The Patriarchy: Feminism’s Totem and Taboo?

Feminist “origin stories” of patriarchy are not empirical studies or historically grounded theories—they are ideological fictions, mythic retellings crafted to bolster feminist identity politics and moral authority.

Much like Freud’s Totem and Taboo, which openly acknowledges itself as a speculative myth—a narrative meant to illuminate psychic structure, not historical fact—feminist accounts of “primal male domination” function in exactly the same way. They project contemporary anxieties backwards, imagining a founding moment when men universally and violently subordinated women, thereby consecrating female victimhood as original trauma, and "patriarchy" as men's original sin.

This is not history. It is myth masquerading as method. Like Freud’s ur-horde of brothers slaying the primal Father to inaugurate Law and guilt, feminist theory constructs a primal scene: a world-historical male conspiracy to install patriarchy as the first and greatest injustice. This myth supplies feminism with its master narrative—a totalising origin story that retroactively justifies its political demands and moral worldview. But this isn’t explanation—it’s scaffolding. The narrative brooks no ambiguity, tolerates no contradiction, and admits no contingency. It is rich in affect, poor in method.

Beyond the bourgeois revolutions, feminist origin stories of patriarchy begin to resemble what they accuse religion of being: a moral cosmology posing as social science, suturing the contradictions of modernity by projecting them onto an imagined primal crime. Just as Totem and Taboo ends with a story that is too neat, too narratively satisfying to be true, so too do feminist accounts of patriarchy read like just-so stories—not drawn from evolutionary biology, anthropology, or historical materialism, but from the libidinal demands of feminist desire and enjoyment.

These myths aren’t trying to understand the past—they’re trying to organise the present, to anchor feminist identity, to eternalise grievance, and to provide moral cover for the regulation of sex, speech, and social relations they desire to control…

—To be continued