Why some young men idolise Andrew Tate, and young women are disgusted

Melbourne teenager Dan* first came across Andrew Tate – the bald, cigar-smoking former professional kickboxer dubbed the “king of toxic masculinity” – in his TikTok feed in late March.

“He was sitting in one of his supercars casually explaining the reasons why most of the population aren’t rich,” Dan says.

Dan, 17, who left school at the end of year 11 to start a business, says Tate’s videos about business theories and how to present yourself and talk strategy appealed to him immediately.

Dan tried using some of Tate’s strategies when talking to clients and found they worked. Tate’s mindset messages also resonated: get up, work hard, go to the gym, strong bodies are strong minds, don’t smoke drugs and watch videos.

‘It’s just a refreshing voice of somebody who’s saying what everyone is deep-down thinking.’

Josh, a young man in Melbourne this week.

“I am an amateur kickboxer and I’m starting businesses as we speak,” Dan says. “I like all the business aspects Andrew talks about much more than just the flashy watches and the smooth talking.”

A little over a week ago, Tate was arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking, with allegations that he is part of a criminal group that sexually exploited women after luring them with promises of a relationship.

Dan says he doesn’t agree with Tate’s “misogyny stuff” – that women belong in the home and are a man’s property – and says he could go about addressing societal issues in a better way. But he sees Tate, a social media influencer who poses with fast cars and expensive cigars, as a straight shooter who says what he wants and is living the life Dan dreams of.

“I walk down the street or shopping centres and everyone is unfit or overweight,” Dan says. “The reason why Andrew has taken off is because there is such a shortage of masculine role models for young males like me.”

‘Shut up bitch’

Tate’s notoriety has exploded in the past 12 months. In July last year his name was googled more than Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian and COVID-19. But teachers across the world have raised concerns about his influence on students, and domestic violence organisations have warned that some of his shocking views – such as women bearing “some responsibility” for rape – are normalising misogyny.

Tate has said that 18 and 19-year-old girls are more attractive than 26-year-old women because “they have been through less dick” and “I can f---ing put my imprint on her and make her a good person”. If a woman goes out with a man, he says, she belongs to him. And women can’t drive.

If a woman tried to attack Tate with a machete for cheating, he said in a video: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her up by the neck. Shut up bitch!”

Tate later says: “Machete is on the floor. Her panties are all wet. Then you go f--k her. That’s how it goes: slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex.”

Tate has said that clips of his comments have been taken out of context.

Among some young men, he is wildly popular. A survey of 500 Australian schoolboys by The Man Cave, a school program promoting healthy masculinity, found more than 90 per cent of boys knew of him. Almost 30 per cent agreed that they looked up to Tate as a role model and 36 per cent agreed he was relatable, with boys pointing to his ability to speak his mind, his successful lifestyle and his perceived advocacy for men. Many qualified their views to say only some of what he said was relatable and that they could not relate to his views on women.

The Man Cave CEO Hunter Johnson.Credit: Oscar Coleman

The Man Cave conducted the survey after its school program facilitators noticed Tate’s growing influence among teenage boys and a worrying rise in misogynistic attitudes.

“We need to focus on why teenage boys like him and what we can do about it,” says The Man Cave CEO Hunter Johnson. Like Dan, the organisation believes Tate is a symptom of a bigger societal issue: that boys lack healthy male role models.

Being ripped, smoking cigars

Johnson says young men are often originally hooked on Tate’s fitness, business or mindset content on social media, which then provides a gateway to some of his more extreme views.

“Some of Tate’s content is actually ‘Have a strong mindset, work hard, make a career, back yourself’. And then there is this whole other side to his content, which is very traditional outdated belief systems around treatment of women, that’s the really kind of messy toxic stuff to be worried about.”

Tate appeals because he has all the things young men are told represent success, Johnson says: “Being ripped, smoking cigars, wearing tailored suits, nice sunglasses, around beautiful women, on jetski boats. Young men have adopted the language. It’s called Tate-isms, certain language like ‘you’re a top G’, which means you’re like a legend or an alpha ... a bit of a top dog.”

Many schools are struggling to deal with it.

