A PERVERT'S GUIDE TO FEMINISM (TARA VON DIJK!)
NEWSFLASH: The Patriarchy Already Got Smashed
"Desire’s fundamental structure is that it needs an obstacle. Remove the obstacle, and desire collapses. The worst thing that can happen to you is to get what you want."
— Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Dear Nevermorons,
As you’re probably aware, feminists have started turning against feminism.
Two years ago, we published a piece by Rozali Telbis under the title Why Are Women Ditching Feminism?
It has proven to be uncannily prescient.
That piece was mostly about how many young women no longer identified with feminism, but also contained some stories about committed feminists who were turning their backs on their flock.
For example, long time rad fem Terri Strange made ripples when she announced not only that she was no longer a feminist, but also that she had also become a Christian.
Around the same time, leading Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy also announced that she was distancing herself from feminism.
“I also started to realize that if I was truly going to be an independent thinker, I had to reject ideology completely, and just take people and policy and politics and ideas as they came, without applying an ideological lens to my analysis. I wanted to be free to work outside the box and with whomever I liked. I wanted to be free to explore ideas with genuine curiosity, not just with the intent to analyze the idea “as a feminist” (or reject it on the same basis).”
Laura Dodsworth is another former feminist who has renounced feminism, though I don’t have a quote handy to prove it.
One of the leading theorists of this movement is “Reactionary Feminist” Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress.
Mary Harrington is big on the idea that modern feminism is totally out of touch with the needs of mothers. Feminists generally act as if they represent women in general, but the reality is that feminist discourse has been dominated by non-mothers since at least the 1970s.
All this has felt like it is building up to something. Are we on the cusp on a new wave of feminism? What wave of feminism are we on, anyway?
WHAT WAVE OF FEMINISM ARE WE ON?
It doesn’t seem like we’re the third wave of feminism anymore. Third wave feminism was all about sex-positivity, and I couldn’t even name you a single sex-positive feminist who has made their name in the past ten years.
I’ve previously written about the mysterious disappearance of sex-positive feminism here:
These days, thoughtful women seem decidedly less enthusiastic about the “empowerment” offered by porn and sex work.
So here’s an idea for you: maybe there was a fourth wave of feminism and no one got around to naming it.
If you think about it, there are pretty big difference between the third wave feminism of Ani Difranco and Bikini Kill and the “intersectional transfeminism” of people like Judith Butler and Andrew “Dinkle” Chung.
If we label woke feminism as the fourth wave of feminism, that it makes sense that the next wave of feminism would be a reaction to it. Hence, “reactionary feminism”.
So, are we on the fifth wave of feminism then?
Well, maybe. But I think that the Feminism brand has lost much of its lustre in recent years. The next wave of feminism might not be too keen to call itself feminism. Or, to put it another way, the next wave of feminism might be anti-feminist.
That said, there will continue to be women who write about women’s issues, and who put women at the fore of their political analysis. If we don’t call such people feminists, what are we going to call them?
I don’t know. It’s certainly not up to me to decide. But it would be nice if we had some clearer language to talk about the shift that is happening in feminist/post-feminist theory.
Which brings me to Tara Van Dijk, who has been gracious enough to allow us to repost one of her essays.
Tara has been creating quite the stir since publishing a piece called Feminist’s Fetishistic Disavowal two months ago.
The piece is absolutely deadly, and the finer points are not easily summarized. But one of the main takeaways is that the Patriarchy has already been smashed, and that feminists cling to an ever-more spectral fantasy of it because they need it to make their struggle against it meaningful.
Tara Van Dijk accuses feminists of taking a perverted pleasure in the idea of their own oppression, and she definitely seems to have touched a nerve.
Tara’s work has met with the enthusiasm of some feminists, such as Jennifer Bilek, but has been greeted with the utmost scorn by others. It is clear that some feminists perceive her analysis as something quite deeply threatening. It’s quite fascinating to watch.
We have already posted one piece by Tara, and her latest continues her blazing attack on the very foundations of the feminist Mythos.
If you’re into political theory and haven’t heard of Tara Van Dijk yet, you’re missing out.
