09.02.2023

School for scoundrels

Widely pictured as a supervillain, Andrew Tate is, suggests Paul Demarty, a banal symptom of atomisation

It is difficult to feel much sympathy for Andrew Tate, who is currently languishing in a Romanian jail, along with his brother.

A former kickboxer and present-day influencer in the so-called ‘manosphere’, he has recently rocketed to prominence, as his various social media channels gathered traction. He broadcasts his opinions about gender roles to millions of Twitter and YouTube followers (though he is periodically banned and restored). Some 100,000 pay him a little under $50 a month to subscribe to his ‘Hustlers’ University’ programme, which amounts to a series of Viz-style top tips for being a fabulously successful pimp with lots of luxury cars.

The allegations against him are related to this pimping of his, although he cannot be matching his $5 million monthly recurring revenue with his small-time camgirl operation - a side hustle to impress the marks at hustlers’ university. This alleged trillionaire is alleged to have coerced young women into performing sex acts and forbidden them from leaving his rather seedy $700,000 Bucharest warehouse. We use the word ‘alleged’ both for his supposed wealth and his activities: though he openly declares that he moved to Romania because it was easier to bribe the police - as I write he has still not been charged.

This may appear to be stupidity on his part, but that is all part of the performance. His carefully-crafted bad-boy public image hinges on a certain guilelessness. He tells you how the world really is, and he tells you straight, and he tells you how to profit from it - naturally, for a price of his own. That is not to say he will get off scot-free. If he is not stupid, he is no genius either, and in some respects stupidity is written into his whole situation. He cannot make his pitch without telling on himself.

Red pill

Tate is more interesting as a symptom than a not-so-supervillain. As we noted, he is one of many grifters profiting from the despair of a certain layer of young men who spend far too much time on the internet. There are various strands to this, whose history is too complicated to go into very deeply: pick-up artists (PUAs), men’s-rights activists (MRAs), male separatists (‘men going their own way’, or MGTOWs), involuntary celibates (incels), neo-traditionalists (‘trads’, who have their female contingent as well), and so on. One might add the more old-fashioned self-help gurus - most famously the lachrymose Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson.

What is worth mentioning is the tendency for prominent individuals to criss-cross between these different positions - as an example, we could mention Daryush Valizadeh (‘Roosh V’), once the liberal-feminist villain of the moment, as Tate is now: he made his name as a PUA, pivoted towards ‘men’s rights’, before winding up a Russian Orthodox trad. Each shift of this sort splits the influencer’s audience, and so the whole manosphere phenomenon has ended up as a strange, incoherent clump of resentment. It is nevertheless something worth recovering the sense of, precisely because of Tate’s impressive numbers (never mind more mainstream figures like Peterson). This stuff has real traction. Liberals and leftwingers are rightly concerned by reports, admittedly anecdotal, that male students happily quote him in secondary schools. You would have to be pretty desperate not to see Tate as the two-bit huckster he is. So what is this desperation?

Let us start by looking at the core of manosphere ideology. The first principles of the movement are that sex differences between men and women are real, pervasive and ineliminable. It is not merely a matter of ‘plumbing’, so to speak: women, due to their typically weaker physical strength, rely more on emotional than physical means to get their way. As child-bearers, they are both more nurturing and potentially more controlling. The male sex, dominant in physical strength, naturally assumes the role of the protector of the family unit, but is also hardwired to, ahem, sow his oats far and wide. All this is thoroughly baked into our natures.

This ‘reality’, however, has recently faced its worst challenge in centuries, perhaps ever: women’s liberation and sexual revolution. Women now compete in the workplace, the same as men. Should they have children, they have as much chance of earning a ‘family wage’ as any man (ie, basically zero, but the principle is the thing …) The balance of power between the sexes - hardly frictionless, but basically stable - shifts dangerously. The supposed tendency of women towards hypergamy (basically, marrying up the social ladder) is exacerbated by sexual liberation and feminism, and the ‘natural’ result is a small number of (high-status, virile, literally ‘handsome’) men having sex with a very much larger number of women - the archetypes called ‘Chad and Stacy’ by the incels - and an ever larger number of ‘ineligible’ men. They are no longer able to offer anything the women actually need - suffering in loneliness. Accepting all this, more or less, is what the audience for these ideas calls ‘taking the red pill’.

From here, the story divides. For the PUAs, the solution is to learn all the Viz top tips for making yourself seem more manly than you actually are, and thereby getting more sex than you can possibly imagine. After all, sexual relations are, according to this worldview, a rather bleakly mechanical affair all round; every agent’s actions are predictable down to the last detail. For the MRAs, the solutions are directly political - a reversal of the gains of women’s lib. For the incels, the solution is weirdly similar to the trauma jargon of their opposite numbers on the identitarian left; a regime of self-care, of mutual emotional support, and ultimately stoicism in the face of the perceived inevitability of a lifelong dearth of romantic companionship.

Occasionally this combination of self-pity and virulent misogyny turns into mass violence, as in the case of the American shooter, Elliot Rodger, or - in my own hometown of Plymouth - Jake Davison. Yet mostly it stews. It seeks an outlet; indeed, a way out. Tate is one smart ‘hustler’, selling such a way out. He hovers between the PUA ‘one weird trick to get infinite pussy’ approach, and more grandly ‘ideological’ claims about the proper ordering of power between the sexes. Given his legal troubles, he may be expected to shift more clearly in the latter direction - selling the secret pimp-lore for $50 per month does not look good in court.

