158: On the Impossibility of Being a Real Man feat. Robin Dembroff

0:00Obviously, we're going to spend a lot of time not trucking with binary opposites, but that said, I was trying to think about what would be the opposite to the Aretha Franklin number. You make me feel like a natural woman per the logic of patriarchy. Namely, you make me feel like a natural man. And I first as like, I could see like, go are doing this or like some sort of like thrash metal kind of thing. But then I'm also like, all those degrees of mediation, you probably wouldn't get right. Like the tentative yearning of that song. And instead, it would just be like, break into a slim gym or it would be some sort of given of a brand. But I don't know. Maybe you have either of you have a better idea for the opposite of this. I wonder if there's something maybe paradoxical or intention with the idea of a man saying that someone else has made him a natural man. It feels like there's this idea of the self-made man. It has to like, you have to do it yourself kind of thing. So it almost undercut the very claim to say someone else did it.

1:02Yeah. So like so many things built on the refreshing of the mother. Totally. I, that's actually one thing that I loved about your book. Because one of my, one of my like extreme pet peeves in even, I think the most like really delicately handled conversations that men have in public and not usually privy to that many conversations that men have among themselves and private about, you know, like when Josh Hawley put out that book and there were all of these conversations about with men trying to be like, like really earnestly and sincerely grappling with what they had been given and like the, the impossibility of living up to the idea of being a good man, which again, like earnest, sincere, thoughtful. And I was just sitting there being like, have you ever thought about being a good person? Like have you ever thought that maybe like the answer is not to just follow the, like

2:06I don't sit here, but like going, I wonder how I could be a good woman today. Like, but so many people do. I suppose, I suppose that's true. I mean, I, it was, I really go back to like Mary Wollstonecraft and they'll like don't give a sex to virtue. And that is not as catchy, frankly, as you know, I can't go around putting that in like the comments of, of like in comment sections, like have you considered reading of indication of the rights of women and, and, and thinking that perhaps virtues should not be sexed. But like the way that you write about masculinity is this thing that is aspirational and that be like, and that men asymptotically, well, they don't even asymptotically approach it. But like the, at the very best can hope to you. It just, it was so, it was so clear. It scratched that itch that I have every time I hear one of those conversations. Thank you. Yeah. It's like trying to get to the top of a stairwell and an Escher painting.

3:08You can never get there, but you keep walking anyways. I just, I wonder if, and like, I mean, I say this like as, as a middle, age cis white lady, right? Like, I feel like most of the women in my life understand that you can't get to be woman. Like, we all know that in some way. Yeah. And that men have not gotten that memo. Yeah, I think that there's a big gap in the political consciousness between men and women. Because I mean, women have also inherited this decades long history, whether in more director in direct forms of feminist consciousness raising of the women's liberation movement of lots of conversations, both in private homes and in public about women as a political class. And I just think men have been treated as, is solely individuals. And so they don't have that political consciousness. What's striking there too is that like it, I think of like counter examples of appeals to men, a political class or an attempt to kind of create this.

4:12As you admirably describe in the book, those are never even as they speak the language of the unmarked man. It's always onward white Christian brothers, right? There's some element in which you are, well, if you do, I turn to you about why the question of masculine of the or manner rather isn't problem with ties in the same way or the ways in which that baggage is repressed differentially among sort of men who really care about this thing. It's hard to feel like on some of a like a verse to thinking in terms of man, like on some it, there's some sort of toxicity to it while you start tearing with it. You're like, I don't even know if I really want to, I still feel bad about my relation to this signifier, but also I feel uncomfortable talking other men about it, but also the only alternative I can think of that really mobilizes it in discourse is reactionary. Yeah, definitely. I wonder too if part of it maybe is that woman as an identity formation or society is at best ambivalent about its value, you know, sometimes it can value, but most of them

5:12it's valued negatively. And I think that creates more of an existential gap within the individual to be able to kind of look at the identity outside of himself. But when men are told that man is this pinnacle of being identity, I think it feels like there's more cost to distancing yourself from it in order to give it a critical eye. You're listening to Ordinarian Happiness, a podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. Ordinarian happiness is completely supported, made possible, and kept ad free for everyone

6:14through the generous support of our Patreon community. We are infinitely grateful for our Patreon subscribers. If you would like to support the show and get to additional paywalled episodes per month, including our journey through the standard edition and our takes too spicy to exist, except behind the paywall, come find us at patreon.com slash ordinary on happiness. I should also mention that we are in the midst of changing the tier structure for the podcast. If you are a regular listener but have not taken the plunge to becoming a Patreon supporter, if you do it before September 15th, you can lock in the existing rates. After that, they will be going up. We're also launching a student membership program because we always want to make sure that students have access to the podcast at a low cost.

7:16If you would like to become a student member, please email us at ordinary on happiness pod at gmail.com and otherwise new tiers with exciting new perks, including due to popular demand, lots of new merch coming September 15th. I'm Abby Cleachin. I'm Patrick Wensfield. And today I am so delighted to welcome Robin Dembrough. Robin is associate professor of philosophy at Yale University, where their research explores how inherited stories about our bodies uphold systems of inequality and violence. Robin's first book, Real Men On Top, How Patriarchy Shapes Are Reality, which is what we were discussing today, was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Robin's writing also appears in popular outlets, including Scientific American, Time, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books, and Britannica has named Robin one of 20 shapers of the future under 40 in academia and ideas. Robin has also co-authored Supreme Court Amicus Briefs in major LGBTQ rights cases,

8:20including a brief quoted in Justice Kagan's dissent in United States Viscourmetti. We're so excited to talk with you today, Robin. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while and glad it's happening now. Likewise. All right. So good. I would say that. I would say that. I would have been really great. It's so lucid and crystal and oh my god. It's, yeah, I want to convey that. Thank you. Well, you'll have a chance to. I know, but I'll front. Robin, before we dive into, I don't want to say dive into men. Crazy. Before we get into the book, I want to zoom out a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, about how you came to this project, and more broadly, how you came to do the work you do? Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm kind of a professional weirdo in a lot of ways. Like I have a very unusual background that's led me to be someone who has this sort of unusual perspective, I suppose. I grew up as a homeschooler, an evangelical Christian homeschooler on a farm.

