The Problem With Andrew Tate

The former kickboxing champion turned life coach has inspired men everywhere with his popular thoughts on gender and masculinity, and his star has only risen, even after he was arrested last year and kicked off several social media platforms.

Andrew Tate is the manosphere’s most vocal apostle, and part of his appeal lies in treating his blatant misogyny and hatred for women as if it’s commonplace or as views that all men share. Now, more than ever, it’s critical to call out his rhetoric for the harm that it imparts to not only women, but also to his most ardent male believers. The problem with Andrew Tate isn’t that he’s wealthy or that he’s an alleged criminal. It’s that he has capitalized on male loneliness and turned it into an empire that seeks the destruction and downfall of women.

Tate’s Past and Present

Though known for his luxury cars and heavily edited music videos featuring mansions and designer sunglasses, Tate wasn’t born into wealth. He was raised in a middle-class family. His father was a career military officer and chess champion, and his mother was a homemaker and later a school lunch lady. While family members close to Tate have said that his father was a genius, if a bit unconventional, his temper could be disturbing and even violent. According to Tate himself, he once asked his father for a nightlight for his room. Tate’s father locked him in his bedroom and said, “There’s monsters in there, son. Good luck. See you tomorrow.”

As children of divorce, Andrew, his younger brother Tristan, and sister Janine spent their formative years in Indiana, and later moved to England with their British mother. Andrew achieved recognition as a contestant on a number of reality shows – most notably Big Brother. He was kicked off after a week following an alleged attack on a woman, but rose to further prominence when he began competing in kickboxing. The brothers, who sought financial security in a number of failed business ventures, also began an adult webcam business in 2016, later making an estimated $600,000 per month.

Tate is characterized by his American-tinged British speech patterns and his notable Twitter presence (having been kicked off other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok), but it’s his rhetoric, along with his coaching business Hustlers University, which has brought him notoriety. He’s also been vocal on social media about his recent conversion to Islam, especially in how it aligns with his worldview. In December 2022, both he and his brother were arrested by Romanian authorities on suspicion of money laundering and human trafficking. While previously on house arrest, they’re free to leave their home but not the county until a trial date is set.

Andrew Tate Preaches Bad Solutions for Valid Problems

It should come as no surprise to any of us that young, single men out there aren't doing well. They’re lonely, directionless, and increasingly impressionable, making them susceptible to messaging that is basically a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

Tate’s appeal lies in his capability to accurately diagnose a societal ill, but he doesn’t prescribe a true remedy. He recognizes that men are being taken advantage of by divorce courts and custody arrangements, and he recognizes that women are increasingly self-absorbed, cruel, and picky, so much so that they’ll forgo a good man for a fantasy who’s over six feet and making six figures. 

Every day, men wallow in despair, convinced that their lack of purpose is their undoing and that they’ll never possess the things they desperately seek: connection, family, love, security, purpose. They don’t know how to be strong and masculine, either because their fathers didn’t teach them or because cultural conditioning constantly impresses upon them how toxic and unnecessary masculine men are. They’re fed up with feminism and how it’s poisoned the women around them, but the proposed “solution” is no better. 

Tate is intelligent, that much is certain. He’s been successful in capitalizing on this collective depression and on his own know-how. He’s also been successful in capitalizing on the loneliness and isolation of men who don’t know how to be fulfilled or masculine because their schools, families, and societies have failed them. Tate is right about all of these things – until he isn’t.

Tate says all the right things to these men – they’re lonely, they’re angry, they’re upset, and they have every right to be. “Being a man is a blessing. The world is never going to think you’re important unless you make yourself important,” he says. As a personality, Tate exudes the characteristics of the warrior archetype, which is why he’s so appealing to other men. The warrior serves as society’s protector, one who combats evil for the benefit of the vulnerable. Warriors embrace challenges and suffering, and their strength is evident to everyone around them, making them an inimitable foe and desirable to women. To modern men, Tate is a dragon slayer, and he’s taking down feminism and political correctness with him.

But, according to Tate, the solution is sex, hedonism, and attaining status and wealth (even through less than legal means, apparently). Hedonism is an old-fashioned word, but it refers to the single-minded pursuit of pleasure, and if Tate were a pastor, his church would be one of hedonism. Mansions, cars, money, wealth, luxury, using and abusing women – all of this is Tate’s prescription to the very real epidemic of male loneliness and insecurity. 

To modern men, Tate is a dragon slayer, and he’s taking down feminism and political correctness with him.

