Enjoy Patriarchy!
The Feminist Libidinal Economy
The central argument in my article, “Feminist’s Fetishistic Disavowal”—that The Patriarchy is ideologically indispensable to feminism—clearly hit a nerve. Feminist reactions ranged from denial to indignation. Author and publisher Renate Klein’s response is illustrative here:
Tara, you have already shown us twice convincingly that you have zero idea about feminism or feminist theory. I doubt you have read any feminist books in your life. Why don’t you go and enjoy some more “jouissance” with Lacan and the feminist postmodern boys you so adore, and leave feminists who have written feminist books for forty years to discuss feminist issues. Your antifeminism will make you many friends—just not among feminists, who roll their eyes at your ignorance. You might stick to geography; perhaps you have something interesting to say in that field.
Her barrage of logical fallacies didn’t merely signal offence—they confirmed my thesis: The Patriarchy is feminism’s sublime object.1
Ad Hominem Fallacy: Attacks my personal credibility (e.g., academic background, field of study) instead of responding to the argument’s substance.
Credentialism / Appeal to Authority: Invokes the authority of unnamed feminists as a stand-in for actual engagement.
Straw Man Fallacy: Misrepresents my critique of establishment or imperialist feminism as blanket ignorance of feminism itself, in order to dismiss it more easily.
Argument from Silence: Assumes I have not read or studied feminist theory simply because I do not cite or affirm its conclusions—without considering that I am quite familiar with the current state of feminist thought, such as it is.
Gatekeeping / Boundary Policing: Attempts to exclude me from the discourse on the basis of group identity or presumed inauthenticity, rather than addressing the validity of my claims.
Poisoning the Well: Preemptively discredits me by framing me as inherently ignorant, thus eliminating the need to engage with my critique.
Appeal to Group Consensus: Relies on the implied authority of “real feminists” to silence dissent, instead of responding to the argument with evidence or logic.
Moral Posturing: Assumes a position of moral superiority without demonstrating how that position addresses my critique.
Performative Outrage: Frames my structural critique as a personal attack in order to shut down the conversation and recast me as the aggressor.
This was a hysterical outburst, not a rebuttal: a structurally defensive manoeuvre aimed at preserving the subject’s fantasy framework by redirecting critique onto the analyst. She is not really defending feminist theory. No—she is protecting feminism’s sublime object-cause of desire: The Patriarchy™. Here is my entry pass into the sacred circle of feminist discourse:
Feminists enjoy fighting, questioning, disciplining, exposing, and—above all—complaining about The Patriarchy. They are experts. Patriarchologists. It gives them meaning and mission. Rooting out sexism is mundane; fighting The Patriarchy is erotic.
What gets feminists off is politically and culturally relevant because today The Patriarchy is about as analytically useful for understanding or improving the material conditions of women as blaming the Devil, fate, or the Illuminati would be. The rule of the Father is history. Traditional patriarchal orders were dissolved by the forces and relations of capitalist development quite some time ago and no centralised or hegemonic gender regime has replaced them.
Feminist ideology is a morbid symptom of this interregnum. The belief in a transcendent, ever-present, and ever-evasive tormentor shields feminists from confronting an unsettling truth: the throne is empty. There is no Patriarchy lurking behind capitalist societies or the Chinese Communist Party, plotting to dominate women and redistribute the spoils to men. And yet, the Patriarchy fantasy is perfect for identity politics. Here, victimhood is currency, and claiming to represent an oppressed group can be lucrative. Patronage politics doesn’t flow from collective material interest but from those who insert themselves as gatekeepers between institutions and “the marginalised.”2
Contrary to popular third wave feminist doctrine, feminism is not intersectional, its contradictory.3 And the one thing that unites all the factions and fractions together is fidelity to the Patriarchy fantasy. In Lacanese, The Patriarchy functions as a quilting point (point de capiton)—the master or empty signifier that stitches together disparate complaints, interests, and identities into a seemingly coherent narrative. What is feminism without the Patriarchy mythos of history and society? Beyond being female, what is the one thing women have in common, according to feminists? That they are all oppressed by The Patriarchy—whether they realise it or not.
