What Came First: The Patriarchy or the Lacking Feminist Subject?

Did the Patriarchy take something from women, or did women's lack give rise to the feminist concept of the Patriarchy?

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the subject (our sense of self) is shaped by lack—an unavoidable sense of something missing, a gap that defines who we are and what we desire. There is no fully formed, complete self to start with. The self is this gap or negativity (alienation, frustration, doubt, and thus desire). What feminists call the Patriarchy is just one narrative to make sense of this, to give it structure and meaning. In other words, it is a symptom of feminism.

Hegel argued that we only discover the essence of something through its contradictions and failures. So the Patriarchy isn’t some original force oppressing women but an incomplete, myth-like story to explain why certain deadlocks, like dissatisfaction and conflict between the sexes, appear and persist.

Via Žižek, who reads Hegel avec Lacan, feminism’s struggle against patriarchy is a death drive, a compulsion to repeat. The feminist subject doesn’t just struggle with its symptom—they enjoy it. This is what Lacan calls jouissance, a kind of painful satisfaction. The Patriarchy fantasy is how feminism stages its dissatisfaction and repeats the plot endlessly.

So what came first? Sexed lack. And the Patriarchy emerged as a way to make that lack bearable—to name it, frame it, and fight it, rather than confront the traumatic truth that freedom itself is marked by struggle, dissatisfaction, and the impossibility of harmony between the sexes.

The struggle must continue not because the Patriarchy is Real, but because its absence is impossible for them to imagine. To use Jameson's quip: it's easier for feminists to imagine the end of the world than the end of the Patriarchy. . .