The New Crisis of Masculinity: Misogyny and Networked Harassment within Manospheric Digital Communities on X
April 25, 2025
I. Introduction: The Disruption of Online Masculinity
Andrew Tate is a 38-year-old kickboxer, content creator, and alleged sex trafficker. Aside from having sex crimes charges in three different countries, he serves as the caricatural figurehead of the men’s rights movement that has now come to align itself with ‘taking the red pill.’ The term ‘red-pilled’ originated in The Matrix (1999), where protagonist Neo must choose between taking either a blue or red capsule. The former allows him to remain in a simulation, allowing others to influence his thoughts and beliefs, while the latter lets Neo choose his own path in the real world, and see what the true world actually contains. Although it began in a culture-shocking sci-fi work, the concept of the red pill has been corrupted by the online alt-right community to show distrust of the government and belief in conspiracy theories, which has culminated in a hatred of the Other. For Tate, the Other is the Feminist.
In April, Sky News wrote of the ‘Andrew Tate phenomenon,’ detailing that school-aged boys in the United Kingdom have begun to demonstrate sexist actions towards their female teachers and peers at a shocking rate. This comes in tandem with the recent downward trend in the age at which children receive their first cell phone. According to researchers at the University of South Florida, “more than 70 percent of 11-year-olds surveyed have their own smartphone, with many acquiring them by the age of eight and a half.” Despite the minimum age for many social media platforms being 13, there is often no verification software required in the account signup process. Many social media platforms have also recently begun sharing ad revenue with popular creators, the payout depending on the success of the post. The present findings on X, formerly known as Twitter, says Dean of the London College of Political Technology Ed Saperia, show that “controversial content drives engagement. Extreme content drives engagement.” These same posts, due to their success (whether it be from arguments in the comments or quote retweets with an inverse message), are being shown widely across the site, to audiences who are not age-verified. What was once known as the alt-right pipeline, a process of engagement-focused targeted recommendations allowing users to be shown increasingly radical extremist content over time as they continue to interact with it, has become just one’s average day using any given social media platform. This is how the cycle begins.
I am an outsider to the Manosphere community and refrain from interacting with any such posts if they do happen to appear on my timeline. I frequently see hateful content pushed onto my feed, urging viewers to continue the ridicule in the comments. One example, from early April 2025, is about black teenager Karmelo Anthony killing white teenager Austin Metcalf and contains the words “Young black males are violent to a wildly, outrageously disproportionate degree,” along with other hateful race-based targeting. This post has 173k likes and 19 million views. Elon Musk even quote retweeted a user’s screenshot of his comment agreeing with the original statement, writing, “🔥😂”. Whether or not one is online, the Tate effect has made its way into real life. In 2024, two separate perpetrators of triple homicides were linked to being fans of Tate’s content. As a layperson in this space, I visited cobratate.com to explore his various courses on offer. I was given the option to speak with a live representative, which I could not ignore as the pop-up window crowded half of my screen. Using a fake email address, I engaged in conversation with Elijah from Cobratate, the live representative. I re-entered the live conversation three times within the same week at different times of the day, and Elijah was the screen name of the representative in all three instances, so I am still unsure if I was speaking to a real person or not. I asked Elijah about how The Matrix is involved in today’s society. Over more than a dozen individual messages, this was Elijah’s reply (strung together for clarity; / separates individual messages):
Elijah from Cobratate: Hey G, how can I help you? / Ever seen the movie? / Okay so you have the reference point now from let's say 5 - 18 what do most people's lives look like? / I meant ages 5 - 18 / They wake up, go to school, get told what to think and do that until they're 18 right? / Now once you're out of school as an adult what is it the average person has to do? / Then work a job until they retire, IF they retire at like 60+ 8 hours a day listening to orders / 2 hours or more driving to work Do you feel for 10-12 hours of time the wagie salary is worth it? Do you feel anyone wants to be doing that and based on that do you feel the average man owns their time? / Exactly now parallel that with the movie where your body heat, essentially energy, is taken to power someone else's future, not owning their energy or irl their time, do you understand? / Exactly, so what's your plan to actually begin owning your time aka energy? / By building your value and skillset so to what you came in asking about, what's your current understanding of trw? / [112k students, the number of active students listed on the site] number is outdated, its ~200k now and no you dont [have to quit your job] Most students join and only once what they do inside outearn their job, then they'd leave and scale further / How much you make depends on the effort you put in / Theres students that use it to make some extra money, a few hundred to a grand and those that use it as their main income making 5/10/100k+ per month inside Do you have faith in your abilities to make money using the millionaire professors' guidance? / [I asked if Tate was the ‘millionaire professor’] He's one of the people inside but each topic we teach also has a person currently making millions in it using what they teach others. This isn't like the regular scam that college is, the people you learn from are actually people outputting the results you want TODAY, not some average wagie teaching a business degree when they never ran a business themselves, makes sense?
I asked if women were allowed to join TRW, and he responded “Why not, anyone can join TRW, some of our top students inside are women, on the site I sent you, you'd have seen some video interviews with some of them too / Did you have any final questions or are you ready to begin learning from millionaires?”
Elijah’s tone proposes TRW as a sort of secret society, where every ‘student’ makes millions off of the teachings from the ‘millionaire professor’ Tate, who actually does not teach a single class. The luring nature of TRW, featuring bright and indulgent imagery, markets the self-made mentality, offering that ‘if Tate could do it, so could you!’