9:25I basically, you know, spent the vast vast majority of my time by myself or with dogs, dogs were my only friends, basically as a kid. But even when I was growing up, I was androgynous. And so I was in this really weird situation where on the one hand, I was within this extremely patriarchal, you know, now it's the heart of maga, the place where I grew up as an androgynous person who didn't have any concepts or frameworks to understand how I was being treated on a daily basis. And so there's just like a huge amount of cognitive dissonance and a lot of questions, but also I spent a lot of time just with myself and writing. So I feel like I became very familiar with my internal world while I had almost no frameworks for understanding the external world in which I had to navigate on a daily basis. And then that, you know, I went to Bible College. I was outed shortly after Bible College when I started my graduate work in philosophy and that experience of being outed, I think, turned me towards the tools of philosophy

10:29as a way of trying to understand. Like, who am I? Where do I come from and what the hell is going on? You know, and I realized the analytic philosophy, which was the field I was training in, had really nothing to offer. So I just started writing it myself and it's taken me, you know, it's now 15 years later since all that, which is crazy, 15 years while. But this project I've been working on for 10 years and it really came from a place of me, you know, having the narratives in my head that I was raised with, you know, God made you a girl who's going to become a woman and this is nature and all of that blah, blah, blah. And that common sense no longer made sense to me if it ever did. But at the same time, all the frameworks that I was encountering in academia also didn't make sense to me. And they certainly didn't seem like anything remotely like a common sense or something that could be a common sense. So this book really comes out of my attempt to continue. And I know we're going to get into this later, but continue what I see as the radical feminist project of trying to change people's common sense,

11:33which requires being able to offer something that is very clear and intuitive that people can just take up very easily without, you know, needing to sit with a 500 page book. Yeah. I mean, and I think the book does that so beautifully, Patrick, and I were just talking before we got on the mic. And before you joined us with like, you know, I mean, the book is fantastic. People should buy it. I will just go ahead and say that. But but also it's the kind of book that you could give to somebody who has zero background in gender studies. I mean, you are really clear from the outset, you're like, this is the water we're swimming in and I want to make it so that things come into view that we just accept as the way of the world as quote unquote natural. I mean, it's just it's, it does such a beautiful job and just really kind of spare lucid pros of making these concepts, which I know from personal experience as somebody who teaches, interested gender studies, like that they're hard to get people to see, especially if they're not ready to see them or if their own lives haven't brought them to some particular kind of

12:44point where they where it becomes really vital for them to start being able to see them. Yeah, I agree with that. I also think if I can just add one thing to what you're saying, one of the things that I see often in the various literatures about gender, whether it's masculine at E study, is a feminist theory or whatever, is that people are often coming to the question of what gender is from a place of centering a particular demographic experience of that system. And my own experience is someone who really doesn't have any loyalty used to quote unquote either side because I was constantly moving back and forth, you know, it's like when people ask me, are you a man or a woman, I say yes, you know, it's like tell me where I am am I in the DMV and I on the street, am I talking to my mother, you know, like I can do, I'm all sorts of things. And I think that that background, particularly as it as it expanded when I started to understand more of the way that, you know, race and disability and many other intersections that I myself don't personally inhabit but became more familiar with the stories of people who do allowed me to approach this book without that kind of sense of a tie or a loyalty to one particular groups experience of the system.

13:55Yeah, that that makes so much sense to me. So the book is called real men on top how patriarchy shapes a reality and I mean it's bold right to take on patriarchy as a term, I mean Patrick, you and I are both old enough to have seen patriarchy as like a concept and a word go in and out of fashion a bunch of times right. And I mean you talk about this Robin in the book, there are fields in which like yeah, you can just invoke patriarchy as a term and other fields are like we're not we're not doing this. This is, you know, this is embarrassing or this you know or I mean it's interesting. I mean I think a lot of people who are not in the academy are unaware of the extent to which like we have trends just like fashion cycles right and patriarchy is one of those. But so before we get into the way that you work with it in the book because you are, you know kind of crafting and deploying your own definition or conception of patriarchy.

15:03Can you talk to us about the history of the term as you recounted in the book and how it's changed in meaning both in academic and activist usages as well as in just you know like colloquial and understanding the ways we hear it in mainstream media, etc. Yeah, it's a fascinating story and one that I didn't really know until I started doing all the background research for this book. So what I found out was that this term patriarchy actually originally comes out of classics and anthropology. And it was originally used to name a domestic order originating in Greek and Roman law that gave the eldest male citizen in a household absolute authority over all other living beings in the household. And by all their living beings, I mean women, I mean children, I mean animals and I mean enslaved foreigners. And that was the way it was used for a while. But then in the mid 20th century you have the radical feminist movement, the women's liberation movement. And really this big upswell in feminist political philosophy.

16:06And one of the main goals of feminist political philosophy was to address a society that took it as again common sense to go back to that phrase common sense that the reason why women were so repeatedly kept out of position. The power locked out of institutions under the power of their husbands and fathers subjected to exploitation rape all these things. That it was common sense that that was because of biology. The biology dictated that fate for women. And the radical feminist political philosophers looked at that and they said we need an alternative common sense explanatory framework that's not just biology makes it so. And they took this word patriarchy and they essentially rebranded it. They took it and they said, okay, we're going to use this term patriarchy to refer to an order that is not located in only the household, although it certainly exists in the household. And it's not confined in any sense to the past because we live with it continually.

17:09And it's instead this order, a social order of gender that prevents every sphere of society. That as they conceptualized it was one that both segregates people by sex and devalues anyone who is female in that process. And one of the things I think is really interesting and ironic in a way about that shift was that you know, and I said before, the previous term was one that said, the oldest male citizen has power over everyone in his household, which included women, but also were other people, but all those other groups got lost in the rebranding. And it became just about the relationship between men and women and the way that you know, marginalized racial groups, children and animals are impacted by this system fell out of the picture. Your work is so admirable precisely in that, well, it's attuned to common sense, this phrase we keep in bokeh. And I'm going to, I'll just name check Gramsci here, right? This idea that like the these terms that are so load bearing, or rather these seems that are so ubiquitous in our discourse are in fact not eternally given.

18:25And in fact, the way in which we talk about them ubiquitously, but also, you know, as though they're everyone understands what they are. It's very, very granular, but also super vague. So it becomes a problem that like you can kind of like, oh, what it is, is what it is. Or within the micro communities of the academy, you can have these kind of weird situations where invoking patriarchy, for example, like it is alternately disqualifying or taken as being unserious, but then sometimes like, oh, no, this is an excellent intervention. Like all these things get to the fact that these terms are not given, but are continually dynamically produced. They require discourses to maintain them and our individual point of intersection with them is only ever sort of partial in some ways, but also like, it takes a lot of work to denaturalize these things. And it takes a lot of work to denaturalize these things and to make people reflect on them using language that isn't extremely esoteric or that feels uncommon. Right, there's something about the your capacity, and I'm just praising the book, and I think you should go out and buy it.

19:27I'm seconding Abby here. The lucidity with which you're able to both talk in terms of a specific structure that has sort of ostensible propositional content as it organizes our lives, but that also is fundamentally an output of ongoing processes, which are never just about a single term. He's just really admirable. Yeah, I just want to affirm that and then everything you're saying right now is also like so crystal on which is one of not basically. Thank you. I was telling Abby I rewrote it from scratch like six times. So that was not that was a hard one clarity over many, many years. It really shows, but yeah, I mean, one of the things to go back to I realized I left out part of your question, which is also how the term patriarchy, the concept has been taken up and evolved. I think one of the tensions within the concept that was developed within radical feminist theory was that on the one hand and to go kind of what Patrick, what you're saying about we inherit these concepts are tools right. They were developed within a given context for particular reasons, and the concept of patriarchy was developed for the purpose of illuminating how social order creates women's subjugation and harm.

