Feminist’s Fetishistic Disavowal
The Patriarchy is Dead, Long Live the Patriarchy!
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and [wo]man is at last compelled to face with sober senses [her] real conditions of life, and [her] relations with [her] kind.
—Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Feminist Denial, Bargaining & Anger
Feminists enjoy the slogan: “Smash the Patriarchy.” But here’s the thing: capitalism smashed the patriarchy because a regime of fixed sex-based roles, rigid hierarchical authority, and paternal control over both household and women’s sexuality were incompatible with its forces of production.
Capitalism needs women as wage labourers and consumers and as mothers and wives. The pre-capitalist family—with its extended obligations and paternal control over reproduction and sexuality—became a fetter to capitalist development. Capitalism dissolved these obligations, replacing them with market dependence. Sex and intimacy were increasingly commodified, and today, sexuality itself is a key site of profit, from advertising to pornography to dating apps.
First-wave feminism emerged during the decline of the Father as Master—the figure who laid down the Law. Patriarchal power was vertical, flowing from the top down, and enforced through institutions like the family, the church, private property, and the state. This authority was explicit, tied to men’s positions as kings, lords, priests, and heads of households. But the rigid, localized authority of the Father was contradictory to capitalist development. By the time second-wave feminism hit the shore, the Father as Master was but a shadow—a socio-symbolic relic haunting a system that had structurally, if not symbolically, fully humbled him.
Formal to Real Subsumption to the Laws of Capital
The demotion of the Father wasn’t simply a matter of cultural change or feminist resistance. It was a process of subsumption by the expanding forces and relations of capitalism. Prior to capitalist modernity, women’s reproductive labour and sexual availability were controlled directly by the Father within the household, and indirectly by the Church through prescriptive norms and prohibitions. In the first phase of capitalist development—formal subsumption—the patriarchal family remained structurally intact, but men increasingly entered the labour market as wage earners or small producers, while self-provision gave way to the purchase of goods and services in the market. Most productive and reproductive labour still took place within or near the home, especially in rural areas and small towns, but sexual and reproductive relations remained under the authority of the Father and the Church, primarily via the institution of marriage.
Through the process of real subsumption, the family itself is restructured to meet capitalist imperatives. No stable family form exists outside the reach of the market. Intimacy, sex, reproduction, and even “gender” itself are commodified, marketed, and subjected to constant capitalist innovation and destruction. The family becomes, at best, a temporary affective contract, easily dissolved and reconstituted, or bypassed entirely through the marketisation of childcare, elder care, surrogacy, dating apps, and “sex work.” Women’s bodies, identities, and sexualities themselves become direct sites of accumulation, from OnlyFans to the fertility industry.
This is a cunning of history, is it not? Capitalism liquidates the Rule of the Father (and the Church), subjecting reproduction, production, and sexual relations to the dictates of the market. Feminism, like Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’s head, emerges as the daughter of capitalism, the sister of imperialism, and the neurotic Big Sister super ego of late capitalism. But rather than confront these origins, feminism retroactively rewrites its own history, casting itself as the ever-suffering, ever-heroic Sisyphean smasher of patriarchy—forever rolling the boulder uphill, only to discover at the summit that patriarchy has merely shape-shifted or multiplied into hybrid, colonial, postcolonial, queer, or stealth patriarchies ad nauseum
The Patriarchy1 fantasy is far from benign: feminism can only sustain this imaginary by keeping the ghost of the despotic Father alive, forever misrecognising the real subsumption of patriarchal relations by capital as its own victory, a story of “women’s liberation.” In reality, feminism’s role under capitalism is to manage contradictions. Big Sister Feminism doesn’t fight patriarchy; she manages relations between and amongst the sexes on capitalism’s behalf. Capitalism still needs wives and mothers, of course, but it also needs women as workers, consumers, prostitutes, and OnlyFans content creators. The breakdown of patriarchal rule created a void, leaving men and women unsure about the new “rules of the game.” Big Sister does nothing to abolish the conditions that generate this neurosis—precarity, commodified intimacy, economic atomisation. Instead, she obsesses over the dangers of “toxic masculinity,” endlessly devising (and selling) new awareness campaigns, speech codes, and HR policies to justify her role as the only thing standing between society and the unleashed inner Andrew Tate.
