Abstract
There is now an expansive literature on the manosphere – the loosely connected groups of digital communities that revolve around men’s rights, aspirations and entitlements, and the perceived constraints upon these. Such studies have produced important critical insights into the collective and organized dimension of the networked harassment of women in digital settings, as well as highlighting the manosphere’s craving to reanimate regressive modes of masculinity. At this time, however, scholars have written relatively little about the manosphere’s high -profile key figures; so-called ‘manfluencers’. While ‘manfluencers’ are symptomatic, rather than a cause, of unequal gender relations, their cultural traction and their role in amplifying misogyny situates these figures as worthy of sociological investigation. In this article, we are concerned with Andrew Tate, the globe’s most prolific and most followed social media producer of masculinity-related content. Building on studies that analyse Tate’s viral video content, here we centre his written discourses, providing an empirically and theoretically driven analysis of his longer-form written content appearing on his website (16,029 words across 64 webpages) and on his Telegram messaging platform (150,288 words across 2191 posts), domains where his more committed followers access unfiltered and persistent communications. Deploying the concept of masculinism as a framework, we combine computational keyword and keyword co-occurrence analysis with a qualitative, close reading of a purposefully derived sub-sample of data. While somewhat subtler compared to his video content, our analysis exposes how Tate’s emphasis on self-help advice for boys and men and his glorifying of essentialism, gender hierarchy and individualism operates as the insidious ideological scaffolding that allows for, leads to and celebrates misogyny, and does so in ways that permits it to be taken up by young men trying to make sense of a context in which previous norms that privileged them are being challenged.
Introduction
The proliferation and specific expression of misogyny and anti-woman sentiment in online settings has become a growing area of concern for contemporary gender studies scholars across a range of disciplines. Noting well-established roots in earlier incarnations of backlash against feminist gains (Faludi, 1992; McRobbie, 2008), research has critically engaged with the praxis of masculinity in the so called ‘manosphere’ – the ‘group of loosely incorporated websites and social media communities where men’s perspectives, needs, gripes, frustrations and desires are explicitly explored’ (Farrell et al., 2019: 1) and which overtly situate boys and men’s (perceived) disenfranchisement as a corollary of progress towards equality for girls, women and people of diverse gender identities (e.g. Banet-Weiser and Miltner, 2016; Ging, 2019; Han and Yin, 2023; Jones et al., 2020).
Such research has produced valuable critical insights, but to date has had relatively little to say about the manosphere’s high-profile key figures; the so-called ‘manfluencers’. Of specific interest to us is Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer turned social media celebrity and self-styled ‘king of toxic masculinity’ who in mid-2023 was indicted on charges of human trafficking and rape. Renowned for publicly espousing views that denigrate women, and insisting that men should be powerful, dominant and wealthy, Tate’s social media reach is prolific. He has close to 10 million followers on the platform X (formerly Twitter), while on the platform TikTok a variety of repackaged video content connected by the #Tate hashtag had been viewed over 13 billion times by mid-2023, despite Tate himself being banned from the platform (Oppenheim, 2023). Tate’s notoriety has increased the media attention given to his messaging, with a now long list of journalistic commentaries showing concern for its influence, especially upon boys and young men (e.g. Bubola and Kwai, 2023; Das, 2022; Fazackerly, 2023). Joining this commentary, numerous researchers have used blogs or news media opinion pieces to also reflect on Tate and his impact (e.g. Ging, 2023; Wescott and Roberts, 2023).
In the media and scholarly commentaries mentioned earlier, and in the empirical research that exists (see later in the article), focus is given overwhelmingly to the content of Tate’s video-clip-based media. To a degree this makes sense; the video content – often snippets of longer broadcasts or media appearances – is a key component of Tate’s traction in the ‘attention economy’ and is a particular and powerful cultural phenomenon. While these viral clips powerfully amplify his most problematic views, they are only an entry point into Tate’s content, and are unlikely to be the kind of in-depth content his ardent supporters immerse themselves in, given they represent only a small fraction of his overall content production. Further, the different modes of content are intertwined but epistemologically distinct cultural forms in that they have ostensibly different audiences and fundamentally different means of communicating knowledge to and influencing the intended audiences. The shock value and ‘click bait’ imperative of the video content contrasts with the communication of the more holistic doctrine that Tate offers his dedicated followers and which resembles an effort to cultivate a fleshed out subcultural expression. 1
Therefore, our aim is to extend the analytic lens beyond attention to viral video content by providing an empirically driven analysis of Tate’s longer-form written content that appears on his website (a total of 16, 029 words across 64 web pages) and on his Telegram messaging platform (a total of 150,288 words across 2191 posts). Following other mixed methods work on large-scale data sets derived from manosphere communities (e.g. Jones et al., 2020; Maloney et al., 2024), we combine a computational approach involving a keyword frequency and co-occurrence analyses, followed by a close qualitative reading of a subsample of the content.
These two sources together present an important corpus of text that allows for a thorough analysis of the composition and key components of the key discourses that boys and young men are exposed to after (and if) they move past the initial sound bites. This analysis is of cultural sociological importance because it centres questions of the intersection of contemporary (digital) media and the power and influence of cultural intermediaries upon social and cultural scripts of masculinity (issues that have been attended to in this journal (see e.g. Davis et al., 2014; Drapeau-Bisson, 2023; McKissack, 2017; Roberts et al., 2021b; see also articles in this journal on gender, culture and power more broadly, e.g. Karazi-Presler, 2021 on masculinity and workplace cultures; Caldwell and Mestrovic, 2008 on abuses of power in the military).
The article’s aim is to provide an analysis that allows for a more refined understanding of the underpinning discourses and (il)logics in the ideological bubble that is the manosphere. While much has been written about the type of masculinity that Tate and other manosphere personalities promote, often focusing on ‘toxic masculinity’, we extend this discussion by applying the concept of masculinism (Nicholas and Agius, 2018) to Tate’s wider discourses. We use this concept to focus on the logics that allow for explicit gender hierarchies that are most visible, and which extend gendered logics to abstractions beyond the embodiment of gender. It is important to understand these to identify the specific messaging young people are exposed to, the rationales that are used to underpin or justify the ideologies, and how these might be ameliorated or challenged. Significantly, while the video clips on which critical scholarly and media attention has focused tend to foreground Tate’s overt antifeminism and misogyny, these themes are much more subtly woven into the longer form discourses consumed by his fanbase and analysed here. Indeed, what Tate is ‘selling’ in this content is an ostensibly more banal (though also traditionalist) ‘self-improvement’ form of masculinity and manhood that then allows for and scaffolds – in a much more insidious way than has been previously identified – the corollaries of explicit antifeminism and extreme misogyny. This insight allows for understanding of the underpinning justifications and masculinist worldviews that are more difficult to challenge, but may be more effective targets for primary prevention and long-term change.
