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Robin Dembroff, "Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Robin Dembroff, associate professor of philosophy at Yale University, about their book, Real Men on how patriarchy shapes our reality. In Real Men on Top, Robin examines the often misunderstood concept of patriarchy. What exactly is patriarchy? How does it manifest? What views does it promote? How does it impact both those who aren't men and those who are real? Men on Top first takes us through the development of modern gender studies and the philosophy of patriarchy to interrogate the causes and consequences of a world dominated by men, worthwhile and important intervention into a hotly contested topic. Real Men on Top is essential reading for anyone interested in digging below the surface of the politics of gender. Robin, thanks so much for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [00:55]
A
Yeah, thanks for having me, Caleb. I'm really glad to be here.
- [00:57]
B
I think this is a really useful book for me, and I'm sure others will find it useful because I constantly find myself confused by certain terms. And patriarchy is one of those terms because it can mean anything, depending on who's using that term. Sometimes it means rule by men, sometimes it means rule by a few men. Sometimes it means certain types of men over other types of men, real men versus fake men or wimpy men, depending on who. On who you ask. It means different things, and depending on who you ask, it's a good thing or a bad thing. And, you know, many people, when they talk about the politics of today, you know, really look a lot at this idea of patriarchy and how patriarchy has really resurged as a value. And I think that this book is really interesting because you walk through some of the ideas and developments in the thinking of the philosophy around patriarchy, how people thought about it over the years. And then you take us to the present day, too, and really tease apart some of the interesting ways that we can think about this topic and how patriarchy is something that we can deconstruct in a meaningful way for the benefit of everyone. So I was wondering if you just first begin by introducing yourself a little bit, how you first got interested in philosophy and interested in taking on this topic of patriarchy.
- [02:14]
A
Yeah. So I think something that's essential to know about me to understand the perspective that's coming out of the book is two things. The first is that I was raised, raised as an evangelical homeschooler in a rural area in a culture that is now very much at the heart of the MAGA movement. A lot of the people I grew up with are now part of that movement. And the second thing that's important about me to know is that I have always been an androgynous person. So unlike a lot of people, even a lot of trans people, I didn't grow up being gendered consistently. I was sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy, often on the same day. And what that meant was that my developed sense of self wasn't tied to one of those parts of the binary. Instead, I experience the referent of I me as something that was beneath or more fundamental than, and something that could go across that divide. And so you can imagine the combination of those two things created a lot of cognitive dissonance when I was younger. And I didn't have access to a lot of the concepts I needed, and I didn't have access to any, you know, stuck inside of what is arguably a cult of the particular community that I was raised in. And within that community, it created, both for me and other queer folks who grew up in that community, it created a lot of mental illness and self harm. And a lot of us have left that area and left the church since then. But this book is my attempt to in some ways reconcile that history. Both because I'm trying to go back to where, in some sense, I'm trying to go back to where I came from and use the language of that place, use very direct language. Like I want. I want this book to be able to speak to people not only who teach in Ivy League universities or in higher ed, but also to someone who is a farmer in the Central Valley where I come from. I want to be able to read by everyone, and I want it to be able to show people a way of thinking about gender, that I can bring all of us together instead of presenting patriarchy as a us versus them or men versus women, or somehow something that divides us from each other.
- [04:19]
B
And as far as your academic interests are concerned, when did you first start thinking about becoming a philosophy professor, philosopher? Someone who was going to spend their life grappling with these very complex issues? Because I think some, obviously every person's story will feed into what they're interested in studying, but the way in which you go about it is quite analytical. So how did that sort of analytical approach first begin to appeal to you in this way of kind of dealing with and breaking down concepts like patriarchy first become something that you felt was a useful way to interrogate these ideas?
- [05:01]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. One way I think about philosophy that I think is really important to understanding. My answer to that question is I think of philosophy as the ability to cultivate, articulate, articulate and weigh worldview. And so I was drawn to philosophy long before I could have explained this. But I think I was drawn to it because I could sense that it had the tools I needed to break out of a worldview in which there was no place for me in that world. That was a world in which I needed to not exist. And so philosophy gave me tools for being able to deconstruct that world and find a way to build a new reality for myself in which I could exist.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah, that's very interesting. And I think that it's. Yeah, it's definitely something that I agree with that appeals to me to be this sort of form of articulation. I'm wondering if we could just jump right into the book and you could talk a little bit about your approach to it. Because I don't know what exactly makes for a standard philosophy book today, what the expectations are, but it seems to me that this is a quite interdisciplinary book. There's a bit of history in here as well. And you. And you begin the book. I mean, of course, you begin the book by talking about your own kind of approach, your own life interest that drew you to this topic. But you then talk a little bit about the origins of radical feminism, where we start to see the idea, the development of thinking about the philosophy of patriarchy. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how early thinkers in this movement were first addressing the idea of patriarchy and that kind of groundwork that was laid for than the work that you end up doing later in the book.
