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What We Get Wrong About Patriarchy

A conversation with philosopher Robin Dembroff about their new book, Real Men on Top, identity categories, and the possibility of undoing patriarchy.

It is a truth recently acknowledged that men are not doing well. Look at different metrics, and a pattern quickly becomes evident: Boys and men are falling behind girls and women. Lower college enrollment levels, higher suicide rates, stagnant wages: The problem is pervasive, and op-eds, essays, and podcasts on the “masculinity crisis” abound. 

Missing from many of these think-pieces, however, is a more rigorous and systemic account of gender dynamics. How can it be true that men are falling behind when we live under a patriarchal society that—traditionally understood—harms women and benefits men? Or, asked in the opposite direction: How can we say that we live in a patriarchal society when men are clearly not OK?

“Many men experience violence, marginalization, and exploitation not despite patriarchy, but because of it,” wrote philosopher Robin Dembroff in a 2020 tweet that was met with wide controversy. Six years later comes Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality, a fresh work of philosophy in which Dembroff defends and expands that thesis. 

Written in the first person and drawing from Dembroff’s personal experiences, Real Men on Top marks a shift away from the detached, impersonal style that characterizes most contemporary academic philosophy, opening formal possibilities for future philosophers to follow. Dembroff reimagines conceptions of patriarchy first inherited from second-wave feminists, many of whom understood patriarchy as the social domination of women by men. Unlike these theorists, though, Dembroff rethinks patriarchy as a system based on a mythology that legitimizes “economic exploitation, political injustice, and social cruelty,” all while harming women, children, animals, and the majority of men.

The Nation spoke with Dembroff to discuss Real Men on Top, how patriarchy harms men, and possible avenues for undoing patriarchy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Andrés Muedano: Your book opens with a reference to David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, in which he shares the story of two young fish who encounter an older, wiser fish. “How’s the water?” the latter asks them, to which one of the two young fish responds: “What the hell is water?” Gender, you argue, is like the water in Wallace’s parable: an often-unquestioned assumption that “disappears into the background fabric of daily life, successfully camouflaged as an eternal and universal given.” You describe the goal of Real Men as an attempt to “articulate the shape of this water.” What do you mean by this?

Robin Dembroff: What we’re doing when we do theory is build concepts that give us an explanatory framework for understanding certain patterns of activity—or, in this case, inequality. When I think about what it means for me to “articulate the shape of this water,” I think of giving people a concept of gender—of patriarchy—that is a very significant revision of the concept they’ve been given before. I hope that as soon as people have this revised concept, they can rise to a level of conscious awareness they didn’t previously have.

An example of this from the history of feminist thought would be when consciousness-raising groups came up with concepts like sexual harassment, for example. It wasn’t like women were not experiencing sexual harassment before, but the experiences weren’t understood as such. And so, what I’m hoping to do is give people a concept that allows them to see their daily lives in a new way that is not only helpful to them personally, but also creates a greater sense of solidarity between them. I’m particularly hoping that men and women start to see each other not as members of “the other side.”

AM: Tell me more about this revised concept of patriarchy. How does it differ from the mainstream conception of patriarchy?

RD: It’s fundamental to my book that we start with the idea of people as living bodies that then get interpreted through inherited concepts and identities. So “Man,” for instance, is........

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