We proceed, first, with an overview of key literature on the manosphere and then outline the concept of masculinism: the theoretical grounding that informs our analysis. We then detail our methods and research design, before elaborating our findings which consists of three major themes: Tate’s broad discussion of (1) men and masculinity; (2) women and femininity, and (3) discourses of subordination; and a series of qualitatively derived subthemes within each overarching theme.
Manosphere Research: A Brief Overview
Research that attends to the tone, tenor and configuration of masculinity practices and/or discourses across the ‘manosphere’ is now expansive (e.g. Ging, 2019, Han and Yin, 2023; Nicholas and Agius, 2018). A key finding of such work is that the manosphere is heterogeneous, but ultimately unified. As Ging et al. (2020: 838) contend, it is an ‘amorphous network of online publics [that] is noted for its virulent anti-feminism, extreme misogyny and synergies with the alt-right’. This unity is co-constitutive of what Banet-Weiser and Miltner (2016) call ‘networked misogyny’: illuminating the collective and organized dimension of the denouncement and harassment of women that emerges as a regular practice in many manosphere groups. This is evident in research that has explored specific online reactionary moments, such as the networked misogyny apparent in responses to the trending Twitter hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile in 2015 (Banet-Weiser and Miltner, 2016) and the online and TV advertisement by Gillette in 2019 that sought to promote its brand of razors through a message that normalized non-dominant, less traditional forms of masculinity (Trott, 2022).
While not rejecting what unifies the groups of the manosphere, Han and Yin (2023: 1923) have suggested more attention be given to the ‘fuzzy convergence of reactionary and antifeminist statements and attitudes’. Analysing a raft of literature on different manosphere groups’ ‘ideological position and the[ir] adherence to different discourse types of reactionary masculinity’, Han and Yin (2023) suggest that groups differ in terms of how they are structurally organized, how they are financed, whether they more or less subscribe to anti-feminist discourses versus personal ‘masculinist’ discourses, in their goals and in their actions. There is value in this mapping of characteristics and that it helps ‘avoid confusion and a misleading interchangeability between the labeling of these groups’ (Han and Yin, 2023: 1936). However, for the most part, we read the literature as already offering this subtle, more nuanced analysis when focusing on specific groups. The extensive research on ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates), for instance, provides a distinctive picture of deep-seated hatred of women and endorsement of extreme violence (e.g. Banet-Weiser and Bratich 2019; Solea and Sugiura, 2023). This contrasts to research on groups such as Men’s Rights Activists (e.g. Rafail and Freitas, 2019), or MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) (e.g. Jones et al., 2020), where ideologies, commitments to violence, active or passive acts of harassment, and articulations of grievances are distinct (and often lesser), even when united by antifeminist sentiment. Adding further nuance still, various studies illustrate the ‘coexistence of good, bad and indifferent masculine practices’ (Maloney et al., 2024: 15), on 4Chan (Maloney et al., 2024), on gaming forums on reddit (Maloney et al., 2019) and even among incels (Thorburn et al., 2023).
As we have now shown, there is a rich, diverse scholarship on the inhabitants of the manosphere. Much of this work has a discursive bent, highlighting the content and structure of ideologies and sentiments dominant in such communities. However, there is little systematic discussion of the manosphere’s key protagonists, those who act as the major mouthpiece for the kind of rhetoric that represents and emboldens men to consolidate anti-women views that circulate in the manosphere. One important contribution is Baker et al.’s (2024) use of a series of fake Tik Tok and YouTube Shorts social media accounts to identify how algorithmic logics feed manosphere content to boys and young men, whether they searched for it or not. Their research elucidated not only the most prominent actors in this space (including identifying Tate as the most prominent and most algorithmically emphasized masculinity influencer) but quantified the amount of ‘toxic content’ each account received.
At the level of individual masculinity influencers, Canadian psychologist Jordan B Peterson, who is similarly influential, but with less traction than Tate (especially among young men), has featured in some analyses. For instance, De Maricourt and Burrell (2022) draw attention to the ways that Peterson’s rhetorics are a source of comfort for Men’s Rights Activists. The discourses themselves, however, have been given little academic scrutiny. The same can be said in the case of Tate. While establishing a causal link between what Tate (and other manfluencers) say and what consumers of their content generally do is hard to establish, it is, in our estimation, valid to consider that Tate likely represents and contributes to the process of ‘misogynist radicalization’ (Wescott et al., 2024; see also O’Hanlon et al., 2023 on ‘misogynistic extremism’).
In wider manosphere-related research, Tate is often referenced in passing when listing examples of ‘manfluencers’ (e.g. Ging et al., 2024; Horeck et al., 2024; Solea and Sugiura, 2023; Thorburn, 2023), and he has been foregrounded (but not the central concern) in important and useful critical scholarly commentaries on contemporary masculinities (e.g. Nicholas, 2024; Verma and Khurana, 2023). However, at the time of writing, there is little systematic (published) academic research that takes as a primary concern the central discourses that Tate leverages and espouses. Notable exceptions include Wescott et al. (2024), who focus specifically on the influence of Tate’s discourse upon boys’ sexist behaviours in schools as described by schoolteachers in Australia, and Haslop et al.’s (2024) focus group study with schoolboys that reveals divergent receptiveness to many of Tate’s proclamations. Alongside this, our literature search surfaced only a handful of unpublished Masters theses deploying small-scale qualitative textual analyses (e.g. Frejsjö and Birgersson, 2023) and industry-based research by Safer Schools (2023) in the UK that finds those as young as 13 were engaging with Tate’s website content, and Women’s Aid’s (2023) findings that show a relationship between viewing Tate’s video content and children and young people normalizing of controlling behaviours. Specifically, there is no research that examines the key themes, contours and structures of the discourses within Tate’s content and, as mentioned earlier, this is a crucial part of fully understanding Tate’s cultural influence. We think this should be remedied, given that media scholars have documented that Tate is by far the most viewed, most prominent actor in the manosphere space, and a long way ahead of the next ‘rung;’ including his own brother, Tristan Tate, and the likes of Jordan Peterson (Baker et al., 2024).
