The bathos, at odd moments, is extraordinary. “If more men walked around the house with swords, most of the world’s problems would be fixed,” says the 35-year-old influencer and ex-kickboxing champion Andrew Tate, explaining to his interviewer, Matt Shea, why he has so many swords lying around. For example, if you get home and your wife has seen something on the news about Covid and is wittering on about it, you can grab your sword and tell her: “I’m brave, I don’t need a mask! I am a commander!” Tate lives with his brother, Tristan – “I don’t have loser friends!” One of his right-hand men is called Alpha Wolf and another is the self-proclaimed “greatest hypnotist in the world”.
If you weren’t already crying, you would laugh. But the problem is that one person’s bathos is another person’s inspiration. Tate’s faith in the home-sword is only one element in the abundance of deeply violent and misogynistic attitudes that he spreads, so far unstoppably, online. His hate-filled videos have been viewed more than 11bn times and he is one of the most Googled people in the world, which has made him very rich and, within certain demographics, very famous. The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate is a Vice special report that investigates his rise and possible – in the wake of his arrest at the end of December last year – fall.
What we learn over 45 often literally punchy minutes (Shea takes part in a cage fight “test” to get closer to Tate and his inner circle) is that the market for misogyny is virtually limitless. Even if you feel you know this – perhaps because you have moved through the world as a woman for more than, say, 30 minutes – it is still quite something to be brought up against it in as pure a form as that which Tate offers his acolytes. As part of his “pimpin’ hoes” online course, he explains his technique for putting his girlfriends to work in his webcam business: “I am her everything … She has nowhere else to go.” He explains the broader mindset. “I fuck women … so I can get what I actually want. Which is not them. They are a means to an end.”
When Shea pushes him on whether his dissemination of such toxic masculinity contributes to a world unsafe for women, and his remarks about rape victims needing to bear some responsibility for being attacked, Tate reacts with a flurry of aggression, nonsense replies (webcamming has prevented more male suicides than anything else in the world, apparently) and more aggression.
Two-thirds of the programme shows Tate’s business model, roots through his noxious spew and highlights some of the grimmest lumps therein. Just as you start to worry that it is in danger of doing no more than mining the rich seam of horror this subject provides, the focus switches to some of the many women who have reported rape and personal physical and sexual abuse by him to the police. “Amelia” has follow-up texts and voicemails from him. “I love raping you,” says one. “I know what I do to you is abusive and controlling,” says another. The CPS declined to prosecute on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Shea notes that in the UK, only one out of 100 reported rapes result in a charge, “let alone a conviction”. He doesn’t say it, but most women will mentally add that reported rapes are only the tip of a soul-destroying iceberg. And so the question of where and how and why Tate finds such a ready market for his bile begins to answer itself.
There is a brief section on the women more obliquely affected by Tate’s influence: those whose boyfriends had started off “sweet, maybe a bit vulnerable” and been radicalised during the relationship; teachers worried for the impressionable boys in their classes; and, above all, the 14-year-old girl on the verge of tears about “all the horrible things” the boys in her class feel able to say to girls.
Tate is a tumour that undoubtedly needs cutting out of the sociocultural body – and let us hope his arrest for human trafficking is the beginning of that excision – but the cancer of misogyny is everywhere. He is a symptom as much as a cause of an era that is busy ignoring women’s concerns, lifting protections against them, taking away their rights (from the reversal of Roe v Wade in the US to the Taliban’s ban on female education and now contraception) and – even in supposedly civilised, democratic countries – unofficially decriminalising rape.
Tate gets 11bn views, but 11bn views gets you Andrew Tate.
• The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate aired on BBC Three and is now on iPlayer.
