Last week, the high-profile misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, and his brother Tristan, returned to the United States after being detained on suspicion of human trafficking and other crimes in Romania in 2022. Charges remain outstanding in both Romania and Britain, and it is not fully clear what facilitated the release, but the return brings renewed focus to the emboldened hatred of women which seeps through Trump’s America and beyond.
Tate’s brand of misogyny combines the overt subjugation of women with the flaunting of excessive wealth. Together, he tells the many boys and young men who worship him, these are the only routes to male self-respect. Tate is notable not only for his astonishing success, but for the coarse, unapologetic brutality of his sexism. This is not a person slickly disguising hatred with theory or irony; he brags about beating women. Addressing men who have been accused of infidelity by their partners, he says: “Bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.” He flaunts his wealth – extravagant cars and homes – online, and this is part of the logic of his sexism. He tells the boys who follow him that “I have everything every man has ever dreamed of. I got a big mansion, I got super cars, I can live anywhere I want, I got unlimited women, I go where I want; I do anything I want all the time.” British school teachers report their students calling out his catchphrases to one another. During the trial of Kyle Clifford – the former soldier who was found guilty of murdering his former partner Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah and their mother Carol – the court heard that Clifford’s murders were fuelled by the “violent misogyny promoted” by Tate and that he had searched for his podcast less than 24 hours before the attacks. The government has said it will “crack down” on people pushing harmful beliefs “including extreme misogyny” as a result.
It is an oft-repeated maxim that Andrew Tate gained his popularity due to an absence of more appropriate male role models for working-class boys and young men. Sam Fender, a British singer-songwriter of working class origin, commented on the danger of Tate’s appeal by saying: “People are very unaware. We are very good at talking about privileges – white, male or straight privilege. We rarely talk about class, though. And that’s a lot of the reason that all the young lads are seduced by demagogues like Andrew Tate. They’re being shamed all the time and made to feel like they’re a problem. It’s this narrative being told to white boys from nowhere towns. People preach to some kid in a pit town in Durham who’s got f**k all and tell him he’s privileged? Then Tate tells him he’s worth something? It’s seductive.”
Fender is absolutely correct that class remains a shamefully misunderstood and under-discussed aspect of life in Britain. However, claiming that boys are only seduced by misogyny because of class issues and the misuse of identity politics is manifestly inaccurate. It also invokes its own form of perverse classism, despite apparently attempting to defend the working class. Working-class men are not inherently disposed to misogyny, and rich boys and men are, famously, hardly immune to it. I have seen no evidence that Tate’s fans have a statistically significant demographic sway toward being economically deprived, but even if that were specifically true of Tate’s fan base, it would not indicate that misogyny is generally born of classist sentiments directed at white working-class boys.
Misogyny can be difficult to quantify or precisely define, as it functions on both a structural and individual level. It is both a way of organising society that benefits the men who have historically ruled over it, and an expression of psychological compulsions which often seem to me both crude and highly complex. Some misogynists are so consumed by rage and hatred that they are driven to beat or kill women until stopped. Misogynists such as Tate appear to openly despise women in a blanket sense, declaring them objects without value aside from providing whatever pleasure or use men wish to make of them. Others will mawkishly valorise some women – their own mothers, or wives or daughters – relative to their ability to conform to male ideas of what an appropriate woman is, while attacking other women who reject these standards, or are unable to conform to them satisfactorily.
Why must the realities of misogyny and classism compete against one another for existential validity? If we can see, as we should, that a white working-class boy can suffer because of his class background – despite the advantages his whiteness and maleness can confer – why can’t we also see that misogyny exists on all levels of society, and that combatting it does not further the oppression of working class men? No doubt there has been ignorant, ill-advised, or just plain inaccurate messaging that has hindered the feminist cause amongst many groups. Like any movement, feminism is factional and filled with both brilliant and passionate people and opportunistic and foolish people. Women, being human – which is sort of the point – are fallible, and so of course every action taken in the name of feminism is not the right or sensitive or defensible one.
