Shiny Chandravel, Assistant Opinions Editor
Andrew Tate is facing 42 criminal charges including rape, human trafficking and possession and distribution of child pornography.
Andrew Tate also has 10.8 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.
When I was 16, Andrew Tate, social media personality and former professional kickboxer, became the third most globally Googled person of 2023. When scrolling through TikToks of baking recipes and dance tutorials, I occasionally stumbled on his videos.
One video featured him stating, “I’m a realist and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist. There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist.”
In another video, he stated, “The masculine perspective is you have to understand that life is war. It’s a war for the female you want. … It’s a war for the car you want. It’s a war for the money you want. It’s a war for status. It’s a war, masculine life is war.”
In similar viral videos, Tate perpetuated the ideology that women belong to men, women bare responsibility for being raped and encouraged sexual slavery.
At first when witnessing these jarring videos, I honestly did not think too much of it. I had learned from a young age that the internet disproportionately spotlights extremist views. It was not until weeks later that I realized how pervasive it had become.
In the midst of Instagram doom-scrolling, I came across a long list of mutuals that had been liking, reposting and following Tate’s content. That was when I felt the deep pit in my stomach form.
How could my classmates — boys I had grown up beside, people I had worked on projects and shared classes with — resonate with Tate’s violent and pejorative messaging?
Tate is just one of many provocateurs, from Andrew Wilson to Myron Gaines, within the popularly coined “manosphere.”
“Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere“, a documentary exploring this subculture, exposed these “influencers” as grifters, many of whom exploit their derogatory talking points for profit. For example, in a Miami court filing, legal representatives for Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, explained that the two deliberately play into the facade that they are wealthier than they are. They rent supercars and yachts to generate online attention because at the end of the day, their “alpha-male” image is just a business model to uphold.
But why are so many of my seemingly normal, well-adjusted male classmates and peers falling for these grifts and violent hate speech? What could these influencers be providing that they cannot find elsewhere?
Theroux’s documentary sheds light on the possible answer.
Theroux interviewed a follower of the manosphere who shared that he had experienced homelessness and lost his brother to suicide. Despite these traumatic experiences, he claimed that he does not believe in depression because of the coping mechanisms he adopted from his intake of hyper-masculine content.
This individual is just one example of the kind of men the manosphere preys on: people in their lowest, most vulnerable states. People who are struggling.
That is the type of grift these men run — they identify their audience’s struggles, take advantage of people in need and make them feel as though they need the “alpha male” product they are selling to solve their problems.
There are very real and serious issues men face surrounding loneliness, mental health, suicide, social isolation and the pressures of traditional masculinity. Dismissing these issues will only push impressionable young boys further into the manosphere’s grasp.
These issues deserve attention, resources and advocacy. By dismantling harmful cultural standards that teach men to suppress vulnerability, I think we will be closer to achieving that.
However, just because people within the manosphere or organizations such as the men’s rights movement are able to name these issues does not mean they are actively solving them. Instead, their “solutions” often make these issues worse.
An isolated young man is not given the tools to build meaningful friendships. Instead, he is told women are at fault for his loneliness.
A middle-school boy struggling with insecurity is not taught how to develop confidence. He is instructed that becoming dominant will earn him respect.
A man experiencing depression is not encouraged to seek help. He is told that he needs to become tougher and that his feelings are signs of weakness.
This is what makes these so-called “activists” and their rhetoric so compelling. They offer simple solutions to truly complicated problems. Instead of confronting the difficult truth and laying the groundwork necessary for building community, seeking mental health support or learning how to communicate, young men are given a much easier answer: you are suffering because society has failed men and women are responsible.
This rhetoric is dangerous. It encourages physical and emotional violence toward the women in these men’s lives, while also perpetuating the very culture that initiated many of men’s issues in the first place.
Young men are learning to find solace in pinning their problems on women, from their mothers to their wives, girlfriends and exes. They take legitimate struggles and turn them into evidence that women are the enemy.
It is pertinent that we create spaces for the next generation of boys to talk about loneliness without shame, seek help without being called weak and develop confidence without dominating others. We need to train young boys and adolescents to not rely on and expect women to solve their problems, but exchange their resentment for honest conversation.
The “men’s rights” crowd exists to grift, cheat and manipulate generations of young boys in their formative years. If we want to win them back, we can’t just tell them they are wrong — we need to offer them something better.