- [06:42]
A
Yeah, it's really important to me in the book to give all of that credit where it's due, because I take myself to be building on that work, not to be usurping it. So it goes back to this notion of worldview, really, because when radical feminism started to emerge, the dominant worldview was that, yes, positions of power are held by men, and women shouldn't hold them. And why is that? Oh, it's because of their bodies. It's because women's bodies make them unsuited for positions of authority. And what radical feminists did was use the term patriarchy to articulate a different worldview, a different explanatory framework for explaining the same sociological or empirical facts. So instead of saying it's biologically destined that women are subordinated to men and men hold power, they said, no, let's think about this as there's bodies that in their view were either male or female for the most part, not all of them, but most of them saw it that way. And let's instead think of patriarchy as an organization of human behavior, a way society is constructed to systematically put women down and elevate men. So I'm coming in with that now being by far the dominant understanding of patriarchy as like you said, a system of male rule or a system of male supremacy or something that harms women and helps men. But that's been that notion, notion of patriarchy has been at the heart of feminist studies and feminist politics basically since the 60s.
- [08:12]
B
What do you see as some of the misconceptions that people have about patriarchy? I mean, when you're, you know, with talking with students and they're suggesting ideas around what patriarchy is, how do you encourage them to think about the concept? You know, obviously there's the sort of the, the original concept meaning from, from the Greek and Roman law that you, that you point towards, and then this new understanding that the radical feminists suggest. How do you think people should go about thinking about this concept?
- [08:43]
A
For me, what's central to the concept of patriarchy is that it's this explanatory. It has this explanatory promise attached to it. It promises to be able to give a non biologically determinist picture of why it is that women are so frequently subordinated to men, violated by men, exploited by men. And so the picture that they came up with in a way did that, in some ways fulfilled that promise. But it also had very deep shortcomings because it missed the ways that women are treated differently than each other as women. It missed the way that gender actually harms a lot of men, even if those men are also harming other men and women and so on. And it missed, in my view, it also missed entirely the place of children and animals in the picture and also often assumed a sex binary at the heart of the picture that I think ends up giving away A piece of patriarchal, patriarchal worldview is built into the binary as opposed to starting the theorizing from beneath that binary.
- [09:46]
B
And that split today seems like so much of the source of conflict. I feel in a way like, you know, people like, I don't know, you know, the trumps of the world probably aren't really thinking about, aren't theorizing about patriarchy or thinking about these different definitions of patriarchy. But this is a debated term, you know, among people that I, you know, you know, might be trans exclusionary radical feminists or, you know, a third wave feminist. I don't know if I've heard that term in a while, but, you know, different, different sort of approaches to thinking about it. Can you talk about the, the role that gender plays in it and how the, the gender binary features into how people think about patriarchy? Especially in the context of, you know, the debates today around non binary trans identities. Other, other ways people think that go beyond the binary that was so central to earlier thinking about patriarchy.
- [10:44]
A
Yeah, the early thinking about patriarchy for the most part, again, it's not everyone. But the prevailing view and the one that has become now the prevailing view of patriarchy assumes this seesaw picture of patriarchy where it's like on one end we have males and on the other end we have females and we assume there's nothing in between, that everyone is one, the other. And think of patriarchy as a system that always puts weight on the women's side and lifts up men while pushing down women. And so for people who are politically, emotionally and often existentially attached to that picture, trans people pose a threat because it disrupts the idea that patriarchy could be such a thing, because it undermines the idea that there is this binary of human beings across this spectrum. And so I think that the idea that it's just not so simple as people having a binary of their biological features that directly maps on to either social advantage or disadvantage threatens the logic at the heart of that picture.
- [11:46]
B
Right. Because a very sort of simplified notion would, in a way, if patriarchy is the only lens that we're looking at oppression from, then we would see maybe the most impoverished man with all sorts of other, other factors that, you know, might not come into play or might cause them to, to be oppressed in certain circumstances as, you know, maybe in a sense oppressing or part of a system that is oppressing the most advantaged woman in the world. Is that part of the problem with this frame is that it just, it, it you, it's, it's, it's a singular frame. It's only taking one approach and holding that approach of seeing that perspective of oppression above other forms of oppression.