Notwithstanding that academic research more overtly centring Tate is likely forthcoming, the current relative scarcity of peer-reviewed research specifically attending to his content also likely reflects the concerns of scholars who are reluctant to individualize the problem of gender inequality. This is clear in Horeck et al.’s (2024: 15) suggestion that rather than focus on Tate, ‘it is crucial to continue to look at the wider – and long-standing – gender issues at stake in the entanglement of online and offline misogynies’. We concur with this statement, but proceed on the basis of the utility of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. In doing so, we follow others who have offered analyses of the masculinity discourses of public figures and their role in normalizing and amplifying problematic gender practice (e.g. see both Johnson (2017) and Messerschmidt (2021) on Donald Trump).
As shown earlier, published academic research is playing catch-up with the now considerable public interest in Tate’s influence, and attention is predominantly given to viral video clips showcasing controversial statements. To complement this embryonic research agenda, our aim here is to empirically document and analyse the core tenets of Tate’s messaging in his written content to demonstrate what content followers are exposed to when becoming more engaged, and to interrogate the worldviews being built or affirmed therein.
Theoretical Grounding: Masculinism
Before presenting our research design and methods, we briefly outline the concept of ‘masculinism’, the more specific theoretical lens through which we approach the study. Masculinism is the ethos or ideology of masculine superiority that often extends gendered meanings to phenomena that have nothing explicitly to do with sex/gender. It is a useful concept for understanding the more implicit ways that gender inequality is scaffolded (Nicholas and Agius, 2018). Drawing from a range of 1980s feminists, feminist philosophers and contemporary feminist international relations, masculinism describes the inherent valuing of traits and phenomena coded as masculine in a binary hierarchy above femininity. Masculinism is most explicitly what Brittan (1989: 4) calls ‘the ideology of patriarchy’ that justifies male domination and allows for its contents to change without its underlying power, but it is a useful way of understanding super/subordination and othering more broadly.
There are parallels here, even in this short definition, with Connell’s (1987) germinal theorizing of hegemonic masculinity. Connell conceptualized masculinities as multiple, relational, and hierarchical, with the hegemonic form being culturally dominant and that which legitimizes and reinforces the subordination of women and other masculinities. While (still) pivotal to the studies of gender, numerous critiques and advances have been put forward as part of broader calls to reconsider how masculinities are theorized (see especially feminist post-structuralist critiques, e.g. Beasley, 2015; Ralph, 2024; Waling, 2019; Whitehead, 2002). Responses to such critiques have included a proliferation of categories of masculinity, including ‘hybrid’ (Bridges and Pascoe, 2014), ‘caring’ (Elliott, 2016), ‘protective’ (Wojnicka, 2021) or ‘inclusive’ (Anderson, 2009). These variously either work with or against the concept of hegemonic masculinity (Caruso and Roberts, 2018). Waling (2019) has raised concerns about this kind of increasingly expansive typologizing, suggesting that it risks reifying categories of masculinity.
This concept of masculinism differs from these other sociological conceptualizations about masculinity – such as hegemonic masculinity – as it refers specifically to the underpinning ideologies or belief systems that produce, reinforce and support the doing of dominant masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is understood as the idealized performance of masculinity to which all men strive but rarely achieve (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005) and is typically deployed more in consideration of the relational hierarchies among masculinities. This does not, according to post-structuralist feminists, best capture important systemic or ideological aspects in discourse. Meanwhile, masculinism inscribes the value of the (changing and variable) practices associated with it, and it has material impacts (Nicholas and Agius, 2018). The distinction is subtle but important, as it ensures focusing not just on dominance or hierarchy but more directly on the ideological defence of traditional male privileges as constituted discursively (Ralph, 2024; Whitehead, 2002) That is, while patriarchy is the structure, and hegemonic masculinity the ideal that legitimates the process of gender inequality, masculinism is the active defence of those systems. For Peterson and Sisson Runyan (2010: 63), ‘understood as a key “move” in producing, reproducing, and naturalizing gender hierarchy, masculinism and masculinist lenses are political and deeply implicated in exclusionary practices.’ Thus, ‘masculinism also operates to materially exclude or marginalize all those who are feminized, whether women or men.’ (Peterson and Sisson Runyan, 2010: 63). These understandings are deployed, for example, in Nicholas et al.’s (2024) analysis of anti-feminist sentiment in discourses deployed by men who use domestic and family violence.
Importantly, for somebody like Tate who, as elsewhere in the manosphere, draws on discourses of chivalry and protection of women that are presented as positive principles, masculinism can present in ways that are not obviously and explicitly dominative or exclusionary. The concept of masculinism can elucidate such mechanisms of benevolent sexism that often play out as what Young (2003) calls ‘masculinist protectionism’. Young (2003: 2) employs a ‘gender lens’ whereby she uses ‘gender not as an element of explanation but rather one of interpretation, a tool of what might be called ideology critique’. Doing so, she uncovers gendered ‘logics’ that ‘provide rationales for action’ (Young, 2003: 2) in a way that is useful for the analysis of the logics of the manosphere and its proponents. The ‘logic of masculinist protectionism’ (Young, 2003) then, may appear benign but, in constituting an apparently essential and eternal dynamic of reliance and subordination, it is a key component in male domination. As Young (2003: 6) argues ‘his [the male protector’s] power often appears gentle and benevolent both to its wielders and to those under its sway, but it is no less powerful for that reason’. This idea has been taken up in the concept of benevolent sexism, defined as ‘a chivalrous view of women as pure and moral, yet weak and passive, deserving men’s protection and admiration, as long as they conform’ (Bareket and Fiske, 2023). Likewise, Bareket and Fiske (2023: 675) argue that ultimately the outcome is still to ‘maintain control over women’.
Notably, idealized masculine ‘traits’ and practices only have value in relation to what is feminized, and it is because they are masculinized that they are superior. This idea has long been articulated by feminist theorists (Irigaray, 1985; Ortner, 1972) who outline that the masculine is the universal subject, while the feminine is ‘other’ (de Beauvoir, 1997). While some of the contents of both hegemonic masculinity and masculinism may have changed over time, masculinism is argued to be ‘the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks’ (Irigaray, 1985: 25). However, as charted by anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1972) in the germinal work ‘Is female to male as nature to culture?’, in the Global North various practices and domains have consistently been masculinized against their feminized binary counterparts, such as culture, the public sphere, dominance, protection and rationality. Indeed, despite huge changes in ways of being a man, it is notable that even when men challenge various aspects of traditional masculinity, they often still use ‘re-masculinizing strategies’ (Ralph, 2024) to recuperate their position in the gender order. For example, feminized acts such as emotional advice and care are often reframed by boys and men in Ralph’s (2024) study as a rational problem.