Online influencers and content creators have been warping their own daily lives into content for years, posting vlogs and tutorials that show off one’s multiple cars or extensive makeup collection. For some of these creators with younger audiences, these full-time social media stars serve as role models. Over the past decade, content creation has become a lucrative full-time career. Surveying 1,000 United States children aged eight to twelve, LEGO found in 2019 that 29% of those interviewed strove to be a ‘vlogger.’ These numbers are also echoed in a 2017 survey published in The Sun, where 34% of six- to seventeen-year-olds wanted to be a YouTuber and 18.1% wanted to be a blogger/vlogger. However, this number seems to have only grown, whether it is due to the isolation set on by the COVID pandemic or by the growing necessity of constant technology fueling a cycle of dopamine dependence. A 2023 survey found that 57% of 1,000 Generation Z Americans want to be influencers, with some choosing it over their current job.
Online content creators have taken a space where well-known movie stars and favorite authors once resided. With online influencers, though, a much more intimate connection is established between the ‘star’ and fans through commenting and replying within social media channels. Additionally, through routine usage of an Instagram account or X, formerly known as Twitter, page, younger audiences are more likely to form a parasocial relationship, given the greater trust established through the posting of everyday ordinary moments.
For male young adult digital natives, feeling insecure in their masculinity and/or future in regards to the online climate of today, videos by Tate and other influencers in the ‘Manosphere’ serve as a role model for modern manhood, brought in under the guise of self-help and advice that veils the marketing of misogyny and hatred. Given the changes in content moderation on X, Andrew Tate is able to thrive by teaching men that the method to improving their own social status is through continuing authority over women. From an anthropological perspective, Tate’s creation of specific cultural practices within his online spaces can be considered a community of practice. The in-group, defined by their shared feelings regarding the reclamation of masculinity, solidifies a shared identity, and, in this case, possibly even acts as an excuse for hateful actions. Through the power dynamics of the space, with Tate acting as its authoritative and all-knowing leader, the out-group can be used to refer to anyone who is disliked by Tate or a community member. The platform that Tate has created for himself allows him to play a significant role in the perpetuation of female oppression by reaching new audiences of young men who are willing to improve their own societal and/or financial status by developing authority over women. How does Andrew Tate’s The primary research aim of this paper is to examine the rhetorical strategies of Andrew Tate’s role in the online Mansophere movement as it relates to misogyny and to identify linguistic patterns relating to gender in his online content on X, YouTube, and Telegram.
II. Literature Review
In ‘The men and women, guys and girls of the ‘manosphere’: A corpus-assisted discourse approach’ (2020), Alexandra Krendal researches the frequency and usage of terms within the Reddit page r/TheRedPill (r/TRP). She uses a corpus-based approach to find how prevalent “online sexism” is within the community, using data from 2017 to 2018, and compares the frequency found in the forum to a sample from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Her findings of words like ‘women,’ ‘guy,’ and ‘men’ appear 12.2, 5.9, and 13 times more in r/TRP than in the 2018 COCA. Further, using WordSketch, Krendal analyzed the classification of the usage (which she lists as “material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal and existential”), the role of the keyword within the context, and the meaning of the usage. By identifying active versus passive verbiage in examples of these keywords in tandem with context found in the remainder of the sentence, Krendal finds that within the inferred age gap between ‘girl’/‘girls’ and ‘woman’/‘women’, the former represented idealized conversations by females while the latter term, inferred to commonly used for females only over the age of 18, was used in mostly instances of mockery. Overall, Krendal’s findings assert that the usage of ‘girl’/‘girls’ and ‘woman’/‘women’ in r/TRP were majorly negative given context and almost always used passively, whereas the references to ‘man’ and ‘men’ were commonly active grammatically, positing their own overwhelming representation on this site. In Krendal’s findings, she also discusses “assumed biological drives” and corrupted instances of pseudoscience, where authors on the forum utilize and invert terms like ‘hypergamy’ and ‘evolutionary programming’ so as to strengthen their anti-female points.
In ‘Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist Men’s Rights Discourses on Rape’ (2016), Lisa Gotell and Emily Dutton highlight conceptions of rape and rape accusations through the lens of online men’s rights groups. A large portion of the article focuses on the concept of blame, noting a sexual assault awareness poster put up in Edmonton, Canada that said ‘Don’t be THAT guy.’ A week later, a men’s rights group had put up similar posters, reading “Don’t be THAT girl: Just because you regret a one night stand, doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual. Lying about sexual assault is a crime.” The researchers also note the rising panic within the men’s rights movement regarding the condemnation of men who are involved in sexual assault at colleges and experience subsequent “abuses of due process”, believing that they are the true ‘victims.’ This article contains other real-life examples of gendered discrimination from men’s rights activists, such as the father’s rights movement, where men are ‘discriminated’ against in child custody lawsuits. The researchers also focus on the men’s rights versus feminism debate, where the MRM views itself as the opposite of feminism, equipping the latter movement as proof that men are victimized by women.