This is the cutting edge. It’s an honour to be publishing her groundbreaking work.
for the wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
A FEMINIST AFFLICTION
Hysteric, Obsessive, Perverse and Psychotic Attachments to The Patriarchy
May 10, 2025
My ongoing work on the elephant in the room of feminist discourse—namely, how it represses, disavows, or forecloses the fact that patriarchy was dissolved by the changing forces and relations of capitalist development—distresses many feminists. They take particular offense at the thesis that: despite the patriarchy being analytically and theoretically useless for explaining contemporary gender relations and sexual politics, The Patriarchy (as a narrative) is both ideologically and libidinally indispensable to Feminism™.
Below is an X thread inspired by the reactions to my “Feminists to The Patriarchy: We Hate You, Don’t Stop!” piece published by Jennifer Bilek. While these posts were largely about "taking the piss," to use a British expression, they did inspire the paper I am working on now that applies Lacan’s fantasy formula to differentiate the neurotic, perverse, and psychotic attachments to The Patriarchy that together comprise the feminist libindial economy. . .
ENJOY!
Feminism, in its current form, is less a coherent movement than a set of symptoms—each structured around enjoying The Patriarchy fantasy in a different way.
🗣️ The Hysteric enjoys interrogating The Patriarchy.
📜 The Obsessive enjoys monitoring & regulating The Patriarchy
😈 The Pervert enjoys applying The Patriarchy’s law under the guise of transgressing it.
🌀 The Psychotic enjoys foreclosing the sex binary—sex is a construct; Trans Women Are Women!
Each of these is entangled with The Patriarchy—not as a material condition to truly abolish, but as the structuring fantasy that sustains their desire and provides jouissance.
They all resist, albeit in different ways, traversing The Patriarchy fantasy—because its function is not to be overcome, but to sustain the drive at the core of today’s feminist libidinal economy.
🗣️🗣️ The Feminist Hysteric
The feminist hysteric enjoys questioning The Patriarchy. She interrogates it endlessly, but is never satisfied.
🔹 “It’s systemic… invisible… unconscious… adaptive… always shifting…”
Every counter-argument becomes more evidence that The Patriarchy is deeply embedded. Every victory just means The Patriarchy has become more insidious and diffuse in ever-more “intersectional” forms.
🚨 Why She Can’t Let Go
The disappearance of The Patriarchy would force her to confront not just what she desires, but how she desires it. As long as The Patriarchy remains, she never has to face the trauma of freedom.
True liberation would require her to define what she actually wants—beyond opposition, beyond grievance. The Patriarchy ensures that feminism remains in suspended struggle.
✔ Every challenge to its existence is proof of its depth.
✔ Every material victory is proof of its adaptability.
✔ Every shift in power is proof that it has only become more insidious.
💭 The Feminist Hysteric isn't really actually fighting The Patriarchy—her libidinal economy is structured around it. She cannot let it go because The Patriarchy sustains her desire for “liberation,” thus always keeping it out of reach. It is a defense mechanism.
The libidinal economy refers to the unconscious structuring of desire—how The Patriarchy functions as an object that organizes feminist enjoyment (jouissance). It highlights the investment in The Patriarchy as a necessary antagonism that keeps the struggle alive and, in turn, sustains feminist subjectivity itself.
🧩Hysterical Responses to My Essay/Posts
Take a recent interlocutor—who insisted that The Patriarchy is "always present," "integral," and will "inevitably enter the conversation." Even when claiming not to focus on it, she could not stop invoking it.
Feminist Hysterics don’t argue: they just repeat, evade, and reassert The Patriarchy fantasy in different ways:
🌀 The “It’s Always There” Gambit
"The Patriarchy is always present! It morphs, adapts, and shifts under challenge. It is inevitable that at some point it will enter the conversation.”
— Translation: It’s like the Illuminati or the Devil
🌀 The “I Don’t Fixate on It, BUT…”
"I’m not obsessed with The Patriarchy! I just know it’s a constant force shaping everything, and it must be examined in every context."
— Translation: Denial while reinforcing the fantasy.