Understanding gender in this way functions to shift the problem away from individual men, and the solution away from women’s inclusion, to analysing and critiquing the ideational level of the ‘culture-wide, epistemological perspective’ (Nicholas and Agius, 2018: 9) of masculinism. Of particular use in analysing discourses and rhetorics is the idea of the masculinist ‘voice’ developed by moral psychologist Carol Gilligan, which helps to make the links between cultural logics and individuals. She conceptualizes that the dominant narrative of a universal moral voice, the ‘paradigmatic human voice’ (Gilligan, 2003: 156) in ‘western’ understandings has actually been a partial account predicated on masculinist ideology. It has privileged and venerated an ideal of the autonomous, self-interested subject that therefore subordinates the ways of being and relating that have been associated with the feminine due to their relegation to the private, domestic sphere and associations with nurturance and relationality.
We analyse Tate’s discourse, reflecting an important cultural intermediary, to explore how and if it draws on these neutralizing and naturalizing discourses of masculinism to undercut feminism’s gains as unnatural, and to re-establish masculinity as superior.
Methodology
Our aim in this article is to provide a critical analysis of the core tenets of Andrew Tate’s messaging in his written communications. There are some distinct advantages in opting to analyse this type of content over and above the video content that is ubiquitous on social media. Social media algorithms ensure that Tate’s videos are fed to huge passive audiences far larger than those who have actively sought out his content (Baker et al., 2024). But the core, unedited (by social media creators), and unfiltered messaging of Tate’s websites and Telegram posts represent material that is more likely to have been actively sought by users (that is, one has to search for, follow and/or subscribe to such content). The material explored in this article is that which is provided to Tate’s captive, core audience. Further, the scale of the content offers an opportunity for a more systematic content analysis than the various videos in circulation and provides an opportunity to assess the ways that Tate’s content aligns with discourses of masculinism (or not).
Our epistemological approach is grounded in the intertwining of post-positivism and social constructionism. Here we follow Saldaña (2015), who explains the value of the integration of systematic identification of patterns and the interpretation of meaning in context. This is instructive for blending computational and qualitative approaches in textual analysis, and for ensuring insights that are data-driven but also context-sensitive, capturing both the structures and the meanings that shape social phenomena.
Data for this research were collected from two primary sources: Andrew Tate’s personal Telegram 2 social media channel and his website. These sources were selected based on their production of long-form text content (neither of these sources are subject to character limits) and the total lack of content moderation on user-generated content, meaning that the data collected represents Andrew Tate’s unfiltered and unmoderated ideology. Telegram posts, along with their associated metadata, were collected between 31 December 2019 and 9 January 2024, totalling 2191 posts. Additionally, all sections of Andrew Tate’s website that contained long-form text at the time of data collection were included, these being the sections entitled ‘Lessons from fighting’, ‘Young Kings’, ‘Letter from jail’, ‘41 Tenets’ and ‘Tales of Wudan’. In total, 16,029 words were collected from 64 web pages hosted on Tate’s website.
To explore how Andrew Tate frames men and masculinity and women and femininity, a series of keywords related to these two themes were determined by topic experts in consultation with relevant literature. Our reading of the literature guided the development of keywords, with initial broad categories including masculinity (‘men’, ‘masculinity’, ‘male’), male relationships (‘father’, ‘son’, ‘brother’), femininity (‘women’, ‘femininity’, ‘female’), female relationships (‘mother’, ‘daughter’, ‘sister’), subordinated men (‘cuck’, ‘faggot’, ‘beta’ etc.) and subordinated women (‘bitch’, ‘tranny’, ‘dyke’ etc.). We accept that this reproduces a binarized understanding of gender, but we proceed on this basis because it is this very binary constitution and its gendered logics that are the topic of interrogation in this study. As with most of society, Tate proceeds on the unwavering premise of socially constructed ‘gender rules’ (Gilbert, 2009); that there are two and only two genders, assigned at birth. It is the logics and corollaries of the operationalizing of these categories we are interested in here.
Initial keywords were expanded using the Python-based Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)— specifically its WordNet interface – which was used to generate synonyms for each keyword. For example, WordNet produced a range of synonyms and words related to the keyword ‘men’, such as ‘man’, ‘gentleman’ and ‘mankind’. Keywords were then lemmatized to ensure consistency and reduce redundancy in data processing. This two-step keyword development process assured that the keyword list was as comprehensive as possible.
The keywords were used to construct the dataset that formed the basis of the analysis. Following the work of Maloney et al. (2024), all sentences that contained one of the keywords (n = 3178) were selected and subjected to a frequency analysis to determine the most commonly occurring words in the corpus – visualized as word clouds and included in the findings section. This process provided valuable insights into the dominant discourses; but to help determine the context surrounding prominent keywords, we conducted a keyword co-occurrence analysis. To do so, we took all sentences that contained more than one keyword and ran an analysis to determine which keywords co-occurred most frequently. This process provided additional context for how keywords were being used. For example, the dominance of the keyword ‘men’ reflects the presence of significant discourse surrounding men and masculinity; however, determining that ‘men’ often co-occurred with keywords such as ‘strong’ and ‘fight’ clarifies how men were being discussed. We reviewed keyword pairings for theoretical relevance, in that they needed to be related to one of the three primary themes that were being explored, namely: men and masculinity; women and femininity; and subordination. Following this process, keyword pairs that co-occurred more than five times were selected to assure that the most prevalent pairs were being selected. All sentences containing one of these relevant and common keyword pairs were selected and subjected to a close, qualitative analysis. The primary analytic lens for the qualitative analysis was masculinism, as described earlier, and thus the deductive coding revolved around the ideological architecture of patriarchy, focusing on elements such as hierarchy, essentialism, order, tradition, individualism, rationality.
