What do feminists want?
Big Sister is watching you. It’s kinda her thing.
What if feminism isn’t really about “smashing the patriarchy”—but getting off on the simulation? Feminism today isn’t a politics of liberation. It’s a libidinal political economy of complaint and control. The Patriarchy? Dead. Retired by capitalism. But feminism must keep the rule of the Father undead—resurrected as ideology, a spectral scapegoat, a moral alibi. Why? So feminists can do what they really want: discipline women and micromanage sexual politics in the name of “liberating” and “protecting.”
After the three essays in this series—Feminists to The Patriarchy: We Hate You / Don’t Stop, Feminism’s Fetishistic Disavowal, and Enjoy Patriarchy!—there were tantrums, social media dossiers, blockathons, and ad hominems galore—not directed mainly at me, but at those who published the articles.
This latest piece doesn’t respond to every protest. But it does go further into the history of feminism’s woman problem—and its oppressive politics of enjoyment.
🔥 Feminism’s Woman Problem: An Unauthorised Political Psychoanalysis is now live on
→Postscript to the Backlash
Before you read it, here’s some responses to complaints that I couldn’t resist sharing.
“But transgenderism is the new face of patriarchy!”
Actually, transgenderism is evidence of the breakdown of patriarchal authority—if we go by what patriarchy historically was, politically speaking, and what the “paternal function” means in psychoanalytic terms. Not the libidinized signifier for whatever currently has a feminist’s panties in a bunch.
“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.” - Janet Marks
My argument is that The Patriarchy is analytically and theoretically useless—but ideologically indispensable to feminism. I never said anything about “Leftist woke-fems,” though I’m fairly certain Judy (they/them) Butler exists.
You write as if women, as a population, are under constant siege in public and private spaces. In most places, that’s not reality—it’s ideology. Feminist discourse continues to circulate the image of Woman as perpetual prey—not because it reflects material truth, but because it enables moralizing and accrues value in the oppression economy.
No one opposes safety. That’s precisely what makes “safety” such an effective ideological frame: it’s basically a moral truism masquerading as political argument.
As for your sweeping, population-level claim that violence against women is increasing: that’s what you believe, not what you know. In most high-income countries, rates of violent crime—including intimate partner violence—have been declining since the 1990s. Ask yourself: what kind of dataset would need to exist, and how would one design a rigorous study to determine where, when, and why “violence” (in its many forms) is rising or falling?
What’s clear is that the feminist ideology of universal female vulnerability does not differentiate. It is also conveniently blind to violence perpetrated by women.
For too long, feminists have played fast and loose with facts. Feminist discourse tends to inflate perceived harm into moral absolutes, regardless of legal or empirical thresholds. Treating all self-reports as proof of systemic male violence is a key way the fantasy of The Patriarchy is kept alive. Ideology overrides material reality—and in return, offers enjoyment: righteous victimhood, endless grievance, moral superiority.
But it’s no mystery what actually improves public and private safety. It’s not smashing The Patriarchy. It’s not shaming “toxic masculinity.”
It’s material conditions: economic security, strong public services, and accountable legal institutions
Violence thrives in precarity, not patriarchy. Feminist ideology narrates violence as men run amok. This personalizes structural failures and turns class contradictions into moral dramas.
Finally, “women just want a level playing field” sounds reasonable—until you ask what it actually means. It smuggles in all kinds of unexamined assumptions about fairness, success, and male wrongdoing.
So let me ask: What do you mean by “level playing field”?
Equality under the law? Already achieved in most countries.
Identical outcomes? That’s social engineering that requires coercion.
Freedom from difficulty or consequences you don’t like? That’s utopian.
What’s wrong with the current field—specifically the one you play on?
Can women vote, work, own property, get divorced, sue their boss?
Are they outperforming men in higher education?
Is the highest suicide rate among single men over 40?
Do you assume any female disadvantage is evidence of systemic oppression and any male success is inherently suspect? What if the playing field is reasonably level and the outcomes still aren’t symmetrical?
What if the fantasy of fairness is doing the real ideological heavy lifting?
“Women are still oppressed!”
Where, exactly, do women not make their own choices? If you add up the number of women living in polities with equality under the law, you arrive at around 90% of the world’s female population.
Neither men nor women choose the context or the range of choices available to them, but most make their own choices within those constraints. That doesn’t mean choices are free from consequences—there are always trade-offs. That’s life.
There’s also a difference between objective constraints (legal, political, economic) and subjective constraints (beliefs, perceptions, cultural norms). Equality under the law removes legal barriers, not subjective or personal ones. This is different from parity of outcome—but outcomes differ among men as well.
Some version of “be nice,” “that’s not fair,” or “what about porn?”
Feminists—get off the cross. You’re not a sacred caste.
The damsel-in-distress act doesn’t work anymore. Neither does the “Two Degrees to Patriarchy or Porn” routine. Correlation isn’t causation. Remember the panic over violent video games? Same logic applies. I’m no fan of Big Porn either—but come on. Get a grip.
You don’t get to launder every social ill through The Patriarchy™ machine and still call yourself critical. The Patriarchy card has expired. You’re not a liberation movement. You do identity politics. No more, no less.
“Patriarchy is REAL and Feminism is necessary”
Interesting how both The Patriarchy and feminism are missing from actual (serious) political theory, political science, and political history.
I don’t think any polity has ever declared itself The Patriarchy. I am pretty sure no legal code identifies The Patriarchy as its organizing principle. Meanwhile, feminism doesn’t offer a model of governance, a theory of political economy, or even a consistent definition of power.
What professional feminism is proficient at is opportunistically & retroactively coding certain outcomes, behaviors, or structures as The Patriarchy while treating feminism (their product) itself as the necessary lens to decode and resist it. This is not political theory or critique, it’s ideological ventriloquism.
This brand of feminism isn’t about analyzing power so much as applying its floating signifier to anything a feminist dislikes or disdains—from manspreading (they do have cock & balls, ladies 😉) to stripclubs to men who won’t text back. Feminists need The Patriarchy to remain undefined and all-pervasive. The vaguer it is, the more things it can be used to explain—and condemn. Convenient that. . .