Feminism, like all successful ideologies, is not just a discourse. It is a structure of desire and an economy of enjoyment. Thus, we must shift registers to grasp the appeal of The Patriarchy. This is not an epistemological issue, but a libidinal one. The Patriarchy anchors feminist desire. It serves as the psychic centre of gravity. What sustains feminist fidelity to this fantasy is not veracity, but enjoyment. What follows is an introduction to A Pervert’s Guide to Feminism.4
From False Consciousness to Fantasy: The Subject of Ideology
Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology introduced a decisive split into the critique of ideology.5 Orthodox Marxist theory centres on false consciousness: the idea that ideology misrepresents the world in order to preserve the material interests of the ruling class. The question is epistemological: How does ideology deceive? A Žižekian critique, by contrast, zeroes in on the nexus of fantasy, desire, and enjoyment, and asks instead: How does ideology seduce?
At the centre of this shift lies Lacan’s theory of the subject. Subjectivity is not something we are born with; it is something we acquire through our entry into the Symbolic Order—the world of language, law, norms, and shared meaning. In this process, the human organism is infected with a negativity called subjectivity. Entry into the Symbolic doesn’t complete us—it splits us. It creates a psychic structure marked by an insatiable lack, an irreducible gap between our embodied life and the discursive systems that seek to name and organise it.
The Symbolic never fully captures or contains us. There is always a remainder—a kind of empty, unassimilable excess that eludes inscription. And this excess is the subject in the strict Lacanian sense: not the ego, not the individual, but the gap created by our very insertion into the social order. To become a subject is to be alienated—to be fixed by language, looked at by others, constrained by norms. This process generates a constitutive split between the subject and the social coordinates through which it becomes intelligible. In Lacanese, this is the split between the subject and the big Other—God, the nation, society, or in the case of feminism, The Patriarchy. This is not the result of loss, violence, or oppression—though it is often felt and narrated that way. Lack is structural. It is the foundational absence at the heart of subjectivity itself—the void that makes fantasy necessary, that gives rise to desire, and fuels enjoyment.
Let’s contrast the subject with the individual. The individual is a one—defined by measurable, ascribed, or attained traits: race, sex, income, education, ethnicity, nationality. The individual belongs to the realm of quantity, data, and statistics. The subject of the psyche, by contrast, is what is irreducible to these attributes. Subjectivity refers to the feeling, desiring, enjoying, unconscious presence. This is why Lacan designates the subject with a barred S (S̷): the split subject.
To be a subject of the Symbolic is to lack—to feel forever exiled from wholeness, harmony, or equilibrium. We desire because we lack, and we can never know for certain what others, or the big Other, really want. Desire, then, is not a need to be fulfilled but a restless force, a kind of drive that can never be fully sated. It is metonymic: it moves from signifier to signifier, always seeking, never finding.
This lack in being—the gap between the subject and the other, between the subject and the big Other—is not just a source of doubt and anxiety. It is also what makes freedom possible. If we were fully determined by biology and culture, if we fit perfectly, there would be no space for refusal, invention, let alone desire. It is precisely because we do not fit, because something always exceeds and escapes, that a space for freedom opens up. But freedom, in this psychoanalytic sense, is not self-mastery or rational autonomy. Freedom is an affliction, a tear in the fabric of being that both destabilises and animates us. The task of critique, it follows, is not to close this gap, but to insist on it—to resist all fantasies that entice us with the false promise of wholeness, restoration, or harmony.
The subject is constituted by lack. This is not a traumatic loss inflicted by The Patriarchy, but an absence that was always already there. As such, it is the destiny of the subject to be plagued by fantasy. The subject is born into a world where it never fully belongs, never quite fits into the Symbolic. There is no original state of wholeness to return to. And yet, fantasy retroactively imagines one. It constructs a scenario that explains what the subject lacks, who or what is to blame for that lack, and what would need to happen for the subject to become whole.