Findings
We present our findings as discrete sections, exploring the key discourses that emerge in Tate’s written communications on Telegram and on his website in relation to three broad categories: (1) men and masculinity; (2) women and femininity; and (3) discourses of subordination. The former two represent idealizations of gendered practice and a presumed naturalness of the sexed body aligned, in Tate’s understanding, with the gender category. It is noteworthy that, against the grain of popular imaginings and/or the widely noted prevalence of misogynistic and anti-feminist Tate content that circulates online, talk about women and femininity in this written corpus is very limited. The major focus, by a significant margin, is on advancing particular projections of manhood, such that the men and masculinity domain of our data comprises 89% of the analysed corpus. Women and femininity, perhaps unsurprisingly, are discussed mostly in relation to men, but feature in only 11% of the corpus. While this stands at odds with popular understandings of the basis of Tate’s rhetoric as fixated on women’s enactment of regressive feminine ideals, a key contribution of this article is its finding that women and girls are a minor fixation (Das, 2022). We speculate that algorithmic amplification of Tate’s more obscene and infamous diatribes about women have resulted in the association of Tate more stringently with anti-woman content. While the virality of these clips has served Tate’s business in both attention and possible referral to his other platforms, his business model relies more substantively on the denigration of men who lack embodiment of the hypermasculine ideals he espouses. Finally, the subordination category includes discussion of both men and women (and very infrequently, other genders) and comprises less than 1% of the overall dataset. Despite its small scale we intentionally delineated this type of talk to better illuminate the nature of the language used in overtly subordination discourses.
Taken together, what becomes clear in Tate’s words is ‘an underlying ethos or totalizing worldview that implicitly universalizes and privileges the qualities of masculinity, and in doing so subordinates and “others” alternative ways of understanding, knowing and being’ (Nicholas and Agius, 2018: 5). Indeed, as we now demonstrate, there is a strong alignment with, subscription to and perpetuation of the discourse of masculinism, through commitments to and elevations of logics of hierarchy, essentialism, order, tradition, individualism and rationality as ‘the gendered frameworks [. . .] that naturalise and maintain hierarchies’ (Nicholas and Agius, 2018: 6).
Men and Masculinity
As shown in Figure 1, several key themes emerged within Tate’s discussion of men and masculinity. Aside from the keywords ‘men’ and ‘man’, the two most commonly occurring keywords present in this domain were ‘money’ and ‘rich’. This speaks to Tate’s framing of wealth and power as central to masculinity. Money is framed as ‘liquid power’ and as such highly valuable and desirable. Money and power are conceptualized in tandem, and viewed as essential to develop freedom and well-being, with Tate noting that ‘Money and power are FREEING’.
Word cloud visualizing the most frequent words occurring within sentences that contain one or more men and masculinity keywords. Word size is based on word frequencies in the source material as a weighted list.
Notably, the discourse that Tate develops around a desirable masculinity is often framed through the prism of self-help and advice in that he first defines what he thinks it means to be a man, and then outlines the approaches that other men should take to achieve this vision. What men are seen to lack, and to need, are very narrowly defined:
Some men can’t punch and live in a dreamland. Some men are single and no quality women want them. Some men are poor with no idea or knowledge of how to change it. Some men have no high-value friends, no one who is actually good around them. Most men are all of the above. No world-class women, no world-class money, no fighting prowess, cannot charm, no network, no valuable people even know they exist. they have nothing. [Tate’s website]
Various prominent keywords that refer to desire and acquisition further attest to a focus on self-help and advice. Central amongst these are ‘want’, ‘get’, ‘become’, ‘make’, which very often co-occurred with keywords associated with wealth and power, such as ‘make’ and ‘money’; ‘get’ and ‘rich’; ‘work’ and ‘hard’; ‘become’ and ‘powerful’; ‘man’ and ‘better’; ‘help’ and ‘men’. The central motif, that men are lacking and need advice, emerges vividly in the following extract taken from Tate’s website:
You must find out what to do and then do it as quickly as possible. That’s how you win. How many times have you told yourself you’ll do something tomorrow? [. . .] if you stopped putting tasks off until tomorrow and instead did them quickly immediately you’d be twice as successful as you are now [. . .] your default setting is slow. But speed is the key to victory. if you move and act twice as fast as normal you get to live two lives. Double the money, women, accolades. Twice the achievement and happiness.
We see in these extracts a foundational emphasis on conventional and long-standing signifiers of a successful masculinity: material wealth, sexual prowess and social recognition (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). The primary and most repeated concern for Tate relates to the need for men to work hard as a vehicle for wealth accumulation, noting women as objects that function as a prize of such wealth (we return to discussion of women in the next section). The recurrent emphasis in Tate’s messaging on working hard to get rich – and the sense of relentlessness and indefatigability often underpinning it – also speaks to ‘the individual hero narrative of capitalism’ (Horton, 2022: 62), and the self-interested, self-responsible, rational and autonomous, idealized subject of neoliberalism and masculinism (see Garlick, 2023 on how these logics serve one another). Indeed, Tate binds masculine being and worth so tightly with self-made achievement, he states that ‘as a man you will never have intrinsic value; you’ve either made yourself important or you haven’t’ (Tate website, ‘Young Kings’ tab). It is particularly concerning that this messaging about male success is compounded, given that research shows that the risk of intimate partner violence perpetration increases when men face perceived failures of masculinity such as financial insecurity (May, 2024).
However, in Tate’s view, men cannot simply become rich to become truly powerful. He explicitly states that ‘there is no point in being rich, without being strong’ and promises to teach men ‘how to become both’. Those who only achieve material wealth cannot truly be masculine according to Tate’s doctrine, as he notes:
A dork becomes rich, he’s a rich dork. Women don’t respect him. Men don’t fear him [. . .] The rich fat dork is still a fat dork [. . .] I’m the rich strong huge brilliant Top G of Earth. (Tate Telegram)
This quotation exemplifies various themes in the data corpus. Notably, hierarchy is present at the start and end of the sentence, with Tate situating himself (and those who achieve physical strength and material wealth) at the summit. The valorization of a particular body aesthetic is at play, again entangled with the emphasis on the idea of the self as an individual project that is central to masculinism, and also reflecting how body modification is a practice that works to regulate normative masculinity (Gill et al., 2005). The need to be esteemed by both men and women is also vivid.
