Jennifer O’Connell: How did Andrew Tate become a role model for a generation of lost boys?

How did a former kickboxer and Big Brother reject turned loudmouth internet misogynist become a role model for a generation of lost boys?

When Andrew Tate – shouty, perma-scowling, self-help guru – was arrested along with his brother Tristan and two others as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation in Bucharest in December, the reaction of many people over 35 wasn’t anger or amusement. It was mostly just confusion. The top “who is” search on Google in 2022 was for Andrew Tate; the biggest spike came the week of his arrest.

Last Tuesday, as a Romanian court rejected the brothers’ appeals against their 30 day detention, lawyers said they “vehemently deny all accusations made against them. They do not condone violence towards women or agree with any coercive behaviour.” The brothers and their lawyers have repeatedly claimed Tate’s most controversial statements are “satirical”.

The details of the allegations involve a webcam business employing up to 75 women. A number of women have alleged they were coerced into sex acts at a location in Bucharest. One of the suspects is accused of using violence and psychological pressure to rape a woman on two occasions in March, prosecutors told the New York Times.

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In what struck many as a neat piece of cosmic symmetry, the arrests followed a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg in which Tate appeared to accidentally out himself – reportedly via the medium of a branded pizza box, though this was later discredited* – as being currently resident in Romania. It felt like the set up for some satirical internet gag, except not much about this is funny.

He churns out pseudo self-improvement tips; financial and dating advice; homespun admonitions about the value of hard work with a casual bit of rape culture thrown in

Google, of course, knows exactly who Andrew Tate is – or its algorithms do. My 15-year-old son first came across him in the spring of 2022, when YouTube started feeding him occasional suggested short videos featuring Tate. The British-American was suddenly everywhere, my son says, shouting at young men in his distinctive blend of Luton accent and mid-Atlantic internetspeak to “stop being so effing lazy” and then offering them discounted entry to online self-improvement courses.

But it was his particular brand of misogyny that got him noticed. He insists that when he talks about women, he’s not sexist, he’s just being “a realist”. Or possibly he’s being satirical. He has claimed that “females” shouldn’t be allowed to drive, belong in the home and “should bear some responsibility” when a man rapes them. In his dating academy, he instructs young men in the art of “negging”, or mocking and degrading women. He has outlined how he would treat anyone who accused him of cheating. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up, bitch.”

If “bang out the machete” was his only message, his appeal would be limited, but he’s too clever for that. He churns out pseudo self-improvement tips; financial and dating advice; homespun admonitions about the value of hard work with a casual bit of rape culture thrown in.

Drill sergeant

I sat through several of his YouTube videos recently. The experience was like being cornered in the pub by an adolescent drill sergeant who had just been introduced to the masculinity gospel of psychologist Jordan Peterson. In Tate’s world, men are either “high status males” and “warriors”, or losers and nobodies. He doesn’t countenance weakness of any kind. “If someone comes to me and says they are clinically depressed, I would say to them, stop accepting the identity of a clinically depressed person,” he told Piers Morgan during an interview in December, in which he also praised the Taliban’s management of law and order, described men who cry as “dangerous”, and said: “Not a single woman has accused me of a crime, not a single woman has accused me of rape.”

All of the attention on Tate is distracting from a much more troubling crisis in masculinity. Like Trump in the United States of 2016, he’s just a symptom, the scratchy throat that hints at the arrival of an infectious viral pathogen. He is the product of an online culture – the ‘manosphere’ – that is grooming boys not just to fear and hate women, but to loathe themselves. For all his bloated ego, Tate hasn’t created anything new. He just tapped into a wider malaise, a sense of what has been called “aggrieved entitlement” among some young men.

Parents, legislators and educators have a role here too. If they’ve never heard of Andrew Tate – who features in videos with 12 billion views on TikTok – they need to ask themselves why

The real question isn’t what should be done about him; now that their parents have started talking about him, the teens are already casting about for the next iteration. It is why some young men are so unhappy about their place in the world they would turn to someone like Tate for guidance.

Tech companies have a case to answer here. The algorithms that lead boys and young men down dangerous pathways into places where these archaic ideas about gender are normalised and celebrated are not some mysterious, otherworldly force. They are a tool whose sole purpose is to keep driving user engagement. Aggrieved young men looking for answers are engaged users, and engaged users are profitable users. Blocking him is useless. He has been barred from Facebook, YouTube and TikTok since last August, but his followers simply flood social media with his videos.

Parents, legislators and educators have a role here too. If they’ve never heard of Andrew Tate – who features in videos with 12 billion views on TikTok – they need to ask themselves why, and what other influences they might be missing.

The young men who admire Tate are not fundamentally misogynist, but they are confused and directionless. The more they engage with his world, the fewer positive role models and real-life conversations they have about masculinity and gender, the deeper down the rabbit hole they go, the darker their thinking becomes. If we don’t find better ways to reach them, people like Tate will.

*Article was amended on January 14th, 2023