I am reminded here of Gramsci’s quip: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The old sexual order, structured by the Rule of the Father, has collapsed, and no hegemonic sexual order has taken its place. This is the real historical context of Big Sister Feminism. It is not a revolutionary force, but a neurotic manager of the interregnum, trying to contain and moralise the disruptions produced by capitalism’s uneven and dialectical subsumption of sex-based roles and sexual relations. Capital has no permanent friends or enemies, only economic interests. Capitalism doesn’t care about feminist liberation or patriarchal tradition. It cares about whatever serves accumulation best at any given moment, in any given place.
Feminism’s Fundamental Fantasy
Feminist discourse hinges on The Patriarchy to sustain its own identity as a liberatory force. The Patriarchy is feminism’s fundamental fantasy. Without it, feminism is unmasked as a form of neoliberal governmentality, managing speech, identity, and interpersonal conduct on behalf of the changing requirements of the market and the state.
Letting go of The Patriarchy fantasy would mean confronting a traumatic reality: no rational, let alone liberating, sexual order can exist under capitalism. Feminism represses, disavows, or forecloses the demotion and eventual liquidation of patriarchal authority in the Real. To survive, it must continually stage itself as a heroic resistance against an increasingly spectral Patriarchy, a figure it both desires and disavows. Feminism’s own enjoyment comes from endlessly rediscovering or inventing traces of patriarchy everywhere. Without The Patriarchy, feminism would have to confront its own origins and actual function. Without patriarchy to fight, blame, and endlessly complain about, feminism loses its reason to exist.
In a nutshell: consciously, feminists wish to oppose and defeat The Patriarchy, but unconsciously they desire the opposite—they want The Patriarchy to persist forever. Psychoanalytically speaking, feminists do not desire to win; they desire to desire endlessly. The death of The Patriarchy would mean the simultaneous death of feminist discourse and the collapse of the libidinal economy that sustains it: the enjoyment of positioning themselves as the oppressed subject, forever competing in the “oppression Olympics.” The most traumatic possibility for feminists today would be for The Patriarchy to vanish from their imaginary. That would mark the end of feminism as we know it, not because women would suddenly be free, but because feminism’s very identity relies on the eternal existence of its oppressive Other.
The Patriarchy functions as feminism’s sublime object—the object-cause of feminist desire, both hated and longed for, the absent center that structures its entire discourse. In Žižekian terms, the sublime object is not simply something to be destroyed or acquired, but the thing that gives desire its direction and coherence by always slipping out of reach. Feminism needs The Patriarchy to remain just beyond its grasp—powerful enough to explain women’s suffering, yet weak enough to be perpetually challenged. If The Patriarchy were ever allowed to rest in peace, feminism would lose its sublime object and collapse into a managerial void, reduced to HR compliance workshops, corporate DEI metrics, and “Me Too” or “I’m with Her” merchandise.
The era of the Authoritarian Father is gone in the Real, but it persists—and even intensifies—in the Imaginary. This is precisely what sustains its sublimity: no longer a concrete social structure, it becomes a spectral presence invested with limitless power precisely because it no longer exists in any clear, locatable form. Capitalism retired the Father, but he was never given a proper symbolic retirement—his authority was dismantled in practice, but never consciously confronted and worked through at the level of language, meaning, and discourse.
This failure to negate The Patriarchy in the Symbolic is the root of the symptoms that plague contemporary feminist discourse. Like a zombie that refuses to die, The Patriarchy returns again and again, animated not by its own vitality, but by the libidinal investments of feminism itself. This undead Father haunts feminist discourse, functioning as the very catalyst of feminist desire. Hence, every feminist victory must be followed by the discovery of new, subtler, more insidious forms of The Patriarchy—from micro-aggressions to jokes, and even to biology itself. Each gain only intensifies the need for new battles, more evidence that The Patriarchy endures.