So many arguments positioning identity politics in opposition to class struggle, though, seem to me to be an easily corrected matter of semantics. This is largely due to the strange idea that advantages and disadvantages are absolute and always quantifiable or visible. That is to say, the idea that a white working class boy experiences, on the whole, more advantages in the world than, say, a wealthy female CEO who is not white, is clearly absurd. Simultaneously, this distinction does not mean a rich woman cannot experience misogynistic violence, or that a rich person who is not white will never experience racism. On the other hand, we can say that the potency and protection of pronounced financial comfort is often capable of cosseting women and racial minorities from the material worst of open misogyny and racism, but this is, if anything, simply another way to affirm for ourselves how appalling the systems of class and wealth we live under are. It should not be a way to say that women or people who aren’t white are nowadays immune to hatred, but rather a way to say that the power of capital is so great it is even capable of obfuscating the objectively and perennially powerful forces of misogyny and racism which also define and bind us.
It’s an oddly simplistic and blinkered way of considering these problems as contradictory. I loathe this idea that we must decide which is the “worst” problem, as though they are static forces and retain the same level of violence and import no matter how they are expressed, against whom, or in what guise. Misogyny is not “worse” than classism, and nor is the inverse true, but there is no reason we must consider these ways of hating one another and organising our rotten society as oppositional to one another. The erosion of one does not necessarily exacerbate the other, and nor does progress in one area indicate that similar improvement is being achieved everywhere else.
Misogyny is not, of course, a modern innovation. It was not developed in response to the recent era of “woke” discourse. Nor is it a consequence of contemporary systems of class and capital. But this is not to say that misogyny is irrelevant to classism or vice versa: they intersect in a literal way when hatred for the feminine is imbued with specific class inflection. Not incidentally, racism is also routinely justified or underwritten with class hatred. One relevant example comes to mind involving another English musician, the 1975’s Matty Healy. Healy was criticized for jokingly (or not) advertising his enjoyment of a pornography channel called “Ghetto Gaggers”, a company which trades off the grotesque convergence of racism, misogyny and classism by eroticising the degradation of women through the prism of their ethnicity and the performed class background of “ghetto” (ie, Black and working class), which neatly demonstrates how these forms of hatred are not only co-existent but also symbiotic.
All forms of social subjection, including classism, necessitate the oppression of those considered weaker, less valuable, less intelligent. The past century has been characterised by determined groups of people challenging dominant modes of power – hard-won victories for women’s autonomy would have been scarcely imaginable a handful of generations ago. Perhaps we should not be surprised that shrewd retaliators like Tate will capitalise on the confusion some – perhaps even most – men may experience in the aftermath of such a profound change, after millennia of uninterrupted supremacy.
Part of the vile discourse which has been normalised online, particularly since Donald Trump’s re-election, is the fetishisation of traditional nuclear families. This not only promotes the supremacy of the heterosexual couple, but also the traditional economic dynamic in which a woman is controlled by and dependent on a man for the very basics of her continued existence. Tate certainly believes this – the least violent of his discourse about women involves the assertion that our value lies in supporting and pleasing men, and that we should eschew independence to this end. We know from the briefest consideration of social history that abuse is facilitated by this kind of financial dependence. Deprived women, whose class positions are not invalidated by the fact of their gender, nor by whatever their race may be, are the people most exposed to brutality by the conditions now openly demanded by the likes of Tate and his disciples.
It is correct that we should consider carefully what circumstances best allow young boys and men to be radicalised. Tate’s brand of extreme misogyny and the flamboyant displays of wealth which bolster such entitlement are indeed not isolated from discussions of class. And yet, the demand to empathise with the boys and men propagating this hatred must surely be exceeded by a justified anger on behalf of the girls and women who are the actual subjects of said hatred. If anything, it is obscene that we women are not more furious and more frightened.
The right response to reactionary reprisals is not, to my mind, for us to become increasingly placatory and apologetic for the advances already made. Instead I would like us to insist, with as much force as necessary, that parity with men is not a treat benevolently bestowed upon us, nor a kindness that can now be rescinded. Rather, those gains were the result of revolutionary action inspired by the fundamental truth of our shared and equal humanity. A girl is born as fully human as a boy, just as a white boy is equal to his peer of a different race, and just as the boy born on an estate in Durham is equal to a boy born into aristocracy. Regardless of any backlash, or the ascendancy of such figures as Andrew Tate, that essential reality – and the urgent fight to realise it materially – will continue.
[See also: Close encounters with Trump]
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