Content warning: Descriptions of sexually offensive or insensitive language
A few months ago, I saw a video on Instagram of a student in a nondescript high school. The student, responding to some unidentified incident, was defying his teacher, referring to himself as the “alpha” and rejecting the teacher’s authoritative ability to punish him. The video’s caption made reference to Andrew Tate, a prominent online figure and self-proclaimed misogynist who frequently encourages followers to live a life of financial extravagance through the lens of male supremacy. While I don’t know if the student was familiar with Andrew Tate, his reference to the “alpha” mindset – an ideal adopted by Tate and others in the online manosphere, a loose group of online “alpha male” influencers – betrays his indoctrination by an online ideology which elevates male promiscuity at the expense of female sexuality.
The absurdity of this video may either overshadow or shed light on the fact that the online space has secretly radicalized portions of today’s young men into misogynistic ideology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok users began to see a rise in “alpha male” podcasts, a genre of media where one or two men espouse misogynistic rhetoric into a microphone. Aided by the algorithm, videos of Tate and other “alpha males” overtook users’ feeds, specifically targeting young men in a manner not seen since the YouTube alt-right pipeline. Today, such content created by the manosphere persists on TikTok and has found new life in YouTube shorts.
The overarching theme of this content, outside of an agreed-upon hatred for women, is sex. When “alpha male” podcast hosts bring on guests, they often pay scantily clad women, some of them OnlyFan models, intended to be representative of the entire gender. The hosts ask about body counts, complain about female sexuality and argue that they should have their pick of women for being “high value” men. Even when the topic at hand isn’t related to sex at all, their schtick requires them to shift the conversation back toward it. In a conversation about Robin Williams’ suicide and the effects of depression, Tate opened his dialogue with a question. “(Robin Williams) could be banging 19 year olds the rest of his life,” Tate said. “How can he possibly kill himself?”
In some of my first encounters with “alpha male” influencers, through the protective lens of critical YouTube video essays, I remember one clip standing out to me. It was a man in his late 20s confidently telling his co-hosts and a group of female guests that the average college woman has sex with 25 to 50 men every semester. I laughed at that absurd claim, which would assume most college women have sex with around three different people every week. This conclusion, drawn from a man’s uninformed perception of what women in their late teens and early twenties are doing, ends up as a kind of brain rot for its proponents, preventing them from thinking about women outside of the confines of sex. These influencers present themselves as so offensive and out of touch with reality that it’s easy to laugh them off. What’s not easy to laugh off, however, is the effect they have on young men who don’t know any better, such as the middle school boys who scroll on TikTok and the male high schoolers trying to find the reason as to why their female peers aren’t giving them attention.
To investigate how Tate and other influencers in the manosphere are affecting male youth, I spoke with a high school teacher. The teacher, who has been granted anonymity to protect his job, will be referred to as Jason in the rest of this article. In our interview, Jason said he first came face-to-face with Tate and the manosphere through slang used by his male students.
“The first time I’ve heard kids reference stuff from (Tate’s) social media personality, (a) kid asked another kid, ‘are you a simp’ or ‘are you an alpha or beta?’ ” Jason said. “At first I was like, what the hell is wrong with you guys? But it only took three minutes of research to know what the hell they were talking about.”
Jason expressed a concern for how this rhetoric impacts his students and younger generations at large. He stressed that it’s disturbing to see the influence of Tate and other misogynistic creators on these students, especially due to the influential careers they might one day possess.
Although it’s difficult to speculate, the fact that young people are having less sex in general could be a potential explanation for the rise in this kind of misogynistic rhetoric and violence. A study by Indiana University concluded that nearly one in three young men have not had sex in the past year. On our own campus, according to the the Statement’s 2023 Sex Survey, 38.4% of men report not having had sex this semester, consistent with national studies. Although this lack of sex is probably explained by cultural shifts, it can’t be assumed that it is wholly wanted or welcomed by young men. Speaking about the Indiana study, co-author Peter Ueda, a researcher with Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, raised concern over how this decrease emotionally affects males.
“A key question is, to what extent is sexual inactivity associated with dissatisfaction?” Ueda said. “While being sexually inactive is a choice for some individuals, it could be a source of distress for others.”