However, Tate’s take on the body is less geared around aesthetics, and more overtly connected to physicality and aggression as central to the development of an idealized masculinity. There were various prominent keywords (as shown in Figure 1) associated with an individual’s perpetration of physical violence such as ‘strong’, ‘fight’, and ‘attack’. These words co-occurred with masculinity keywords, such as ‘men’ and ‘strong’, and ‘men’ and ‘fight’. Validation through physical combat is framed as an essential and innate element of all men:
Men were born to fight. Every single man fights. He wants to fight, he trains to fight, and he stays awake at night praying for the day he gets to enter the cage and try his very best to hurt somebody. The males who don’t feel this warrior urge, simply are not men. (Tate’s Telegram)
While an ideal masculinity is positioned as having both an innate desire and a moral duty to engage in combat, Tate acknowledges that men are often not equipped to do so. To Tate, the inability to fight is ‘excusable’, however the refusal to fight is ‘inexcusable’. As such, becoming combat-ready is framed as crucial preparation for supposedly inevitable violent encounter with another man as a desirable rite of passage, a mythic framing of violence that taps into ingrained societal discourses naturalizing the relationship between strength, competition, and manhood (Gottschall, 2016). Prominent keywords such as ‘strong’ and ‘strength’ outline an inherent requirement for a masculine form that is ready for battle and combat, while prominent keywords such as ‘gym’ and ‘train’ outline the method by which this masculine form can be attained:
I believe that men have the sacred duty to rigorously train themselves both physically and mentally every day. (Tate website, ‘41 Tenets’ tab)
Broader and more explicit violent ideation was also present in the corpus, in references to the necessity for ‘battle’ and ‘war’. Combat and sometimes participation in a larger conflict such as a war is framed in Tate’s discourse as a masculine rite of passage and an essential feature of desired masculinity. This sentiment is caught up in discourse surrounding paternal lineage:
The males who don’t feel this warrior urge, simply are not men [. . .] Why are all of you too cowardly to honor your bloodline in battle? [. . .] Your ancestors deserve battle [. . .] Most of you will never make your fathers proud [. . .] Only victory in battle can do that. (Tate’s Telegram)
Here, following in the footsteps of the father, and proudly carrying forward their legacy, is offered as an essential pursuit for all men. This idea emerges frequently in statements such as the following that captures a commitment to – and locates fatherhood as centrally within – traditional modes of manhood:
I believe in traditional masculine values, I believe it is a man’s sacred DUTY to be competent and capable in protecting and providing for his family. (Tate’s Telegram)
Tate refers to his own father, Emory Andrew Tate Jr., who was an international chess master, when discussing this topic. Tate believes that ‘the only superhero a boy should have is his father’, and that ‘most of you will never make your fathers proud’. Tate speaks openly about the role he believes his father had on him, noting:
From my father, I was instilled with a mindset of excellence [. . .] I am who I am because of my father. (Tate’s Telegram)
This discursive strategy, with its emphasis on the father as rational, success-oriented and emotionally remote, sees parenting by men as distinctly masculinized and as a requisite counterbalance to the nurturing of motherhood, reflecting a ‘re-masculinizing’ (Ralph, 2024) strategy. This demonstrates how potentially progressive ideas such as active fatherhood can be recaptured in this narrative, ‘reconfiguring patriarchy by drawing distinctions between mothering and fathering and dominant and subordinate forms of masculinity as they relate to men’s parenting’ (Randles, 2018: 516).
Women and Femininity
Tate’s online discussion of women and femininity is much less frequent than his discussion of men and masculinity. As we hypothesized earlier, it is possible that the sensational virality of Tate’s videos featuring his attacks on women and womanhood has contributed to received wisdom that this theme is a defining feature of his content, despite it being a quantitatively minor aspect (according to our more extensive dataset). As can be seen in Figure 2, topics concerning women are accompanied by a significant discussion of men; in relation to, rather than autonomous from, unlike the corresponding discussion of men and masculinity. It is apparent from this analysis that women and femininity, according to Tate, are shaped in relation to men and masculinity, as ancillary and subservient constructions. The central themes that occur within Tate’s discourses on women and femininity all serve in different ways to shore up ‘the cultural and material devalorization of feminized qualities and subjectivities’ (Peterson, 2018: 25) in alignment with the discourse and function of masculinism.
Word cloud that visualizes the most frequent words occurring within sentences that contain one or more women and femininity keywords. Word size is based on word frequencies in the source material as a weighted list.
A foundational discourse that Tate propagates in relation to women and femininity relates to essentialist gender difference connected to an understanding of sex role complementarity in a binary model:
I believe Men and Women are different, and that each has their own unique and important strengths and abilities. (Tate’s Telegram)
This difference is further vividly captured in statements about fathers and daughters, such that he states ‘I believe that Men have the Sacred Duty to raise kind, feminine, and virtuous daughters’ (Tate’s Telegram). Tate’s use of the terms ‘believe’, ‘sacred’ and ‘duty’ are important here, as they are used near-universally in respect of men’s duty towards women and girls. Contrary to our expectations, there was no talk of women having their own sacred duties (crucially, they do instead have expectations, as we note later). The subordination of women and girls simultaneously emerges through these statements, where although women and girls are positioned as ‘important’ to Tate, their value is established wholly via the virtuosity of men’s completion of their work in shaping women as their docile and pliant objects.
This masculinist logic in Tate’s discursive repertoire that situates women as objects shaped in relation to and as the project of men is overt and dehumanizing:
Young Kings, females are objectively beautiful. Separate to being a person, they are gorgeous as an object. Even straight women want to kiss a truly beautiful woman. (Tate website, ‘Young Kings’ tab)
Drawing from the word cloud in Figure 2, we can see that this relates to what Tate outlines as desired femininity, which is one that is ‘beautiful’ (‘beautiful women’ are seen as desirable and only possessable to those men who are sufficiently ‘powerful’) and ‘virtuous’ (desirable women are those who are ‘beautiful, positive and virtuous’). However, more central to Tate’s conceptualization of women is how they are positioned primarily in reference to their relationships to the men in their lives.
Desirable women must take a traditional, submissive and subservient position to men, who they must ‘respect’ (women can only be ‘happy’ if they ‘have a man [they] respect’), and in return these men must ‘care’ for ‘their’ women (women are there to be cared for by ‘strong, honourable, courageous men’) and ‘protect’ them (men have a ‘sacred duty’ to ‘protect’, ‘provide’ and ‘care’ for women). Tate also sees women’s role as supportive of the men in their lives, and to provide various functions that help or assist aggressive and dominant men:
Men are angry. Real men, with real problems are FULL of temper. How would they affect the world without it? Real women understand it, respect it and help calm it when the time is right. Good women never tell powerful men to not get mad. They calm with love. (Tate Telegram)
This again demonstrates violence-supportive sentiments that affirm the myth that men cannot control their anger, while also relegating women to roles of servitude and submission; affirming that their value exists in relation to what they allow and provide for men. The prevalence of keywords such as ‘mother’, ‘wife’ and ‘girlfriend’ further outlines how women are framed as an auxiliary to men, and their identities are formed by proximity to and relationships with men. While it is a man’s role to attain wealth, power and status, and Tate believes they cannot be truly happy or masculine if they fail to do so, the same is not the case for women:
WOMEN can be average – become a mother. And be happy. (Tate’s Telegram)
This is perhaps the most explicit example of the protectionist masculinism that justifies men’s domination by women’s inherent subordination and need for protection from the Hobbesian state of nature, to which Young (2003) adds a gendered analysis. For Young, this benevolent sexism is all the more insidious:
Feminine subordination, in this logic, does not constitute submission to a violent and overbearing bully. The feminine woman, rather, on this construction, adores her protector and happily defers to his judgment in return for the promise of security that he offers. She looks up to him with gratitude for his manliness and admiration for his willingness to face the dangers of the world for her sake. (Young, 2003: 5)
In the cultural narrative that Tate propagates, the embodiment of the mother role is the ultimate enactment of women’s ‘unique and important strengths and abilities’, fulfilling a fundamental purpose to bear the children upon whom men exercise their sacred duty. The overt masculinism of this rhetoric rests not only in the positioning of men as protectors and rulers, but also in the association of womanhood with roles and attributes and offer them up in service of men: wives, mothers, carers.