🌀 The Defensive Reversal
"Can you list all the 'material' things YOU have done to improve women’s lives in The Patriarchy?"
— Translation: Attack the critic to avoid addressing the critique.
🧐 The Obsessive Feminist 📝
The Obsessive Feminist believes The Patriarchy can be tamed, managed, and eventually abolished—through rules, procedures, and compliance frameworks.
Where the Hysteric Feminist enjoys endless questioning, the Obsessive Feminist enjoys administration. She does not question whether The Patriarchy exists—she assumes it does and treats it as a bureaucratic problem.
It’s not liberation she desires, but total administration:
📋 "If we just get the policies right…!"
📋 "More rules, more training, more sensitivity workshops!"
📋 "We need clearer guidelines, stricter enforcement, and compliance frameworks!"
🛡️ Administration as a Defence Mechanism
Obsessive Feminists don’t seek liberation. They desire the impossibility of fully regulated, compliant, and administered relations between men and women. But the more they regulate, the more contradictions emerge. The more procedures set, the more loopholes appear. The more "equity guidelines" imposed, the more grievances proliferate. . .
This process doesn’t resolve The Patriarchy. It sustains it. Bureaucratic expansion perpetually postpones the confrontation with freedom. It keeps the Patriarchy alive as a technical problem to be managed rather than an ideological fantasy to be overcome.
Obsessive Responses to My Essay/Posts:
📊 "Patriarchy exists because X% of CEOs are men, Y% of wealth is controlled by men, and Z% of lawmakers are male." Translation: If we quantify it, we can prove it. If we can prove it, we can manage it.
📑 "We don’t need ‘The Patriarchy,’ but we do need new language & frameworks for sex-based oppression." Translation: If we categorize oppression correctly, we can regulate it correctly.
🔗 Posts a link to “Ethics in Sociology” as if to discredit my argument. Translation: This discussion must conform to pre-existing institutional standards, or it doesn’t count.
Why Obsessives Can’t Let Go
A world where sexual relations aren’t administered is traumatic for them. They cannot imagine a social order without constant oversight, formal policies, and managerial intervention. The endless writing of new guidelines, sensitivity training sessions, and policy revisions protects them from confronting the impossibility of their goal.
The comic-tragedy of the Obsessive Feminists is that their efforts never resolve contradictions. They only generate more rules, more bureaucracy, more administration. They mistake the accumulation of procedures for progress.
Coda: The Patriarchy is not a policy failure. It’s a fantasy that sustains feminist subjectivity itself. But the Obsessive Feminist cannot confront that, so they administrate instead.
The Perverse Feminist 😈
Where the Hysteric Feminist interrogates The Patriarchy and the Obsessive Feminist seeks to regulate it, the Perverse Feminist wants to provoke it—to transgress, to scandalize, to play the badass while ensuring The Patriarchy remains intact as her necessary antagonist, the Joker to her Batman.
Troon Hunters & AGP Exposés 🕵️♂️📸
🖤 They don’t just want to expose these men—they enjoy exposing them.
🖤 They don’t simply oppose AGPs—they fixate on them.
🖤 They don’t seek liberation from male deviancy—they curate a never-ending gallery of it.
At some point, this stopped being about reporting and became a compulsion—a jolt of jouissance in the act of exposing these men, in fixating on their grotesque performances, in the ritual of denouncing them over and over again.
But who, exactly, is this ritual for? 💡
If the goal were simply to expose, that’s been accomplished by now. If the point were to change minds, this would have worked by now. So why continue scouring social media for the latest grotesque display? How many randos in their mother’s clothes or even diapers do we need to see? How many posts on sissy porn does it take?
It’s not about stopping them. It’s about the thrill of the chase and the trophy (post). A Perverse Feminist subject in her own words:
Confession of Enjoyment1
"I've spent the past five years of my life peeping down a rabbit hole of horrors..."
Note the language: peeping, rabbit hole of horrors—this is not dispassionate research. This is an obsessive fixation that has become her entire identity. There is a thrill, a jouissance, in repeatedly immersing herself in the very thing she consciously despises.
