When talking about their book project with a colleague from gender studies, Robin Dembroff was met with skepticism: “Why are philosophers still talking about patriarchy?” Real Men on Top is an attempt to answer this question. Our understanding of gender, in academia and activism, might have become more nuanced and complicated than the “men vs women” zero-sum game that the radical feminist concept of “patriarchy” is purported to offer. In Dembroff’s words, “This received understanding gets a lot right—women are systematically abused and exploited, and usually by men—but it also leaves a lot out.” Still, it is not yet time to dispose of it. In Real Men on Top, Dembroff offers an account of what this understanding of patriarchy leaves out, while also elaborating what it gets right, and what it could get even righter if we are willing to look beyond oversimplified frameworks.
According to the autobiographical notes in the preface, Dembroff is in a generative position to make this case. Now a philosopher at Yale, they started life in Evangelical homeschooling and received their higher education at a Bible college. Throughout this education, however, they never followed “one of society’s most sacred rules”—fitting on one side of the line dividing the gender binary—to the extent that the “family minister tried to exorcize [their] demons of nonconformity”. This acute awareness of “the price we pay” to be and become men and women has given Dembroff the possibility to start to name, describe, and analyze a reality that for most is unquestioned: gender.
Real Men on Top is Dembroff’s case for holding on to “patriarchy” as the name for this reality. Despite its publication by a university press, the book is short, readable, and accessible, without hesitating to venture into the complications of theoretical analysis. It shows how the identity of “Man” is a marker and driver of social dominance, but a dominance that goes beyond the gender binary. Frustratingly, the argument does seem to end up reinforcing another binary, that of rich, powerful men against everyone else. Regardless, there is much that Dembroff has to offer in a book that impressively combines political bite, analytical nuance, and concrete examples.
Complicating patriarchy
Besides a preface and a postscript, the book is divided into three clear and sharp chapters that build toward the same goal: a more productive understanding of patriarchy. In the first of them, Dembroff traces the history of “patriarchy” to the radical feminists of the 1970s and ‘80s. The term had “to do a particular job, and it got that job done”: naming the male dominance over women as a social system. However, the view that “men win when women lose” is too narrow, for three reasons.
Firstly, Dembroff points out that “intersectionality upsets the ideas that gender, as a social system, reduces to a sexist bent toward male dominance”. The differences within women’s experiences of patriarchy show that gendered identities are from the start “saturated with race and class assumptions”. Dembroff does not promote a simplistic, additive understanding of intersectionality, but the much stronger argument that “gender cannot be causally delineated from race in a society where what it means to be an ideal Woman is to be White”. The example that they use is the US Supreme Court case Relf v. Weinberger, which prohibited the use of federal funds for the purpose of forced sterilization. The win achieved by this decision, primarily affecting poor women of color, is the right to “preserve” one’s fertility, not to “limit” it, as in the case for activism centered on abortion and contraception. The larger point that Dembroff makes is that white feminism in the 20th century was often underpinned by eugenicist assumptions that put it at odds with the feminism of Black women or women of color.
The second of Dembroff’s points is the main driver of the book, and more controversial. Dembroff found this out the hard way when, after tweeting that “Many men experience violence, marginalization, and exploitation not despite patriarchy, but because of it”, they were met “with sharp hostility by many women who gendered [them] as Man”. Still, Dembroff forcefully makes the argument that “patriarchy is not designed to benefit men as a class”. Intersectionality has to be applied within the category of men as well, showing how some men who are racialized, working-class, or sexually nonconforming are on the losing side of patriarchy. “The sexist oppression of women”—while doubtlessly real—“does nothing to relieve men’s hardships.”
Lastly, Dembroff argues that the men-vs-women view of patriarchy reinforces a gender binary that ignores “androgynous” people. Patriarchy so narrowly understood buys into the assumption “that everyone will present unambiguous cultural genitals and these cultural genitals will faithfully announce anatomical ones”. Men’s dominance over women is thus anchored in a biological reality that patriarchy reflects in social reality. By taking this as a premise, the simplistic view of patriarchy cannot and will not question the mechanisms through which this binary is enforced. In other words, it will not question gender.
The trinity
Throughout the book, Dembroff distinguishes between identities, capitalized as “Man” or “Woman”, and the real gendered experiences of people in everyday life. “Identities are not people”, they write, and “patriarchy thrives” when we fail to make this distinction. The book’s second chapter unpacks the content of the identity “Man”, or, as Dembroff calls it, its “mythology”. In the book’s strongest and most interesting argument, Dembroff argues that Man is indeed an identity of “biological supremacy”, but one that is not reducible to the supremacy of men over women.
