In October 2017 the US-American actress Alyssa Milano called upon all women around the worldwith a Twitter statement to speak out about their experience with sexual violence. The #MeToo move-ment followed, an incisive event in the feminist movement to start a wide public discourse about sexu-al violence. However, building identification with a movement on the basis of pain that is assumed tobe collective, creates certain problems, which are analyzed in this paper from a perspective of affecttheory. I argue that the instrumentalization of the affect “pain” led to three problems: a blurring ofpower imbalances between the women affected, a blurring between sexism and sexual violence, andgendered generalizations. Therefore, reference to collective pain as a basis for building and identifica-tion with a (feminist) movement as well as instrumentalizing affects to build social movements shouldbe problematized.