In Junior Diaz's Drown, women in the Dominican culture seem to suffer from a patriarchal system. They are treated as more of playthings than they are as people. The men seem to do whatever they want. Rafa uses women in the Campo by taking "the girls down to the dams to swim and if he was lucky they let him put it in their mouth and assets." (5) Another example is Papi. Papi is cheating on his wife and is violent. He "took hold of [Mami’s] arms and pushed her against the slumping walls of the house, thinking his touch would snap her from a brooding silence.” (166) Both Papi and Rafa basically say that the only role women have is to please men. Rafa does this by calling dating "getting pussy," and Papi does when he says that "a man his age has to masturbate when he had a wife." (31, 179) It seems that men must prove their dominance over women by being physically and sexually stronger than they are.