The "Real Man" Trap

Guest post by the philosopher Robin Dembroff

[In their new book Real Men on Top, the Yale Philosopher Robin Dembroff provides a framework that speaks powerfully to the present moment, where billionaires and autocrats such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump are weaponizing patriarchy against the working class. In the wake of the UFC fight on the White House Lawn on Trump’s birthday, the explanatory power of Dembroff’s framework is hard to deny.]

BY ROBIN DEMBROFF

In 2020, I sent one tweet that got more reaction than anything I had ever published. The tweet was about how patriarchy harms men. I wrote, in part, that many men experience violence, marginalization, and exploitation not despite patriarchy, but because of it.

Most men responded warmly. Many women did not. “Jesus, do you want us to sort everything out for you?” one woman wrote. “Do you want us to whip up some sandwiches for a picnic at the same time?” The pile-on seemed endless. To preserve my sanity, I deactivated my account and deleted the tweet.

I tell this story not to relitigate it, but because it highlights a problem that we continue to ignore. Patriarchy doesn’t simply favor men — in fact, it systematically harms most men both psychologically and economically. But we are discouraged and sometimes even punished for naming this reality. We rarely, if ever, consider that patriarchy might not be a contest between men and women at all, but rather a means of producing and excusing the grotesque wealth inequalities and abuses of power found everywhere around us.

My new book, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality, offers a reimagining of patriarchy that brings this picture into sharp relief. The book argues that patriarchy is not simply a system of male dominance but a tripartite mythology of Man — as Male-Human-Adult — that concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a vanishing few, at enormous cost to women, children, animals, and the vast majority of men.

We cannot understand what is happening to men in America today without understanding how that mythology works. And nothing in recent political memory illustrates the argument more vividly than the exchange between Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico and his Republican opponents.

Or, more precisely, the way Talarico chose to fight back.

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The attacks on Talarico are by now familiar — and they come as no surprise, given Republicans’ current obsession with proving political legitimacy by way of “real manhood”. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller mocked Democrats for nominating their “first transgender Senate candidate.” (Talarico is not transgender.) His opponent Ken Paxton’s first campaign ad branded him “too low-T for Texas.” Fox News’s Jesse Watters suggested reporters confront Talarico with a schoolyard battery of manly tests: “Do you own a gun?” “Do you own a truck?” “Do you wear women’s underwear?” Ted Cruz, not to be outdone, told Sean Hannity that if you made a list of a thousand adjectives to describe Talarico, “masculine” would not be one of them.

These attacks are puerile at best. They are also, as political theater, quite effective. Seeing why is the beginning of understanding why Talarico’s response — however emotionally satisfying — walked straight into a trap.

Last week, Talarico answered his critics on MSNBC. He told host Jen Psaki about his adoptive father, who every week mowed not only his own lawn but also his elderly widowed neighbor’s lawn — without being asked, without ever mentioning it, “because that’s what a man does.” Talarico made the moral explicit: “A man takes responsibility. A man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors. A man does what’s right, even when no one is watching.” Then the line built for the clip: “I’ve said before, and I will keep saying that real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.”

It’s a sharp answer, and a politically smart one. It’s also the wrong fight to win.

***

In Real Men on Top, I argue that claims about who is or isn’t a “real man” do two distinct jobs, and that conflating them carries enormous danger — political and otherwise.

The first job is boundary work: drawing the line between Man and not-Man. This is what Miller was doing when he called Talarico transgender — attempting to push him across the border that separates men from women. It’s what people are doing when they tell trans men they are “really” women, or teenagers that they are “really” still boys. This use of “real man” is about sorting bodies into categories: Man or not-Man, where the alternatives are Woman, Animal, and Child.

I want to pause on that list, because it matters more than it might seem. Patriarchy’s mythology of Man is not simply built against Woman. It is built against three figures: Woman, Animal, and Child. To count as a “real man,” you have to clear three bars simultaneously — you must be Male, Human, and Adult. Fall short on any one of them and you are placed outside the category of Man entirely.

This is not incidental. Look at how these three categories have been weaponized in recent political attacks. Miller calls Talarico transgender — feminizing. Trump calls undocumented migrants “animals” — dehumanizing. Cruz dismisses a heckler as a “child” — infantilizing. These are not random insults. They are the three available moves in a very old game, one in which the identity Man sits atop a hierarchy that is defined against and above these three other figures. Feminizing, dehumanizing, infantilizing: the whole vocabulary of political degradation runs through these channels.

For exactly this reason, the boundary work of “real man” bleeds into its second and most common use. This job is ranking men — establishing hierarchies among people who are already categorized as men. This is Don Vito Corleone’s move in The Godfather: “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” Nobody thinks Corleone is saying that dads who miss family Christmas are secretly women, children, or animals. He’s saying they are lesser men. He’s establishing a pecking order among men. And this ranking use of “real man” is where most of our political conversation about masculinity lives.

Crucially, these two uses overlap and reinforce each other. Insults that drop a man down in the masculine hierarchy work by likening him to those imagined to exist outside Man. You can emasculate a man by feminizing him, dehumanizing him, infantilizing him. Miller’s “transgender” jab at Talarico displays both uses at once: it ranks him as lesser by attempting to push him across the border entirely. The insult stings precisely because it occurs in a culture that has already decided that Woman, Animal, and Child are other and lesser than Man. In that world, being likened to any of them carries the force of degradation.

Now — look at Talarico’s answer. He doesn’t question whether “real man” should be the measure of worthiness. Instead, he plays right into the practice of putting masculine evaluation at the center of political legitimacy. Rather than reject the premise, he offers a competing definition of real manhood — a better one, a kinder one — and argues that he meets it more fully than his opponents do. He accepts the ranking game and plays to win.