Andrew Tate.Credit: Twitter

As one female teacher told Man Cave: “I found it difficult to talk to the boys about Tate, they saw me as a ‘crazy feminist’. I leant on my male staff to talk to the boys.” In the end, though, “we ended up outlawing Andrew Tate talk altogether”.

But Johnson believes it is critical that discussions about Tate are held in schools. The challenge for parents and educators, he says, is to give boys the opportunity to express their perspectives without being shamed, and then to explore with them how some of his views are harmful.

“The way to do that is to create teachable moments where they can have politically incorrect, messy conversations.”

In Man Cave school programs, facilitators might examine the way Tate talks about women and then get the boys to hear first-hand experiences of misogyny.

“It fundamentally changes the game, particularly when they feel they are not being shaped.”

The third strike

US-born Andrew Tate, who was raised in Britain and competed as a professional kickboxer, first gained mainstream media attention after appearing on Big Brother in the UK in 2016. He was ejected from the show after a video emerged of him hitting a woman with a belt. Tate said at the time the video had been edited, tweeting: “They are pretending I beat her up when we were joking and the belt made noise but didn’t hurt!”

He has become a leading voice of the manosphere, a digital space in which masculinity, men’s rights and opposition to feminism are discussed. At the same time he has promoted “Hustler’s University”, a subscription-based online program which teaches how to get rich in the digital age, with lessons ranging from copywriting to crypto investing.

Dan is aware of the misogynistic comments that got Tate kicked off Facebook, Instagram and TikTok last August.

“When he talks about women are his property and they bear some responsibility for being raped – just as a blank sentence like that, it’s very vile,” Dan says. “But when you listen to him explain it, it’s not like he’s right, but you can see the perspective that he is coming from.”

Dan is sceptical about Tate and his brother’s arrest in Romania on December 29. The brothers have been detained for 30 days. After news of his arrest, a tweet on Tate’s Twitter account said “The Matrix sent their agents”. Tate often uses “the Matrix” to describe mainstream society as opposed to his “real world”. It is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, where the protagonist is invited to take a red pill and reveal the world as it really is.

Andrew Tate is led away by police in the Ilfov area, north of Bucharest.Credit: AP

“Obviously, I don’t know the truth about what is happening,” Dan says. But he reckons Tate knew the arrest was coming. “He said multiple times: ‘you get three strikes – the first they try to cancel you, the second they’ll put you in jail, the third, they’ll try to kill you’.

“I think they will do whatever they can to shut him up.”

Shifting blame to women

When The Age and the Herald canvassed young people last week, views on Tate ranged from disgust and horror to a belief that he makes some salient points about masculinity. All the young women we spoke to condemned him, but the men were divided.

Chloe, an 18-year-old university student, said his worst utterance was at the height of the #MeToo movement in 2017 when he tweeted that if women put themselves in a position to be raped, they “must bear some responsibility”.

“He’s shifting the blame on women, again, for being victims of violence and that’s just really harmful, especially if young boys are listening to that.”

Chloe, 18, says Andrew Tate’s views are harmful.Credit: Wayne Taylor

But Josh, 24, believes Tate is often taken out of context and labelled as misogynistic because hour-long interviews are clipped into short soundbites. Sometimes, Josh says, he is joking when he makes sexist comments about women.

Josh, who first discovered Tate after listening to him featured on an episode of US comedian Tom Segura’s podcast, is attracted to his messages about motivation and hard work.

“Like you know, as hard as it’s going to be you can’t ever back down. You have to always work hard on yourself. If you want to be active, you have to go to the gym and … eat well, and so on.”

Asked why he thought Tate was popular among young men, Josh says: “It’s all about the masculinity isn’t it, really? It seems that there’s a bit of an agenda getting pushed everywhere in the world.

“It’s just a refreshing voice of somebody who’s saying what everyone is deep-down thinking.”

Josh, 24, is an Andrew Tate fan and believes some of his misogynistic comments towards women were jokes that have been taken out of context.Credit: Jason South

Vinnie, 17, profoundly disagrees with Tate’s views on women and was “pretty happy” to hear he had been arrested.

