Today, Explained - Andrew Tate: The king of toxic masculinity

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Controversial manfluencer Andrew Tate is in a Romanian prison, accused of rape and human trafficking. Vox’s Rebecca Jennings and sociolinguist Robert Lawson explain why his brand of grotesque misogyny appeals to millions of men. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Serena Solin, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King.Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It seems every generation's great revolutionaries suffer from unfair imprisonment. Whose account was that tweeted from yesterday? It's not one of the young protesters in Iran who face the threat of execution. It's not one of the nurses striking for better working conditions today in New York. It's Andrew Tate, a manfluencer who sits in prison in Bucharest, Romania, accused of rape and human trafficking. Millions of people, mostly men, follow Tate for his brand of bullish optimism, unrepentant, even grotesque misogyny, and now it seems we can add self-pity to the mix. This man, who's had an outsized impact on the culture, is now facing criminal charges,

and today, on Today Explained, we will examine who he is and what he tells us about who we are. A heads up, Andrew Tate says some terrible things about women, and we will use a small amount of that tape in this episode. If that's not for you, we'll see you back here tomorrow. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Rebecca Jennings covers internet culture at Vox, and last summer she wrote a piece titled, You Can Ignore Andrew Tate. Her argument went thusly,

do you have children who know who Andrew Tate is? Talk to them. Are you an officer of law enforcement investigating his alleged crimes, keep doing that. Otherwise, ignore him altogether. You'll be doing the world a favor. But this week, little man Tate is everywhere, not for some galling or deranged thing he said, but because he is now charged with real crimes. So I called Rebecca to ask, who is Andrew Tate? So Andrew Tate is an influencer in his 30s. His whole thing is telling young men how to be successful, basically. And in the process of doing so, he's deeply, deeply misogynistic. He's very proud of that fact. I will state right now that I am absolutely sexist and I'm absolutely a misogynist. Because 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. He shows himself smoking cigars, driving cars, surrounded by models in various degrees of undress. He has gotten really, really big on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter in the past few years, but has been banned on several of those platforms because of his extremely misogynistic comments. What kinds of comments? What sort of things does he say that make him a misogynist? Some of the things he said, you know, he would brag about assaulting women if she accused him of cheating. You're cheating. It's bang out the machete, boom in her face, and then grip her up

by the neck. Shut up. How he views women who are younger as more valuable because he can make an imprint on them. The reason 18 and 19-year-olds are more attractive than 25-year-olds is because they've been through less. Oh. On a podcast episode once, he said that he had hit a woman and broke her jaw during a bar fight, but got away with it. And he said he moved to Romania because they're less likely to investigate charges of sexual assault. Okay. So misogyny plus. Yes. How did this guy in his 30s get to where he is?

These are statements that, I don't know, you might expect from a man's mouth 200 years ago. Right. Where did this guy come from? So he's kind of been trying to get famous for a long time. He grew up in the UK. His dad was a professional chess player. When you're playing chess, you take every single opportunity to exert power. That's how you win. He was into kickboxing for a while. Andrew Tate's arrogant, he's brash, he's bold, he's confident, but the speed of the King Cobra, venomous when he hits. And he went on Big Brother in the UK.

Tate was a kickboxer, kicked off a UK reality TV show. Andrew has had to leave the Big Brother house. Because of a video where he appeared to attack a woman. But he claims that it was consensual. And from there, he and his brother founded this webcam business where he would lure women into living with him and then pressuring them to perform like online sex work, you know, where men pay to talk to you online. But he and his brother would pocket the money. And since then, he has operated this scheme where he tells young men how to, you know, become exactly like him, how to make money online, doing like scam adjacent things like drop shipping and crypto investing.