- [12:31]
A
Yeah, I think one way to think about it is actually tied to this slogan, which maybe you've heard before, of gender is the social interpretation of sex. And if you think of it that way and you think, okay, sex equals male or female binary. So gender equals the interpretation of male or female. And the view was gender is a CIS sexist system so patriarchy, in the radical feminist view, just is gender when viewed at the scale of a social system, not just an individual, individual relationships or within a household. But when you think about how it structures all of our institutions, our schools, our churches and so on, that's when you see gender emerge as patriarchy for them. And so if you have this view that gender is just male dominance, then when you look at patriarchy, that's what you would expect, right? And so then you have to say, well, patriarchy helps men, but these other things can harm men. White supremacy can harm men. Capitalism can harm men. And so you end up having a piecemeal picture. But that actually undermines the promise of the concept in the first place, which was to explain how gender operates through and structures every single sphere of our life and instead tries to carve it up into like, well, there's the gender dynamics over here, but then there's the race dynamics over there. And what I really hope to do in this book is show that another way to look at it is more that gender and patriarchy is one point of view on what is a unified material and empirical reality. And there are other points of view, too. These don't need to be in competition, but it's a point of view that doesn't need to leave anything out. It just shows how it all falls under a particular logic.
- [14:07]
B
This question of division is so central to philosophy. I was randomly reading the Dialogue that Statesman the other day, where there's this long kind of discussion of divisions. How should we divide up all of the animals in the world between the herding animals, the land animals, and this sort of problem where it's like, if we rush too quickly to certain divisions that we think make sense, then we might miss out on the fine details, the actual picture of the world. Can you talk a little bit about this approach to dividing, how the way in which we divide and cut up the world impacts the frame, impacts the lens that we have, and then also impacts not only the worldview that patriarchy might impose, but also how people then think about, you know, dismantling patriarchy, the view that is going to undo that and maybe bring us to some post patriarchal, post patriarchal utopia or something like that?
- [15:07]
A
I don't know if I would go quite that far, but. So I really like this phrase by the journalist Michael Pollan. He talks about the windshield of consciousness. This is a phrase he uses frequently. And I really like it because I think it helps us understand something about what you're talking about. Like, we all have A windshield of consciousness. And that windshield organizes our perceptions and our experiences according to the concepts and effectively the pieces of language and the concepts attached to them and the bodily histories and connotations that we attach to those things. And so what is true is that we do need to do that. That's what I want to say first. Sometimes people are like, oh, you want to get rid of categories? No, we need to have categories. We need to have identities, because that's what it means to have language. And we do have language. And we need it to have a society together, live together, coordinate, have economies. Where things go wrong, I think, is when that windshield is structured so that it reproduces and legitimizes vast wealth inequality and abuses of power. And those same people who benefit from it tell you there's no other windshield. And in fact, there isn't a windshield at all. You're looking directly at nature. And that's, I think, when we get ideology and I think the hope of a lot of philosophy, I think philosophy at its best, is to try to see through the thing that we're seeing through and be able to articulate it in hopes of being able to understand it differently and rebuild it into something else.
- [16:37]
B
A related concept of patriarchy is sexism, where patriarchy is the sort of the system of. Of. Of male domination. To some extent, sexism is sort of the act of bias towards, you know, especially towards women or to non men, bias against them due to their. Their gender identity or their sex. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship between sex and patriarchy?
- [17:04]
A
Yeah. So here I want to go. I like. I like starting with sometimes what other people say because it helps frame what I'm getting at. So in the Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir talks about myths of woman and talks about how the myths of this identity, woman need to be understood in order to understand why women are subject to sexism. So kind of the point there, I take it, is that when you have economic and political inequality, look for the ontological inequality that lies underneath it. And it's very central to patriarchy. I think it's one of the core three dimensions of patriarchy. I do think it's been mistaken as the only dimension, but I think it's one of the core three dimensions of patriarchy that are myths of man are understood in part in contrast to an opposition to myths of woman that automatically set up a hierarchy of value between those identities. And so sexism isn't just that bias being acted out against women. It's also that bias being Acted out against anyone who is compared to or likened to or said to be similar to this identity. Woman, which often is what men are doing to other men, men feminizing other men, is drawing upon those degraded myths of woman as a weapon against other men.
- [18:20]
B
And, you know, related then to that is this notion of justice or injustice and a system that. That is unjust in some way. That there you talk about how injustice is something that's sort of assumed in our society and that goes hand in hand with. With patriarchy, that people might have some recognition that the positions of power seem to be or appear to be occupied by mostly men, by mostly certain types of men, and that we know on some level that there is maybe this unfair advantage. Right. There's this injustice related to it. But people accept it because it seems natural. It's just part of reality. It's the nature of things. It's order. Can you dig into this idea, a little bit of injustice, how to think about the. This aspect of patriarchy and whether or not it's something that we should so readily accept as we seem to do?