20:39However, they continued with an idea of patriarchy as something that's the gender order within all spheres of social life affecting everyone. And I think it's that tension that has created the conflict that's led to the concept of patriarchy being discarded within many parts of the academy, you know, to the point that I tell the story in the book, but I have a colleague in GSS here who when I first started working on this book, I told her about the book and she just gave me this. What are you doing? Look and said, why are philosophers still talking about patriarchy? It's just kind of like a like our what era are you from that you're writing about this concept. And I think that's because people have started to realize that those two goals don't go together. If you want to talk about how gender operates in all of society and affects everyone, a concept of gender as a battle of the sexes that favors males is not sufficient to do that job. So there's that explanatory gap that I hope my book is helping to fill your team up beautifully for the next thing that I wanted to ask you, Robin, because you know, one of the things that's a really distinctive move that you make in the book after you tell this story about the changing meanings of patriarchy and in particular, the ways that it was it was taken up and and used by certain radical feminists is that you.

22:04are pretty insistent that we should not abandon this term, you know, like you do name check and and site a number of theorists and I suspect that they're theorists that you admire and whose work that you know you site in other contexts. Who have chosen to say let's let's let this time go right and you are just not to do so and I want to read a pretty long passage here from the book in which you make that case quote. After all history is full of antiquated and invalidated ideas letting go of those that no longer serve us is essential for intellectual progress, but I urge you to wait we need this concept we need a way to name gender not merely as a set of norms or identities, but as a system that structures power value and vulnerability across all spheres of social life. Patriarchy is our inherited name for that system if we relinquish patriarchy from our theory and vocabulary we incur significant costs among them are the possibility of a coherent feminist politics and even the ability to identify gender as a source of systemic inequality.

23:22Gender cannot generate broad patterns of injustice if it is reduced to local practices or individual attitudes gender produces systemic harms precisely because it is a social system to give up patriarchy then is not just to retire a term. It is to forfeit an account of how gender organizes daily life across contexts yes the way we think about that system is often reductive any description will obscure some parts of it even as it clarifies others, but this system is an observable and undeniable reality when that pommels our bodies and our bank accounts and contorts our relationships with others and ourselves. The concept of patriarchy illuminates coherent patterns in what would otherwise be millions of disparate and unrelated experiences of violence exploitation and harm. It promises to reveal these patterns not as biological fate but as the product of socially powerful ideas but ideas that we nonetheless could change close quote.

24:26So can you tell our listeners a bit about the way that you define and use the term patriarchy and about why you find it so vital to retain despite you know there being some drawbacks to doing so. Yeah i'll start with the second part first actually like why i think it's important and then i can say more about. The view that i think helps us you achieve those goals and so that i like in the quote you mentioned the thing about systemic gender injustice one of the things that i've observed repeatedly is that even in the very same disciplines that want to ask you the notion of patriarchy they continue to talk repeatedly about things like systemic gender injustice. And to me there's a conflict between those two moves because in order for there to be systemic gender injustice there needs to be a system of gender. And so if you're going to get rid of patriarchy which is our name for the system of gender i don't think we can continue to talk about systemic gender injustice it's like you know it's like.

25:30Saying that the rain is hitting the sidewalk but there's no rain clouds in the sky like where does it come from if there's no such thing as patriarchy and since its development and to rebranding in the radical feminist and women's liberation movements. It has become the unifying concept of feminist politics it is the articulation of the system that feminist politics aims to change. And so I think I think we give up far too much if we just throw up our hands and say because the battle of the sexes conception doesn't get that work done let's just get rid of it all together if they only explain these patterns let's give up on explaining all of the patterns. So that's why I felt like it was really important to least give it my best shot. To come up with a notion of what how is the logic of this system organized in a way that can help us make sense of the very complex and broad patterns of gendered harm that are observable that include but go beyond men harming women.

26:32And so the concept that I put forward in the book is one where in a way it's kind of a simple shift but it's also everything in this shift so we developed a notion of patriarchy as a system that creates men's world. It's about men versus women and it favors men it creates a world for men. And my view is that no it creates man's world it creates a world for man where man is not an individual man is not a person man is an imaginary it's a mythological construct of a being who is at the pinnacle of existence. And this identity of man is defined and understood not only in contrast to women but certainly also in contrast to women but there are two other dimensions that we've just completely left out of our feminist theorizing which I think are essential to understanding how the system works which is that man is contrasted to not only woman but also to animal into child. And this is how man actually has a trinity a trinitarian identity a triune identity of not just the male but the male adult human or the male human adult and if we treat man as only male we end up erasing the way that ideas of lineage and development that are so much at the core of our ideas of what segregates the adult from the child or the human from the animal.

27:58And then we can all play an equally important role in explaining the patterns of gendered harm that we see across context. What I love about this I mean there's it's a really clarifying move both clarifying in terms of how it approaches these heuristics in general but also just by giving us the way to work with this term that doesn't make it pass through the impossible test of well you have to explain everything but also it has to have a lot of precision to do it right which is. And i'm sure which is a lot to ask of like a master signifier to begin with but also kind of includes the fact that that's how a master signifier works or anything but by producing that demand and frustrating it but. But what i'm really struck by especially in so far is that you don't just do this to to to to man as like a signifier but also. In bed that in the relationships of the adult we'll be adulthood and also to an an amality I guess is is that it.

28:58It clarifies so much of how those abstractions actually work to produce these differential relations of. Where in the individual is always subordinated in various senses to the abstraction even as they occupy different positions here and I think about you know like well just think of the children which is oftentimes used as a war and. To her kids right or the way in which you know all men are created equal but actually only in so far as you are potentially like participating in this category of a particular time male body or. Yes you reproductive rights like the way in which like the. The claim of like I think a variety of ideologies where where like the person who is pregnant has a claim to rights only in so far is that the. Their understood to be but the initiating someone who will eventually become a man in this established order right so that very specific and abstract signifier does this work to hollow out all the individual positions relative to each other in addition to being a really difficult position to occupy or never come to occupy it on of itself.

29:58Yeah definitely I agree I agree completely with that and it's really important to me in the book to make sure you're using the language of signifiers and it's really important to me in the book to make sure that I distinguish between. Yeah man woman animal child as signifiers versus the people who have been you know to now draw in the language of interpolation or you know I want to have been interpreted through the lens of those signifiers so at the very beginning of the book I say. Man is an identity man are people and that seems like a simple distinction but I really think that the entirety of the value of this concept the power of this concept as an explanatory framework rests on that distinction because once we see. Man woman child animal as signifiers that are built up through stories of biology but are not in fact tied to any particular biological descriptors or characteristics we see how they become symbolic of a value system and this is exactly why no matter how male and human and adult you and other people take yourself to be you nevertheless can be feminized and dehumanized and infantilized and have the identity.

31:13The symbols of woman child and animal weaponized against you in order to degrade your status and legitimize your exploitation so it's really important to me that this logical framework of patriarchy not be understood as saying something about biology per se but it's saying something rather about the biological storytelling we do in order to create a grammar of legitimacy and degradation yeah this was one of the most. Generative parts of the book for me not just this sort of like the woman animal child kind of discussions but the way that it leads you to be able to think about feminization infantilization dehumanization and i'm going back to the idea of like should we keep this word patriarchy around and you can see one of the sort of low hanging fruit in some way to say well maybe we should get rid of this because. The output of it is thinking about gendered oppression just along the axis of gender which includes other intersecting categories but you actually use this argument about how man is defined in relation not only to woman but also to animal and child to get us to the ways in which.