Enjoying Patriarchy
Unconsciously, feminists enjoy their symptom: The Patriarchy. The real libidinal drive lies not in achieving the stated aims, but in the fight itself. What feminists truly desire is the jouissance (a term Lacan uses for the addictive pleasure found in suffering—especially the satisfaction derived from repeatedly not getting what one thinks they want) of battling an undead foe. Without The Patriarchy, feminism would have to confront much messier truths: that sex-based differences and inequalities are not the result of a patriarchal conspiracy, but a shifting interplay of biology, the mode of production, and human desire.
Lacan argues that human desire thrives on impossibility. Feminism mirrors this: its true goal is not victory, but the chase. “Smash the patriarchy!” is less a concrete call to action than a mantra that sustains the movement’s very identity. Imagine the Coyote finally catching the Roadrunner, euphoria would quickly melt into existential crisis.
Lacan’s fantasy formula, $ ◊ a, offers a key to understanding feminism’s unconscious attachment to The Patriarchy. In this formula, the barred subject ($) represents the divided, lacking subject of desire, never fully knowing what it wants or why. The a designates not the object of desire itself, but the cause of desire, the elusive thing that triggers desire into motion. The diamond (◊) marks the unstable, shifting relation between the subject and this cause. This dynamic can develop into different pathological structures: hysteric, obsessive, perverse, or psychotic.
For feminism, The Patriarchy occupies the position of a, the object-cause of desire. The very desire for liberation is caused by the phantom presence of The Patriarchy itself. This villain structures feminist discourse from within, shaping its coordinates and animating its demands. The Patriarchy is imagined as the primary obstacle to women’s freedom, the force that denies them their rightful agency. Precisely because feminism needs The Patriarchy to organise its desire, to give itself a coherent mission, identity, and moral urgency, it cannot afford to let him rest in peace. Without this spectral enemy, feminist desire collapses. Feminists need The Patriarchy the way Christians need the Devil.
The Patriarchy functions as feminism’s sublime object, the absent centre invested with all the power to explain and justify feminist struggle. It is also feminism’s Master Signifier, the core term that anchors and organises every other idea in feminist discourse. It serves as the ultimate, in-the-last-instance reason behind every grievance and dissatisfaction. The Patriarchy also plays the role of empty signifier, a concept so vague and elastic it can mean almost anything. It explains wage gaps, sexual violence, and even why women apologise too much. The more it absorbs, the less it clarifies. Like a conspiracy theory, it thrives on being unfalsifiable and mobile, always shifting to account for new developments, new defeats, and new forms of harm.
The Patriarchy is feminism’s fuel, the cause of its desire. Remove it, and the engine stops. The Patriarchy is to feminism what the Joker is to Batman. And like any shapeshifting villain, it evolves to survive. Legal equality achieved? Now patriarchy lurks in “micro-aggressions.” Workplace parity within reach? It hides in “unconscious bias.” Each victory spawns a new iteration, ensuring the fight, and thus, jouissance, never ends. The Patriarchy also serves as feminism’s armour. By blaming every inequality or conflict between the sexes on this fluid, omnipresent foe, feminism avoids confronting the real taboo: the messy, irreducible tensions of sex itself—biology, reproduction, power, and desire. This brings us to the absolute sublime object, the thing feminism fights to avoid facing directly without The Patriarchy acting as a crutch or filter: nature itself, specifically biological sex and sexual difference. Nature is the ultimate rock against which ideology crashes. Feminism set out to liberate sex, to free it from repression, taboo, and patriarchal control. But the more feminism pursued this “liberation,” the more it found itself needing to manage sex through consent workshops, legal frameworks, and the micro-policing of language, desire, and interpersonal conduct. Liberation became an iron cage of administration.
This contradiction has been flagged before, even by feminists themselves. In The Whole Woman (2014), Germaine Greer infamously declared that rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman:
Rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is not an injury that incapacitates her. It doesn’t break bones or leave visible scars. We are not afraid of rape as an isolated act, we are afraid of the rapist as a type of man, the man who hates women, the man who responds to the availability of a rape victim as if it were an opportunity.
