin fills the frame, his body tense with victory, her own frozen into poise. Fear has been polished into something collectible. It is the oldest formula: female pain arranged for beauty.
We keep seeing it again and again: in television, film, advertising. Rape scenes are justified as “historical accuracy,” even when everything else in the frame is invention. Period dramas make sure the corsets and dialects are wrong, but the violence is always true to form. The assault remains because it must. Pain has become a kind of realism, the price of credibility. It authorizes belief.
The comfort people take in watching women suffer is hard to look away from. Pain is always available, always public. When it’s women’s pain, it is also somehow pleasurable. There is a strange cultural logic that links agony and beauty, suffering and purity. Subjugation becomes desirable precisely because it is unwilling. Once a woman consents, it’s no longer entertaining.
When I think about suffering, I think of Mariya Karimjee’s essay “Damage.” She writes about being cut at seven years old, her body turned into an archive of violence. Her sentences are plain; she holds language carefully, safe from allurement. The emotion is there, but restrained, never courting pity or cadence that invites sympathy. She writes in a way that resists being consumed. Reading her, I questioned: is my own writing answering the questions too neatly? Are we implicit in aestheticizing the pain of others, unknowingly, even as women?
“Art is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” But when the subject is women’s pain, everyone seems comfortable looking. It has become an aesthetic, something audiences recognize, even crave. Outrage, then repost, then move on. Pain becomes the medium itself. It gives stories weight, makes them feel urgent, but it also flattens them. The cycle of empathy is brief.
As Elaine Scarry wrote in The Body in Pain, extreme sensation unravels language itself. We reach for analogy, for poetry, trying to polish it. Absurd, that we try to polish pain. I do it too. It’s a strange contradiction: I want to expose this dichotomy, but in doing so, I’m softening it so it can be consumed by an audience. Every turn depicts the same unease, control over women’s bodies presented as progress.
The same contradiction runs through culture at large. AI sex robots come programmed to protest, as if refusal itself is part of the fantasy. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 and overturned in 2022, as if autonomy were a performance that can be given and taken away for effect. One machine, one statute – each generation seems to reflect the nymph and the satyr: the same story, a different face.
Film is the exact same. I watched Thirteen (2003) and felt conflicting emotions, torn by the accuracy of girlhood, appalled at how beautiful all her pain was. It was an honest depiction of the lives of many young teens, but it was also pleasing to look at. Her trauma was almost too photogenic.
But what happens when the pain isn’t pretty? When it’s banal or grotesque, when it doesn’t resolve into meaning or form? Then we look away. Culture allows women to suffer only if the suffering can be shaped. If there is no redemption, there is no audience.
The aesthetics of pain always depend on a loss of control. A woman with agency ruins the narrative. If she chooses her pain, or even her pleasure, the story collapses. It stops being tragedy and becomes something else, something undesirable. It removes the innocence we want to witness being taken. Is control the real subject then? Not the woman? Are we not even at the mercy of our pain?
I keep returning to the marble nymph. She never escapes. She sits there frozen in her twisted struggle, her face reconstructed by someone who thought he could imagine fear better than she could show it. Maybe that is what history does, it sanitises pain until it looks like grace. Even now, with this writing, I wonder if I have done the same: restoring what was not mine to touch, mending it enough so it can be seen.
Maybe writing about pain is always wrong. Maybe it’s a kind of betrayal, even when you mean well. But maybe being wrong is the only honest way to see, knowing you will fail, but looking anyway.
Bibliography
https://www.frieze.com/article/functions-female-rage
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford,1985
Retrospect Journal 