Patriarchy is built on a triple hierarchy articulated along biological lines: Man over Woman, over Child, and over Animal. In a double-step logic, biological differences are established as natural truths along these three distinctions, and then overladen with normative values that impose social dominance.
The supposedly biological difference between Man and Woman is established along sexual lines, constructing behaviors and tasks that are perceived as masculine as “worthy of resources and authority”. The dominance of Man over Child is anchored in ideas of lineage, a mainstay of patriarchy that allows fathers to tyrannically control children. Lastly, the dominance of Man over Animal is underpinned by ideas of development and hierarchies between natural forms of life.
What makes Dembroff’s argument particularly useful is that they present this “trinity” not as three distinct elements coming together, but as three mutually constitutive logics and sets of practices. Sexism is also built through the animalization and infantilization of women. At the same time, this conception of Man is deeply intersectional. Arguments of sex, lineage and development are a central part of racialization, as colonized peoples are presented as effeminate, infantile, and subhuman.
Man’s problems
The book’s final chapter returns to exploring how patriarchy affects men. Far from engaging in the usual handwringing about crises of masculinity, Dembroff wants to concretely present how patriarchy polices men’s identities while also establishing almost insurmountable hierarchies among men. The entry point into this investigation is the often-invoked exhortation that one should be a “real man”. That is, of course, a commonplace in the reproduction of what we might call toxic masculinity: real men don’t cry or express feelings, work hard and drink beer, get women and provide for their families. But it also appears in more well-intentioned discourses, such as the pandemic hashtag claiming that #RealMenWearMasks.
“‘Real Man’ is the identity of a figure imagined to sit at the pinnacle of existence, superior to all other living beings.” As such, it is unachievable, and there will always be a gap between Man and men, leading to rankings based on how close one is to the ideal. One ranking mechanism that Dembroff dwells on is the penis. The question of men and penises is supposedly “obvious and uncomplicated because whether someone has a human adult penis is obvious and uncomplicated”. But constant anxieties about penis size show that it is never as simple as that and “the ruler of manhood remains underdetermined and ambiguous”. Nothing, ultimately, can guarantee that one is and remains a Real Man.
This does not mean that some are not more of a Man than others. “In America, hegemonic masculinity hinges on and is measured by financial status.” By definition, however, economic success is achievable only by a few in capitalism, and many are condemned to being less manly because they are poor or working class. “Masculinity is a stacked game”, according to Dembroff, “engineered to secure and reproduce the wealth and authority of those who already possess vast amounts of both”.
Wealth
This is where the rubber hits the road in Dembroff’s account, as it shifts from conceptual analysis to more explicit politics. If most men suffer under patriarchy, the natural question is why they continue to support it and identify with it. Men continue to aspire to be Man, despite the harm, and thus “maintain their own exploitation”. Through patriarchy, “we, as a society, authorize a small number of men to exploit and even destroy millions of other men’s bodies”. But Dembroff adds that they “don’t blame men for this loyalty, as they have been shaped by the idea that patriarchy has something to offer to all men”.
Dembroff’s answer to this dilemma falls short of the theoretical complexity of their analytical interventions about patriarchy. In fact, they do not have much to offer beyond an appeal to false consciousness: men simply do not see their real interests. Dembroff resorts to a kind of economic reductionism, in which the continuation of patriarchy is underpinned by maximising profits. In this way, “the wealthiest men” can convince “poor white men” that they are in an alliance against a “racial threat”, and also enlist them in “heterosexuality crusades” that replace economic success with the assertion of masculine dominance. Poor men are, in Dembroff’s words, “political pawns”.
In these terms, Dembroff’s takeaway seems both naive and condescending. Naive because it assumes that men have nothing to gain from patriarchy beyond (the illusion of) economic success and political authority. Condescending because it sees most men as acting without any awareness of their interests or even of the content of their own actions. This allows Dembroff to hold on to some optimism about the possibility of change. Looking around, however, one might understandably feel the need for a more cynical understanding of men’s participation in patriarchy.