Finally, keywords such as ‘weak’, ‘loser’, ‘competition’ and ‘alpha’ within the extracted women and femininity discourse connect broadly to the desired masculinity that is outlined in the previous section, and the subordinated masculinity that will be outlined in the proceeding section. Within the context of women and femininity, these keywords define the kinds of men that are unworthy of, and unable to attract, desirable women. For example, men who do not ‘work hard’ to transform themselves into the desired masculine form are ‘weak and no women look at [them] because [they’re] lazy’. Further amplifying the masculinist discourse of a slut-shaming sexual double standard, he also warns that ‘the lazy man gets the leftovers [. . .] women who’ve been with countless men before you.’
Subordination
As mentioned earlier, masculinism is the logic that underpins the idea of men’s superiority but also the ‘disparaging [of] feminized phenomena and minorities’ (Nicholas and Agius, 2018: 32). Here, we turn to overt disparagement in Tate’s website and Telegram communications, focusing on his promotion of the subordination of a variety of masculinities as well as women and people of all genders. Even though these make up just 1% of all the data points in the corpus, the nature of this commentary and its potential to be harmful is illuminating, and as such has been extracted from the foregoing sections of this article. This analysis further emphasizes the dangers of Tate’s discursive range beyond the themes and statements most commonly attributed to him; his masculinist messaging is more covert and sinister than what exists in public imagination.
As can be seen in Figure 3, there are several key themes that emerged within Tate’s discussion of groups he seeks to subordinate. Perhaps the clearest and most developed subordination within Tate’s discourse are those men that do not meet his standards of an idealized masculinity. As outlined in the previous section, Tate has a clear understanding of what kind of masculinity men should aim to attain.
Word cloud that visualizes the most frequent words occurring within sentences that contain one or more subordination keywords. Word size is based on word frequencies in the source material as a weighted list.
This idealized masculinity is one that prioritizes wealth and power, along with a desire, ability and willingness to attain it – through awakening to the ‘Matrix’, and subsequently adopting a physical and mental training regimen along with a readiness to accept and perpetrate violence and aggression on varying scales. However, while Tate considers this as the desired masculine form, he does not believe many men will achieve it, as he notes contemptuously throughout his discourse that:
Most men out there have been conditioned to be weak [. . .] Most men are parasitic, too weak to GIVE [. . .] Most men leave everyone around them weaker, poorer, or at best unchanged [. . .] Most men sleep fine knowing their dreams will remain dreams [. . .] Most men demand respect without any of the qualities that earn respect [. . .] Most men aren’t superheroes and don’t want to work hard enough to become one. (Tate Telegram)
In his written communications, Tate does not readily deploy the ‘diverse set of insulting and mocking neologisms such as “manginas”, “gimps”, “betas”, “simps”, “soy boys”’ typically used in the manosphere to describe men presumed to subjugated in a gynocentric society (Han and Yin, 2023: 1936). Instead, he uses a more traditional repertoire of gendered slurs that serves to elevate him above the fray of the more ‘terminally online’ and ‘neckbeard’ manosphere (stereo)types: men who do not embody this desired masculinity are more typically framed as ‘failures’, ‘cowards’, ‘pussies’ or ‘bitches’ are ridiculed, for lacking ‘motivation’, being ‘sniveling’ or ‘boring’ and are excluded from the rewards that ideal men receive:
When women say they don’t need a man. They don’t mean it. What they mean is they don’t need a sniveling pussy who earns less than 5 million a year and can’t bench press double his body weight [. . .] If you lack motivation, it’s because you’ve accepted the bitch position of life. (Tate Telegram) When I tell you to stop being a coward, when I call you a bitch deserving of absolute failure because you won’t do your pushups. When I say your life is shit. I say this because it’s the TRUTH. And only the truth will set you free. (Tate Telegram)
In some cases, women are centred as the reason for the failures of non-masculine men, and subordinated men are framed as ‘cucks’, who are subservient to their wives, or to broader cultures of ‘political correctness’:
Imagine being a full-grown ‘man’ cucked to the point where you don’t speak what’s on your mind. (Tate Telegram) My dad sacrificed his marriage to raise me exceptionally. My mother simply didn’t get it. Men raise pussy sons because they cuck to wives. My father lost his wife for ME. (Tate Telegram)
As per the word cloud (Figure 3), ‘liberals’ and ‘feminists’ are not much discussed. But when this occurs, they are perceived culprits for the development of ineffectual and emasculated men. There is a clear oppositional framing in his commentary, predominantly centred on what he perceives as the ‘dangers’ of feminism and the prospects of sexual liberalism that he believes feminists promote for nefarious ends. This post, for example, linking feminism with promiscuity via his use of the term ‘hoes’, is indicative of his concerns that feminists harm rather than benefit women:
Hoes are dangerous with a platform. They brainwash impressionable girls to become complete hoes, to cheat, to have 4 boyfriends at the same time. This can easily provoke violence from the boyfriends, against her or each other. They encourage naive girls with weak frames towards danger. To download Tinder and meet strangers in random places? How many murders and assaults happen this way? How is this feminism? How is this protecting or helping women? (Tate Telegram)
This discourse reinforces long-standing ideas around women’s sexual agency as problematic and dangerous. Not only is he disdainful and fearful of women’s sexual agency, Tate also propagates victim blaming in making sense of violence against women. This contrasts with the specific mode of manhood that Tate promotes as better for women than feminism:
The number one way you help women, is to help men be better men. I do more good for women than any feminist ever has. (Tate Telegram)
As is clear, Tate’s concerns for women are grounded in a (tenuous) form of benevolent sexism aligned again with patriarchal logics, such that the ‘masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience’ (Young, 2003: 3).