In ‘Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment’, Alice E. Marwick and Robyn Caplan discuss and study the rise of coordinated efforts of cyberbullying and e-harassment by the manosphere. The target of these threats and online hate, the researchers argue, is women. They believe that the cause of these hate campaigns is the rampant misogyny found in these online men’s rights communities, but more specifically, the online language making its way into the daily use of developing boys and aimless grown men. They hone in on the term ‘misandry’, which is a word that means women who hate men solely because they are men. They trace this word through men’s rights campaigns in the late 20th century and find linkages to its use in modern-day forums. While the meaning of the word has not changed within that time, its application has. Rather, its use within these online communities and forums has helped to strengthen the binary between modern-day, fourth-wave feminism and the tenets of the men’s rights community. They note that a frequent finding within their research of these sites was that feminism has helped to “cultivat[e] misandry,” giving into the concept that feminists are man-hating rather than pushing for equality. Through men’s rights groups persisting this belief, as the researchers link it to its fading popularity over time in mainstream media and usage on the internet, the term has grown stronger within these groups, yet represents a backbone for unsubstantiated rhetoric used in targeting female creators online. Through “doxing, death threats, revenge porn, cyberstalking, and other threatening behavior,” the researchers believe that the mention of the word misandry or misandrist seems to be enough for other online men within these communities to tag along into the hate, even if there is no proof of misandry at all. Of course, given the pick-up artist aspect that arises within some subgroups of the manosphere, a woman turning down a man is viewed as instant misandry. They cite real-life cases, such as Elliott Rodger, a self-proclaimed ‘incel’ who killed six people and harmed 14 in a shooting, which he attributed to “punish[ing]” the women for the harm that their gender had caused to him by turning him down. This language is so pervasive within these communities that it is almost ingrained within the minds of younger users (teenage boys, misguided adults who have felt wronged by women), and may result in real-life violence and danger. That is how powerful the vocabulary is within the manosphere.
Lastly, ‘Im/Perceptible Boyhood in a Post-Andrew Tate World’ by Georgia Thomas-Parr and Marcus Gilroy-Ware show how Andrew Tate, known today as the ‘leader’ of the manosphere, has helped to bring the men’s rights verbiage into the mainstream, all the while profiting off of it as a form of social media content. This article highlights how influenced young people, especially young boys, are by the content creators that they see online. With YouTubers Jake and Logan Paul both of whom have recently turned to boxing and MMA after taking a break from social media influencing, their snack food and beverage brands have encapsulated young minds, begging parents to spend $5 on a single drink, just because it has the Paul name on it. Tate is also an influencer/kickboxer, and while he is friends with the Paul brothers, as well as other personalities (Kanye West is a very recent example, though not highlighted in the article), his content consists solely of proving the gender politics of today’s social climate. At present, Tate is battling multiple accounts of sexual abuse and child trafficking charges, of which he was just brought back to America after having to hide out in his native Romania for years to evade these cases. Tate’s content has been labeled over and over again as outright misogynistic and hateful, yet he was the third most Googled person in 2023 and has 10 million followers on X. In March 2025, his bio on X reads, “Escape Slavery”, followed by a link to his website. It has since been changed. He also includes other links to his products, which are mostly gym powder and protein supplements. This article argues that Tate has successfully taken charge of “at-risk” individuals, young boys who sit at home and browse social media in their free time. With thumbnails and video transitions that make the content sound normal at first, Tate’s striking voice and strong persona almost hide the ultra-conservative and harmful views that he shares. Still, the videos are filled with ads, meaning that he is very obviously profiting from this content. He uses phrases like “be a man”, by which he means that one must make money, work out excessively in the gym, and turn down women who are not “of value”. This piece also highlights the awkwardness of young boyhood, including voice cracks and puberty. The authors argue that Tate takes advantage of this stage, teaching them initially how to combat this stage through his more popular videos. However, once one begins getting recommended more of his off-the-path videos, they are indoctrinated with his ‘alpha male’ mindset, which Tate says was the way that he has become rich and successful. Luxury cars and his large muscles serve as physical reminders of the Tate process, urging the viewer to consider his lifestyle. They define his content as rage-based misogyny that is marketed and edited into edible portions so as to be easily understood by younger male demographics. He could be credited with bringing the ‘red pill’ ideology into the mainstream, and so far, he has been very successful.
These works help to highlight and bring together recent research into the ‘red-pilled’ mindset and how the perception of women has been shifted through the continued usage of language to being viewed as useless on the path to male success. These studies were done through a digital ethnographic approach, by applying word identification programs like WordSketch to detect and count the frequency of individual words. The works also utilize sites like Reddit and online forum websites. However, given the current changes in guidelines and policy on the website X, formerly known as Twitter, this verbiage has been pushed even more into common use in the online world. The algorithm itself is unable to tell if a certain word or subject is negative, in the instance that the term has gained a definition separate from its initial usage. In the case of the manosphere, when negative content is pushed to unknowing audiences, they are unintentionally brought into a space of which they are unaware of its true cruelty. Because of the spotlight that has been put on the manosphere community through the rise of Tate as well as various new documentaries (Adolescence, 2025), hashtags go unused in this realm. Therefore, the community is almost hidden. Yet, the crumbs are available to find for those who care to learn the vocabulary.
III. Tate & Unveiled Misogyny
Tate began his online reign after he was removed from the British reality television show Big Brother in 2016, when his tweets from the early 2010s resurfaced. One of these tweets reads, “The racist lady on the train is right.” While on the TV program, he was also being investigated for charges of sexual assault and rape in the United Kingdom, which were later dropped. Tate and his brother Tristan then launched courses for men on how to seduce and pursue women. The pair have tried and failed four separate times with this venture, marketed under a different name every time. At present, the brothers operate The War Room, which is listed on Andrew Tate’s own website as “a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” One ‘ticket’ to The War Room also costs $7,979 USD. They also have a similar platform called ‘The Real World,’ formerly known as Hustlers University, where Tate gives his “students” tips on how to make money. There is also The Real World 2.0, which is hosted on university.com, yet his name is not mentioned on the site. According to cobratate.com customer service representative Elijah, “different domains to manage traffic.” At present, both editions of the platform seem to be active, yet are hosted on separate sites. This may be due to The Real World being the target of a November 2024 security hack, which leaked “the email addresses of hundreds of thousands of users as well as the contents of the platforms’ private chat servers.” The banner for X account of university.com reads, “Andrew Tate’s University”, and its bio is “Andrew Tate's Online Financial Education Platform”. As one looks through Tate’s personal website, cobratate.com, pop-ups appear notifying the viewer that others are purchasing the above packages in real time. One such pop-up reads, “Davide M. from Italy has purchased The Real World and is escaping The Matrix.”