32:37By thinking about things like infantilization by thinking about things like dehumanization that's actually where race and class get i don't want to say smuggled into the argument but like that's that's that's where they appear in these ways that you know that I think the worry sometimes about patriarchy is that it's just it paints with such a broad brush that it doesn't let you get outside of gender. And you know I think probably people will be familiar with the language of say like feminization right like I might make a claim broadly like what we did Patrick the episode on fashion with with Valerie steal from the fashion Institute of technology she talked a lot about how. Even though clothes are like vastly culturally important because they are associated with women they are feminized and treated as frivolous and unimportant but that usage of feminization the way that that travels it goes way beyond simply affecting women.

33:47There's a kind of ability of this argument which gives us like infantilization and dehumanization in addition to feminization it gives us these verbs I guess technically those are nouns but the noun for first you know what I mean it lets us look. At situations for instance in which men of color are both infantilized and dehumanized like so all of a sudden by introducing. These terms of child. And animal we start to see the ways in which this structural system of gender oppression. As as its output things that don't map neatly simply onto what looks like oppression through the I don't want to say the lens of gender but you know what I'm saying yeah because I think this is you really making me think so much I be and and and Robin I love this phrase of the grammar right yeah to put another words hopefully what you're saying I be to pick up from it.

35:02That type of orientation allows us to then decode the specific forms of our like our different articulations of these sort of logics what the work that they do in any given context. Structurally but also like we could say to use our language like libidinally right in terms of what are the anxieties what are the fears what's the narrative and I the example that. Came unbidden into my mind is how growing up the idea of the quote unquote male nurse right it was a punchline right I think there's actually an entire one of the and still movies talk about the families is it will wear his like meeting me the parents or whatever like the whole joke is he's a nurse right. And of course this is self evidently feminized profession is not funny this man has to be less than a man in doing this and then I think about like how that actually the people who actually are. nurses right demographically speaking I think with the hospitals like I received care there are plenty of male nurses and they're oftentimes people of color and oftentimes i've had to rely on those people for such a situations in which I might myself.

36:06Be governed by anxieties about being in fatilized like they're attending to my body when I cannot. And so the city you can almost see how you are actually i'm just i'm thinking about that time you remember when you are recovering from surgery and that. A doctor told you Patrick's a redhead so he's got some stuff with anesthesia and one on he was in a ton of pain and this attending I think it was was basically said he said man up. Wow to Patrick and I was like give my husband demoral you sex is piece of shit basically and he looked at me and he was like give him some demo. But he was the whole thing he was you were in this moment where your masculinity was actually in question because you fear what inability to deal with you know really. unreasonable amount of pain and there was no reason. That gender needed to enter into that whatsoever but it was there gender is often away for all people to make them feel shame for not being willing to withstand large.

37:15Mounds of pain across the board yeah and to go go back to the point about grammar one thing one way of putting it that I think can be helpful is that. A lot of people are familiar with this idea of gender as the social interpretation of sex yeah where it's like gender is all the social symbols and meanings and so on that we attach to ideas of biological sex. When we think about the ship that I'm doing this book is saying gender is the social interpretation of the social meanings of sex lineage and development. So gender is as is this three dimensional thing it's not that I'm saying that patriarchy is gender plus other things I'm trying to hold to the idea that the content of patriarchy is gender. But draw out these two missing dimensions that we just have not attended to if we're going to have a complete picture of as Patrick was saying like the grammar that we then can apply. To any particular context I mean even if you take the example that you brought up Abby of black men. If you look at the social and political rhetoric that's been deployed to legitimize black men's incarceration their enslavement.

38:21You find not just in Fantalization and dehumanization you'll also find feminization and I think for basically any group that is systematically oppressed in our society. If you look at the rhetoric in the imagery that is used to legitimize that you will find all three dimensions not always an equal measure. But you'll find all three at least I have yet to not I've yet to not find all three in any particular example. No, I think that I mean and this is just one of those things where you know I think about I'm can I am putting my professor hat on for a minute which I don't always do on on the show but. When I talk like day one of gender women's and sexuality studies I'm always saying like this class should give you tools. And it feels to me like some of like one of the one of the huge kind of take away is in terms of like you can take this to the bank is attuning your audience to like are you seeing these things are you seeing feminization are you seeing in Fantalization are you seeing dehumanization gender is it work.

39:26In some sort of way in some sort of way that might not be entirely obvious. And and now I'm coming all the way back sort of to the big very beginning when you were talking about the ideas of like a good man or these things they get deployed right now there's just so much money getting poured into. You know creating positive masculinity having all these social and political programs for young men and boys I think all that's great and not i'm pro us paying more attention to the way that gender impacts men and boys however especially within the United States less so in some other countries like Australia but. We're especially within the United States these programs continue to be almost uniformly centralized around ideas of the real man and the good man they like oh no the real man isn't that. Keat Hegseth the real man is you know JFK or it's just it's just swapping one notion with another while keeping the exact same logical form that I discuss in the book and I just think that's not going to get us anywhere you know all you're doing is swapping out some characteristics while leaving the same logical structure supremacy in place.

40:34I just had the most unpleasant intrusive thought that maybe you're going to say the real man is not Pete Hegseth the real man is Pete but a judge. I'm just some people think so I don't think there's any real men so. There is there is some deep I think the homo nationalism angle though is I think also there too and I think it's not coincidental if I could just inject a little bit more political economy into this like a lot of the institutions that don't just. I'm. Receive the funding to do a lot of the stuff but they have kind of been the the gestators of it and are the carceral security state right are the military right I mean I think about the the. Whether it's you know police athletically to the advertisements of like the military being like you can come the real man is soldier and you can identify me what but fly this drone like there is this kind of way in which the. Our own individual anxieties about this sort of keystone concept are well received the power don't have those societies when it comes to leveraging them in all their kind of cash value or getting people to do things the real man has an infet amine psychosis.

41:47Yes sorry now our mandatory testosterone training screening oh god yes. I was just saying to friend the other day Pete Higgs said is actually very helpful for me because he's such a caricature of someone doing yeah man drag 24 seven. He's just like he's a very helpful pedagogical tool actually for these reasons that's true that's true you know I if I think about Pete Higgs has this is giving rise to teachable moments maybe they'll be maybe that will maybe they'll help you. I think about this the dimensionality of time and also how that involves like lineage and these sort of coordinated logics where I mean our experiences of vulnerability. Life aging like we're living in a certain timeline but these. Keystone Tickle fires like man here I think is the one have a way of. Packaging and.

42:48Freezing so many different logics of teleology and narrative and the mental image I keep having is of the of the classic descent of man style you start with I don't like the little fish eel thing and you work your way through the various aits and then finally you get this sort of like. Pete Higgs at style him bow and this sort of pursuit fellow and and realizing that that's a grand narrative but also his suit. He's like a man scapey kind of we're flowing right I mean he's there's something going on but like you never really occupy that right like and said there's this but this way in which like both the collective and the individual. Are presented this thing as a destination and I mean even he he hexeth cannot occupy it otherwise he wouldn't be running around and doing all this sort of camp. Yeah yeah no it's it's a mirage it's it's eternally receding and always the most desirable thing because you're told this mythology of it as the thing that's going to give you happiness and status and satisfaction and you know can't get no.

