Real Men On Top: What If We Stopped Making Everything About Gender?

Photo by Daniela Denyer Malo

Robin Dembroff’s new book is part feminist critique, part philosophical intervention, and part invitation to rethink the way we understand ourselves.

There are very few books I finish wanting to underline every single sentence, yet Real Men On Top was one of them.

I read Robin Dembroff’s new book in one sitting, and by the time I reached the final pages, it genuinely felt a little like having gone to therapy. Not just therapy for me, either. Therapy for everyone I know. Therapy for the entire political landscape. Maybe, occasionally, therapy for the entire world.

That sounds dramatic. But the book is dramatic in precisely the way good philosophy can be: it takes something that feels so deeply embedded in everyday life that we rarely question it, and then asks what would happen if we stopped treating it as inevitable.

For Dembroff, that something is gender.

What if gender isn't the point?

At its core, Real Men On Top is a deconstruction of the ideologies, assumptions and political movements that have grown around gender and sexuality.

Dembroff begins, in part, with their own experience of gender and the complexity and fluidity of their identity. From there, the book expands into a much bigger argument: that we have become so accustomed to interpreting the world through gender that we have started treating it as the organising principle behind almost everything.

Feminism. Masculinity. Femininity. The patriarchy. Intersectionality. Inclusion. Exclusion. Even the ways we understand oppression.

The problem, Dembroff argues, is not simply that these categories exist. It is that we have allowed them to become so central that they can reproduce the very divisions we are supposedly trying to dismantle.

And that is where the book gets particularly interesting.

Because what if the patriarchy isn't simply a war between men and women?

What if there aren't actually winners?

The patriarchy has no winners

One of the most compelling ideas in Real Men On Top is Dembroff’s rejection of the idea that the patriarchy is fundamentally a system in which men win and women lose.

That doesn't mean that women don't experience profound disadvantages within patriarchal systems. We obviously do.

Rather, Dembroff asks us to consider what it means to define masculinity itself through a set of expectations that men are also forced to perform.

Strength. Dominance. Emotional restraint. Power. Sexuality. Success. Authority.

The same system that tells women what they are supposed to be also tells men what they are supposed to be. And when someone deviates from those expectations, the consequences can be anything from social exclusion to shame, insecurity, hatred and violence.

This is why the book's argument feels much bigger than a conventional critique of patriarchy. Dembroff isn't looking for us to just redistribute power between two opposing groups. They are asking us to question the premise that these groups should be understood as opposing groups in the first place.

Women shouldn't have to hate men to oppose the patriarchy and men shouldn't have to hate feminists to reject the idea that masculinity is a cage. And perhaps most importantly, neither side is going to be free until we stop assuming that freedom has to come at someone else's expense.

Gender as a political cage

There is something particularly uncomfortable about recognising how often we reinforce the categories we claim to oppose.

We exclude people from certain spaces because of gender, we create spaces specifically because of gender, we demand representation according to gender, we construct political identities around gender and we try to make institutions more inclusive by paying closer attention to gender.

And even when these actions are motivated by genuinely good intentions, Dembroff asks whether they can sometimes strengthen the very boundaries they are supposed to dissolve.

This is not an argument for pretending gender doesn't exist. In fact, Dembroff explicitly acknowledges that we cannot simply step outside gender altogether. It is intertwined with our bodies, our social experiences and the ways we are perceived by other people.

But just because something is real does not mean it needs to be the most important thing about us, and something being socially powerful does not mean that we should allow it to determine what we can become.

The problem with the "intersectionality cake"

The book also takes on one of the ideas that has become increasingly central to contemporary political discourse: intersectionality. Through this theory, we often imagine oppression as something that can be stacked.

Gender + race + class + nationality + sexuality + whatever other category applies to a person. By that logic, the more categories someone occupies, the more oppressed they would be.

But Dembroff complicates this way of thinking, saying that the question isn't whether different forms of oppression can intersect - of course they can - but rather the more interesting question is what happens when we begin organising people's political identities primarily around their position within these categories.

If we become obsessed with calculating who is more or less of a victim, we risk turning political struggle into a hierarchy of suffering. And that can create yet another way of separating people from one another.

Perhaps the more useful conclusion is not that some people are more or less trapped by the system, it is that different people are trapped by the same system in different ways.

And while that might seem like a small ideological difference, it can result in a politically enormous shift.

Men have something to lose too

My favourite idea in the book is also one of its most uncomfortable. If we want to leave the patriarchy behind, Dembroff argues, women need to be incredibly strong.

But men need to be brave.

Because for men, rejecting patriarchal expectations can mean giving up some of the privileges and identities that society has taught them to associate with being a man.

It means accepting that strength does not have to look like dominance, that vulnerability isn't weakness, that being successful doesn't require superiority, that masculinity doesn't have to be performed at all times. And, perhaps most frighteningly, that you can be a man without conforming to the rules of what society has decided a man should be.

Dembroff puts it beautifully:

“We - you, me, everyone - will not be free of patriarchy until men collectively claim freedom from its manipulative myths.”

The cost of that freedom, they write, is being less than man. The promise is becoming more fully yourself. That, to me, is the heart of the book.

When "natural" isn't actually natural

Another section I couldn't stop thinking about concerns the argument that gendered social roles are natural. We hear this constantly from certain political groups. Men are naturally more aggressive and women are naturally more nurturing. Men are biologically wired to lead and women are naturally better caregivers.

And because these things can sometimes appear to correspond with biological differences, they can acquire an almost unquestionable quality.

But Dembroff asks us to consider something much more fundamental: how much of what we call "natural" is actually the result of living inside a system that has taught us what reality is supposed to look like?

There is a line near the end of the book that stayed with me:

“Patriarchy's rules for reality are likely to feel natural, their truth inevitable.”

That is what makes systems of thought so difficult to escape and, if you have never lived outside them they don't feel like systems or made up rules, but rather like common sense - and that is the most dangerous thing about them.

So, should you read this book?

Yes. Actually, I'm tempted to say that you should especially read it if you think you already know where you stand on feminism, gender, or the patriarchy.

If you are exhausted by conversations in which absolutely everything becomes a battle between men and women, no matter which side it’s coming from, this book might give you a different way of thinking about the problem.

If you are deeply invested in feminist theory, it will challenge some of the assumptions within the movements you already care about.

If you don't understand contemporary conversations about gender at all, it provides an interesting philosophical entry point.

And if you are a man who has ever felt that feminism assumes you are automatically the enemy or a woman who feels men can never be a part of the positive because they will never understand oppression, I suspect there is something here worth sitting with.

The book isn't asking us to stop caring about gender, it is just asking us to stop letting gender determine the boundaries of our humanity.

And in this day and age, that is the most radical proposition of all.

We spend an enormous amount of time arguing about who belongs on which side of the divide, but maybe we should be asking why we keep building the divide in the first place.

So yes, I really did want to annotate almost every sentence of this book.

Until the next page!

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Edited by Ainhoa Aron, Literature Editor