Fantasy positivises lack. It provides a name and cause, and therefore a solution: “You suffer because of X. If X were removed or overcome, you would finally be free, fulfilled, or complete.” This is the libidinal logic of fantasy. It does not deny lack, it narrates it. In Lacan’s formula for fantasy (S̷ ◊ a), the split subject (S̷) has an imagined relation to the objet petit a (the object-cause of desire) the interchangeable stand-in for the Thing that was never possessed in the first place. Any object can become an objet a for the libidinal economy. In feminism, The Patriarchy plays this role. It becomes the imagined obstacle. The X that stands in the way of women’s liberation, wholeness, or full recognition. The fantasy promises: Only when The Patriarchy is fully dismantled will women become free, autonomous, complete subjects. And yet, this moment never arrives. The Patriarchy always recedes, shifts, multiplies. Because the truth is: no-thing will ever fill the negativity that constitutes the subject. Alienation is not a bug, it’s a feature of social reality.
Fantasy sustains our desire not by satisfying it, but by structuring it. It stages the scene of the crime or fall, and the possibility of justice or restitution, in order to keep the subject occupied, entertained, desiring. Any object can become libidinised. Its status comes not from what it is, but from the role it plays in a fantasy that has gripped the subject. What and how one desires matters greatly for ethics and well-being. But for the psyche, it does not matter what the object-cause of desire is. It only matters that the subject is desiring. The question is not only what we want, but how and why. There is more than one way to relate to fantasy. Thus, different ways of enjoying infinitely deferred resolution or satisfaction.
To recap: we are split subjects because we lack. This lack is structural. It arises from our entry into the Symbolic Order: language, law, culture. It’s not an injury that can be healed, but a void that causes desire. We never really know what others—or the big Other—want from us. We never fully articulate what we want, or why. Alienation is baked in. Desire doesn’t emerge after we find something to want; it’s a pre-existing, chronic condition.
Enjoyment: The Obscene Underside of Ideology6
This is what makes ideology so sticky: it binds us not just at the level of belief, but at the level of libidinal investment. Fantasy fills out the void of subjectivity, stages our desire, and delivers hits of enjoyment. Again, to understand the grip feminism has on feminists, we must move beyond what it says to the unconscious economies of enjoyment that sustain it. We must ask: What do feminists really want? What jouissance does The Patriarchy provide—even, or especially, in its absence?
If fantasy structures desire by narrating lack, then enjoyment—or jouissance, in Lacanian terms—is the surplus affect produced by the libidinal economy. Ordinary pleasure has a measure: hunger is followed by a satisfying meal. But jouissance is paradoxical, excessive, and often self-destructive. Think: hunger followed by eating oneself sick, binging and purging. Complaining, losing control, taking unnecessary risks. Staying out partying knowing full well we’ll suffer through work the next day. These all provide jolts of jouissance.
Enjoyment is gratification that takes a toll. It is not an equal exchange. Jouissance is not rational. It has no sense. Its register is the Real: that which escapes symbolisation, exceeds the image, and defies meaning. Enjoyment is affect: a bodily intensity, a surge of tension, heat, excitation. It doesn’t speak—it insists. The subject desires; the body enjoys. Desire can be read by interpreting fantasy. Enjoyment is signposted by pathological conduct.
And because jouissance is Real, it cannot be eliminated by explanation or refuted by fact. It follows that what binds subjects to ideology is not false consciousness so much as libidinal investment. This is why people cling to ideologies that clearly fail to deliver what they promise. Ideology doesn’t need to be persuasive; it needs to tickle the subject.
The Patriarchy Fantasy is Fundamental to Feminism
Fantasy mediates lack. But not all fantasies are equal. Some bind us to paranoid moralising and perpetual grievance. The Patriarchy is one such fantasy: it explains why women lack. It is a compelling story that protects the feminist subject from confronting the abyss that engenders subjectivity itself. Consider the question: Did The Patriarchy take something from modern women—or did women’s lack give rise to The Patriarchy story about society?