Additionally, Tate allegedly has several children with different women, or as he puts it, “a few ovens to bake the bread,” and has gone on record saying that he sends money to the mothers of his children. To Tate, that’s the beginning and end of his connection with his children and his obligations as a father. As with anything personal in his life, a sacred calling like fatherhood boils down to a transaction, and he’s effectively encouraging men with children to operate the same way. 

Through their coaching platform Hustlers University, Tate’s brother advised subscribers on how to sleep with virgins (which he accomplishes through the pretense of being their boyfriend). The brothers made their webcam business successful by persuading women to begin doing porn, which Tate calls “the loverboy method.” Tate has also been vocal about only sleeping with 18 and 19-year-old girls because they don’t have as high a body count as older women. 

Tate’s Recent PR Campaign

Many observers have clued in to the fact that the modern man’s most empowering, inspirational figure is nothing but a mercenary – but some haven’t. Conservative figures, under whose beliefs Tate tries to closely align himself, further serve to legitimize his scam. Media heavyweights like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have hosted Tate on their platforms, broadcasting his troublesome logic to their large audiences. 

But in these two appearances alone, Tate uncharacteristically appears to be doing damage control. In his interview with Owens, who questions his connection to his web cam business, he replies that he hasn’t been involved in that enterprise in “eight to nine years.” However, his own appearances from 2020 and from the Full ReSend podcast published in 2022 directly contradict that claim.

“I’ve seen men give away their life savings to girls they’ve never met,” he tells Owens soberly. But he has also openly bragged about how much money he’s made off desperate men who will sell their houses, drain their life savings, and take out loans to pay for pornographic content. On the Full ReSend podcast, he claims that he made a million dollars off one man alone. “We’re milking them dry,” he tells the hosts.

Tate also tells Tucker Carlson that he’s charged with using his “loverboy method” to incentivize women into prostitution, nothing more, and that violence was never an aspect of his human trafficking enterprise, but the charges outlined in his arrest documents clearly state that he stands charged of “exerting physical violence” on the alleged victims. 

Throughout both interviews, Tate contradicts himself again and again. It’s unclear whether he’s a pathological liar or using these media platforms to attract more followers to his narrative by making his past actions more palatable – or both.

Tate Co-Opts Traditionalism To Elevate Male Power and Status

So how did Andrew Tate become the mouthpiece for the manosphere anyway? Men especially might recognize the benefits of traditional gender norms, which they want in their own relationships and in their homes, and Tate uses that as the foundation for his rhetoric.

While most mature men and women who deliberately seek out traditional gender roles in their relationships know that they must be bound by an understanding of unity and complementarianism, Tate co-opts this by suggesting that traditionalism is imperative because men are superior and women are inferior, not because we all live in a fallen world and need one another to survive. His businesses operate entirely on this thesis. Tate has coerced or persuaded vulnerable women into prostitution, which he then sells to lonely, desperate men, accumulating millions in the process. He then asserts that women are the true victors in society, and men are the losers, while ignoring his own contribution to an increasingly sexualized and promiscuous culture. It’s a convoluted system rife with dangerous standards, but it has reaped considerable rewards for him.

If every man subscribed to Tate’s worldview, true masculinity – which thrives on strength, self-control, inner peace, and protectiveness – would almost certainly vanish altogether. 

It’s this mindset with regard to gender that makes Tate’s teachings so poisonous. Any kind of figure, narrative, or discourse that pits men and women against each other wants the human race to fail utterly. Civilization has persevered only by the bonds which connect men and women to each other. Any society, as we can plainly see today, that constantly stokes ire in men against women, and women against men, is doomed to fail. It’s rhetoric like Tate’s that promotes a men versus women mindset, and one which almost ensures that everyone loses in the fallout of the gender wars as a result.

The solution to feminism isn’t to hate women or to use them until they’re “damaged goods” for the next man. It’s to be an embodiment of true masculinity, thereby encouraging a woman to be her true, inherently feminine self. The solution to male loneliness, falling birth rates, declining trust in marriage as an institution, and picky women gatekeeping the dating scene is to pursue that which is most fulfilling: a home, a wife, children. If every man subscribed to Tate’s worldview, true masculinity – which thrives on strength, self-control, inner peace, and protectiveness – would almost certainly vanish altogether. 

Closing Thoughts

Andrew Tate urges men who are seeking fulfillment to “leave the matrix” and conquer whatever their heart desires. It’s an enticing offer, and one that promises sex, power, and respect if they agree. At the same time, he espouses that female promiscuity (without recognizing male contribution to that issue) is the cardinal sin for which women everywhere should be punished. But for better or worse, men and women need each other, and any source – no matter how successful they might seem – preaching a message as divisive as his should be kept away as far as possible.

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