He's really good at going viral on TikTok because he has all of these flashy things. He has these exotic cars, all these models. He smokes cigars and like, you know, he looks like budget pit bull is what someone else described him as. So he's good at getting attention, but in the worst way possible. Who does his message resonate with? So Andrew Tate has a lot of fans, pretty much all of them male,

be it adult men or teenage boys or middle school age boys. And most of the coverage has been on his influence with that demographic. You know, there are a lot of complaints online from teachers who say that boys in their classes who listen to Andrew Tate have just completely derailed any kind of discussion of anything political and that he's responsible for an uptick in sexist remarks and sexual harassment in schools. The amount of young 11-year-old boys that told me that they love Andrew Tate is ridiculous. This man is really affecting the minds of young men. We've seen versions of this kind of guy, this kind of like manosphere type of like alpha male conspiracy theory, like everyone's out to

get you. You can only like look out for yourself type of guy. They want you to do your job well enough for them to benefit, but they don't want you to think outside of that job. One of his main revenue sources is this thing called Hustler's University, where people pay like 50 bucks a month to do these courses that he sells in order to, yeah, like figure out how to become rich online. The reason I started Hustlers University is because I was arguing with someone about how pointless the modern education system is. And so naturally the kind of people that that attracts are, you know, people that don't have a lot of money who are maybe young, don't know what they're

doing with their lives, maybe like are in a state of, you know, transition or looking for some kind of way out of their current situation. So naturally that, you know, often aligns with like younger men. We're talking about Andrew Tate in large part because late last month, something happened to him. And in response to what happened, he tweeted the following, the Matrix sent in their agents. What happened? What was Andrew Tate referring to? So, yeah. So on December 29th, the Romanian police arrested him and his brother and two other suspects on charges of rape and human trafficking. They alleged that they have six victims of trafficking in which, you know, him and his brother would lure these women to these

certain buildings or houses in Romania and sort of like under false pretenses, right? Like sort of like love bombing them, like saying like, okay, we're in a relationship now, whatever. And then once they're there, you know, they're under constant surveillance and they're forced by threat of violence to perform the sort of online sex work or online porn, which would then be distributed with the Tate brothers, you know, making all the money. So this is obviously extremely serious stuff. And currently he's being detained for 30 days now. So end of January. These are very serious criminal charges. What has he said about them beyond that cryptic tweet?

Yeah, like he keeps on just tweeting this same kind of stuff. Like there are dark forces working against you. You must recognize them and you must fight back. So he's like kind of building this mythos that he's being witch hunted or he's some kind of a threat to this larger system where really, you know, he's a threat to these women who he's trafficking and assaulting. Two days before he was arrested in Romania, Andrew Tate tweeted at Greta Thunberg, the climate activist. Tell me about that exchange. So Tate tweets, hello at Greta Thunberg. I have 33 cars. My Bugatti has a W16 8.0 liter quad turbo. My two, I don't know anything about cars. I'm sorry. My two Ferrari 812 Competizione have 6.5 liter V12s. This is just the start. Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions. And Greta

responded, yes, please do enlighten me. Email me at small energy at getalife.com. Okay, so he's trolling a teenage girl. Why did that make news? So I believe this made news because, you know, Andrew Tate is already such a person who is good at courting attention and really riling up and angering people, as is Greta. How dare you? So I think when you have these two kind of bastions of both sides being, you know, uber trolls and, you know, being like Greta's response was pretty funny. And so that just makes for a fun news article. And then obviously what happened afterwards, because right after this, you know, his arrest took place, that made it even more prescient. And so, yeah,

it was huge news. Andrew Tate has this enormous online following. How have social media companies responded to him? Right. I mean, so until Twitter reinstated him, he's been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. He's not really welcome there anymore. But I think like the real problem with that is that most of the Andrew Tate videos, at least on TikTok and probably elsewhere as well, they're not posted by him. They're posted by people who are fans of him. And so you can't really ban one specific person from the internet in a meaningful way when like, you know, you've already banned the user. There's not much more you can do to ban, you know, even images of that person. So I think that's kind of the fundamental conundrum of him on the internet. How are the millions of people who find him compelling responding to the fact that he's been arrested

on, again, very serious charges, not saying something offensive, not being a jerk, rape, sexual trafficking? Right, and I think it's the same kind of mindset where, you know, if you're being told that this guy is actually, like, you know, he's misunderstood, he's not really a misogynist,

