It persists despite resistance. For ex., the relationship between heterosexuality and men's position of dominance. Connell notes that gender, as a way of structuring social practice, is unavoidably connected to other social structures, race and class for ex. Gender interacts or intersects with race and class. For instance, white men's masculinities are constructed in relation to black men as well as in relation to white women.
White masculinity is fused with institutional power.
Also class masculinities, for ex. Working class masculinities depend on class as much as they do gender relations. The argument behind this is that to understand gender we must constantly go beyond it. We must not only recognize multiple masculinities, we must investigate the relations between them, gender relations among men, in order to avoid a simple character typology. Very few men are actively engaged in maintaining the hegemony, but the majority of men gain from it because of the overall advantage to men of the subordination of women.