From a psychoanalytic point of view, the answer is clear. The feminist subject is not deprived of something she once had. Like all subjects she is constituted by lack. The Patriarchy is the fantasy that makes that lack intelligible. It offers a myth of theft, a moral storyline that covers over lack. This is where the Imaginary does its work. The Imaginary is the register of appearance, coherence, and identification. It smooths over contradiction. Feminism’s image of The Patriarchy operates here: a coherent, culpable villain. But behind this Imaginary foe, the Real—that which cannot be symbolised or pictured—insists. In feminist discourse, the Real is sexual difference itself: the impossibility of a final harmony between (or within) the sexes.
Since the feminist subject cannot accept this ambiguity, the contingency of desire, or the non-relation at the heart of sexuality, it must be displaced. And so, feminism avoids the Real by constructing a fantasy. The Patriarchy is not just an explanatory device; it is a defence against the unbearable truth that the sexual non-relation is not caused by men—it is constitutive of sexuality itself. Feminism becomes the compulsion to repeat, the enjoyment of failing to eradicate The Patriarchy.
Fredric Jameson once said, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” For feminism, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of The Patriarchy. Because if The Patriarchy no longer guarantees meaning, if there is no Master to accuse or rebel against, then feminists must confront the trauma of the Real of their desire. And so, the struggle continues, not because The Patriarchy is real, but because repressing and disavowing its absence maintains feminist desire and protects them from inconvenient truths.
This fantasy delivers hits of jouissance by staging obstacles (e.g., male privilege, toxic masculinity) and displacing contradictions (e.g., sexual difference and capitalist political economy) onto scapegoated figures of men—The Patriarchy in general, and Andrew Tate, INCELs, or trans-identified males in particular. These are their figures of enjoyment.
Renate Klein: Enjoying Disavowal
Klein’s response to my Feminist’s Fetishistic Disavowal is instructive not for what it argues—there is no argument—but for the excessive nature of her refusal:
“Tara, you have already shown us twice convincingly that you have zero idea about feminism or feminist theory. I doubt you have read any feminist books in your life. Why don’t you go and enjoy some more ‘jouissance’ with Lacan and the postmodern boys you so adore and leave feminists who have written feminist books for forty years to discuss feminist issues…”
Klein casts herself as a guardian of feminist orthodoxy, dismissing critique not through engagement but through exclusion. The rhetorical force of her statement comes not from what it proves but from what it stages: the enjoyment of disavowal. The object of her ridicule is not just Lacan or “postmodern boys,” it is the proposition that feminism itself might be animated by fantasy, lack, and enjoyment.
Klein’s tone is tinged with jouissance. Her sarcasm (“enjoy some more ‘jouissance’”), her appeal to authority, and her territorial marking (“stick to geography”) demonstrate her libidinal investment in The Patriarchy. She enjoys not refuting my critique. This is a classic defensive manoeuvre: enjoying belonging via the expulsion of a heretic.
Victoria Smith: Another New Patriarchy
Victoria Smith’s recent article, “Trans Activism is Progressive Man’s Manosphere,” similarly operates within the fantasy–enjoyment structure. At first glance, Smith appears to amend the Patriarchy narrative by designating trans activism as a new vector of misogyny. But then she tells us that “Trans activism has made monsters of those who might otherwise have merely been casual sexists.” Old wine, new bottle, same libidinal economy.
Smith writes with visceral outrage at male trans rights activists (TRAs), whom she depicts as modern-day incels in progressive drag. Her tone is laced with jouissance: disgust, betrayal, and moralism. But what her moral clarity obscures is the fantasy logic at play. The Patriarchy has been recoded yet again. Where once it was embodied by the father, husband, or boss, now it now appears as the trans-identified male, the HR department, or the leftist podcast bro. The structure of grievance remains, but the patriarchal villain has been recast. The libidinally invested obstacle to equality is now the “progressive manosphere.” Again, desire is metonymic: it moves from one figure to the next, preserving its structure through substitution.