In 2017, Tate cycled through three separate X accounts, all of which became permanently suspended when he tweeted, “Women have been exchanging sex for opportunity for a very long time. Some did this. Weren’t abused. If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare [sic] some responsibility. I’m not saying it’s OK you got raped”. In November 2022, Tate’s @cobratate X handle was reinstated, verified, and currently has 10.7 million followers.
Tate is considered a key leader within the online community collectively known as the ‘Manosphere.’ Manosphere is an overarching term for internet spaces on social media platforms and digital forums that promote men’s rights and masculine ideals, but it has come to be defined by its heavy opposition to feminism, which is perceived as anti-man through the communal lens. Beginning around 2014 in the digital realm, these communities of shared practice with ideals set on male dominance began on Reddit forums and 4chan chats. However, the Manosphere has made a massive shift in the past year, with subgroups populating on sites like Instagram and X. While this is not the main subject of this paper, there are multiple instances that can be linked to this change. In a March 2025 article in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis argued that the rising popularity of Tate and other online “alpha[s]” helped to get Donald Trump elected for a second term. In August 2024, three months before the election, gaming streamer and Manosphere figurehead Adin Ross interviewed Trump during a 90-minute livestream, during which he also vlogged as he gifted the president a Cybertruck and Rolex watch. During this talk, half a million viewers tuned in to listen to the pair discuss UFC fighting and politics. “My son Barron says hello. He’s a big fan of yours,” Trump told Ross in the opening minutes of their conversation. While Barron has no social media accounts, comments from Trump have shown that he is indeed online. In an interview with Daily Mail, Trump said that Barron “actually calls all of them [podcasters Theo Von, Adin Ross, and Joe Rogan] like friends of his because it’s a different generation.” Now, Trump is routinely seen at UFC events, shaking hands with head commentator (and right-wing podcaster) Joe Rogan. Prominent thinkers like Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, and Tucker Carlson have also made their way around this right-wing podcast circuit.
These appearances by Trump have proved to be ultra-popular — his episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast currently sits at 58 million views and was only posted in October 2024. Trump is not the only White House personnel featured on JRE, Rogan’s episode with Elon Musk is at 13 million views at present and was posted on February 28, 2025. In early summer of 2022, Musk, the world’s richest man, began the process to purchase Twitter in order to create “an inclusive arena for free speech”, with one of his key outlines for change being reinstating Trump’s once-deactivated account. In October, the deal was completed, and Musk renamed the platform to ‘X’ in July 2023, marketing it as ‘the everything app.’ With this purchase, more concrete changes came as well, including a cutdown on fact-checking and a minimization of content restrictions and moderation. While Musk stands as a champion of free speech, wrote Tommaso Segantini, his actions of banning accounts of established journalists and shifting content guidelines have transformed the space into a “battleground where disinformation and hate speech flourish unchecked.”
On November 5th, 2024, minutes after the US election was called for Trump, white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” In the day before, of, and after the 2024 election, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found “a 4,600% increase in mentions of the terms ‘your body, my choice’ and ‘get back in the kitchen’ on X.” In April 2025, the post has 50k likes and 36k retweets. Tate also made an X post shortly following the US election, writing, “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.” According to the ISD, the post received almost 700k views within two hours of its posting.
IV. Authoritarian Strategies of Hatred
Andrew Tate is a “self-proclaimed misogynist”, but the extravagance of his multitude of world kickboxing champion belts and trophies, fleet of 33 expensive cars, muscular figure, and well-spoken rhetorical skill is the first impression one would glean from his content. Tate is constantly seen with a cigar in his hand, showing to the audience that he is in control while also demonstrating that he has already become successful enough to have lengthy cigar breaks in lieu of the quick cigarette. Whether sitting in front of his elaborate and cushy podcast setup or filming an Instagram reel from the seat of a private plane, he exudes wealth and power before he even begins speaking. He has curated himself as a brand, showing that if one were to follow his steps, they have a chance at obtaining his luxury lifestyle. Wearing glaring aviator sunglasses and constantly surrounded by a cloud of cigar smoke, Tate hopes to prove that men have become victims of feminism. In his case, the harm has already begun.
Despite claiming to have 13 different driver’s licenses and seven citizenships, Tate currently resides at a £7 million mansion in Bucharest, Romania, where he and Tristan are awaiting trial for “kidnapping, coercing and raping at least 34 women, including a minor, and setting up a criminal organization.” In late February, the Tates flew to Florida. Although they managed to take advantage of a travel ban lifted in relation to their Romanian charges, the pair is also currently engaged in a “civil suit from a woman alleging they coerced her into sex work, and then defamed her after she gave evidence to Romanian authorities.” The brothers were born and raised in the United Kingdom, where they also face charges of human trafficking and rape. After a month in America, the Tates returned to Romania. Three days after their heavily publicized flight home, Andrew’s girlfriend, model Brianna Stern, sued him for sexual assault as well as beating and choking her. She broke up with him and filed a restraining order the next morning, as she sat in the hospital waiting to be seen, which led to her being diagnosed with a concussion. The lawsuit includes text messages sent by Tate to Stern during their ten-month relationship, examples of which include, “You back talk too much whore so I beat you. I will hit you today. But I love you” and “What’s the point in having you if I don’t beat you and impregnate you.”
