Big Brother, “bitches” and battery: if you don’t already know of him, meet Andrew Tate, the uber-misogynistic TikTok guru whose radical rhetoric finally got him banned from the platform last week. Tate’s personal accounts have also been removed from Facebook and Instagram, but not before the former professional kickboxer amassed a fan base of 4.6 million. It has been widely reported that in July, the name “Andrew Tate” garnered more Google searches than either Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump.
Tate is a glowering, egg-bald 35-year-old with an odd mid-Atlantic accent and some seriously specious business acumen. He espouses to teach lonely disenfranchised young men how to be “men”, which demands — as per his brand — physical strength, emotional fearlessness and an iron-fisted mastery of money and inferior lifeforms. He likes Bugattis and sparkling water. He doesn’t believe in depression or in unprovoked rape.
Tate’s infamy dates back to his rapid disqualification from Big Brother in 2016: he was summarily nixed from the cast six days into shooting after footage leaked online of the ex-MMA fighter berating — and then seemingly assaulting — a woman with a belt. He maintains that the flogging was consensual and all in good fun. But make no mistake, there’s nothing kinky about Tate’s attitude towards violence. In subsequent years he's made it clear that he believes in corporal punishment when it comes to the management of disobedient dogs, children and women. In that order.
Brash and boastful to the point of oddity, Tate was born in America and raised in England; his late father, Emory Tate, was a trailblazing African-American chess player, a polymath-polyglot whose erudition makes his son’s brutality seem all the more bizarre. Though he exaggerates his net worth — professing “trillionaire” status — Tate is unquestionably wealthy, and produces video content that showcases his cars and his toys (read: firearms) as the backdrops to his vitriolic blustering — the symbolic spoils of his hypermasculine ethos.
The unseemly influencer’s warped Willy Wonka world comprises a Romanian webcam empire and “Hustler’s University”, a life-coaching service (and nascent pyramid scheme,) which essentially charges subscribers to promote Tate’s online content as part of their “training”. In April this year, a Romanian SWAT team descended on Tate’s residence after the US embassy passed on a tip that a woman was being kept there against her will. He says he wasn’t charged by the police and vehemently denies the allegation.
The world according to Tate can be deduced from some of his more notorious propositions which include the following: women shouldn’t be allowed to drive; they belong in the home; they’re at their best aged 18-19 when men can still “make an imprint” on them. Tate maintains concurrent relationships with several women, but expects absolute loyalty from his girlfriends, failing which, he has said he would (or does) destroy their property, hit them, choke them and stop them from leaving the house. Tate counts women as property (if not strictly as assets); men need them to be manly, but they also need women to know their place.
One can only hope that Tate’s expulsion from Facebook and other platforms will put an end to his burgeoning popularity
Not unlike his anaemic, quasi-intellectual counterpart Jordan Peterson, Tate’s lodestone appeal to young men online seems to derive from his insistence that progressive politics have made the world a very hard place to thrive in if you’re a heterosexual dude.
And while it’s sorely tempting for the rest of us to get aggrieved to the point of combustion at the sheer idiocy, the gross inaccuracy, of a worldview that casts straight men as the ultimate pariahs, we’d do better to start paying serious attention. If millions of boys and adolescents are ifolising these reactionary crusaders, then at the very least we, their detractors, need to acknowledge that in trying to dismantle toxic masculinity we may be failing to offer viable alternatives.
A number of anti-hate speech and women’s rights organisations such as Hope Not Hate have been outspoken about the danger of Tate’s prolific online presence, warning the public that his rhetoric has the potential to radicalise young men and induct them further into the world of far-right conspiracy theory culture. Schoolteachers in English-speaking countries have begun to express concerns en masse about the overnight prevalence of Tate’s influence in their classrooms, where male students have purportedly described him as a hero, and bonding over his antics, mimicking his language. One can only hope that Tate’s expulsion from Facebook and other platforms will put an end to his burgeoning popularity.
The irony is that there’s something quintessentially vulnerable and sort of sad about Tate’s performative machismo. His aesthetic is a dated Hefner-esque amalgam of silk dressing gowns and lit cigars; he is a self-styled “realist” who simultaneously — and seemingly in earnest — compares himself with Batman. Spend enough time watching him closely and you’re apt to start to feel as I do that his neoconservative psychobabble is a well-honed defence mechanism. The lady-hater doth protest too much.
In response to his banishment — and in between bemoaning the assault on his right to freedom of speech — Tate has said that he loves, respects and empowers the women in his life and employ; and, rather interestingly, that in many of his diatribes he is playing a character and being deliberately outrageous in a manner that is meant to be comical not instructive.
Unfortunately, the truth is that it doesn’t matter whetherTate believes what he’s saying on social media: it still warrants concern because a vulnerable contingent of his audience is taking his word as gospel; and what a dark liturgy his is. I don’t disbelieve that Tate is periodically playing a part, but the occasional disclaimer to this effect is insufficient to dissuade school-aged children from taking him seriously. Anyway, the playacting is a testament to his arrogance: a declaration that at this point the scope of his influence is such that he can get people to believe almost anything; that he can say almost anything and get away with it.
The dire reality is that for all his messianic delusions Tate is not an exception to the rule. His sloppy brand of misogynistic rhetoric is neither original nor unique nor as antiquated as we would like to believe. There are as many versions of Tate as there are Tate followers, and the likelihood is that some equally charismatic chauvinist is simply going to emerge from obscurity to fill the vacuum Tate’s left online. That’s what we really have to reckon with: not one man’s cult but an entire culture of seriously unstable masculinity.