The presence of terms such as ‘gay’, ‘LGBT’, ‘homosexual’, ‘transsexual’ and ‘tranny’ within this theme reflected that Tate casually uses homophobic and transphobic language, and often does so when referring to forces or ideologies that seek to subvert the masculine order that he sees as natural and desirable. For example, he claims that:
Most of my haters took drugs. Or sucked a dick in college. Or Jerked off to tranny porn. (Tate Telegram) If I was a transsexual the USA embassy would have instantly taken me out of the jail and harshly condemned Romania for being transphobic. (Tate Telegram)
Tate also situates being gay as somehow related to the erosion of western culture that is being overseen by global elites:
I am fighting back against the Demons out there trying to convince you to be gay and castrate yourself [. . .] There is a War for what is normal, what is socially acceptable [. . .] They’re trying to make it the norm to comply with their every whim. Normal that you can’t leave your house. Normal to watch porn. They are trying to turn your children into Eunuchs. Eat the Bugs, Live in the Pod, Climate Change, Pandemics, DINKS. It’s good to be Trans, unable to reproduce. (Tate Telegram)
The conspiratorial narratives present in the foregoing extract also emerge in homophobic narratives surrounding LGBTQIA+ people and paedophilia, which intersected with ideas of cabals of paedophilic elites:
There’s zero reason homosexuals should march naked in the streets in front of children [. . .] SATANISTS RULE THE WORLD. EVIL CHILD FUCKERS CONTROL THE WESTERN WORLD GOVERNMENTS. (Tate Telegram)
This connection to wider conspiracist discourses demonstrates the extent to which gender, gender norms, domination of men, and subordination of women and feminized others are the ‘connective tissue’ (ADL, 2018) between manosphere content and the wider far right ecosystem. This cross-pollination, as identified by Baker et al.’s (2024) study discussed earlier, demonstrates that this kind of content that, on the surface, is about self-improvement and achievement and appeals to a sense of aggrievement in young men, can be the gateway into more and other types of violent and violence-inciting content and sentiment (Agius et al., 2021).
Conclusion
The ‘manosphere’ is a cultural phenomenon that has attracted increasing levels of research attention in the last decade, across a variety of disciplines. In part this is due to the growing pervasiveness of manosphere themes and content visible through social media, which has amplified and mainstreamed content that was little more than a niche when it was predominantly situated in blog posts and forums. In tandem with growing significance of social media influencers (Abidin, 2018), the manosphere has spawned its own prominent key figures. These ‘manfluencers’, like influencers more broadly, are cultural intermediaries that shape trends, public conversations and cultural narratives through highly curated content broadcast to large, highly engaged audiences. The way such figures shape identity, social relations and meaning-making around masculinity in a rapidly changing world is a key concern for cultural sociology, and this is reflected in a growing literature on the manosphere’s most prominent content creator, Andrew Tate (Haslop et al., 2024; Wescott et al., 2024).
In this article we have turned attention beyond the type of naked misogyny that is typically identified by researchers who have interrogated the controversial video clips that circulate prolifically across social media platforms as a result of algorithmic amplification. Noting this as just one part of the story of understanding Tate’s cultural traction, our analysis of the key discourses in Tate’s website and his Telegram channel enables us to expose the insidious ideological scaffolding that allows for, leads to and celebrates misogyny. That is, central to Tate’s written online communications is the ideology of masculinism, propagated in a variety of ways and that lays the foundation for misogyny to be legitimized. Deploying the concept of masculinism allowed for a focus not on masculinity as identity, embodiment or practice (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), nor on categorical conceptualizations of masculinity and which works best (see e.g. Roberts et al., 2021a; Waling, 2019), but instead on the promotion and defence of ‘the logic, discourse, impulse and moral voice that maintains and naturalizes subtle and overt forms of domination’ (Nicholas and Agius, 2018: 5).
Like other manosphere spaces, here a logic of masculinism rests on perpetuating an ‘ongoing catastrophism’ (Bujalka et al., 2022: 13) related to a perceived (but fabricated and illogical; see Roberts, 2018: 18–22) crisis of masculinity allegedly caused by feminist gains. Seemingly an effort to remedy (but also perpetuate) the ensuing sense of ontological insecurity among boys and men, the ideology of masculinism – and the tenets of order, hierarchy, tradition, individualism, essentialism etc – provides a simplistic but attractive framework for boys and men to make sense of a world where their entitlements have been eroded, but through which these can be regained. Ultimately, what Tate is actually ‘selling’ to his predominantly young and cisgender hetero male audience is an ostensibly banal hodgepodge of traditionalist and neoliberal masculine themes, coupled with a need for reproducing, and naturalizing gender hierarchy, which then insidiously conveys subtler but still anti-feminist and misogynistic ideals.
Clarifying this, we suggest, has significant implications, not only for how we properly understand reactionary figures like Tate, but also how we more effectively respond to them and the discourses they expound and defend. Exploring the comments sections of news articles and YouTube videos critical of Tate – such as the YouTube upload of a celebrity UK women panel show’s related segment (Loose Women) – one finds a preponderance of his supporters vehemently pushing back against claims of misogyny and hate, with sentiments such as ‘How about you guys invite Andrew Tate and interview him and hear his side instead of bashing his name?’ and ‘These guys clearly haven’t watched any of the long form conversations with the Tate brothers’. Mirrored in Tate’s own conspiratorial rhetoric, whereby Tate is positioned as the victim of an organized ploy to misunderstand and undermine him, this typical sentiment of misrepresentation and persecution among supporters is legitimized and reinforced by a reductive mainstream narrative that fails to draw the necessary distinctions between Tate’s ostensible masculinist ‘self-improvement’ product, and the hateful themes more subtly woven into it. Indeed, even in respect to the latter, it is important to differentiate between the kinds of broader gender essentialist positioning that are widely expressed in some quarters of society, and explicit expressions of misogyny and hate for which the broader positioning serves as foundation. This is not to deny the regressive and oppressive outcomes of these discourses, for men, women and gender diverse people, but to better understand that what gives these ideas appeal and cultural traction and what makes them insidious is their seemingly non-radical nature. This, we hypothesize, allows them to be so easily taken up by young men trying to make sense of a context in which previous norms that privileged them are being challenged.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received financial support in the form of a ECS small project grant from the Faculty of Education, Monash University to conduct this research.