A self-described “pimp,” Tate has also recently hit the news for the removal of a handful of his podcast episodes from streaming service Spotify. One such audio ‘course’ was entitled ‘PhD Program,’ which stands for Pimping Hoes Degree. During the episode, he says that PhD functions as “my recruitment system” because “it’s impossible to have a woman work for you without having sex with her.” In a June 2021 YouTube interview with James English entitled “My Life as a Pimp - Andrew Tate Tells His Life Story”, Tate described his process of collecting multiple girlfriends, telling them that they will be moving in with him, and that they had to fly to London to meet up with him. Once they arrived, Tate would sit them down in the same room, saying “Listen, I’ve been with you all, I’m starting a webcam business, I’m going to get rich, some of you either going to come with me to the top of the mountain or if you’re pissed off you can fucking fly home.” Tate then brags about the 75 women that he has been able to sway into sex work through this method. The YouTube video contains advertisements, which means that English is making money from this post. An article by Villanova University’s Law Institute to Address Commerical Sexual Exploitation refers to this tactic as “Romeo pimping,” where individuals “often target women who are awed by their image and what they represent.” Although he continually mentions love and the power of a strong romantic relationship within his interview with English, this is also the warped basis with which Tate allegedly conducts prostitution.
The bio of Tate’s X page reads, “2025 Worlds Sexiest Man.” His account is a collection of reposted images of Bugatti cars and Cybertrucks, black and white infographics with his own quotes, and posts that encourage readers to “Resist the Slave Mind” and that “Men have hearts. Women don’t.” His posts include line breaks between each sentence, and he frequently uses all-caps. This register creates an illusion of yelling, or in this case, being yelled at by Tate. The multimodal aspect of his content extends beyond the text itself — his demeanor and rage are felt through the screen.
His posts on X are not solely about gender and the Matrix, such as “Hate speech is funny”, posted in April 2025. The comments below his posts seem to mostly agree with his every statement. Beneath the aforementioned post, an X user responded, “Sometimes you have to lie in order to accommodate few people because truth is considered hate.” Another X user, Dawn, whose bio includes multiple pro-Trump phrases, directs a comment to Tate, writing, “Really? Then why are you suing those who used hate speech against you??” In the replies, 12 users send their individual retorts, including, “No women in the comments”, “That’s for pussies and faggots”, and “Female IQ… Please don’t comment if you’re going to be this dumb.” To these apparent fans of Tate, his tens of open court cases and multiple platform bans only help to reinforce his appeal as a man who was hunted for speaking ‘the truth.’
Tate’s authoritative tone used in his online posts allows him to operate as a subject of power, speaking down to his audience in an informative fashion. He rarely responds to comments under his X posts, allowing the readers to take the conversation their own way. Also through his self-given status as the omniscient instructor of various training platforms, Tate preys on men’s insecurities, whether financial, sexual, or emotional, in order to create a system of dependence upon his image. When Tate posts so heavily about what he refers to as “low-value men” who “chase happiness, [which] I think is a very feminine frame”, the male audience members who see their own traits listed as “weak” latch onto him. He is viewed as their only way out of becoming a ‘beta male,’ which is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as “a man who is not as successful or powerful as other men”.
In an X post promoting university.com, the website where The Real World 2.0 is hosted yet includes no mention of the phrase nor any information referring to Tate, Tate writes: “You need to stop accepting second place. / Stop accepting you’re a second-class citizen. / Get rich, get free. / Live how you should: university.com”. Tate’s posts that advertise his products, whether it be his supplement brand, his self-help platforms, or cryptocurrency courses, take a different tone from his usual low-effort, text-based content. Accompanied by a flashy fancam-style edit of clips of Tate boxing and speaking with text flashing in rainbow as he speaks, he frequently uses a second-person pronoun in his promotions, speaking specifically to the individual reader:
“None of it is luck. / I was from the VERY bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. / I just took every opportunity I was given. / Will you? jointherealworld.com/ai”
“If you home school your children they have an armed guard against school shooters. / A guard who adores them and would die for them. / YOU! / And they can learn everything about how to be more successful than any ‘teacher’ here: university.com”
“EMERGENCY MEETING - YOU’RE A NOBODY! / LIVE IN 2 HOURS / [link to Tate’s first episode for Tate Speech, a podcast launched in March 2025]”
The use of second-person pronouns helps to establish Tate’s authority but also his confidence in the success of the platforms, regardless of the fact that the recruitment-style member levels of his platforms resemble the common pyramid scheme. In discussing the linguistic style of Reddit posts in 14 Manospheric communities, Aggarwal and Stevenson note a distinct usage of the second-person pronoun that closely resembles Tate’s. The researchers find that “This style [of Manospheric Reddit communities] is characterized by discussions of gender (female, male, use of she/he pronouns), toxic language, and the use of 2nd-person pronoun you; the latter syntactic feature perhaps captures the confrontational tone of the Manosphere”. This linguistic feature is also heavily present in Tate’s posts on X and YouTube, more public social media where he strives to attract individual users.
In analyzing Tate’s content on his Telegram account (a more private platform, where he can speak in group chats with fans) and personal website, Roberts et al. highlights that a majority of the instances where women are discussed “position[s women] primarily in reference to their relationships to the men in their lives.” In order to be a high-value woman, the researchers glean from his Telegram content, “Desirable women must take a traditional, submissive and subservient position to men, who they must ‘respect’... and in return these men must ‘care’ for ‘their’ women… and ‘protect’ them”. In the single quotation marks, the researchers are citing individual postings made by Tate that are included in full within the paper, spotlighting single keywords for clarity. Tate’s tactic of “protectionist masculinism” helps to cement his insistence on female subordination and obedience to male figures. The word ‘protect’ is also routinely used on Tate’s X account. For example, a January 2025 post on X reads:
“Misogyny protects women. /Misogynistic men dont let their women vote to bring in illgeal migrants which rape. / Misogynistic men dont believe women can protect themselves so ensure to protect them. / Misogynistic men believe theyre better at making money so allow their women to stay at home. / Seeing your woman as an equal puts her at monumental risk. / Shes yours and you protect provide and guide her because youre her boss.”
