The Ideal Nobody Meets

Raewyn Connell‘s 1987 framework opens with a distinction most everyday thinking about masculinity hasn’t caught up to: the dominant form of masculinity in any culture isn’t a description of how most men behave. It’s a position at the top of a hierarchy — one most men can’t occupy but nearly all help maintain.

The concept borrows from Gramsci: hegemony isn’t dominance by force, it’s dominance by consent. The stoic breadwinner, the action hero, the founder pulling all-nighters — these aren’t archetypes because most men live them. They’re archetypes because most men agree they represent what a man should be. That agreement is the engine. The same mechanism keeps fiat currency stable — not gold in a vault, but the collective agreement to act as though it’s worth something.

Connell calls the majority position “complicit masculinity.” These men don’t meet the ideal, but they quietly collect what she terms the ”patriarchal dividend” — the everyday advantages of being male in a system organised around male authority. The system doesn’t need most men to be dominant. It needs them to be invested. A man who’s never thrown a punch still benefits from a culture that treats physical dominance as masculine. The benefit precedes the question — which is why the question rarely comes.

The hierarchy doesn’t stop at complicit. Gay men, and men whose race or class bars them from the dividend, aren’t incidentally excluded. They’re structurally required — the way a credit score needs defaulters to mean anything. A ranking that includes everyone at the top isn’t a ranking.

The archetype updates. The hierarchy doesn’t. The frontier cowboy gave way to the corporate titan; the corporate titan gave way to the disruptive founder. The faces change on a generational schedule. What doesn’t change is the investment — from men who will never meet the ideal but keep validating it. That’s not false consciousness. It’s a rational response to a system that pays dividends regardless of whether you live the image.