43:51You can't get there I mean actually Pete Higgs said there's like the perfect person to think about this because. I think about those rumors that he's eyeing the presidency I mean it's it's just another you know being to which he needs to aspire right there's there's never there's never you get what you want and then you simply have right or you simply are. Yeah it's it's an inherently insecure status and that's that's something that you know there's a there's a really great book by David Gilmore where he he's an anthropologist be does like a cross cultural anthropology of manhood and he you know the language of masculinity as a mythic confabulation is a quote from Gilmore and one of the thing that he talks about over and over again is exactly this that it said inherently insecure status that is nevertheless presented. As a biological state and prescription which then creates a lot of risk seeking behavior a lot of violent and aggressive behavior a lot of you know just coming from a place of insecurity a lot of desperate attempts to achieve this thing it's in fact never achievable.

45:15One of the other things for which I found so many resources in the book is how does talk about how gender is something that harms everyone not only women and non binary and trans people. But you know one of the difficulties is also how to do that without just kind of like flipping back over into centering discussions of gender on men suffering like we see this for for instance I mean I think the whole like you know Hannah Rosen the end of men and like fear mongering about men's decreasing rates of higher education in comparison to to women. And above all in like the endless discussions of the quote unquote male loneliness crisis which I feel like is a phrase that is absolutely inescapable when you're just like you know people are like this is again the same thing I'm like people people are lonely.

46:20Yeah like people are lonely and atomized an experiencing anony why do we need to make it the male loneliness crisis. But I do want to talk about the ways that you deal with men like lowercase men the people who are men right as well as this aspirational identity that is you know uppercase man. So can you walk us through your argument about how gender and patriarchy because in some ways these two are almost interchangeable terms in your book about how they're not things that simply benefit men but also in some really concrete ways harm them. Yeah I felt like it was important for there to be a message that can both acknowledge the reality of the suffering that I think underlies a lot of the discourses that I very much disavow like reverse sexism or the like you're saying the disappearance of men from because of modern society.

47:30Those are Michael Kimmel makes this distinction one of his books between emotions being real and true which you know whatever we want to make of those terms you know the distinction between like the agreement that a lot of men have is based on real suffering but the story that they've been sold about why they're so agreed is false and it ends up misdirecting. And so I thought it was really I feel both from from my own personal relationships with men but also just because of the political and economic situation that we're in that there has not been a good men have not been given a good story of how to understand their suffering in a way that doesn't just further segregate them from other people suffering. Absolutely. So the idea of the book is is the first thing is that I want to separate out discussions of gender that highlight the way that it psychologically and interpersonal harms men from the ways that it economically and politically harms men and my observation is that while we have had increasingly discourse that acknowledges the first part like things like the male loneliness epidemic language where it's like yes people are starting to have some of them.

48:44Kind of acknowledgement that these ideas of masculinity that say don't cry don't be vulnerable always be tough you know that you were talking about with the anesthesia right like just tough enough man up you know that that is harmful to men at a psychological and emotional level. However, I think that the concept of patriarchy that we have inherited is one that has left a general sensibility that even if gender sometimes harms men emotionally and psychologically if benefits are pocketbook it benefits their bank account it benefits their ability to be represented in politics and I think that's a lie. And one way to get at that is to say look there's an acknowledgement from the mid 20th century that gender is something that operates in every sphere of society and there's also an acknowledgement that gender is what Charlotte what calls a mega social role that every single role that we occupy is inflected by the interpretation of our body.

49:44So putting those two things together if we look at how political and economic power and opportunity is distributed in our society we should be able to use gender to explain what that is and when I look around I don't see a world where men have all the money and power and no one else does I see a world where a very very small number of men. Have an enormous amount of wealth and power and are able to use it in cruel ways with impunity including and sometimes especially against other men and the promise that we were given about gender and patriarchy was that these are frameworks that are going to help us explain these kinds of outcomes. So the idea especially in the fourth in the third part of the book part three which you know along with the title I love a double entendre is called erecting real men. And the idea that is that we can use going back to this idea of the grammar when we look at the rhetoric and imagery that's been used to again enslave and incarcerate men of color that's been used to terrorize.

50:52Queer men and exclude people with disabilities from political participation that's been used to trick working class white men into believing that they're part of a brotherhood with other white wealthy men who are going to have their backs when they then just sell them out for corporate interests. The concepts and the imagery and the fantasy of manhood within patriarchy is I think the most important concept for understanding these really systemic ways that men are exploited and violated and sent to die and rich men's wars and are you know, the main that work and are ignored when they do experience sexual violence are so shame they're not even supposed to talk about it in the first place. So it's really important to me that we stop thinking about patriarchy that helps men in general and instead think about it as something that has this formation of man at the center that ultimately it's the men who are born into a bunch of wealth and power that are the only ones who economically and politically benefit from this construct.

51:59This seems like such a key point and it's it's it's one of those things that like seem so vital to say but it's hard to say without well you say it so well I guess but like I think you hear about the the how the system you described even on its own terms. It doesn't really I'm struggling to say it's delicately I think about like Donald Trump as this sort of apex figure of masculinity or like Elon Musk like trying to dance right or like I do there's something about these even within the regime of patriarchy they're not sending their their best men so to speak like there's this guy I feel like I don't want to like body shape people or are like do something to like buy into this sort of weird kind of call the sack of like I actually see this from a lot of liberals like Donald Trump be a real man nuke around like what the fuck this is crazy that that that's madness but but there is this way in which it feels like and perhaps this is a way to kind of resolve that burden or at least make it more tenable part of what the men who are not born into those circumstances have to assimilate as almost like an added kind of

53:10dignity is the fact that well these are the people who are in top of the situation right like like there's something about getting like having Donald Trump like I really need tall generals right or are you on must being like just just work that out if you're already alienated having to try to assimilate the fact that these are the people that you have to listen to and emulate but also you don't want to look like them or like that's another thing that seems to be not articulable yeah and that's the best case scenario I think a lot of the time there isn't even that critical edge to it because masculinity is so hierarchical that there is a lot of I mean I think the Trump White House is a great example of this there is a lot of unquestioning submission by men to men who they see as higher on the masculinity hierarchy in them who are more real men than they are and so I think a lot of the time you know men men who have nothing will look at Elon Musk and they see him as a figure of legitimate authority they see him as someone who they should trust to tell them how to navigate reality and they don't even have that tension that you're describing of sort of like well this guy's in charge but like I wish he weren't it sort of like this guy's in charge so I guess he doesn't

54:27deserves to be and that's this cycle the man is ultimately a way of laundering legitimacy of power because the more power you have the more of a man you are and the more of a man you are the more power you deserve to have and so it just creates this endless endless cycle of legitimacy even when it's completely undeserved it's pyramid scheme. I mean one of the things that was most striking to me in this discussion of like the harms versus the like the cost benefit analysis right for men of like of gender of patriarchy is the way that you describe how part of this functions is by pitting men against each other. Do you mind if I ask you to just like say a little bit more about that aspect of the argument. Yeah I mean I do think masculinity is ultimately an affair between men I think you know for a lot of men the relationships they have to other women their ability to produce children their ability to dominate and or kill animals these are ultimately performances for other men and the way that masculinity is structured and patriarchy is as a zero sum game of status and power.