By raising concerns for women under the guise of fear (of rape, of illegal migrants, of financial security), Tate offers subordinance as a natural cure. He uses this same logic of protection to shoot down feminism. A Tate X post from December 2024 reads, “My thoughts on Afghanistan and the Taliban restricting women’s rights. Feminism is a lie and women have zero power without men,” with an attached video of him speaking more broadly about the Taliban and its rules on women. Lastly, he writes in a March 2025 X post, “The primary objective of feminism was to force most men into perma fights with their disobedient wives so that they dont have the energy to fight against evil. / If we took the energy wasted on hen peck arguments with ungrateful wives and directed it at The Matrix we could win in a week.” He calls his audience to disregard feminist women and instead aim to be with women who want to be protected. In a Telegram post, Tate says, “WOMEN can be average — become a mother. And be happy.” In Tate’s mind, motherhood is female fulfillment. At the same time, the man protects ‘his woman’ and keeps her safe and financially stable. This is all justified, and promised, through Tate’s hefty programs.
V. Misogynistic Impact on Similar Influencers
Brian Atlas is the founder of ‘whatever’, a YouTube channel that he has labelled as the “Dating Talk Podcast.” With 4.45 million subscribers, Atlas hosts a weekly stream, ranging from four to nine hours in length, where he holds a topic-less conversation with two men and a group of women, many of whom are explicit models on the site OnlyFans and are on the podcast for exposure. The thumbnails of each video include a zoomed-in shot of cleavage or women making pouts with sexual connotations, such as a tongue sticking out. While the YouTube channel shows that Atlas has to posted other content in the past (such as “Feminists for Trump Prank (ATTACKED by SJWs)” from 2021 and “Asking Guys for Sex (Social Experiment)” from 2014, with 73 million views), Dating Talk Podcast appears to be his only routinely updated series. A main topic of the show is the body count (number of people that an individual has slept with) of the women being interviewed. In episode #69, [middle guy] says, “Women are born with their value and men have to build their value.” His evidence for this claim is that women of any level of attractiveness are able to “get DMs [direct messages] from men”. Keeko, one of the models on the panel, is actively annoyed by this comment, and the pair go back and forth for a few minutes. The guests then discuss male and female dating, with both sides noting that the more average-looking individuals will always go for the more attractive perspective partner. This moment takes place almost three hours into the stream, and the tension, discomfort, and anger between the eight guests is visible. While the stream plays, fans can donate money to Atlas in real time. If the user donates above a certain amount, their comment is read on air and the conversation is paused. During this conversation, Keeko refers to herself as a “10” and a viewer donates $200 to tell Keeko to “be less narcissistic.” The show continues, with the three male hosts all voicing that they believe that feminism is harmful to modern women. Almost every time a female guest speaks, an offscreen sound machine makes a loud sound or says an automated phrase, like ‘erroneous!’. Another viewer donates, with the comment, “Looking at Keeko and the way she behaves/reacts and appears she is an actual 6 downgraded to 5. Masculinity in women is a man repellent. I can guess what her BF is like now.” Keeko, visibly uncomfortable as she looks around the room, reads the comment herself out loud. “Did we do everyone’s body count yet?” asks Sam, one of the male hosts. The group then goes around, and Keeko and Sam are the only ones who share their number. Despite saying minutes prior that women with high body counts are “gross”, Sam responds in regards to his body count, “I’ve lost count.”
The aforementioned episode of whatever has 3.4 million views, which is similar to other episodes posted on the account. Due to the immense length of the video, many shorter clips are available on Instagram Reels and TikTok. In the comments of Tate’s video “My Life as a Pimp”, the official whatever account writes, “Andrew Tate is a Positively Inspirational and Motivating Person.” The choice in capitalization spells out the word ‘PIMP.’ In a clip of a Dating Talk Podcast episode from September 2023, titled “Brian DEFENDs Andrew Tate In Heated Debate With Feminist,” an OnlyFans model on the panel talks about a past experience of going on an online video call date with Tate, where she and several other women, she says, “were fighting for Andrew Tate’s love. And this was before he was, like, our Hitler.” Atlas is visibly confused by this comparison. The model brings up a video of Tate where he proposed that all women should have their body count on their forehead. She continues, saying, “We are perfectly able to talk about how men should focus on themselves and empower themselves to be ‘kings’ and whatever the fuck without demeaning womanhood and putting all their value on their personal choices. Those things can totally be separate.” She is repeatedly cut off by the voice machine, saying ‘erroneous!’ multiple times. Although put off by the attempts to quiet her, she carries on speaking about women being seen as lower “in our current patriarchy,” then saying, “Men think there’s two extremes, I can either date a hobo or a millionaire.” Atlas repeatedly attempts to break her stride, asking how she would be able to afford a house, despite the model saying that she brings in millions of dollars a year from her OnlyFans account. Despite the title claiming that the debate is ‘heated,’ the model calmly dissects Atlas’ weak points, including his belief that there is no patriarchy.