He discovered Tate months ago and understood the appeal of some of his motivational videos, but never liked Tate’s “superficial” persona and grew more opposed after learning of his misogyny.

He is also concerned that new internet personalities are expressing increasingly shocking views to attract eyeballs.

“There’s always been figures like that, who young, impressionable people are drawn to, but I feel like it has slowly been getting more extreme the last few years, especially after coronavirus.”

Vinnie, 17, is not an Andrew Tate fan like some of his young male peers and worries about increasingly extreme online identities.Credit: Penny Stephens

Life in the manosphere

Tate is the latest in a succession of manosphere influencers. Others include Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who says “the masculine spirit is under assault”, and blogger Daryush Valizadeh, better known as Roosh V, who in 2019 renounced many of his “neo-masculinist” views and declared himself a devout Christian.

Deakin University political sociologist Associate Professor Josh Roose says the manosphere reflects the views of men who believe they are disenfranchised and the world no longer holds the possibilities for them that it once did. Many of them believe feminism’s critique of men’s behaviour has damaged relationships between the sexes.

“So there is a sense amongst a swathe of men out there that people like Andrew Tate might be a solution by buying into that neo-masculinity, or you could call it effectively a violent misogynist masculinity, that men must reclaim their places as head of society, as head of the household and that women must fall into line,” Roose says.

“That ties into a much broader issue of what’s happening with men globally, particularly amongst younger men in the West, where there’s been a backlash against feminism, against #MeToo.”

‘All my students in Year 11 knew who Tate was. Female students ... had absolute looks of disgust ... male students wanted to begin a debate.’

Secondary school commerce teacher Casey Megna

Roose is examining the impact of manosphere influencers such as Tate on the online harassment and abuse of women – and whether this flows into real world violence – as part of his research into anti-women online movements. He says schools need to educate parents about the dangers posed by misogynistic views about women.

“If the far right were infiltrating our schools, or if Salafi jihadists were infiltrating our Muslim community schools with these sorts of narratives, there would be a lot more outrage and a much harder crackdown.”

Bettina, a year 12 student and youth activist from girls’ charity Plan International Australia, is concerned that boys are internalising Tate’s misogynistic messages because his views are so prevalent on social media that they have become accepted regardless of whether they are factual.

She is also worried that “freedom of speech” is often championed as a reason as to why he should be allowed to say whatever he wants. “When you become someone with millions of followers, you become a role model,” Bettina says.

Casey Megna, who teaches at a co-ed Melbourne secondary school, says Tate had “become a bit like an idol” for some boys at her school.

Casey Megna, a secondary school commerce teacher, is often asked about Andrew Tate.Credit: Jason South

“I’ve even had students that I’ve never met before asking me my opinion on Tate during yard duty or whether I was going to bet on the Tate vs [Jake] Paul boxing match.”

Megna, who teaches commerce, says Tate’s businesses and influence was brought up during a Year 11 ethics discussion about how Adidas had ended its partnership with rapper Kanye West over his anti-Semitic comments.

“All my students within the Year 11 class knew who Tate was. My female students ... had absolute looks of disgust over their faces at the mention of his name; my male students wanted to begin a debate about him and were very familiar with his ‘philosophy’.

“We talked about the TikTok algorithms, and the fact that a lot of the stuff that is being picked up is very misogynistic, and that those views are actually quite poisonous and dangerous.”

Megna, who is 28 and a gamer, feels fortunate that she is connected to the online world and is able to engage her students in discussion.

“Tate is a dangerous person who has a significant amount of influence on young males, but I believe he is one of many, such as Logan Paul [Jake Paul’s brother] and Adin Ross, who have a large reach and power through social media, especially TikTok,” she says.

“I find myself having to keep my finger on the pulse so I can almost be a buffer of some sort to explain that those views are extreme.”

Megna can understand why some teachers, who may not be familiar with Tate’s cultural references, may struggle to make him a teachable moment.

“I feel like Andrew Tate is a perfect example of the need to look at the way that we teach curriculum, and how we teach kids about engaging on social media and the sort of things that can happen.”

*The Age and the Herald have elected not to publish the surnames of the young people quoted in this article, as a number are under 18.

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