- [19:23]
A
Yeah, like you were saying, it's accepted because it's seen as normal or natural. And it's very central to my picture that again, to go back to the. If you see socioeconomic and political inequality, look for the ontological inequality and the myths of reality that patriarchy gives us, that we've grown up within, that we identify with at our deepest sense of self, is rooted in an ontological inequality because it tells us that man is a figure who is the identity of biological supremacy over all other beings. And I want to be really clear that when I say man, I do not mean a particular man, and I do not mean men. I mean this as a mythological figure and one that men are constantly weaponizing against other men. See how just, you know, the other day. Oh, what's it. Stephen Miller tried to insult James Talarico by saying he was transgender. And what's the point of that? What's the logic of that? Well, the logic is that even if you're likened to a woman, even sarcastically, that's enough to mean that you're not a real man. Oh, and who deserves wealth and power and authority. Real men. And not. Not real men. So these identities are used in a way that doesn't map onto biological features. What they are instead is more like a moral grammar of excusing abuses of power and also legitimizing inequalities of power. And that, in my view, is injustice. You know, I don't think Stephen Miller agrees with me. I think that he thinks that's just the way things ought to be. But in my view, because it's fundamentally based on a mythology that is false, I see that as injustice.
- [20:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, I want to get to that idea that you pointed towards, this notion of biology. Right. There's this idea that undergirding all this is biology. Right. That because of a particular biological makeup of certain people, that it makes them, in a sense, preordained for certain positions of power and not even dealing with the fact that we don't even know if this biological picture is true. I mean, lots of biologists who are working on this, on these topics will, you know, constantly point to the fact that we don't actually fully understand, you know, the pure picture of what's going on. Like it especially related to biology, you know, you know, inheritability of traits, all sorts of things. It's still a big mystery. A lot of it's still a big mystery to us. But could you talk about this notion of biology, how this kind of underpins the idea of patriarchy and sexism?
- [21:57]
A
Yeah, I think if I'm trying to articulate the logic in its simplest form, it's something like the story. It's important that it's the story that the story that the biology of the adult human male makes that figure, the figure of not only power, but legitimate power. And the power and the legitimacy go together. The more power a man has, the more of a man he has, the more of a man he is, the more power he deserves. And so there's a. It's a might makes, right mythology, essentially, where anyone who gets feminized or dehumanized or infantilized or said you're too much like woman or child or animal to be a real man to be man, then you don't deserve to have power. You don't deserve to have autonomy. Instead, you deserve to be under the control of the real men. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, maybe I'm misunderstanding a bit.
- [22:47]
B
No, it definitely does. And I think it would be helpful to. To also connect it with the idea of myth that you were suggesting. Like the way in which there's a sort of a myth making around biology, how central, how these two tend to go together, like we've seen in the past, the way in which people will marry a certain notion of biology with a certain notion of myth in order to promote a particular political program. You need these two parts, right? Because if you just have myth right Then in a sense, it's a story that can easily fade away if you just have biology. Well, actually, if you. Actually, the reality is too hard to tell because if anything, we don't actually know. We don't know what is fit for the environment yet because we would have to be looking thousands of years in the future to know which ideas that are currently in existence would win out on a certain level. So we bring these two together in some format, or people bring these two ideas together in order to promote a particular program. I don't know if that's like a fair reading of what you're sort of suggesting that the kind of these two components are very essential for each other.
- [24:02]
A
Yeah. It's what Anne Fausto Sterling calls biological storytelling, the use of stories about biology to legitimize inequality. So it always draws on biology. But the biological story itself is constantly a shifting target. Like, I don't know if you've ever gone to an arcade and played whack a molecular. You know, where there's the little mole heads that pop up and you hit them, but as soon as you hit one, another pops up. And that's what it's like to deal with these myths around biology. It's like, oh, it's XX chromosomes. No, it's having a penis. No, it's having these gonads. No, it's having these hormone levels. And it's constantly shifting all over the place. Because fundamentally it's based on the lie that human biology comes in a binary because it doesn't, you know, like that's true for creatures pretty generally. So this force of the biological storytelling is more, I think, in its seeming plausibility as being based on something natural and as a way to never have to really look at it that hard. It kind of fosters a certain sort of denial that says, no, no, I know that this is nature. I know that this is real, that this is normal. And so I'm just going to put my hands in my ears and say, nah, nah, nah. If you try to tell me about how this is a false picture of biology, instead I'm just going to switch to a different story. Because it's the framework that's being held fixed, not the biological story that fills it.