he just says these things to get attention, but he's really, like, saying, you know, important's misunderstood. He's not really a misogynist. He just says these things to get attention. And, but he's really like saying, you know, important stuff about the value of hard work. But it's like, if you're already able to kind of convince yourself as to like, that's what's happening, it's easy to convince yourself that like, you know, people are really out to get him, you know, these charges are fake, you know, like these things aren't actually happening. It's all, they all just like want him gone. So they're making up these accusations andrew tate is evil because he encourages men to focus on positivity this is the real reason why they go after him there is an agenda to silence guys like andrew tate the romanian government is under

intense pressure from the united states and big tech to shut him down and so yeah i think people who have already bought into the andrew tate mindset are very willing to believe that it is actually all fake. Last summer, you wrote a story about Andrew Tate, and the headline was, you can ignore Andrew Tate. Does this arrest change your mind on whether this man is somebody we should pay attention to? I mean, I think what the arrest has done is made it impossible to not pay attention to him, because obviously these are very serious charges. And, you know, he's a very influential person, especially if you have young boys at home who spend a lot of time online or young girls who have to be around boys who spend a lot of time online. But beyond that, I think whenever there's a meaningful feminist movement,

as I think like a lot of this stuff is really just backlash to Me Too, There's going to be these people that profit off of that backlash. I mean, I don't think that we need to give this guy a ton of attention or pretend that he's some kind of genius when, you know, he's just kind of capitalizing on something that's much more prevalent in culture. Since time immemorial, you've had like 12-year-old boys being like, like women belong in the kitchen. And right now, the loudest voice in the room telling them that is Andrew Tate.

Coming up next, we try our hardest to figure out why Andrew Tate appeals to millions of men. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.A.M.P. dot com slash explained. R.A.M.P. dot com slash explained.

R.A.M.P. dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Do you know who Edutate is? Yeah, dude, I love him. Terms and conditions apply. It's Today Explained. We are back this time with Robert Lawson. He teaches sociolinguistics at Birmingham City University in the UK. He's got a book coming out called Language and Mediated Masculinities. Robert, when did you become aware of Andrew Tate? Do you remember when this guy

crossed your radar? So as part of my research, I'm interested in language and masculinity, particularly in media spaces. And so unfortunately, through my line of research, I have to spend time on the less enjoyable, less pleasant parts of the internet. So I kind of spend time on Manosphere subreddits, Manosphere blogs, forums, and so on, kind of trying to understand how does masculinity get kind of configured and understood in these places and

I think it was in one of those forays that tape originally popped up and it would have probably have just been something that was linked to a Jordan Peterson video or a Ben Shapiro video or a Stephen Crowder video this kind of what's occasionally called the intellectual dark web youtube's kind of algorithms put it through to my front page and from there what youtube's algorithms doing and a lot of other social media sites do they start to feed you more of the same content and ideas to kind of drive engagement drive ad views in particular it becomes a kind of really dangerous pathway if you like from one form of content that might seem fairly innocuous through to potentially more extremist and more radical content and I was

sort of interested in you know why is this guy so popular what is it that he's selling that people are buying and you go on any YouTube video of him at all and you read the comments under the video and they're almost all universally positive, praising Tate for how insightful, how brave, how inspirational he is. And there's very few dissenting voices on those YouTube comments. As you watch the videos of Andrew Tate and listen to Andrew Tate, talk to me about where your mind went on the question of, this man appeals to millions of people. Why? Why is that? and traditional male kind of characteristics and behaviors power control he's very big on this idea

of the alpha male the the man that's in control that always knows what he's doing always gets what he wants that has everyone kind of waiting for him hand and foot and sort of this idea that he's infallible i think some men can see that as a particularly attractive trait. But he's also big on conspicuous consumption. He lives a very jet-set lifestyle, fast cars, private planes, mansions, expensive holidays away. And then he has, I think, really traditional and, to my mind, outdated views about what a relationship should look like,

what the role of men and women in those relationships should be. And so the man is not just the kind of protector, but the patriarch, the provider. But what he says goes, it's his way or the highway. Women are only there to, you know, attend to the house, to look after the kids, to really be in service of the relationship. And so I think my immediate reaction was probably one of sadness that this is the kind of image of masculinity that sells.

