**4.1 Misogyny and denialism**

Broadly put, fifty years of denialist campaigning torpedoed the possibility of the world taking the actions that needed to be taken to mitigate, if not avoid, catastrophic climate change. These campaigns were motivated by commercial interests and neo-liberal ideology, but they also have a strong association with misogyny [11].

The misogynist sensibility is devastatingly split-off from source and earth and is horrified at the primacy of the womb. This is why Vladimir Putin refers to Russia as the Fatherland, just as the Nazis did in their heyday. For haters, for those who fetishize control, it is intolerable to countenance the idea that man and his precariously built environment is an epiphenomenon, a puny subsidiary, of Mother Nature's infinitely grander organic enterprise. That this nature can abolish up-starts, that human hubris relies on the indulgence of a higher power for its life, so annihilates conceit it cannot be contemplated.

Why? For 'male-stream' thinkers [12] their hatred of dependence is so visceral as to demand that the map must be read upside down. This perversity is evident in tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel investing fabulous sums into nature denying projects: artificial islands; the artificial extension of individual human life; the colonizing of space. These conceits speak explicitly to the subverting power of their aversion. These nay-sayers have naturalized an inverted version of reality, a perversion that begets sadistic callousness, ever murder, more than numb indifference. (This idea was developed by Wilhelm Reich, mindful its reception has been side-tracked by the controversies that surrounded his later life).

The same ideology was evident in early Australian explorers hot to 'penetrate' the continent's interior [13]. Theirs's was the mythopathic mission to conquer and dominate. It is the dream of the phallic triumphant that represents heterosexual sex as the subjugation of the yonic by a more powerful authority. Of course, this reading can be upended. The yonic can be understood to use, to exhaust, to engulf, to swallow, and-or to mock, the tiny phallic intruder. The more civilized view understands there can be a frisson – a dialectic; a dynamo; a difference engine – in the contrast between two energies.

Whatever interpretation of sexual politics might be favored, the misogynist position entails a fear, and a simultaneous hatred, of the feminine. This ambivalence played itself out aggressively in debates about climate change between, say, 1970 and the early 2020s, and can be expected to play an even more vexed part in the world of climate collapse. In this context deniers will be subject to full force of mother nature's physical 'derelictions' as these people will also be subject to the 'return of the repressed' [14] at the deepest level of interiority. This means that aggressive projections will be likely, along with an ill-at-ease subjectivity [15, 16]. However disowned, it would be terrifying to be haunted by an angry and powerful fantasy figure that is part Kali, part Medea, part Black Widow.