- [25:23]
B
Right. And as far as these stories are concerned, oftentimes the way that stories operate and become significant is that they have certain definitions that they will put forth for things that become fixed in a way. I mean, even if they are changing on some level, there is a fixed nature to them. I think what's interesting that you pointed out is even though our definition of sex has changed, seems to have changed a lot every year, there's still this promotion of this idea. It's like, well, but it is fixed. We just don't know what it is, but it's fixed, even though our definition is changing. So I think that shows in a way, the prevalence of this idea that there is this world, there's this reality that fits certain notions that we are trying to describe. It's our fault for not being able to fully describe it, but it will conform to this fixed idea that we know that there are these differences. That's a little vague way of saying it, but you dig into this idea of the definitions that patriarchy produces. It produces certain definitions that are fixed. Can you talk about the way in which it does this?
- [26:34]
A
Yeah, I think this is super tied to. I just want to point out what you just said is really tied to why these fascist regimes all over the world are so terrified of gender studies. Because as soon as you actually start looking at where our conceptions of sex and gender come from and what they have been and what they are across context, then you start to see that this story, that it's eternal and unchanging and fixed and immutable and from God and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that starts seeming implausible very quickly. So instead of updating the framework, because the framework is the point, they try to silence the people that are putting pressure on that framework. And so that's the way I think, if in terms of how it gets naturalized. Well, part of it is that it's the silencing of voices that could undermine that naturalizing story. I also think religion plays a huge role in the naturalizing of those stories. I don't think it needs to, but I think especially the way that Christianity has been developed in the United States and in a lot of Western colonialism around the world, that has been very central to their stories of God is that God made man in his image instead of, as is actually the case the other way around.
- [27:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. There's an idea that you talk about, too, that I think is quite interesting, and it's sort of a central aspect of patriarchy, is that there's. And this goes to your title, too, Real men on top is that there. There are, you know, there are real men and then there's. There's the rest. Right. And. And how patriarchy enforces a certain idea of man. Because it's not just about men versus women or men versus women and non Binary people or men versus trans men. It's about men versus real men versus other men too. So could you talk about that framing as well, this notion of real men and how that fits into the story?
- [28:32]
A
Yeah. So here again we can go back to the frameworks. I think it helps answer this question. So if we think of patriarchy not as a force that creates a hierarchy between biologically defined groups, oh, the men over here, the women over here, but instead is fundamentally this framework of mythology that uses all kinds of biological stories to fill it in as convenient. The way that structure is set up is one where man is at the top of a moral hierarchy against his three contrasts, which are woman, child and animal. It's those three contrasts that give the figure of the male human adult. But while this is said to be biological, when we look at how it actually plays out, especially between men, we see that man is actually used much more as a mark of superiority and desert than it is as pointing at certain anatomical characteristics. Again, the example of Stephen Miller and Talarico is a great example of that. He's putting him down not because he doubts truly anything about his biological characteristics, but it's instead because he's trying to put him closer to, in this case, woman than he is and say, therefore I deserve more. It's a way to legitimize power and wealth and misuses of those power and wealth. So what I think we're really seeing now, like, why is it that authoritarians and technocrats are so obsessed right now with their masculinity? Like, why are they also obsessed with bulking up and getting hair plugs and doing whatever it is that they're doing to try to be the real men? I think we need to ask the question, why does that matter to them so much? And it matters because in their moral grammar, in their worldview, that is the thing that makes their wealth legitimate and it's the thing that makes all the exploitation that their wealth requires legitimate as well. It's much more a moral grammar than it is a biological difference.
- [30:23]
B
There seems to be in a way too, this, almost like this self fulfilling prophecy where, because this is the, you know, this is the framework in which other men understand themselves to be. That you can motivate men to do things by saying, if you do this, you will be a real man. If you do, blank X will happen. And that thing being a real man, it's like this perceptual thing. It's not if you do this, we'll give you money. If you do this, even Though they might see that as maybe a consequence of being a real man. It's about being perceived a particular way. And it's interesting how the perception of being a real man is seen in many ways as like, the highest good for a lot of men and the way in which that's reinforced, as if that's the goal. In a way, it's not to be a good person, but to be a great man. It's kind of interesting to think about that. You talk about this in the context of the early pandemic where there was almost this, you know, people were, you know, Marco Rubio is basically trying to compel. His constituents are telling people like, oh, you know, real men wear masks, right? Trump didn't want to wear the mask because he thought it was emasculating. Nancy Pelosi said, oh, if you're the real. If you're, you know, the real president, then you should be an example, because a real man would set an example and do the right thing. So it's sort of interesting, this. This way in which this word or this concept is used as a motivating force to structure people's actions and behavior. Do you see that as playing, like, a factor in two with, like, you know, the people that you were discussing?
