Real Men on Top How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality

by Dembroff, Robin

• ISBN13: 9780190052560
• ISBN10: 0190052562
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780190052584
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2026-05-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary

A revelatory new lens on patriarchy-as a force that governs how we see the world, live in our bodies, and imagine our futures

In Real Men on Top, Robin Dembroff shows us that we don't just live in a patriarchal world. We live in a world that patriarchy taught us to see. Patriarchy is not simply a system where men dominate women, Dembroff argues. It is a deeper reality-shaping force that legitimizes economic exploitation, political injustice, and social cruelty by dividing all of us into the rigid categories of Man, Woman, Animal, and Child.

These categories are presented as natural truths, but Dembroff reveals them as man-made myths—ones that construct a reality in which being characterized as Woman, Animal, or Child marks moral degradation. By no coincidence, feminization, dehumanization, and infantilization are the very degradations used to make a man 'less of a man'.

But this book is more than critique; it's also a guide to transformation especially for those grappling with what it means to be a man under patriarchy. Patriarchy's myths celebrate the identity Man, but these myths are no friend to most men. Promising strength and superiority, they instead fuel isolation, emotional repression, and relentless pressure to prove oneself while propping up systems that enrich the powerful few. Rather than deliver freedom and prosperity, these myths entrap and impoverish. Real Men on Top invites readers to see through them and, in so doing, to find new possibilities for living, relating, and becoming human.

Sharp, daring, and deeply felt, Real Men on Top is a book for anyone who senses that something is deeply wrong with the way we live and wants to understand how we got here, and where we might begin the work of remaking reality.

Author Biography

Robin Dembroff is an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University. They received their PhD from Princeton University in 2017 after attending Notre Dame and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Dembroff, who was home-schooled in an Evangelical community, is now an expert in feminist and LGBTQ philosophy, and has published extensively on related topics in both academic and popular media outlets.