A starting point for this cynicism might be W. E. B. Du Bois. Dembroff briefly refers to his attempt to answer similar questions to theirs. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois spends significant effort trying to understand why poor whites engage in racism against their apparent economic interests, which dictate that they should present a united front against white capitalists. But Dembroff does not cite one of Du Bois’s most influential concepts: the psychological wage. This does not refer to an illusion that is used to hide their real economic condition from white workers, but an alternative form of real advantage that compensates for and complements financial wages: access to public spaces, preferential treatment by the police and state, “public deference and titles of courtesy”.
A similar psychological wage compensates poor men today. They might not be winners of capitalism, but many of them are allowed to play a game that is stacked against women and gender nonconforming people. Cishet men can go through the world in ways that are denied to others, expecting respect and deference when others expect harassment or violence. And when respect is not forthcoming, they can appeal to forms of self-assertion, verbal and physical, that bolster their masculinity. When they engage in assault or rape, they can realistically count on their acts not being sanctioned by the state.
This is not to deny that differently racialized men can and do have very different experiences in society. But Du Bois’s point about the psychological wage was that even the lowliest white still had someone to look down on, someone lower on the hierarchy who elevates their own special status. Dembroff points out that gender pay gap discourses ignore the fact that Black men have lower levels of income than white women. What they fail to fully consider is that Black men still reap the benefits of patriarchy in relation to Black women.
Authority
This overly narrow understanding of relative economic success is paired with an overly narrow understanding of authority. The winners of patriarchy are, for Dembroff, those with “vast amounts” of authority, those with power to “lay claim to the labor—or the lives—of the losers”. Dembroff complicates patriarchy to show that some men, such as politicians and bosses, can lay claim to the labor and even lives of other men. What falls to the side in the process is that, while most men cannot lay claim to the labor, bodies, and lives of most other women, they can do so for at least a few, especially in their homes.
Manon Garcia, among many others, makes this point about the Pelicot trial. All the accused in the trial were, for all intents and purposes, everyday men that one might come across in the streets, in the shops, in the public institutions everywhere. Rapists and abusers are not only Hollywood magnates, politicians, or students at elite colleges. They are husbands, fathers, colleagues, or friends.
As Dembroff themself mentions, “patriarchy” was a word that was used to politicize the personal. Indeed, the word has roots in the personal sphere, as radical feminists repurposed a term that initially referred “to a domestic order, originating in ancient Greek and Roman law, in which the eldest male citizen in a household held absolute authority over the dependent women, children, and enslaved foreigners within that household”. The trick that patriarchy pulls, as a social order, is to present this authority as natural, as a matter of private matters that are in a separate sphere from the public and the political.
Despite legal and social progress, men’s authority in the household is still unchallenged in many respects. Most men might not have the vast amounts of wealth and power that elites do. But they still benefit from significant, if not absolute, authority in what in liberal societies is still the private sphere of family, romantic, and sexual relations. In this sense, most men are winners of the patriarchy.
Doubtlessly, Dembroff is aware of this, and many of their examples and analysis show it. However, their efforts to complicate our received understanding of patriarchy end up overly simplifying the role that men play in contemporary society. The men vs women, zero-sum image of gender might be overly simplified. But so is an image that shows that only some, very few men benefit from patriarchy.
That is also shown by Dembroff’s encouragements to men. Gender and patriarchy are made and remade through a myriad of everyday behaviors. Dembroff calls on us all to be aware of these behaviors, to start challenging them, and “to articulate ourselves anew—not in opposition to others but in ways that make our collective flourishing possible”. This is a beautiful image, and a necessary one: men do indeed need to renounce the aspiration to be a Real Man to flourish in a way that would be compatible with the flourishing of others. However, renouncing this would not only challenge their “self-conception”, as Dembroff says, but also force them to give up everyday advantages that are material as much as they are ideological.
Despite this unsatisfying ending, Real Men on Top is a book worth reading and promoting. Its analytical contributions to our understanding of patriarchy, especially its deep commitment to intersectionality, are key lessons. Its theory of change might ultimately be unsatisfying, and might look like it lets many men off the hook, especially in the face of so much horror that they perpetuate. But it ultimately is an essential aspect of any reimagination of gender. As Dembroff notes, “we are deluged with self-help books, influencers, podcasts that offer quick fixes for emasculation in the form of everything from fast cars and bodybuilding to wilderness survival and Christian nationalism”. In this bleak landscape, having a short, accessible book that names patriarchy to encourage men to become aware of the ways gender shapes their lives might prove to be useful.