- [32:01]
A
Yeah, I think it is the core factor. Because, again, we are. Think about the question that people ask. Pregnant people will often ask, is it a boy or a girl? Which suggests that to most people, gender assignment is a prerequisite to personhood. You're an it until you're a he or she. And what it does to us to be raised in that world is that our most fundamental sense of self. Again, to go to what I was talking about way before, and I was talking about my own childhood, something that made my childhood very confusing, was that for everyone else, and what I was told was supposed to be the case for me, my most fundamental sense of I, of me was supposed to be tied to boy or girl. In my case, girl. And so when your most fundamental sense of self is tied to this, and then we have a story that, well, boys are supposed to become good men and girls are supposed to become good women, and those are different. Well, what we've done is split the moral universe of people. We've now said there are different moralities for each person, fundamentally, because their self. What it means to be a good version of me, what it means to be a good me is to be a good woman or a good man and not to be a good version of myself. And so, like, you were saying before, when people have that perspective, it makes it very easy to manipulate them by manipulating societal notions of what is a good woman or a good man or a real woman or a real man. It becomes a lever for changing their sense of what they ought to be.
- [33:33]
B
So when thinking then about what constitutes our identities in terms of the centrality of gender, I mean, you, you talked a little bit about for yourself that, that you felt like, I think at the very beginning you said you felt like the, your eye, your sense of self was sort of deeper than, than, than, than gender identity. That this was something that didn't feel, you know, essential or central. And I was sorry if you could, if you could talk a little bit about that idea that, you know, something that you had experienced. But also just when approaching this topic in general about like kind of, you know, what peoples are left with from an identity point of view, you know, do we need, why, why do we feel that we need identity in this way? That we need to ident. Be able to find our sort of gender identity as something that we identify with that can then anchor us like what, what is that, that, that desire? And then what are we left with if we don't have that?
- [34:32]
A
Yeah. To answer the first part, I think it could be probably best answered with just an illustration which is that it's. And you're an androgynous person and you walk into a room full of people and you know, half the room is going to think you're a man and half the woman's going to think you're a woman. Well, no, kind of. No matter what, you're screwed because they have opposite expectations of how you ought to be. And so that becomes, that contrast becomes very obvious. And while it's not essential in the sense that I didn't become. My sense of myself didn't become tied to one of those because I was always caught in the middle in this way. It was essential insofar it was the biggest driver of my life in terms of the most complex thing I had to navigate in order to have relationships with other people and just to move around in the world. So it was different than the way other people experience it. But it didn't make it any less essential to my navigation of social reality. But to go to the second part where you were talking about why do we have these identities? Why are they so important? Identities are what allow us to be intelligible to ourselves and to be intelligible to other people. And therefore to form meaningful relationships. We need to have identities. But the thing is, most of our identities we understand to be things that are temporal, to be chosen to be things that we can put on and take off. For example, I'm a professor. That's an identity that I have. I don't think that if I stopped to being a professor, I would stop being me. Nor do I think that everywhere I go, I'm a professor. You know, when I'm talking to my kid, I'm Papa, not Professor. And when I'm at school, I'm professor, not papa, thank God. And so with gender, it's different than that, because gender operates as what a philosopher named Charlotte Witt calls a mega social role. It's an identity that we're expected to have at every waking moment of our. Of our life. And it's an identity we're expected to put on ourselves even when we look in the mirror. And this is because it's supposed to be tied to our sense of I, our sense of me at this deepest level where we stop to see it as an identity that is made and remade by us together and instead think of it as something that was stamped upon us by nature or God via nature.
- [36:54]
B
Something that I feel like has been such a major storyline in the past few years has been sort of this question, you know, what's the matter with the boys? You know, why are boys seemingly so depressed? Why are they seemingly so attracted to certain forms of radical politics that are openly misogynistic? You know, I, I think that, that in a way, like when I was coming up as a kid, it was a much more. And I, you know, obviously everything is depending on the certain environment you grew up in. But, you know, I had friends. You know, there wasn't like this, this, this gender segregation that I feel like is, Is become common again. In a way, it feels like some of the, the, the ways in which boys and girls are socializing is similar to how maybe it was in the past. And I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about this and, you know, this kind of general concern that people have for boys about why is it that boys seem to be struggling. If you, you know, what you think of this narrative in general. You know, there's been some theories that, like, on the one hand it's, you know, there, it's a sort of a reaction to, you know, it's a kind of a backlash, a reaction to more gender parody. On the other hand, that, you know, it's this exposure online to ultra patriarchal ideas, you know, things related to, to sex, to the, to the idea that if you're not having sex or if you're not, you know, you know, you know, hanging out with the right people, then you're, then you're, you're worthless or meaningless. So I wonder if you'd comment on this kind of like, what's the matter with the boys thesis that people have been debating.
