Masculinity

How do I explain Andrew Tate?

I don’t know. How do I explain anyone who hurts people? How do you explain being hateful, degrading, and inflammatory for sport?

I could simply say that he’s a human trafficker, luring women in with love bombing, emotionally abusing them, forcing them to do cam work or have sex with his friends for his financial and emotional gain.

But that, it seems, is not enough. It’s not enough for men to stop insisting that he’s a man who cares about men. But I don’t see where. I don’t see how convincing men that they aren’t responsible for their own healing and emotions- just like everyone- is “care”. Where is the care in convincing boys and men that their value is in how many cars they can buy and how much disrespect they can get away with? What care is there in a life that provides you no equal, no shoulders to lean on, no hands to take, but only people to berate or instruct?

Is that care?

Every time a big male personality whose work insists that their masculinity makes them superior is found to be hurting people, from cosigning eating Ivermectin to running human trafficking rings in multiple countries, The Discourse™ inevitably crops up:

The left or at least the not-alt-right- women in particular- should make space for men. If we made more space for them (and of course no one can ever tell me explicitly what that means) then they won’t become rapists, abusers, fascists, incels, mass shooters, familiciders, etc.

Here’s the thing- there isn’t a way to do that if their requirements for said space is that it has inherently ill intent with room for them to condescend & dominate.

Women, the left, or whatever imagined hive mind of the day a man dodging responsibility chooses, can’t offer a balm to men who seek out content & personalities that tell them that women aren’t people. That empathy is bad. Masculinity offers unique challenges to healing. And those who have been conditioned within that masculinity deserve space to unpack it, to mourn what they lost from the performance of it, and to move forward either free of that label or to define masculinity as something less consuming and destructive.

But the men who defend Andrew Tate when he uses women as tools and celebrate it, even men who worship at the altar of the least consistent middle-of-the-road jester Joe Rogan, don’t seek them out because they want to heal.

What speaks to them is the extremism. What calls them in is the cruelty.

These personalities teach men that being combative and unempathetic is the default. They teach the belief that being logical means to reject feeling. The leap then is that it is somehow logical to not only accept that life is hard and unjust and always will be but to punish anyone who works towards a life that is softer, more open, and less cruel. The rhetoric always blames victims, including the men these personalities are speaking to. Their rhetoric, passively sure but most times actively, apologizes for abuse, rape, and more as being inevitable because life is hard.

Even male personalities that lead a masculinity-first lifestyle that doesn’t inherently center a sort of anti-woman, anti-world, anti-community view, pushes itself and the young men who find it to the extreme. Take the Liver King, whose pseudo spiritual caveman lifestyle and the body born of it were recently revealed to be the result of steroids. I recognize the genuine sense of betrayal and the heartache that many of his followers are feeling. I don’t think it’s funny. They thought they found a guide and the falsehood about how he built his body for them is sort of like the death of God.

However, while the Liver King’s barefoot, organ eating, driveway farmer carrying lifestyle did not lend itself so immediately to platforming fascists and rapists or gleefully partaking in those things, it is still a platform of extremes. It is not enough to be strong. You have to be strong for and like a hypothetical ancestry. You must suffer. Lifting weights can’t just be fun. It has to be about sacrifice. It has to be about suffering. You have to tell the modern world no and yet still maintain that masculinity is the most important thing and allows no vulnerability.

Liver King’s apology, in fact, reveals what these hyper masculine personas are offering. It’s not philosophy or community. It’s Evangelicalism.

LK half-assedly owned a problem he caused, a lie he told, in asking for grace, feigning a kind of penance. On the other end of toxic masculine Evangelicalism is Andrew Tate.

Andrew Tate presents us with the other side of the non-apology coin: Tate would ask you to ignore any blood on his hands in favor of blaming “The Matrix.” The Matrix in this case meaning the decades now willful misinterpretation of the social cyberpunk concepts popularized by the Wachowski sisters with the 1999 film. The Matrix in the mouths of MGTOW, incels, or any of their associated public figures is the equivalent to the Evangelical concept of “demons.” Yes, I did it, but it was the demons. Did I fail? Sort of. But the demons did it and the important thing is that I have survived the demons. This stretches itself to imply that anyone who may have assisted the demons or the Matrix- a big money pastor’s mistress, the children they assault, in this case the people Andrew Tate allegedly abused, groomed, kidnapped, and trafficked (in any combination of those things)- has to be an extension of those demons/the Matrix. And the question shifts from, How could you, oh spiritual leader, fail us, betray us, and do harm? Into, How did x,y, and z become agents of the devil?

Evangelicalism isn’t the only format being rebranded to keep men at their worst, harming women and children and glorifying capital. The cult of masculinity is making men more susceptible to things that were traditionally more targeted towards women. The aforementioned Liver King plops comfortably into models of diet and wellness culture that were used to tell women to hyper restrict, swapping the bowls of cereal in the Special K diet for raw animal organs. Disordered eating is celebrated in men now. Social media is full of men who will stalk the aisles of grocery stores to tell you how everything is bad for you, including which vegetables are wrong and bad. The MCU body holds hands with the rise of crossfit-hustle culture IG bros in setting a body standard that is for most men genetically and hormonally impossible without extreme restriction, rigorous exercise, and hundreds to thousands of dollars in supplements monthly. Where MLMs used to target housewives, usually stay-at-home moms, desperate for income and agency, now the digital space does MLMs for boys- NFTS and crypto currency, arguably Elon Musk’s silly little secondary blue checkmark. The digital space itself is what is teaching boys and young men that they aren’t enough physically or financially and priming them to make these sort of dangerous, fruitless gambles in the first place.

It goes a step further, implying that these failures of currency and body are also failures of spirituality and/or performance. But don’t worry. Here are a hundred YouTubers and Twitch streamers of various levels of established scam-artistry and avoidable controversy to sell you courses on how to be a man for these specific digital lanes.

Here is the hard and terrible truth: It is hard to be a man because it is hard to be alive. It is hard to be a man because it is hard to bear the weight of constantly performing gender ideals. The system doesn’t care if you benefit. If there’s any Matrix holding you back it is patriarchal capitalism, telling you that you only matter in how you express immovable, invulnerable, miserable masculinity and the perceived strength of hustle culture and capitalist ideology. You aren’t Neo, you’re Cypher, begging an ever growing algorithm of Agent Smiths (all aforementioned men, Jordan Peterson, Russell Hartley, Alex Jones, Good Bro Bad Bro, Fresh & Fit, Elliott Hulse, Anthony Spade, Aaron Marino, it could go on forever) to cut you a deal and let you turn it all off again and just have steak and bitches.

If you actively pursue personalities who tell you you should hate people more, isolate more, consume more, love less, listen less, & consider other living people NPCs I can’t save you or save me from you. Maybe I can start by letting you know that you deserve so much better than these men who would stoke anger and insecurities to get your credit card info. You deserve catharsis, understanding, and growth. It’s hard work but you owe it to yourself. If you can’t care about how you’re hurting everyone else yet, maybe start with caring about you.