Hers was a deliberately provocative statement, one that cut to the heart of a central tension: is feminism about cultivating female strength and sexual sovereignty, or about constructing women as perpetually vulnerable beings in need of protection?
Similarly, Camille Paglia’s critique of the campus date rape panic in the 1990s argued that feminists were resurrecting Victorian sexual morality under the guise of “safety,” treating women as fragile innocents incapable of navigating the risks and dangers inherent to sexual life. In Free Women, Free Men, she writes: “If you drink to the point where you cannot control yourself, and you go back to a guy’s room, don’t be surprised if something happens.
Paglia’s provocation was that sex is inherently risky, messy, and entangled with power—and that feminist attempts to sanitise it through bureaucratic oversight would only create new forms of repression. These feminists were not liberating women from patriarchy; they were replacing the Father’s authority with Big Sister’s moral-administrative gaze.
This is the psychoanalytic irony: the more you try to rationalise and sanitise desire, the more obscene and uncontrollable it becomes. Feminism couldn’t bear the chaotic reality of sex—its ambivalence, its capacity for aggression, play, power, and surrender. So sex had to be flattened into a bureaucratic flowchart. Yet in chasing sexual freedom, feminism ended up promoting a castrated sex—a sex stripped of libido, tension, and risk, reduced to a sterile performance of consent and compliance.
But desire doesn’t work that way. Sexual attraction thrives on tension, difference, and the unpredictable interplay of dominance and submission. Feminism’s current moral-managerial stance cannot tolerate this because it exposes the very thing feminism’s fantasy of The Patriarchy exists to cover up: that sex itself is not a blank slate to be rewritten, but a site of irreducible contradiction. A collision zone where biology, culture, and unconscious desire meet in ways no political program can ever fully control. And thank God/dess for that!
Feminism’s Perverse Attachment to The Patriarchy
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, perversion isn’t just about personal kinks or sexual eccentricities. It’s a structural position in relation to authority and desire. The pervert does not rebel against the law—she enjoys enforcing it. There is pleasure in staging scenarios of guilt, punishment, and redemption, all in the name of a higher cause, of course.
The undead Patriarchy functions as feminism’s fetish—the object that sustains desire by covering over a traumatic lack. What lack? The absence of a stable sexual order after the collapse of patriarchy, and the absence of any revolutionary subject capable of resolving this impasse. Feminists know, at some level, that the Authoritarian Father is dead, but they disavow this knowledge and continue to act as if he still rules.
This is the logic of fetishistic disavowal: I know very well, but all the same… Feminists know that capitalism—not some eternal Father—has reshaped gender relations, and yet they continue to act as if smashing The Patriarchy remains the central historical task. This disavowal protects feminist discourse from confronting its own complicity with capitalist social management.
But the perverse twist is that this disavowal isn’t experienced as frustration, it is a source of jouissance. There is real enjoyment in endlessly discovering traces of patriarchy everywhere, in constantly rewriting rules, revising language, demanding new confessions of guilt, and staging elaborate performances of allyship. Big Sister Feminism, like the pervert, enjoys the scene of judgment, shaming, and purification. Every micro-aggression is a fresh opportunity for moral enjoyment—the thrill of uncovering sin, enforcing speech codes, and casting out the impure.
Without the spectral despotic Father, this entire libidinal economy collapses. The Patriarchy is both feminism’s imagined enemy and its real source of enjoyment. To put it bluntly: feminism needs The Patriarchy the way the Inquisition needed heretics.
In sum: if there were no Patriarchy, feminists would have to invent one. Feminism needs The Patriarchy to sustain and structure its entire libidinal economy. Unconsciously, the real drive is not to defeat The Patriarchy, but to keep failing to do so, because this failure is what sustains feminist desire itself. If feminism is to develop, or sublate into something more ethical and less pathological, it must confront and take responsibility for its own desire.
Traversing The Patriarchy: The Courage of Feminist Hopelessness?