The Ritual of Exposure
"I've written hundreds of articles based on court documents depicting the actions of pedophiles and sex offenders..."
The Perverse Feminist does not simply want to expose bad actors—she needs to catalogue them—to dwell in their depravity, to showcase them to the world again and again. If AGPs disappeared and gender ideology collapsed overnight, would she feel relief—or loss?
The Fixation on ‘Sissy Porn’
"They get the most upset at me when I talk about sissy porn and trans. Because I'm right, I've been right for years, and the truth hurts."
Why the obsession with this niche? Why does this specific subset of male degeneracy draw her in? The Perverse Feminist is not merely documenting or analysing—it is a ritual, a performance, an endless cycle of revealing, condemning, and enjoying.
The Fantasy of the ‘Knowing Subject’
"I know. So they hate me."
The Perverse Feminist positions herself as the one who sees the truth while others remain blind. This fantasy of being the lone "knowing subject" sustains the cycle. The enemy must never be fully defeated, because their continued existence makes her role (and enjoyment) possible.
Why They Struggle To Let Go
The Perverse Feminist needs The Patriarchy (or degenerate stand-ins) as a stage to enact her drama. It isn't an enemy to destroy—it’s a script to rewrite, a game to play over and over.
The Psychotic Feminist 🌀
The Patriarchy isn’t real. Neither is the sex binary. They are both retroactive effects of discourse.
Where the Hysteric Feminist interrogates The Patriarchy, the Obsessive Feminist regulates it, and the Perverse Feminist plays with it, the Psychotic Feminist forecloses the Symbolic altogether—dissolving categories, disintegrating meaning, and rejecting any stable definition of sex or reality itself.
No feminist embodies this more than Judith Butler (they/them).
🌀 Psychotic Foreclosure: The Dissolution of Sex
The hallmark of psychosis, in Lacanian terms, is foreclosure—the refusal of a limit that organizes reality. This leads to a breakdown in the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, signifier from referent, meaning from nonsense.
Judith Butler enacts this foreclosure in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter by rejecting the most basic material anchor of human subjectivity: SEX.
💬 Sex is always already gender.
💬 There is no prediscursive sex.
💬 "Bodies only appear as male or female through performative acts.
So, no prior reality, no material basis—just discourse, only signification. The body has no preexisting reality; it is “called into being” through "speech acts". 👀
This is why Butler’s logic leads to full-blown transgenderism—if sex is just discourse, then anyone can claim any identity, and nothing can be refuted: "To claim that someone is a man or a woman is always a normatively invested and, therefore, politically loaded claim."
Translation: There is no truth to sex—only power, only discourse, only performance.
🌀 The Psychotic Escape from Nature
This psychotic trajectory doesn’t stop at the dissolution of sex. No, it extends to the radical negation of reproduction itself. Shulamith Firestone desired artificial wombs to "liberate" women from the "burden" of pregnancy.
🚨The logical endpoint of extreme autonomy is not freedom, but rather extreme alienation and fragmentation.
⛓️Why They Can’t Stop
The Psychotic Feminist can dissolve categories indefinitely because reality persists. Sex is real.
Like Galileo whispering Eppur si muove after being forced to recant, the material reality of sex remains—no matter how many incantations declare it a mere social construct.
The endless dismantling, the infinite destabilization, the refusal of limits—these provide doses of jouissance and protect Psychotic Feminists from the traumatic truth: they are misogynists 💀.
🌀 Psychotic Feminist as the Ultimate Late-Stage Capitalist Subject
Radical transgenderism and the dream of women being liberated from the tryanny of pregnancy embody what Deleuze & Guattari describe as schizoid deterritorialization—where all stable identity, rootedness, and material constraints are dissolved in pursuit of an infinite, free-floating becoming.
This is freedom as the total liquidation of limits, leaving behind only unconstrained desire and an endlessly malleable self.