55:45And so there's no there's no way to have an intimacy or a friendship with other men for those who are caught within this ideological system that isn't tainted at best if not completely undermined by the constant sense of competition because you're in a locked into a zero sum game for who could be the more real the more good the more true man. That's so helpful and I really wanted to make sure that we had that piece of the argument really securely in place for our listeners before we talk about apparently from my correspondence with you a part of the book that most of your interviewers don't want to talk about but because we are psychoanalysis podcast and technically we usually talk about the fall is but today we actually get to talk about penises. Do you see a void it and literally all my own. So this is this is from a wrecking real man.

56:48Biology only further debunks the idea that the penis provides a discreet and fixed boundary around the identity man are genitals like our bodies more generally do not come into dichotomous types. I'm skipping a little bit but this is all part of the same argument genital formation across human bodies is anatomically contiguous. Men already know this too the continuity of genitals is precisely what feeds a widespread anxiety among men that therapist Angela Gregory describes as a man's quote unquote trauma of fearing his penis is too small. Men use weights prescription drugs extenders pumps dermal fillers plastic surgery and give this really blew my mind even snake bites in attempts to enlarge their genitals. The global market share for surgical penile implants alone was over 450 million in 2019 expected to surpass 640 million by 2027.

57:52Studies suggest that men with statistically average penises frequently experience shame obsession or other psychological disorders in relation to their penis size. This anxiety isn't about their genitals size observed in a vacuum free from their culture's ideas of man. It stems from the fact that the penis though purported to secure masculine identity as biological truth is yet another place where the ruler of manhood remains under determined and ambiguous and by the way this this then slides right into the claim man is a real identity but never a secure one close quote. I mean I just need to sit with it for for a minute snake bites snake bites can you imagine is there a particular kind of snake. There probably is that I don't remember what you're. A non fatal kind.

58:53I mean there's probably some people who fucked your own with the wrong kind of snake I mean humans have done all kinds of things so you're probably right it's been done. There's some element of like sympathetic magic here like here's this thing that kind of yeah it's a little. Fowl like yeah swell that yeah okay I wanted to get that out there but I also have questions I didn't it's I'm not just reading about penises just because I'm reading about penises it's because I've got some questions I've got some questions Robin about penises and their me makes. I mean what I'm interested in here and and this is really broadly about that claim that you make man as an identity that can never be securely achieved is how does this signifier of the identity man function as you understand it and why is it so impossible to achieve. And do you think that this is related going back to our conversation at the very top of the episode about how so many of us still tend to understand virtues as being either masculine or feminine such that men.

1:00:04are often aiming at being good men rather than at the task of you know say being good people. Yeah I mean the way that the the signifier functions I mean does a lot of things simultaneously it's a very load bearing signifier as Patrick was saying earlier when one of the things it does is segregate people from each other through a story of a natural division of biology of a natural division between male and female between human and animal between adult and child when in fact as with the passage you just read about the penis but the same is true if we want to look at the discussions of hormones or gonads or gametes that they're these are stories of a biological chasm that doesn't actually exist. So it is often doing this work of segregation with a self referential story of that segregation being given but that segregation is also very unstable and fragile because it is not given but then in addition to the segregation work and connected to what you're saying about the idea of a good man or true man real man is that it's also doing this work of sizing men up against each other so we even once you segregate them away from everyone else well now it's this competition between them and the term real man does both.

1:01:19So terms like real man or real men can both do the work of saying who is a man as opposed to a woman child or animal as when for example teenagers are told you're not a real man they're not they're being told you're still a child that's one way of using it but then another way of using real man is this sizing up where you know two men are playing basketball one of them wins and then like oh you're the real man you know like there's this way like you win you're better and this comes through in a lot of our language too like you know the man just to phrase the man is very illuminating the fact that we like oh you're the man no one ever says you're the woman now that's not a thing that people say no because you're the man means you're the best you're on top you're in charge you deserve to be in charge yeah or you've got balls like those kinds of things and there was that like little move to be like oh you got over in it you know it really doesn't it doesn't work I mean maybe eventually it could

1:02:21with enough usage although I think it couldn't be used to mean the same thing we'd have to like you can't just you can't just swap in oh this is this isn't a side but one time I saw a production of hello dolly where they left no no it was mama Mia where they left the entirety of the script exactly the same except they just substituted the husband character or the fiancee character for a woman to make it a lesbian couple and it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen so it was like the entire script of heteronormativity superimposed on this lesbian relationship and I feel like that sometimes when people try to take like oh the language that we use but you've got balls and then just substitute the word balls for ovaries and pretend that that's going to be censical to anyone you know the changes need to go deeper than that we have to go but below the surface to make these changes but all that to say so in terms of the signifier man because it's doing this it has this self-referential story of being natural and unchanging and unquestionable while the work that's it it is in fact doing is very

1:03:27context dependent and stipulative and in fact a very very fragile of both segregating people and sizing them up it's creates this deep internal dissonance and conflict I think because men are told on the one hand this is a definition of your body and also it's a measure of your social worth that can never be firmly achieved and those two messages are really destructive I think when someone is given both of them simultaneously I was really fascinated by and this is like it's a seemingly subtle linguistic point but but I think it it lands really hard when you take it in the way that you know because you you talk a lot about like the real man but you give all of these examples in the book of the ways that sometimes when we just say man as in you know be a man or or talk about becoming a man that real is implied I want to like like it has real is implied but there's

1:04:30also there's like a there's a perluxionary function to this if we want to like get a little jail are we going to do a little how to do things with words yeah can we just do you you just we don't want to bring that up so we can put that in the show notes yeah I don't know how to do things with with me that's a different book altogether that jail Austin would probably not have approved of but there is something about like so so it's like be a man means be a real man but functionally in perluxionary terms it means shut the fuck up can you just find perluxionary yes through the doing of the thing this is like the speech act right there's something accomplished in terms of well I'm not I don't want to floss or like states of affairs in the world that is kind of magically conjured simply through saying a certain set of things and if we want to run with this and make it a little bit bigger you could say that in addition to the signal speech acts of like I minister a pronounced human and wife or I now think we say husband and wife now but just for the theme of the episode it should probably be man yeah or I like I Chris in this ship

1:05:33Jessica or whatever and I smack a bottle of crystal on it like these kind of I pronounce you guilty yeah honestly like these these ritualized fictions of like legitimating slice of like a thing that can be done with words it cuts through time and changes the status of the things themselves right that to run with that more broadly from the kind of narrow philosophy of language thing like again like the conversational import every time I've been told to be a man is generally stop crying or stop making a scene or you're gonna fucking take this or shut up right like you this is it has a regularity of kind of function there and it it results in bad feelings I mean the way you see you don't necessarily feel better you just see you actually truly feel worse you just learn to stop showing it and there's something about that kind of the cumulative effect of that as it produces this type of relation of things I think a lot like Finans like approach like whiteness in some ways like even the people who occupy that position of relative privilege if we even want to use that language which would be useful in some cases nonetheless exist in an anxiety