- [38:39]
A
Yeah, there's a lot of things that are all going on at the same time. And I think the two that you named are both true. Right. These aren't in competition with each other. They're not in competition with each other. They can all be true at the same time. One big part of the picture that I think people need to get clear on in our moment is that we live in a culture where economic status is masculine status. And actually it's masculine status in a way that's more extreme than other cultures. Because in a lot of other cultures a man is supposed to be a provider. So when there's times of great wealth inequality like we are living in currently, a lot of men experience sexual anxiety because they can't provide for their families. In the United States, it is not only the case that you're supposed to be a provider, but because of our capitalist culture, you have to be the richest. The real man is the richest man, not just the one who could put food on the table. And so in our moment of, of great wealth inequality, of people being very anxious about their ability to pay rent and buy groceries and just do the basics of life for boys and men, that's going to come at an extra cost. Because while economic anxieties are economic anxieties for everyone, for boys and men, that's going to be an identity crisis of their masculine identity. And so I think that what that creates and what we've seen it create in the past, like for example in the 1930s, is a big move of boys and men towards looking for non economic means to assert their manhood. And often doubling down on sexual dimorphism is a way to do that. Doubling down on misogynistic treatment of women, doubling down on the abuse of children, doubling down on the killing of animals. These are all other ways that men turn to in order to assert their real manhood because they can't do it with their paycheck or their Bugatti. You know, in the 1930s, bodybuilding gymnasiums were a booming business while all the other businesses were closing. That's when bodybuilding gymnasiums began was in the 1930s. Figures like Charles Atlas and Superman are from the 1930s. And this is because we saw what we're seeing now then, which is that because so many men were out of work and they were feeling sexual anxiety because of their economic standing, they turned to crusading for heterosexuality and turned towards bulking up as ways to say, no, no, despite my poverty, I'm a real man. And the thing I really want to stress too, about all of that, going back to what I said before, is in an ironic and cruel twist, that is patriarchy at work. Because the richest men who are fueling that wealth inequality, who are defending the wealth inequality, who are recreating it, are not only responsible for it, but they also then go and manipulate those men who are experiencing sexual anxiety to hold, keep them in power while they stab them in the back. And that's what we're seeing right now with the relationship between Trump's administration and the white working class man.
- [41:32]
B
I mean, to, to a certain extent, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like as the book progresses, you know, you're starting to address men more directly. Sort of a, you know, a mat, you know, a man who might just take on or accept in a way that this, this patriarchal worldview, whether they know it or not, maybe they're, you know, over the course of reading we'll see the ways in which they, you know, are impacted by it. I certainly think that, you know, when you, as you say, you know, this economic anxiety then does produce the sense of, like, having to prove oneself in order to, you know, be worthy, be worthwhile, you know, in the eyes of other men, in the eyes of other people. And, and I was wondering if you talk about, you know, how, you know, who you feel like you're addressing and what, what you want them to understand or take away by this book, because I think, I think, you know, I think that there are lots of men that actually probably agree with this thesis and they might agree with it and they might even think on one hand that, like, they want to push against it, that they might think that, you know, especially, you know, if they have daughters or if they have, you know, gender non conforming children or if they have, you know, sons that maybe don't conform to, you know, the ultra masculine, you know, sensibility, you know, what you want the, you know, what do you want these men to consider what you're sort of after in terms of reshaping or reshaping how they think about patriarchy
- [42:58]
A
generally in the book, I hope to be speaking to everyone, but I agree with you that as it goes along. I definitely am speaking more towards men. And in fact, I intentionally wrote the book so that part three, which is called Erecting Real Men, could be read on its own. For those men who don't wanna read parts one and two, you can just skip directly to part three. And I think the main thing I want everyone to take away, but something I think because of our feminist history that has given women more of a political consciousness is harder for men to grasp sometimes, is that identity is not given and fixed, but is rather a social tool that has been inherited by us that we can remake in the ways that we want to, that are best for our lives. So I want men to think about, okay, this, this identity man, this, this notion, this concept that I've inherited. What is my history of association of contact with this concept? What was a man to my father, what was a man to my teachers? What was a man to my friends? And how have all of those things become wrapped up in my conception? And has it given me a vessel? Has it given me a conceptual container that I feel like I can be myself in, in a flourishing way? If the answer is yes, then I think the question is, okay, how do you need to remake that container or live within it so that that's true? And if the answer is no, well, then the question is, well, what other identities could you make for yourself instead that will allow you to form the relationships that are meaningful to you, to have a flourishing life? So I'm hoping to give people more of a sense of critical distance from these identities that we are constantly using to segregate and rank each other and instead own our agency over those which also requires owning our accountability for all the damage that they've done. But also with that is the promise, I think, of being able to remake them into something that I hope for men especially will lead to more, not only less wealth inequality at a bigger scale, but at an individual scale will lead to people, just men, having happier lives where they have more meaningful and deep relationships with others people and non human people.