While Atlas lacks the powerful, commanding rhetoric of Tate, his viewpoints are being referenced and defended by content creators who are not even members of the Manosphere movement. Tate has become an idol to the digital community of ‘misunderstood’ young men and boys, representing the power that a man can achieve and the glamor with which he may exude. Tate is well aware of the impact he has on male youth, as he writes in a March 2025 post on X:
“Young men idolize me because their fathers taught them nothing but to tolerate endless henpecking from their wives. / Men don’t want to be bossed around by females their entire existence. / From female teachers to wives it’s age 5-90 endless female henpecking. / I’m idolized because I teach men to simply say no and do what they want. / “I’ll leave you!” She screams. / “Ok go” we say. / This send them into a meltdown. / The system fears men not controlled by women, as it has weaponized females to destroy masculinity. / Masculinity resists enslavement, so the easiest way to make us all slaves is to destroy masculinity via weaponized femininity. / You place women in charge of society then psyop the women = job complete. Slaves. / Covid was simply women henpecking husbands over “grandma might die” and husbands complying. / Women are easy to scare and psyop via the news and Netflix. / Hence they want women in charge. / Resisting female power is ground zero for the battle against The Matrix. / The fact I teach men to have standards and stick up for themselves and ignore the noise is a primary threat to our slave masters.”
One such Tate fan has created a life for himself, gaining fame and wealth that rivals Tate’s (not including the sex crimes). In 2021, gaming livestreamer Adin Ross posted a video discussing the possibility of finding a career outside of online streaming, saying that he was feeling lost due to falling engagement. At this time, 21-year-old Ross’s content consisted of him playing video games like NBA2k, sometimes featuring celebrities like Lebron James’ son Bronny. In August 2022, Ross hosted Tate on a Twitch stream. After years of gaming, Ross’ content began to get more political, despite him claiming in earlier streams that he does not care for politics. In December, Ross, who is Jewish, had made plans to interview controversial anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West. The interview was scrapped by West, but Ross spent the month instead flying to Dubai to visit Tate, as the latter was placed on a travel ban and was unable to visit America. Ross was banned from livestream platform Twitch in 2023, and almost immediately began to post anti-trans comments on X, such as “THERE ARE ONLY 2 GENDERS.” This post has 522k likes.
Given the rise in engagement and interaction numbers following his collaboration with Tate, it could be argued that the profit incentive drove him further into befriending Tate, and continuing to post hateful content. During Tate’s short jail sentence in 2023, Ross was one of five individuals who was allowed to visit him while incarcerated, the other four being Tate’s family members. Over the span of a year, Tate had completely melded Ross, now age 24, into a personal mimicking prototype, misogynistic talking points and all. In 2023, Ross said about women who do OnlyFans, “No woman is allowed on my stream unless I get a percentage out of her.” He has also adopted Tate’s concept of high-value women, voicing his belief that a woman’s sexual history affects his perception of her, despite his own admittance that he had a “hoe phase.” Of course, these ideals were not formed overnight by hanging around one man. Ross’s decision to freely discuss racist talking points and use racial and anti-LGBTQ slurs during streams was also his own choice.
During a 2023 video when Tate and Ross collaborate in person, they have an arm-wrestling contest. Tate wins every match. Of this moment, Sarah Stöckl writes, “In Tate’s eyes, his decisive triumph stands as evidence that Ross is not ready for the challenges that ostensibly accompany the masculine existence. Deftly employing verbal, physical, and visual means to establish his superiority over Ross, Tate further underscores his supposed archetypal image as a warrior and epitome of masculine potency.” Stöckl’s paper compares modern masculinity to war, and shows that a constant rivalry is afoot between males even in minor instances. In the same vein, she argues, the Matrix is the antagonist of Tate’s existence, eating him up even when he is offline. This is also evident in his repeated posts urging the audience to “Resist The Slave Mind”. As a free thinker, one is able to see the real world. Rather, Tate’s ideal male exerts his control over others (his wife). In Tate’s construct of the perfect society, the male protects his female, and in return, she offers him obedience. In order to peddle these claims, Tate turns to pseudoscience.
VI. Corrupted Pseudoscience as a Crutch
Bujalka, Rich, and Bender argue that figures such as Tate in the Manosphere are able to maintain their success through “symbiotic cycles of ontological security and insecurity through the YouTube and social media content they produce.” One key tenet of this model, the researchers note, is the stability of the in-group and out-group within the community. The ‘us versus them’ approach is dual, however, and can be applied to the concept of the low- and high-value males as well as men and women in general. By reinforcing the gender binary through hardened terms and absolutes like ‘always’ and ‘never’, Tate presents his misogynistic viewpoints as fact.
In the same vein, Tate uses the word ‘naturally’ to hint at an innate and science-based causation for his claims. In a July 2024 X post, Tate writes, “I don't want to be labeled a misogynist, / But when you watch Females operate under extreme stress, / You realize they just aren't naturally made for it. / I'm not sexist, I'm a realist. / I fly private to guarantee my pilots are male.” When this is coupled with Tate’s representation of men as “naturally” dominant, then women being naturally weaker or more emotional than men is seen as a biological fact, which ‘proves’ that male dominance is not an act of oppression, but instead the way of the natural order. When women are viewed as “irrational, hypergamous, hardwired to pair with alpha males, and need to be dominated” through the lens of non-human mate selection in evolutionary psychology, writes Haslop et al., their previously-held sexist beliefs are excused. If linkage to a reaching scientific concept is unachievable, Stöckl writes, “when proposals and claims… are given the resemblance of scientific or academic terminology by adducing the words ‘theory’ and ‘law’.”
