Andrew Tate, The Manosphere, and Imagined Utopian Pasts

How young men are being targeted by the latest Angry Man Online

This summer, former MMA fighter Andrew Tate became the latest angry man to get famous online for hating women. Using a variety of social media platforms, but making particular use of Instagram’s “Reels” function and TikTok, he targeted awkward and disaffected young men with a simple message that thousands of other angry men have touted for years: its not your fault that girls don’t like you, its feminisms fault.

Like the other angry men who came before him, Tate preaches of an imagined past (usually somewhere around the 1950s) when women were housewives and men were all butch, and everyone was happy. Tate, it should go without saying, is wrong. He’s wrong because many of those housewives were trapped in awful relationships, he’s wrong because men were drinking themselves into early graves to escape the things they saw while fighting World War II, he’s wrong because in the 1950’s no one had figured out how to make good TV yet (other than maybe Alfred Hitchcock Presents).

This idea of an imagined past that was later sullied by feminism is not new. In the angry-man-internet-ecosystem, often times referred to as “The Manosphere,” various internet personalities have bubbled up over the years preaching more or less the same thing that Tate is preaching now. From Roosh, to Paul Elam, to Jordan Peterson, they all find themselves to be very unique and deep intellectual thinkers but really just espouse the same tired misogyny that their fathers or grandfathers likely taught them. They imagine a world where things were simpler, where everything made sense, and the only thing that ruined that world was women wanting equal pay, bodily autonomy, and the right to get divorced.

But the Manosphere is not the only place where men speak of a perfect and beautiful utopian past that never existed; many far right movements and figures have relied on this same idea to bring in new recruits. The Proud Boys are one of the more recent examples, claiming to be “Western Chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” The popular “reject modernity, embrace tradition” meme grew out of the conservative and traditionalist view that modern society is degenerate and we should return to some perfect and beautiful past. Even fascism itself relies on the perception that the nation is in decline, and offers the myth of a more perfect past that can be attained once again through national rebirth.

This commonality is what can make the digital misogynist landscape so dangerous: for many young men it can serve as an entry point into outright fascism. Not every misogynist is a fascist, but absolutely every fascist is a misogynist. And with that belief comes the entire slate of other hateful beliefs: racism, homophobia, transphobia, hatred for immigrants, etc. This comes as no surprise when we observe Andrew Tates public life, in which he’s cavorted with far right figures like Mike Cernovich for some time now.

As with all angry men dreaming of a non-existent utopian past, the young men who buy into Tate’s worldview are going to run into consequences when they put his philosophy into action; be it punishment from teachers or their mothers, women refusing to date them, or facing sexual assault allegations after following Tate’s violent advice for how to treat women. Tate himself has beaten women, faced human trafficking charges, and moved to Romania in part because the police were less likely to pursue sexual assault allegations there.

As of today Tate has been deplatformed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. It is likely that the young men who buy into his worldview will follow him over to alt-tech platforms such as Rumble and Gab, and there will probably be fan accounts that still promote his content on social media, but deplatforming him is the right move. However while removing him from these platforms will help stem the tide of his hateful content, if we truly want to prevent another angry man from finding an audience full of disaffected young men looking to “reclaim their masculinity,” we need to find new ways to engage them and inoculate them to this style of content before it gains ground again.