Smith’s article doles out jouissance via indignation. Her readers are invited to enjoy the exposure of hypocrisy, to feel the thrill of speaking the truth no one else will say, to revel in the collapse of liberal pretences. This is not a politics of resolution—it is a politics of repetition. The fantasy of patriarchal persecution must be preserved. Without it, there would be no antagonist, no moral high ground, no steady supply of outrage.
Smith’s fantasy also operates in the Imaginary register: she constructs a clear opposition between real women and fake women, true feminists and traitors, moral agents and pornified objects. This coherence masks the fact that the feminist subject, too, is structured by lack and contradiction. The horror she projects onto trans activism—woman as non-person, woman as fetish—is not foreign to feminism but a return of its own repressed complicity with pornographic, liberal, commodified femininity. The very femininity that second- and third-wave feminism constructed as a “social construct” divorced from biology and sexuality.
In both cases, these feminist subjects double down on The Patriarchy. Each reiterates her desire—along with the contradictory position of being both oppressed and superior—by staging the fantasy once again. And they enjoy it—not in spite of its impossibility, but because of it. What sustains feminism is not its truth, but the enjoyment of the compulsion to repeat the scenario over and over.
The grip of the Patriarchy fantasy on feminist discourse is libidinal. Its function is not to persuade via evidence but to organise desire and deliver enjoyment (jouissance). These two examples illustrate how feminist subjects remain affectively invested in this fantasy structure. Rather than confronting the contradictions and lack at the heart of subjectivity and sexual difference, each response displaces this Real onto a new or recurring fantasy figure embodying The Patriarchy.
The ladies doth protest too much, methinks.
Endnotes
The sublime object is what structures and sustains libidinal investment in a fantasy. “The Patriarchy” functions in this role for contemporary feminism—it is both the supposed enemy, and the thing feminism cannot give up, because giving it up would dissolve the very structure of feminist desire.
Adolf Reed Jr makes this argument in reference to antiracist politics.
Despite endless appeals to “solidarity,” feminists have yet to explain how women can, and why they should, form a coherent political coalition—especially given that men, historically, never have.
This is a play on two films featuring Slavoj Žižek—A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)—both directed by Sophie Fiennes.
Many others, including several women, have contributed to developing this intervention/innovation in critical theory: Alenka Zupančič, Joan Copjec, Renata Salecl, Jodi Dean, Anna Kornbluh, Mladen Dolar, Todd McGowan, Frank Ruda, Samo Tomšic, Robert Phaller, among many others.
My understanding of enjoyment/jouissance is indebted to Samo Tomšič.
The next instalment of The Pervert’s Guide to Feminism will be “Pathological Feminism.”
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Complex stuff, but one thing is clear: radical Leftist woke-fems, since the 80s, have done little to advance womens rights, which were already going in the right direction - they have though birthed a far right toxic masculinity and global resurgence of misogyny. Horrible though it is, all humans act out of their own logic, and any man under 40 who has endured this endless onslaught of manhating since the 80s, well who can blame them?
Women, conservative or liberal, who fight for equality, but also love men, praise male virtues, and well usually, like to kiss men - they have the balance right.
Correction, progress, respect for girls and women - but this insane academia/high school/popular media attack on all things man has run its course.
Its not only turning men (and women) in the West to the right. Its turning the authoritarian patriarchal hellholes of the rest of the planet Fascist: they are watching us. They cite us.
The fantasy of “radical Leftist woke-fems” obviously hits Sian and Tara’s buttons. Loving men and praising them occasionally doesn’t make up for the need for safety in public/private spaces. Violence done to women shows no sign of reducing. Feminism doesn’t need patriarchy - women need a fair playing field, that’s all.