‘Under patriarchy, men cannot be both powerful and connected.’

Terrence Real, 2020

In his seminal book I Don’t Want To Talk About It (1997), Terrence Real outlines how contemporary men, within the frameworks of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, must undergo a severing of self from self, and self from community. Real identifies how the so-called masculine power attained through this severing comes from a ‘one down’ position in which the struggle for ‘power over’, rather than ‘power with’, is a central doctrine of what he calls ‘patriarchal masculinity’. This power over, rather than power with, is similarly manifest in international governance, statehood, community and the family unit itself – and it is even manifest in the representation of male characters in Australian literature.