He falls into the “real man” trap.

***

Patriarchy’s mythology of Man runs on a single rule: the more of a man someone is, the more he deserves power; the more power he has, the more of a man he is. Might makes right makes might. It is a closed loop. Talarico’s answer moves the goalposts of what counts as might — he trades dominance for decency, self-enrichment for service — but it leaves the loop intact.

Talarico is not alone in taking up this strategy. Democrats broadly have answered the manosphere with their own account of “good masculinity” and “real manhood.” They advocate for competence instead of cruelty, presence instead of bluster. The impulse is understandable. In an environment where the alternative is Paxton, it is smart politics to redefine the terms of the contest in your candidate’s favor.

But here’s the catch: if “the contest” is a measure of manhood, we’ve already lost the game. A kinder man who claims authority through “real manhood” doesn’t put a dent in patriarchy’s grip on our personal and political lives. He plays straight into it. He hasn’t asked whether manhood should be the entry fee for power; he endorsed a nicer king for the throne.

Patriarchy’s mythology of Man isn’t just a rhetorical game. As I recently discussed with Jennifer Welch, this mythology has real world consequences — especially in a society where money is a primary measure of manhood. This mythology historically has been used, with remarkable consistency, to funnel wealth and power upward while offering most men only the mirage of dignity in return.

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We are living through a period of extraordinary economic inequality. The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 to $6.72 trillion in 2024. This group consists of about eight hundred people, or 0.000002% of the U.S. population. Its three wealthiest members — incidentally, the three men with front seats to Donald Trump’s second inauguration — have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. That’s three men who are richer than enough people to make up the population of New York City twenty times over. Full-time employment among men has dropped precipitously since the 1970s; their hourly wages have lost purchasing power. Many men who can find full-time work are working longer hours for less money in jobs that are increasingly unreliable and stripped of basic benefits.

This is the economic soil in which the current masculinity panic grows. And patriarchy’s mythology of Man does something specific and functional in this soil. As Jason Stanley discusses in How Fascism Works, fascism thrives by converting economic anxiety into masculine anxiety, and masculine anxiety into political energy that serves the interests of those already at the top.

This is not a new dynamic. Historians have traced it through the Great Depression, through every period in American history when economic conditions tightened and the culture lurched toward obsessive competitions over manhood — heterosexuality crusades, racial scapegoating, loud and often violent preoccupations with who is and isn’t a real man.

Patriarchy’s playbook is consistent across these moments. When men are economically precarious and feel their masculine status is under threat, they become susceptible to politicians who promise to restore their manhood — not by redistributing wealth or protecting workers, but by identifying enemies: immigrants who have stolen what’s theirs, queer and trans people who have confused the natural order, women who have taken too much. The politicians running this play understand exactly what they are doing. In public, they perform outrage on behalf of “real men”. In private, they protect corporate interests, freeze wages, break unions, and structure tax policy to maximize wealth concentration for those at the very top. They offer men the mirage of dignity while extracting their labor, their votes, and their futures. They fashion manhood as the Trojan horse of extraction and exploitation — including of their own base.

Talarico knows something is wrong with this picture. His answer about mowing the widow’s lawn is partly an answer to it — an attempt to name a version of manhood not organized around dominance and extraction. I believe him when he offers it. But I still think his answer is wrong. Not morally but structurally. Even a politics organized around “good manhood” rather than “bad manhood” leaves the fundamental question untouched: why is manhood the price of political admission in the first place?

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In his classic 1910 poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling takes on the voice of a man counseling his son on the path to true manhood. At the end, he concludes with an image of Man as master of the Earth — entitled to dominion because he is Man, and Man because he holds dominion. “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, / And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son.” The couplet is circular in a way that precisely makes my point. The Earth belongs to him because he is Man; he is Man because the Earth belongs to him. Power and manhood underwrite each other endlessly, with predictable horrific consequences.

Paxton’s attacks assume this worldview. Albeit in a gentler key, so does Talarico’s clapback: a real man still inherits the Earth, but he has promised to take better care of it than the last guy did.

I get the political logic. A culture that rewards mowing a widow’s lawn is better than one that rewards attacking immigrants and queer people, protecting sexual predators, and enriching oneself through extraction and fraud. Hands down, I’ll take Talarico’s vision of manhood over Paxton’s any day. But choosing a better answer to a bad question is not the same as challenging the question.

Whether you think a “real man” looks like Ken Paxton or James Talarico makes no difference. Until we stop using “real manhood” as our entry fee for power, patriarchy will continue to govern our politics, no matter which side’s candidate ends up on top.

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One of the arguments I make in Real Men on Top is that the virtues we associate with masculinity — protection, provision, sacrifice, courage — are genuine virtues. I believe in cultivating and celebrating them. What I resist is the premise that these virtues are biologically prescribed, that they are what make someone a man, that manhood is the container in which they live and the credential through which they gain legitimacy.

Masculine virtues are virtues on any body. But are we willing to decouple them from the mythology of Man? Can we celebrate responsibility, service, and sacrifice without first asking, as a precondition, whether the person practicing these virtues is man enough?

What I wish Talarico had said: We don’t need politicians to be a “real man” to serve their communities, and the question itself is a distraction from what matters — whether candidates are trustworthy, competent, and compassionate.

I get that this is harder to fit on a TikTok clip. It goes beneath our usual interpretive frame and asks something more difficult of its audience — not to root for the better man, but to question whether “better man” is the right measure. It’s also the only response that won’t keep us tangled in patriarchy’s logic of power.

Who does the Earth belong to: the real men, or all of us? Until our politics starts from a new premise, I think the question will continue to answer itself.