The playwright and activist V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, has warned that a new and more dangerous mutation of patriarchal power is accelerating across the globe, fusing authoritarian politics with billionaire technocracy to create what she terms “psychopatriarchy.” In a searing analysis published this week, the founder of the V-Day movement argues that the system is no longer merely oppressive but actively psychotic — dissociated from empathy, accountability and reality itself — and is now the primary engine propelling racism, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism toward collective catastrophe.
A backlash against progress
V traces the emergence of psychopatriarchy to a violent counter-reaction against decades of civil rights gains. Women’s rights, trans rights, workers’ rights and immigrant rights have all advanced, she argues, triggering a consolidation of power among a tiny, predominantly white, male billionaire class. This elite has merged with state apparatuses — controlling communication platforms, artificial intelligence, police forces and agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement — to enforce a new order built on “terrorizing violence, cruelty and precarity.”
The mindset, she writes, is encapsulated in the Silicon Valley mantra “move fast and break things.” Or, more bluntly: “grab things, rape things.”
Impunity at the summit
The analysis centres on the United States, where V notes the president is a civilly adjudicated sex abuser who has dismissed allegations against allies and made misogyny a cultural hallmark of his movement. This sanctioning of hatred from the top, she argues, has normalised a spectrum of violence: from the “manosphere” and online “rape academies” where men trade tactics for drugging and assaulting women, to the proliferation of deepfake pornography and sex robots.
She points to the alleged “rape islands” frequented by the powerful, to university campuses where gang rapes go unpunished, and to legislative efforts such as North Carolina’s House Bill 1232 — a measure that would potentially legalise the killing of women who obtain abortions. “The fact that it is even being considered is an example of how deeply far we have fallen,” she writes.
The death of compassion
A hallmark of the new order, V contends, is the explicit rejection of empathy. She quotes Elon Musk: “Empathy is the fundamental weakness of western civilization.” In its place, dissociation is reframed as strength. The ability to feel no guilt, shame or horror becomes a qualification for service to the state.
She cites the renaming of the Department of Defense to the “High-T Department of War” under Secretary Pete Hegseth, alongside proposals to mandate testosterone levels for military personnel over 30 to “optimise natural capabilities, longevity, and readiness.” The goal, she argues, is a “psycho army driven by chemicals beyond their control.”
Accountability erased
The architecture of impunity is now comprehensive. Courts, the Department of Justice, Congress and international legal frameworks have been hollowed out or ignored. V lists a litany of atrocities committed without consequence: the genocide in Gaza, the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran that killed 120 children and 26 teachers, the extrajudicial kidnapping of presidents, the deportation of elected officials such as Ilhan Omar, the lynching of Black Americans, the felling of ancient trees for border walls and golf courses.
“When there is no accountability, when there is no place to turn for justice, a society loses its moral footing and begins to fall,” she writes.
Accelerating the polycrisis
Psychopatriarchy, V argues, is not merely a political project but a state of existence — a “blight on the condition of humanity” locking populations into daily terror, depression and manufactured powerlessness. Rather than mitigating existential threats — artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, climate collapse, pandemics — the psychopatriarchs are accelerating them all. AI advances without regulation. The nuclear arms race escalates. Oil drilling intensifies at breakneck speed.
“It is propelled by its own mad trajectory,” she warns.
Resistance through reality
The response, V insists, must be multi-pronged: legal challenges, strikes, electoral removal, public naming and shaming, artistic witness, and the creation of parallel structures so “inviting, generous and caring” that they draw people out of the cult. But the core requirement is psychological: a refusal to dissociate.
“Psychosis is the inability to tell what is real from unreal,” she writes. “Our work is to say what we see and trust what we know, to keep speaking truth to power and go to any lengths to stay connected to reality and each other.”
Why it Matters
V’s framework reframes disparate crises — reproductive bans, AI deregulation, Gaza, the manosphere, billionaire capture of state power — as symptoms of a single, coherent pathology. By naming “psychopatriarchy,” she offers a diagnostic tool for movements struggling to connect the dots between misogyny, authoritarianism and ecological suicide. The stakes are not merely political but existential: a system that rewards dissociation and punishes empathy cannot negotiate its own survival, let alone ours. The question is whether democratic institutions can act before the trajectory becomes terminal.