What is it about the society that we're living in in 2023 that makes Andrew Tate acceptable and attractive to millions of men? So one of the sort of the best accounts that I've read as to why young men in particular find this kind of articulation of masculinity and someone like Tate advocating for it is Michael Kimmel's idea of aggrieved entitlement. And it's basically based on the idea that over the course of the last sort of 20, 30 years, the world has changed in a way that has de-centered primarily young white men.

And they've kind of moved from the center of society to the margins of society. Every single society that was successful since the dawn of human time was male-led, all of them. And then the last 30 years, they've come along and say, let's put women in charge. It's going to be good for us. Well, I don't think it will be. And someone like Tate is attractive because he re-centers young white men in a really obvious and very explicit kind of way

and basically says, you're important, you're needed, your masculinity is needed to fight against all of the changes that are happening in the world. The world is no longer for you or wants to invest in you. No longer are women reliant on men financially, emotionally. And I think that someone like Tate basically says we will fight against that and here's how we fight against that is by reclaiming this kind of sense of primal traditional masculinity

and that's a story that goes all the way back to you know even the 1980s. Warren Farrell claims women drive men to prove themselves so much that men have got themselves into a serious rut and the only way out is a men's liberation movement. A lot of what Tate is saying in some senses isn't actually new it's a re-articulation of a kind of crisis of masculinity discourse that we see back in the 1970s back in the 1980s through the men's movement led up by people like Robert Bly and so on, where it was a sense of sort of reconnecting with your own masculinity as a way of kind of fixing the world. I think he's only another entry in a long line of other men who have done something similar. Does your research show us anything about whether

these young men who are impressed by Andrew Tate, who are seduced by Andrew Tate, are fundamentally hateful people, are fundamentally misogynist, or are they unmoored young men who are being taken for a ride by a misogynist con artist? I think what someone like Tate does is he normalizes misogyny. I think he makes it seem socially acceptable. I think he wraps up in a discourse of rationality. This is just the way that the world is. This is just the way that people are. I really try and base my worldviews on brutal realism. I try and be a realist, even if it's hard to be a realist. And I don't think that we can say that the men that engage with this content are fundamentally misogynistic. It might be that through a process of repeated watchings of engaging with his content of posting up on forums about him or on twitter or on youtube comments or whatever that they may be nudged

towards these positions as misogynistic but that's what a lot of radicalization looks like it's it's taking someone from one position and gradually moving them along that path of radicalization extremist kind of viewpoints where those viewpoints which initially seemed extreme become normalized and so I think Tate represents you know the kind of one strategy if you like of that radicalization pathway to male supremacism. So the question then becomes, if not Andrew Tate, then what? We want to do better than this man. Where should young men be able to go if they want optimism and strength and attention to men's issues, if we can call them that, without the misogyny, without the hatred of women?

Does that currently exist? And if so, where? And if it does not, where should it? So I think first and foremost, I would say that young men shouldn't be looking at social media personalities for, you know, what it is to be a man. I think they're much better off looking within their local communities their families their friendship networks for emulating masculinities that they find you know supportive nurturing healthy places for young men to meet other men that they can look up to that they can be mentored by i think for those young men you know who are really struggling with their own sense of masculinity and what it is to be a man things like counseling can be really

helpful and i don't think that there's anything wrong with seeking those kinds of forms of support out as far as the manosphere goes you know i have hopes, not high hopes, but some hopes, I think, of what a more progressive kind of manosphere might look like, one that's kind of free of the misogyny and anti-feminist kind of stance that we see in a lot of manosphere spaces. Whether that will actually come to pass is an open question but i think tate sells this really romanticized and to me quite superficial idea of what it is to be a man i know loads of men i don't know anybody who acts or talks or behaves like andrew tate I think Tate is a Hollywood form of masculinity, but it's one that, you know, is as deep as a puddle. There's no substance. The men that I look up to, you know, people like my

dad, teachers that I had in school, instructors that I had when I was in, you know, my youth groups, those are the men that have, you know, given me the biggest lessons of my life. Those are the men that I will continue to look up to and learn from. And I think that there's men out there like that, that other young men can aspire to be like and look up to and learn from and be guided by. But I don't think Andrew Tate is the one that we should be putting up on a pedestal. Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy.

It was edited by Amina El-Sadi and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. It was fact-checked by Serena Solon. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you