1:06:37to it it produces these moments of you check yourself you pull up to police yourself you wait to be police by others and oftentimes you do that and I hit your point about how much people do or don't clock the ways in which like the standards of masculinity or not the standards of masculinity that they themselves espoused but like it does produce this kind of like anxiety or alienation that produces a lot of weird encounters where either you you can't think about it or you try to think about it too hard but in any event once you start feeling it or clock it's a little bit it gets weird I mean I always think about how in the 90s I was told or I think this may have been true I don't think it's true anymore but the condoms started or at least the main brands that were available at the time they started at medium so like which again that's like one of those things where it's like the opposite of women's clothes I was just thinking that that started like extra extra small yeah or like remember the introduction of the zero wasn't actually about long again and then they had to introduce the double zero double zero yeah yeah I think a snug now is what they do for

1:07:39the smaller sizes shut up snug and then the medium is now standard or classic right classic I love that as if your condom is like old-spice but like well I like all the like the experience of buying condoms for the first couple of times like that is already or at least the way I don't know I think go ahead it's weird right like because like you you you already are a little embarrassed to be doing this for whatever reason and and oftentimes yeah I remember like like getting these weird like like the pharmacist who I kind of knew earlier growing up like like giving me this look like yeah man like and I'm like no I don't want this I've never come here again I feel terrible right like and so like you have there is this like awkwardness but just imagine like to put it very bluntly how many fewer condoms would be bought right if man if if people like like we're being asked like go I would like the tiny insufficient like you don't want to pair like it's unthinkable right it's

1:08:45the stuff of humor of like you want to like laugh it's the other as we or like TV jokes about micro penises yeah yeah definitely and they're used I mean going back to the attempt to keep the structure in place about flipping the script in some way like the amount of times I've heard you know Donald Trump called a man child or called a woman or you know it's just the same is the same grammar just getting flipped against different people and I think you know going to what you're saying Patrick one of the things that I think is is true of of all of patriarchy's identities but is perhaps for particularly announced around man is that it's a tool of manipulation you know use the term regulatory and I think it is regulatory but I think it is regulatory with a sharp edge of manipulation most of the time and that manipulation works through fog works through fear obligation and guilt the three the three main mechanisms through which saying the man man up

1:09:46why don't you be more of a man are ways of convincing someone that they not only should do it you want them to do but they should be guilty about the fact they haven't already done it's one of those cases where like the distinction between abuse and use gets a little difficult because like one know that this is it's an abusive dynamic I'm like an interpersonal toxic level but this is actually the use of the term normatively yeah and I think things like drafts and especially the economic wars that we've been seeing for so long it's like I mean take what's going on in Ukraine right now where the the language and imagery of hyper masculinity that is getting used both in Ukraine and Russia but I mean Russia is definitely the aggressor here to get men to give up their lives or what is essentially another man or a small set of men's bank accounts is absolutely insane and it is so manipulative I mean we saw the same thing happened in the American south here where these rich white land owners needed to somehow get poor white men to die for them so they intentionally

1:10:46develop this idea of southern manhood and made a bunch of propaganda telling poor white men that their ability to belong to the brotherhood of southern manhood and have their manhood affirmed was dependent on their ability to defeat Northern quote unquote Northern aggression and to protect the so-called real America not that we're hearing that again or anything like that so these are very old tropes very old playbook that gets repeated over and over again when men with more power especially want other men to give up their labor or their lives to benefit them. Oh man talk about your double binds I mean I don't want to say men need to have consciousness raising groups so that they can recognize themselves as belonging to a sex class like all uh Shula Misfire Stone's language of the sex class but that's what I've been thinking about as I'm kind of like free associating with I'm just going to restate one of the one of the claims from from the book which we've already said it but I just want to kind of get it back out there

1:11:49that gender and or patriarchy which again are in some ways fungible terms in in this argument harm most men far more than they benefit them right and one of the ways that they inflict this harm is that masculinity becomes as you say Robin a zero-sum game it becomes something that sets men against each other and so I'm thinking about admittedly it has been moments since I've read the dialectic of sex but where where Shula Misfire Stone who's who's a Marxist feminist really talks about the necessity of women recognizing themselves as belonging to a sex class and I'm thinking about her chapter of that book on the beauty ideal and the ways that women are taught whether it's in the workplace or whether it's in competition for you don't want to see a mate that sounds very but like for a spouse this is a you know a mid-century book that that that

1:12:51language is is appropriate they are pitted against each other in terms of beauty right like the terms are really clear who's the prettiest who's the one that's getting picked out of of the group and you know there's this moment where she also talks about how that that makes women generic right like a man can come this is going to sound like very madman but like a man can come into the office and say like I love blondes and all the blondes sit up and feel that they have personally been complemented even though they haven't that's actually like a generic trait and that there's something that can happen with the realization of yourself as them as a as a as a member of a sex class which doesn't involve simply sort of reduplicating this logic of let's all compete against each other but then if we if we move that logic over to men as a class the way that men so often show

1:13:54solidarity is by acting violently and through honestly this kind of tripartite set of verbs you're through infantilizing dehumanizing and feminizing women so I mean there's there's no kind of easy way out of gender even through the sort of idea of what if we recognize that these things are being done to us and we had a certain amount of class consciousness like I don't see that as like the way through you know what I mean yeah I don't think it's sufficient I do think that it's an important start though I think we can't even ask questions about what else should we do about something that we can't see and I'm curious you said you said right at the beginning of what you said you said something like I'm not advocating for consciousness raising groups for men and I'm just curious why like why wouldn't you want consciousness raising groups for men oh I mean I'm

1:14:58not I guess you know what men go ahead have consciousness raising groups like have a fucking ball I don't know um I guess I think all of the efforts that I have gent not I'm gonna paint with a broad brush so much that I'm certainly gonna like make some errors or offend some people and I'm sorry so I'm not I'm not talking about like you know like I know like there are certain like therapeutic men's groups that seem to have helped a lot of a lot of friends of mine you know things like that but often stipulating that a consciousness raising group involves at least in like the 70s women getting together and talking about their experience qua women realizing that experiences that they have had that they thought were about themselves that were individual were actually about gender right and we're actually about this category inhabiting this category of women I don't think and you know this is not an original thought this is straight out of some unto bovars the second sex I don't think that masculinity and femininity

1:16:03or the category of men and the category of women I don't think they function in the same way um and so I guess I feel like in so many homo social settings women are the ones that are harmed when when men kind of uh form these bonds but I guess what I'm saying is and I think this is a different I think this is like a it's maybe a subtle point but but I think it's an important one is that what I see your book calling for is not for men to recognize themselves as in the class of men and act accordingly it's for men to understand themselves as gendered there is for men to understand themselves as gendered subjects not just as individuals that I think is I would love to have a whole lot of men sitting around together talking about what it means to be gendered and to think about masculinity how they experience it but I think that is and again

1:17:09so I'm saying it's subtle I think that's different than being like let's organize around the category of men does that make sense? Yep yep that makes sense and I think if I were to have if I were you know able to snap my fingers and create my ideal consciousness raising group that addresses these things it would not be conscious raising for men it would be consciousness raising about masculinity and I think that that should include every kind of body in the space because I think women and men and I'm buying every like everyone needs to be thinking more about masculinity and I think the fact that masculinity studies as a field is only now starting to gain some real traction I think in and of itself is so eliminating because I have found that the things that are last to be studied are usually where like a lot of political power is that that's been hidden for a long time this is really clarifying and I particularly taken with this with sort of the dual move here one like I mean where the phrase that really struck me from what you were saying was this idea of