Gender essentialism is the theory that differences between men and women occur at the cellular level, resulting in a stark contrast in the actions and behaviors presented by each gender. Because the Manosphere only recognizes gender as a binary, the same will be the case here. Gender essentialism plays a large role in evolutionary psychology, a concept that is key in the concept of domination through the Manospheric lens. Louis Bachaud and Sarah E. Johns demonstrate how those within the manosphere corrupt comparative psychology and Darwinian principles in order to paint female sexuality as evil and cunning. For example, they highlight the application of the dual mating strategy, more commonly known as strategic pluralism, to modern-day humans. The theory posits that females (of all species, including humans) have different mindsets for looking for a mate depending on whether the relationship is desired to be long-term or short-term. If the relationship is short-term, then women will tend to choose attractiveness as their guide, but in long-term situations, women look for ‘good’ genetics. While this hypothesis has yet to be truly proven, it is used as “proof that women’s supposed fidelity and desire for monogamy is a myth” and that it shows women’s “biological drives to cheat”. The sexual behaviors of men and women are likened to the behaviors and actions of women to animals viewed in the wild. For example, within the manosphere, terms from the dynamics of a wolf pack (alpha, beta, sigma, omega) are applied to humans to denote one’s place within a hierarchy. The researchers find that this belief system is commonly adapted and intertwined with strategic pluralism, with the phrase ‘Alpha Fux, Beta Bux’ commonly appearing on the site. This means that while the beta male (the average unattractive man) gets the long-term relationship, he will inevitably get cheated on with the alpha male (the more good-looking man). In Bachaud and Johns’ findings on Reddit forum r/TheRedPill, there are references to natural selection as evidence for the cynical perception of women, with posts saying that it “eliminated the faithful females… that left modern-day man with only a huge pool of hos”. The application of evolutionary psychological terms creates a “token of authority” that okays the prejudiced opinion.
VII. Conclusion: Implications of ‘Returning to Tradition’
Tate, as well as other influencers in the Manosphere, has reiterated that, writes Haslop et al., “men are natural warriors who are always the ones sent to war”. Dominance, therefore, is an inborn trait. Enter feminism, the concept of everyone being equal and equitable regardless of gender. By establishing men and women as equals, men are then deprived of their inborn dominance. The only way through is to put women back in their place. In Tate’s view, men have become victims of feminism.
Tate’s repeated use of ‘brother’ and ‘brotherhood’ and the ‘boy’s code’ help to cut out women as a whole from the minds of the viewers, seeing them only as a reward (again, but only if they are ‘of value’). “Civilization is over because men started listening to women. / I promise you. / More than any other group you think it is. / The destruction is actually from women and their enablers,” Tate posted on April 17, 2025. The replies to the tweet encourage this mindset, with a comment from @guideforlovers, an account with 426.8k followers, saying, “Men lead with logic, women lead with emotion / I make the dumbest decisions sometimes, but I can’t help it / Men are the real leaders, always have been”. The bio of @guideforlovers reads, “Traditional values & modern dating”. Tate also frequently equips the term ‘traditional’ in his own content. On his X page, he posted, “Traditional masculinity is what is missing in today’s society” in November 2023 and “I believe in traditional masculine values, I believe it is a man’s sacred DUTY to be competent and capable of protecting and providing for his family” in February 2023.
The phrase ‘traditional values’ has become a misogynistic dogwhistle in recent years, especially in collaboration with Trump’s concept of Make America Great Again (MAGA). ‘Traditional’ women can be associated with submissiveness, domesticity, and following the established female order, whereas ‘traditional’ men bring to mind virility, physical strength, and acting as a protector and provider of the family. This is evident in the resurgence of the ‘tradwife’ on social media, a married mother who practices a “radicalized domesticity” while incorporating modern aesthetics of effortless beauty. Several scholars have argued that the re-emergence of pro-domesticity in online spaces “amplifies extant racialized and gendered discriminatory beliefs intrinsic to normative culture.”
At present, the political state of America and of Americans has unveiled many reversals of policy. It is no coincidence that ‘your body my choice’ trended on X the night that Donald Trump was announced as the next President of the United States. It is no coincidence that the 2024 election race was dubbed ‘the podcast election.’ It was no coincidence that Trump’s policies already seem to be closely aligned with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump, who referred to himself as “the fertilization president”, has recently declared a vow of “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth” is already being utilized to justify crackdowns on women’s rights. These political struggles co-exist with the lessening of moderation on social media, allowing younger audiences to view any type of harmful content — all they need to know is what exactly to search. The rise in more traditional ideologies surrounding family and gender is also at play here. Caroline Kitchener writes, “Many Christian conservatives see declining birth and marriage rates as a cultural crisis brought on by forces in politics and the media that they say belittle the traditional family, encouraging women to prioritize work over children.”
As extreme views on femininity, gender, and sexuality continue to infiltrate the American mainstream, the world faces a possible turn to hegemonic gender roles. The underlying narrative of Tate’s discourse ties masculinity to entrepreneurship and financial success. His movement defines male achievement in terms of feminist downturn, which is eerily similar to the present digital divide in America attributed to shifting extremist politics. Tate’s conception of ideologies of gender, masculinity, and politics have a global impact. For the impressionable youth, digital natives who thrive in online spaces, the age gap between the viewer and Tate may create a father-figure-like association. As one spends more time alone consuming Tate’s ever-flowing content, free from parental control, Tate offers an answer for the isolated viewer who is already feeling lost — that contemporary society is to blame. Under the guise of self-help, Andrew Tate markets the American dream of the 1950s, keeping the racism, sexism, and white supremacy, only swapping the ideal of a 9-to-5 job for cryptocurrency trading.