What About the Men?

December 15, 2025

[Editor’s note: this is the first of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, Cambridge University Press, 2025].

Dean Stopler has written a penetrating and persuasive account of the position of women in liberal democracies, specifically, although not exclusively, the United States. She characterizes liberal societies as patriarchal, meaning that the societies are organized, managed, and dominated by men to the detriment of women. I largely agree, but have one complicating narrative from outside the Western societies that form the basis of Stopler’s argument. Before I give my perspective, however, some background on the book is necessary.

To simplify an empirically rich and absorbing account of patriarchy in Western society, Stopler begins with the historical, social, and ideological foundations of gender discrimination. Although religion may have initially included worship of a Mother-Goddess, e.g., Amaterasu in Japan, the emergence of archaic states brought monotheism and, over the centuries, an elaborate ideological, religious, and social structure entrenching patriarchy based on a single male god. While male dominance of the contemporary world is hardly a novel idea, Stopler broadens and deepens that analysis by focusing on gender discrimination in precisely that portion of the world that often compliments itself on countering that dominance, the liberal democratic West.

As the title indicates, the self-congratulatory rhetoric of democratic liberalism masks, if not reinforces and perpetuates, a patriarchic structure that keeps both genders in their unequal relative positions. Stopler does not resort to dramatic or rhetorical reference to time-worn, if accurate, generalizations, but painstakingly demonstrates how patriarchy is reconstructed in contemporary Western democracies with reference to and analysis of phenomena like the transformation of the US Supreme Court and decisions like Dobbs eliminating the national right to abortion.

In doing so, she recounts the transformation of liberalism’s celebration of individual human rights from an emancipatory call to gender equality into a vehicle for the re-establishment of male control of women, particularly married women, all with the passive involvement, if not approval, of leading liberal ideologues like John Rawls and in contravention of international covenants like CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women]. For Stopler, the vehicle for this transformation is the pre-occupation with and faith in the public/private distinction and its insulation of the patriarchal structure of human relationships, especially but not exclusively in families.  

Stopler is persuasive, and I agree that contemporary political, religious, and ideological trends, at least in the United States, support her claims. For this reviewer, however, she neglects a perspective that would significantly complicate the relative status of men and women in contemporary affluent democracies. The missing perspective is that of non-dominant men, by which I mean 80 to 90% of the male population. To illustrate my argument I will recount the social and economic position of Japanese men in a Tokyo suburb of 30+ years ago. To make explicit what will be obvious, I am recounting a personal experience. I make no empirical claim either that the situation I describe was universal in Japan at that time or that it represents the situation in other circumstances and societies. That said, I believe that my reflections present a viewpoint that is often neglected in discussions of gender relationships in rich, capitalist societies like the US, Western Europe, and Northeast Asia.

At the end of the last century I lived with my family in a middle to upper-middle class suburb of Tokyo. The area was entirely Japanese (with perhaps assimilated Korean citizens), i.e., there was no significant population of foreigners other than the four of us. Our daughter was beginning kindergarten and we enrolled her in the local nursery school. Each morning and afternoon either my wife or I delivered and picked her up at the appropriate time. During that year, my wife made lifelong friends among the mothers of our daughter’s friends. I never met – literally never saw – a father. The mothers were at home; the fathers left home for work before the children went to school and returned after the rest of the family had eaten dinner and, often, gone to bed. The fathers not only worked on Saturdays but also frequently had to socialize with colleagues in the evening. My wife has maintained her relationships with her friends from that period over the course of several subsequent stays in Tokyo. The first and only time I met a father was when one accompanied his family to New York on vacation.

To step back from the personal to state the obvious: the mothers managed the home and childcare and had no chance for any life other than that of mother and housekeeper. While it is important to note that occupational opportunities increased after the children had reached adolescence, the chance to pursue a profession or conventional management career was non-existent. Meanwhile, the husbands/fathers were working intensively. In other words, the relative gender roles were consistent with the patriarchic society described by Stopler.

What is missing, however, in my experience and in many accounts of patriarchy is what happened to the men. A tiny percentage became patriarchs, designing, creating, and presiding over the liberal Japanese society of the period. The rest became employees. They did not rule the world; they served others. Like the women, they were denied professional fulfillment, unless they enjoyed going out drinking and making small talk with bar hostesses with their bosses or being assigned for months at a time to market research while living in a business hotel in, e.g., Hungary or Argentina. Unlike their wives, however, they were also denied to a non-trivial extent the joy of parenthood. In a word, they were oppressed. At that time living in Tokyo, I felt sorrier for the fathers than for the mothers.

Two important qualifications must made. First, the above account is out of date. A recent return visit to our daughter’s nursery school confirmed what my wife and I had expected: there are now lots of fathers bringing and picking up their kids. On a grander scale, although the political role of women generally remains relatively low in Japan, the current Prime Minister and, perhaps more significant, the current Minister of Finance are women. Second, Japan and the Japanese gender situation are unique, just as are the equivalent situations of Germany, the US, and every other society. Thirdly and most important, my family’s experience does not contradict Stopler’s central argument about patriarchy, especially in the family. What I hope my reflections do contribute, however, is an additional perspective on the costs of patriarchy: what it means for non-dominant men and especially for fathers. To state the obvious: the preclusion by gender discrimination of free choice of how to structure one’s life has social and personal costs that extend even further than those described in Women’s Rights in Liberal States.