This is Freedom as Death Drive 💀
🤪 Schizoid Deterritorialization: Escape Fantasy
The schizoid subject deterritorializes itself from all stable structures—rejecting the family, society, biological reality, and even the species itself. Radical gender ideology and techno-feminist “liberation” embody this precisely:
⚧️ Sex is not real → Total symbolic deterritorialization
⚧️The body is a canvas → Molecular becoming
⚧️Biology as Tyranny → Escape from the species itself
Where feminism once sought material rights for women as a sex, the Psychotic Feminist dreams of abolishing sex altogether.
💊Schizoid --> Psychotic 🌀
In psychoanalysis, extreme autonomy—severed from society, the family, and even the species itself—is the hallmark of psychosis.
Whereas the neurotic subject (Hysteric, Obsessive) still operates within a symbolic framework—questioning, regulating, but never fully breaking with reality—the psychotic forecloses symbolic reality itself. Boundaries dissolve, signifiers lose coherence, and the self disintegrates into chaos.
💡 This is why Judith Butler, Paul Preciado, and gender abolitionism produce a fundamentally psychotic discourse. This isn’t just postmodern fluidity—it’s psychotic collapse, a rebellion against the real limits of material existence.
The Schizoid Subject & The Capitalist Machine 🏭
Capitalism and radical gender ideology share the same logic: boundless de/re-territorialization, rejecting all material constraints.
This is why transhumanism, postgenderism, and AI surrogacy are the ultimate capitalist fantasies. They promise to overcome all limits—biological, social, even the boundaries of the species itself—reducing humanity to pure marketable fragments.
The ultimate commodity under late capitalism is the human subject itself: sliced into infinitely customizable, profitable, and exploitable identity markers.
Editor’s Note: Tara in the midst of a major series called A Pervert’s Guide to Feminism.
Subscribe to her blog for more!
Series Articles:
Feminists to the Patriarchy: We Hate You, Don’t Stop in The 11th Hour
Feminism’s Fetishistic Disavowal in Savage Minds
Enjoy Patriarchy! The Feminist Libidinal Economy in Savage Minds
Death-Drive Feminism & Its Conservative & Reactionary Politics (May)
Taliban Nights: The Erotics of Imperialist Feminism (May)
The Rise and Fall of Patriarchy: A Historical Materialist Acount (June)
Feminism: A Capitalist Inherent Transgression? (June)
Turning Feminism Inside-Out with Lacan’s Four Discourses (June )
There's some good food for thought here. I'm of two minds about the concept of the 'patriarchy.' It's such a nebulous and often ill-defined term that makes it easy to dismiss entirely. But I think patriarchal culture does still exist, at least in Western societies. Modern Western society is the result of thousands of years of domination, slavery, exploitation, etc. and these ways of life persist to this day in all sorts of ways. Every aspect of living depends on how we can manipulate, erode, and exploit the Natural world in as many ways as possible, and these are remnants from many, many years ago when predominantly men engaged in dominator culture (herding culture, for example, paved the way to the modern factory farm - a horrific practice that never should have been normalized).
I think about patriarchy from this historical context, not for example, when it comes to talking about pay gaps, or #MeToo, or other complaints made about the 'patriarchy' today. I hate the way that it's framed now - rarely is it expressed in a way that I personally resonate with.
A culture that engages in partnership and co-existence is key, but I don't think that can ever be possible because we are so deeply entrenched in dominator culture.
Modern life has made all of this even more confusing to navigate. The problem is both sexes are ignoring what is needed most: The ability to partner, co-exist, and nurture compassion -- Women are now engaging in these 'dominating' practices (as I expressed in my latest piece), and men do much of the same, just in different ways. It's a lot to grapple with.
I’m thinking about writing a piece called “AntiVaxxers’ Fetishistic Disavowal” or “A Pervert’s Guide to the Medical Freedom Movement.” It is going to be about jouissance, Lacan’s Four Discourses, the antivaxxers’ libidinal economy, how medical freedom folk secretly obsess and desperately desire the very thing they claim to despise - the Criminocracy, the Cabal, The Globalists. And if anyone gets upset? I’ll say “Gotcha! You’re denying it so you must really want it! You are asking for it!” Good bit of Freudian unconscious impulses theorising to make myself look smart.