Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Weaponizes Gender

A bold work of philosophy that argues for a paradigm shift about gender: that it exists and functions as a system that privileges real men over others

The resurgence of Smash the Patriarchy! following the election of Donald Trump and the rise of #MeToo was not a throwback to a bygone political slogan. It was a cry of frustration from millions who sense that there is a common culprit behind their experiences of gender-based violence and exploitation. But who or what is that culprit? In Real Men on Top, philosopher Robin Dembroff asks you to reconsider everything you believe about gender and patriarchy.

Gender, Dembroff argues, is not being a man or a woman. Even more fundamentally, gender is gendering: the process of evaluating and treating people based on cultural ideals of what men and women should be. Patriarchy, they say, is the institutionalized system of gendering. Against the accepted idea that patriarchy privileges men over women, Dembroff argues that patriarchy elevates people who resemble culture’s most powerful ideals of manhood-ideals that reflect men who are white, straight, wealthy, and not disabled. To put it simply, patriarchy puts real men on top.