Robin Dembroff’s Flawed Patriarchy Book

Robin Dembroff’s highly anticipated Oxford University Press book, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality, hit shelves in May with impressive endorsements. According to the philosopher Jason Stanley,

Real Men on Top is a stunning work of philosophy that explains why insights from gender studies are so feared by authoritarian regimes. In plain language, Dembroff illuminates gender as the internal logic of our current fascist moment—how it divides us from each other and enriches the wealthy few.

Other philosophers call the book “brilliant,” “rigorous,” and “profound and necessary.” Dembroff’s own website reports that Real Men on Top has been “acclaimed as paradigm shifting.” It also mentions that Dembroff—a tenured professor of philosophy at Yale who self-describes as “genderqueer”—was named by Encyclopædia Britannica as “one of twenty ‘shapers of the future’ under [age] 40 in the category of academia and ideas.”

For a monograph published by Oxford University Press (OUP), the book is astonishingly short. It has three chapters (or “parts,” as they are called), which total a little over 27,000 words, about five times the length of this article (and a third of what you’d expect from a typical OUP philosophy monograph). Real Men on Top is given more heft by ornamental chapter headings that take up more than half a page, generous first-line indents, large font, and huge bold all-caps section headings.

Admittedly, many books are far too long, but the topic of patriarchy is the subject of a sprawling interdisciplinary literature, rooted in anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary biology, among other fields. One might think that—in OUP’s words—a “revelatory new lens on patriarchy” requires substantial scholarly treatment. Let’s see if Dembroff has managed to confound this expectation. (Full disclosure: Dembroff and I have had our disagreements.)