For feminism to have a future beyond Big Sister managerialism and perpetual grievance, it must do what psychoanalysis demands of any analysand: traverse the fantasy. This means feminism must confront the truth that its struggle against The Patriarchy was never a revolutionary project, but a fantasy structure that shields it from a far more traumatic reality—the impossibility of any risk-free, fully equitable sexual discourse or intercourse. And this holds true across all sexual orientations.
Traversing the fantasy means giving up the comforting illusion that The Patriarchy is a coherent external enemy, and admitting that feminism has needed a Father figure to rebel against. It requires recognising that sexual difference is not a political mistake to be corrected, but a real, unresolved antagonism at the heart of being human. It also means abandoning the fantasy that some future utopia will dissolve sexual tension into pure horizontal harmony, where all desire is conscious, rational, and mutually consented to in advance—or worse, that women could simply “opt out” oppression by embracing political lesbianism, as though same-sex desire (albeit a new strand of homophobia) could somehow transcend power and conflict.
Traversing the fantasy does not resolve sex-based antagonisms. It means ceasing to stage the Father—or his spectral remains—as the cause of every discomfort, and instead recognising that sex itself is inherently conflictual, ambivalent, and excessive. Sexual relations can never be fully transparent or egalitarian. This is not because men secretly conspire to oppress women, but because, as Lacan put it, there is no sexual relation. There is no preordained harmony between the sexes—only an ongoing, fragile, and often messy negotiation of desire, power, vulnerability, and difference.
Instead of remaining trapped in the repetitive loop of smashing an undead Patriarchy, feminism would have to confront the radically open question: What do we do when there’s no Master to blame? What kinds of relations between the sexes do we actually want? And is this desire itself despotic? Is it even rational, given the limits set by nature?
What is feminism without its endless policing of speech, masculinity, and femininity? Without its moralisation and micro-management of difference? Without its compulsion to impose ideological coherence onto the messy reality of sexed life? It would have to become something far riskier—a feminism willing to confront the void. A feminism that admits the future of sexual politics is not already written, and that no DEI office, consent regime, or intersectional checklist will save us from the Real of sexual difference.
Such a feminism would no longer be a neurotic governmentality or a therapeutic substitute for politics. It would be an ethic—a commitment to living with sexual difference without guarantees, and without the comforting scapegoat of The Patriarchy. Only by traversing its fundamental fantasy, smashing the Father in the Symbolic and Imaginary registers of the feminist discourse can feminism free itself from its compulsive attachment to the spectral Father and figure out life without him.
Neither the death of the Patriarchy in the Real, nor its symbolic burial, will bring about the end of sexual politics. The relations between the sexes—desire, power, ambivalence—cannot be abolished by decree, nor by Big Sister feminism. What capitalism dissolved was not sexual difference itself, but the particular ways pre-modern societies organised, contained, and gave meaning to it. Feminism retroactively mistook this capitalist unmooring for its own victory, but the disorder that followed—our endless disputes over gender norms, consent, identity, and power—reveals that the core problem remains: how do sexed beings, divided by difference and driven by desire, live together?
To move beyond the morbid symptoms of our current sexual politics, we need what Slavoj Žižek calls the “courage of hopelessness”: the courage to give up the comforting fantasy that there is a final solution, a purified utopia without antagonism. There is no future without sexual conflict, because there is no sex without conflict. This does not mean resigning ourselves to violence or injustice. It means facing the truth that sexual difference is irreducible.
The death of The Patriarchy was not the end of domination; it was the opening of a historical void. Big Sister feminism tries to fill it with managerial power, moralism, and an undead Father. But the void remains. The courage of hopelessness means accepting that there is no external Master, no Big Sister, no perfect system that can resolve this for us. To face that void without illusions, to desire without guarantees, to negotiate sexed life without fantasies of purity, innocence, or final reconciliation—that would be a sexual revolution I could desire.
Actual liberation begins when feminism gives up its ghost—the undead despotic Father—and risks the freedom of life without a Master to blame.
“The Patriarchy” refers to the imaginary, undead despotic Father and “patriarchy” to the real, existing historical social order (just discussed) that has been liquidated by the process of formal and real subsumption.
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