Getting here

It will be clear from our tone, by this point, that we do not think Tate and his ilk are selling anything worth buying. There are many on the left, however, who suppose that this equally obliges us to ridicule the claims made on our sympathy by the sort of men who might respond to Tate’s nihilistic schtick by reaching for their credit card. Such men - so goes the argument in much popular liberal critique of the ‘manosphere’ - complain about being denied something they have no right to: while the more acutely patriarchal norms of former times might have delivered them miserable, unsatisfied wives who needed someone to bring home the bacon, today there is no such outcome on the horizon. And this is to be celebrated as an advance in women’s freedom. The men’s complaint is not truly of an oppressive burden, but of a frustrated sense of entitlement - a lost privilege aching like a phantom limb.

This critique is hardly senseless. It is plain that the entry of women into the workforce, significant steps towards equal pay and the bonfire of conventions and laws tying women to their husbands have resulted in a qualitative shift in the relations between the sexes, in urbanised societies at least. To reverse such changes would be monstrous morally.

Yet it is peculiarly unempathetic, especially when it comes to the run-of-the-mill incels. To talk of their condition in terms of privilege seems to stretch that word to breaking point: loneliness is loneliness, wherever you are in the big pyramid of oppression. The liberal critique, in other words, poses as an explanation for the vulnerability of large cadres of alienated men to far-right, masculinist and misogynist ideology; but in fact it offers a moral justification for failing to provide such an explanation. No such explanation is owed, any more than sex is owed to the incel.

Besides, are the ‘manosphere’ people really the only ones dissatisfied with all this stuff? Is the average middle-class single woman in a major western city happy with how things play out on the dating scene? Has she never been taken for a ride by a ‘Chad’ type? There was briefly an internet scandal concerning a New York man called Caleb; several women worked out that they had been led on, shagged and ghosted by the same man, and made a TikTok video outing him as a sexist pig. All good fun: but there are a lot of ‘West Elm Calebs’ out there …

We need to look a little more closely at why we have ended up where we are. We cannot go into the depths here, but we may roughly say that pre-modern societies functioned more or less by means of arranged marriage - among the elites, of course, where marriage negotiations were an important form of power-broking, but also at the lower level, where entry into urban guilds and expanding rural smallholdings relied on arranging couples into breeding pairs.

The urbanisation of Europe, in stages and then rapidly after the end of the Black Death, produced the conditions which allowed the prototypical forms of the bourgeois world we know today to emerge. The basic economic reality of family life shifted. Children could escape their parents, and so escape unwanted betrothals. The expanding cities saw a heady variety of gay subcultures. Large multigenerational family units gave way to the nuclear family (for all the cod-medievalism of the ‘trads’, their image of family values - the pot bubbling away on the stove, mummy and baby waiting for daddy to come home from work - dates from the 19th century; for a start, in a peasant family, everyone works, though only the father profits).

Love matches, in stages, become a thing, as does libertinage; but they do so under the prevailing social conditions of capitalism. We are in a marketplace, and we are the goods; we hawk fetishised images of ourselves to each other. “If you’re not the customer,” says the Silicon Valley executive, “you’re the product”: but in the sexual marketplace we are all customers and commodities alike, simultaneously. It does not matter whether we are after a ‘happy ever after’ or a quick and dirty hook-up. This is especially obvious today, with the increasingly dystopian array of dating apps around, but the truth is these norms have long been on the rise.

Subculture

What has also been lost is a certain kind of countervailing force. The advent of capitalism gave rise, of course, to an organised working class, with its distinct cultural landscape; the need for the ruling class to respond to this paradoxically revived its organs of civil society. In this country, the Tories became a mass party; churches and other forms of communality equally posed as alternatives to the union hall, the organs of self-education, even in the greatest working class parties, the beer halls, cycling, hiking, shooting and chess clubs.

All of these subcultural institutions are places where people can meet and … well, you know.

The ruling class counter-offensive of the 1970s and 80s succeeded in smashing the working class half of the equation. But there was no longer such a need for the bourgeois political subcultures in that case; the result has been the phenomenon famously described by Robert Putnam’s Bowling alone, in the American context: an absolute decline in what he calls social capital - meaning essentially forms of civic engagement and connection outside the narrow confines of the workplace.

Add to that the normalisation of high rates of unemployment and, most recently of all, the experience of pandemic lockdowns, and we have a situation where sexual contact is - at best - mediated through apps who are, let’s say, incentivised in your remaining single for as long as possible, and often merely replaced by the fantasies of either Hollywood romance or hardcore pornography.

Thus a purely liberal approach to the matter does not really do the job. Tate may be sent down, but there have been many before him, and many are no doubt lining up to seize his ‘Top G’ crown. The endless succession of moral panics about this or that manosphere creature is part of the cycle of backlash. It is equally plain - for all the worried attention given to books like Bowling alone - that bourgeois society is in fact incapable of solving its own problems of atomisation and ambient resentment, in which soil ever crazier ideologies may sprout.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk