Geoff Dench was a British social scientist with a special interest in the lives of working-class men. Because he arrived at unfashionable conclusions, his work is neglected. Many of his books are out of print or difficult to find, but his widow has kindly sent me copies of them.
He argued that patriarchy ‘guarantees that men will be fitted in the society.’ As he explained in Transforming Men,
The case against feminism is male frailty, fecklessness and capacity for sheer obstructiveness and, as a consequence of this, that men need not equal but additional rewards in the public realm, to compensate for their inevitably secondary place in the private domain, and as an incentive to submit to community discipline and to throw themselves into reciprocity. (p. 239)
To understand these concepts of community discipline and reciprocity, however, we first need an overview of George Gilder’s Men and Marriage (1986), which Dench pointed to as a strong influence on his own work. Dench lamented that Gilder ‘had little impact on academic work’ overall, and this book, too, is now out of print.
According to Dench, ‘the kernel of Gilder’s case’ is that the family integrates men into the community. By contrast, as Gilder said, ‘a man oriented towards his next fix, lay, day at the race or drinking session with the boys’ is not ‘durably tied to the social order’.