1:18:13men thinking about themselves as subjects yeah right and Robin if you've allowed a cruelly paraphrase what you're saying I think there's this the thinking about masculine or taking masculinity as a discursive object or as the object of this type of work I think that is so vital a distinct that pivot is crucial in so far is that thinking about just I don't want to it always falls back on shake like men be like this but by do think about like one of the ways which men do get together and they have there has to be an object like frequently like there's got to be a thing right we're going to talk about we're going to talk about we're we're like I think a bunch of men like hanging out in a gun shop they want to talk about the guns or we're going to talk about how's that grill coming along like really let's talk about a car because like somehow there has to be an object to orient the conversation otherwise we're going to wind up in some space of conflict with each other or we're going to have to exist in relation to each other which is going to be produced like anxious collapse right and I think that that's that's bleak I mean but I mean like

1:19:15give me what the yeah what the objects are generally it's like it's a fire or it's a weapon right it's a can you just have a book club well that's not I think I would like to I'm maybe that I'm showing a certain some spectrum traits here but I'm willing to move it from less toxic concrete objects to something that is a little bit I don't I don't really know it's a solar panel or it's a garden or something like but I know I mean silly in some ways but like I don't know I would love for you to belong to a men's gardening club I love to have landed garden but there is that like that ability to talk about shared experience without having the determinants of that experience like flood the room or getting enacted yes yeah super hard yeah and it's especially hard because so many of these spaces where men do have men's groups about you know whatever it is from guns to mass to talking about masculinity and manhood our spaces where it is still taken for granted

1:20:19that man is a natural category yeah that man is a natural category that has separated this group of people from everyone else and it is also like we've been talking about several points still a space we're not only is it understood as a natural category it's understood as a moralized category you know there's this still there's this splitting of the moral universe where people have this idea humans come with a biological chasm segregating females from males and which of those you are indicates what morality you are subject to over the course of your life and this comes through not only in language of good man and good woman but also for the many many religious people in the language of godly men and godly women like at bible college I remember our freshman orientation was sex segregated and we had to go off and be told all these lessons about what would make us godly women while the men went off and were told what would make them godly men and this I think having this kind of split moral universe is not compatible with making forward progress on these issues yeah to your back to you I think about how I'm thinking about my experiences of like a homosexual male

1:21:24spaces and you did go to an all-man's high school I did yeah and I always I've had a very hard time having maintaining friendships with men and and oftentimes it's it's because the object in question becomes women right and it's like an invitation to participate in some sort of conversation that I just don't I don't want to learn I like I don't want to hear people say certain things I'm afraid they're gonna say it or I'm gonna I don't want to be trusted with someone like someone else's infidelity or like I just don't want it and and I think sometimes I pray for that just being lonely right not having this but there is this kind of I think about even like the the the appeal men have to have some kind of space like the locker room talk type thing right really well but what actually is that safeguarding and oftentimes it's a whole bunch of men finding some sort of equality insofar as they can participate in these other types of domination the better to briefly LA their anxieties about masculinity right right I remember when I was um you know still religious and the church I went to had segregated men's and women's groups throughout

1:22:27the week and I you know the men's group was reading books that I wanted to read and the women's group was doing I don't know like you they were doing like flower bouquet like something I wasn't as interested in just because of who I am and so I wanted to go to the men's group and I remember the priest telling me no you can't come because if there are any you know he said women that was you presenting as a woman at the time if there are any women there the men won't speak as openly and I'm like how is that my fault they should be able to speak like my presence is not the thing that's making them unable to talk their ideas of me is the thing that's making them unable to talk and so why should you know women bear the burden of these segregation for the you know exactly the reasons that you're saying so that men can what talk trash about women behind their back like that's not fair they're not gonna talk openly it's like finally we could have solidarity no you it's gonna some guy is always gonna be like I can't wait to get out like hang out with some cooler fuckers than you assholes or other people like there's no it's the fantasy of openness and

1:23:29transparency that's being protected there more than any actual conversation among men and what's the solidarity around like you're saying what's the object that the solidarity is centered on and I think often you know even when it's not explicit it still is this object that's built out of you know the misogyny and the infantilization and the dehumanization of a whole trying to hold together this identity that you know ultimately is always busting and leaking at the seams so we've been mired for I don't know at least half an hour and also millennia in the harms of gender but I want I want to close our conversation today by asking about love you write towards the end of the book quote patriarchy orient us against loving truly compassionately deeply ourselves it sets

1:24:29impossible and painful standards of what would make us good it guarantees that we experience shame about our desires in our bodies close quote so I don't think that there is like a what you would call like a utopian vision that underwrites this book but I do see it containing an awful lot of hope for how we might live and how we might imagine ourselves otherwise so Robin I'm hoping you can talk to us a bit about that hope and about the vision of love that accompanies that yeah it felt really important to me to end the book with a discussion of love and of reimagining what even if we keep these identities as socially significant what their significance could be to us and to others in the way that they could organize our life together and you know to go a little more start a little more theoretical that's because ultimately I think patriarchy although

1:25:31it contains an epistemology it's not an epistemology like providing more information to people is not the thing that's going to move them outside of this because it's a fantasy structure it's a mythological structure and so there needs to be an affective reorientation to ourselves and to others to be able to move into a different metaphysical picture a different way of perceiving the reality of ourselves in our relationships with others and I think that love is is that key because ultimately what patriarchy tells us is that we belong to this category that has a homogenous paradigm that we should be trying to live up to which is never achievable which always requires us to be policing ourselves and others and evaluating and weighing and judging our own desires and our actions and whether we're performing the thing that we're supposed to be well enough rather than asking whether we're actualizing the person that we are in a way that's in line with our integrity and so I

1:26:38really hope that I can just create a little bit of space just a little bit of space for people to just ask that question not who should I be but who do I want to become like what's the what's the version of myself that I can love more each day than I did the day before because it's more in line with the way I want to show up in the world with my values with the relationships and the effects that I want to have on other people and I think that you know Christian religion is often used to uphold patriarchy and part of the reason too why I wanted to bring it back to love at the end is because the I think this is a deep distortion of the truths of religion because when you look at religious traditions they all have this message of reciprocity of loving others as we love ourselves and I don't think that message of reciprocity is compatible with patriarchy. Robin before we go where can people find you more of your writing info about I don't know the audiobook all of these other things on the

1:27:41internet? So if you go to my website which is just robindenberoth.com on there you can find both my academic facing pieces as well as links to my public facing pieces and there's also more information about the book including the audiobook which actually just came out a couple of weeks ago it's three and a half hours perfect time for you know a commute or a train ride or maybe a short flight so I would point people to those places. Wonderful I will put all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for making the time to be here today the book is phenomenal and it was so wonderful to talk with you. Thank you both I really enjoyed this conversation I love that you create a space that is both structured and also just fun and free-floating we were able to go to lots of different places which makes for the best conversation.

1:28:45This has been an episode of Ordinary Unhappiness a podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. I'm Abby Kluchin and today I was joined by Patrick Blanchfield and Robin Dembrough. This podcast is produced by Daniel L. The music by formal chicken.