Tate and other manosphere influencers offer the solution to these sex-lacking young men, promising fame and wealth through their advice and online courses. At the same time, they entrap their listeners into an echo chamber, repeating their presuppositions about women and encouraging them not to go to therapy, but to become the “chads” of the society that they feel has oppressed them.
The end reward is not fame, wealth or an ideal body – it’s sex and women, the two things insecure young men feel as though they’re lacking in life. In an appearance on the Full Send podcast, which has hosted figures such as Donald Trump, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, Tate discussed the use of women as a status symbol, arguing that he’d be the richest man at any party if he had two women accompanying him instead of one.
“Women are the true currency of ballers. Fuck money, it’s women,” Tate said. “If I go to the Bugatti dinner, everyone there is rich … who cares. But who’s sitting there with two wives, me … I could be the poorest man in the room, but I’m the guy they want to talk to. So women are the true currency of international ballers. So you need to be able to pull hotties out your ass just for fucking status.”
As someone who’s only had mature relationships and has friends who are almost all women, this rhetoric not only disgusts me, but scares me. The misogynistic concept of women being symbols of status or only being good for sexual satisfaction is nothing new. The popular idea of classic post-war misogyny consists of middle-to-upper class men flashing their wives at work functions. Pick-up artists, who similarly promised young men the secrets to getting women, have thrived for nearly 50 years. But Tate, appearing on podcasts and selling a subscription service on how to pull women, represents the commodification of objectifying women. There are countless influencers in the manosphere, spouting similar rhetoric, influencing the same young men, all for the pursuit of the money in the industry of online misogyny.
When Tate appears on the same podcast as such right wing figures like Trump, Shapiro and Owens, he introduces his listeners to a wider world of extremist ideologies. Tate and other influencers personally praise Trump and Putin as resisting a global conspiracy of shadow figures who secretly run the government, a centuries old anti-semitic trope. In an episode of the Pomp Podcast, Tate explained:
“I think Trump mattered, because he was the last bastion of resistance to the shadow figures who truly run the world,” Tate said. “I think now, from here on out, whoever (the president is) is (president) because he has people above him who he complies with. Putin said himself that the president has people above him telling him what to do. Trump was the first guy saying ‘I want to do this,’ and they just attacked him with their propaganda machine. On top of that, they still rigged (the 2020 election).”
I personally believe and hope that most young people are responsible, educated and mature, recognizing Tate’s dangerous rhetoric for what it truly is. Unfortunately, this majority may not be vocal enough. Jason said his main concern is that a small group of young men will be influenced to demonstrate Tate’s dangerous ideology while most people stand by and watch.
“With this manosphere … you’re turning people into being more confrontational, not accepting, more into an absolutist,” Jason said. “Everything is black and white, either or. If that kind of mentality sets in on a good group of kids, it can’t lead to good things.”
Already, Jason said he’s seeing high school students simply ignore or reject the authority of female teachers in school. Primed by an ideology viewing men as dominant and women as rightfully subservient, though also rebellious and promiscuous, a younger generation is becoming eroded by an old, familiar evil. As these students become adults and interact with female peers and women in the workforce, will they treat them as equals, or view them with archaic, presumptive judgments about their sexuality?
As much as I wish I could offer a perfect solution, I don’t think there is one. The commodification of misogynistic ideologies hasn’t occurred in a vacuum; it directly ties to the rise in the acceptance and dispersal of other ideologies targeting queer people, racial and religious minorities and anyone deemed as inferior under the “alpha male” mindset. The fact that these figures — Tate and those he inspires — work primarily on the Internet, hides their rhetoric from older generations who aren’t chronically online.
However, that also makes a possible solution relatively easy to implement. It doesn’t require government intervention or vast systemic changes, but a mobilization of the country’s adults to regulate young men’s internet usage. Not only do we need parents tracking their children’s search history, but responsible men stepping in as role models in place of these online figures. Teachers need to target the use of Tate’s rhetoric in schools, and siblings need to look out for their younger ones. We, as a society, need to discuss sex and relationships in a way which impresses healthy and secure mindsets on teenagers. We cannot ignore the influential relationship between the internet and our country’s youth, especially given the current existential battle for young men’s minds.
Statement Contributor Joshua Nicholson can be reached at joshuni@umich.edu.