- [45:10]
B
I'm wondering with this work because it's such a, you know, it's coming out at a particular moment in time. And, you know, I almost feel that if this book had come out, you know, even a few years ago, it would be a very different moment in many ways. Perhaps, you know, the reception will be different depending on that. And maybe if it, you know, were to have come out in two years from now, things would be very different because it does feel like the debate on this is fast and Changing. And I'm wondering for this particular moment and also just looking ahead for the future, how you want people to think about this topic. Because it does feel sometimes very challenging to talk about it. I do feel like depending on who I'm talking with about this topic, it can feel. If I'm talking just with a group of other men, it can feel very uncomfortable talking about this topic. Sometimes if I'm, you know, the only. The only man talking with people about it, then I feel differently about it too, depending on the circumstance. It's sort of interesting sometimes how even I feel myself thinking about this topic, depending on who I'm talking with. And I wonder if you could talk about that too. Just like how we can talk about this, how people can get together and actually talk about this type of issue. These challenging issues where people feel like their identities are almost like. Like, you know, on trial while they debate it. It's hard to step back and be philosophically almost objective about this.
- [46:40]
A
Yeah, well, I. I hope that the book allow. I'll say that I do hope that the book allows people to have those conversations. And I made a free discussion guide that's on my website for anyone who wants to use it not just in classes, but also with their family. Sit down, read it as a family. It's only 26, 000 words. It's a quick read. Sit down at the kitchen table and have a conversation about it. Because it'll always be hard at first, especially for men who are not practiced in vulnerability or in articulating their relationship to masculinity or their family history of ideas of what makes a man and how that's impacted their life. Just expect that it's gonna be hard at first, but I think the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The more you talk about it and see, oh, nothing bad is happening when I do this, it'll start to feel less scary to do it. So I think it's a combination of two things. It's both giving people the information and the concepts and the structure to have the conversation. Because it's hard to do those things on your own if you aren't coming out of a gender studies background or something like that. But I think the second thing is the willingness for it to be hard at first and seeing that it'll be worth it to engage in those hard conversations in hopes that they become easier in the future.
- [47:52]
B
Yeah, I do think that, you know, like, you know, conversation is such a great door opener because we oftentimes have incredible misconceptions about what people are actually thinking, how they're actually identifying what they're actually struggling with. And, you know, when we don't have those conversations, then we basically just have the kind of the general zeitgeist vibe atmosphere to go off on. And that can be extremely misleading. And I think that this book does a good job of sort of showing what that zeitgeist is that sort of permeates everything and that it's actually on an individual basis, we're still as a society working our way to resolving these issues, but on an individual basis, we can kind of poke the bubble a little bit and it can be freeing on an individual basis, which can really go. Go an immensely long way. You know, with this book having just come out, obviously, you know, you're going to be waiting to hear what the reception is from readers. But I'm also wondering, you know, what you're working on next, you know, what other questions you feel like went unanswered, other questions that you're considering.
- [49:03]
A
The main question that I've been thinking and writing about since finishing Real Men on Top, which is a question I often get, but with live audiences when I talk about the themes from the book, is how to more explicitly draw, connect the dots between the book and our current political moment, in particular, current fascist moment. So I'm currently working on a project tentatively titled, well, I think it's going to be titled the Macho State. And it is what I came to in thinking about this, and I taught a course actually with Jason Stanley, who wrote How Fascism Works at Yale last year, two years ago, that was about the relationship between patriarchy and fascism. And out of that course and out of my thinking about it, I came to the view that what fascism is, historically, we look at instances of it, and now when we look at it rearing its ugly head again, is it is a violent reaction to the disintegration of this mythology, to the formation, the structure of this mythology. Because when, as you know, Foucault helps us understand, right, the perfection of power means it doesn't need to be enforced, right? If when people see the world, when they see reality through patriarchy's mythology, it doesn't need to be violently enforced because everyone just regulates themselves according to the mythology. But when that mythology starts to crack, and I think wealth inequality in particular has brought us to a point where it is not. It is becoming rapidly unviable, both for us now and certainly for future generations, I think what we're seeing is an attempt to use violence to use repression in order to put the mythology back in place. And what my hope is is that the cat is out of the bag this time and we can move towards a different way of seeing reality.
- [50:54]
B
Well, when you publish that book, we'll certainly have to have you on for a further conversation. And you know, yeah, it was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you. Robin. Thank you so much for being guest on the New Books Network. It was fantastic speaking with you.
- [51:07]
A
Yeah, thank you, Caleb. This is really fun.