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Andrew Tate is hardly a stranger to mainstream commentary. Search Google News for his name and you get, at the time of writing, about 15,200 news articles. The self-proclaimed “misogynist influencer” has for a few years now been seen as the figurehead of the “manosphere” – a loose network of online communities, social media spaces, blogs and forums where (mostly) men gather to discuss topics related to men’s issues, from health and fitness to work, dating and men’s rights.

Many have become spaces where explicit misogynist and anti-feminist views abound and in which women – and to a lesser extent, other men – are denigrated.

Tate and his brother Tristan are currently under criminal investigation in Romania for rape and human trafficking and face similar allegations in the UK. Andrew Tate is also subject to civil claims of physical and sexual assault in the UK. The brothers flew to the US in the wake of Donald Trump taking office, after a travel ban was lifted.

The influencer has been thrust further into the limelight in the wake of Netflix’s hit show Adolescence. The four-part drama follows a British family in the aftermath of their 13 year-old boy being accused of murdering a young girl. The influence of Tate, the manosphere and “incel culture” plays a central role. The show has clocked up over 114 million views and counting, and has become Netflix’s fourth most popular English language show ever. It clearly struck a nerve.

The show has fanned the flames of existing calls for totally banning smartphone or social media use for children. The show’s writers have called for it. Teachers have called for it. Some countries, including France and the Netherlands, have already banned smartphone use in schools. Australia has gone further, totally banning social media use for under 16s.

Clearly something has gone wrong. A recent survey of 200 British teachers found that 76% of secondary school teachers and 60% of primary school teachers reported being extremely concerned about the influence of online misogyny. Other recent research has found that the more boys talk about online misogynists in a particular school, the more discrimination female teachers and female pupils within that school experience. The author of these two studies, Harriet Over, told me she has also collected data “suggesting that male pupils’ engagement with online misogyny is associated with symptoms of stress and depression among their female teachers”.

Similar trends have been observed in Australia, and judging by the reported interest in Tate’s content among Muslim-majority countries, it’s probably not confined to the West.

But is the answer as simple as restricting young people’s access to social media, smartphones, and by extension, hoping they won’t be exposed to the kinds of ideas found in the manosphere?

I spoke to Marcus Maloney, an Assistant Professor at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures who researches men and masculinities online, about Adolescence, the internet, and what we’ve got wrong about the manosphere.

Josephine Lethbridge: Netflix’s Adolescence has led to an enormous surge in concern about internet radicalisation and the manosphere. Do you welcome that?

Marcus Maloney: I actually found the response to the show – the almost exclusive focus on internet radicalisation and calls for smartphone bans and so on – quite bewildering.

From where I sit, it seems obvious that the writers were careful not to lay blame or point fingers in any particular direction when it comes to trying to understand what went wrong with this boy. The show very clearly wants the audience to think much more deeply and systemically about these issues. The online aspects are depicted as just a small part of all this: an underfunded education system, issues of family socialisation, the role that the father plays are also all central themes.

So I’m really pretty disappointed that what we’ve ended up with after a really excellent and nuanced drama is lots more hand-wringing about the evils of social media and Andrew Tate, rather than a serious discussion about the wider sociocultural factors creating a breeding ground for it.

Josephine Lethbridge: So despite spending your life researching these online misogynist spaces, you’re saying that there’s something of an overemphasis on them?

Marcus Maloney: Yes. When it comes to trying to understand the mental wellbeing of youth, there is enormous overemphasis on social media.

In my research I do deep dives into these manosphere spaces, where young men express themselves in an unvarnished way. So I have a pretty good understanding of what’s driving them there. And it precedes the misogyny they’re ultimately exposed to in these spaces.

In 2022, myself and some colleagues did some in-depth analysis of [internet forum]  4chan’s advice board. This is a longstanding and notorious breeding ground for the manosphere and the far right. What we found on that board was a lot of lost, broken young men who felt no sense of optimism for their future, very lonely, very self-hating, no friends, no girlfriends, no prospects.

Most of the time they weren’t exhibiting reactionary or anti-feminist views. They had these problems in their lives and they were trying to find people to help them make sense of them. They weren’t at this point blaming women or progressive shifts. They received all kinds of responses, and a subset of these were indoctrination-type responses.

We are living in a time of deep economic, political, environmental and social flux. Most human beings cannot live in a state of existential uncertainty without trying to find something to hold on to – something concrete and stable. In such contexts people look for not just simple but Manichean worldviews, a world defined by clear good and evil. Even if these worldviews are grim, they are simple and something to anchor to. That is appealing when everything else seems out of your control.

Josephine Lethbridge: So how does this then relate to the appeal of men like Tate?

Marcus Maloney: In another study, myself and collaborators at Monash University and Western Sydney University, Australia analysed Andrew Tate’s longer form content. This is the kind of stuff his actual fans consume. If you read the news reporting on Tate there’s this misapprehension that he’s leading with the overt misogyny and that’s his business model, that’s what he’s selling audiences. That’s because journalists will find the most sensationalist snippets, and report on them.

But the anti-feminist rhetoric is actually much more subtly woven into what he does. The main thing he’s doing is offering a self-improvement narrative around how to achieve financial success, how to be attractive. Mainly what he’s selling is a fairly banal capitalist self-improvement narrative, coupled with a bit of biological essentialism – men are like this, women like this. These are not extremist narratives. But more sparingly and subtly woven in, you do find misogynist and anti-feminist rhetoric. By the point they reach it, the audience is primed to absorb that.

So we have a very clear dynamic here. There’s a supply side issue – the anxious, precarious experience of young men – and then this figure of Tate and others like him, who says “I will teach you how to be successful and attractive,” and then leads you down a certain path.

Josephine Lethbridge: Given the powerful way that social media platforms amplify the voices of people like Tate, presumably better regulation of these platforms has a role to play in addressing this issue?

Marcus Maloney: Regulation of social media is absolutely important in ensuring the experience of being online is safe for the victims of misogynistic and more broadly hateful manosphere discourses – whether it’s girls and women, trans people and or other minority groups who come under fire.

But this sort of approach can only ever be a sort of “whack-a-mole” end-stage approach to a much deeper and wider issue.

The real hope here – and it will take a substantial long-term commitment – is in the implementation of “critical digital literacy” education – essentially giving young people the intellectual tools to understand the dubious business model of someone like Andrew Tate, broader forces of disinformation, extremism and so on. Showing kids Netflix’s Adolescence in class time, as the UK Prime Minister has suggested, just won’t cut it.

More broadly, we urgently need to look at our fractured society.

Josephine Lethbridge: So what’s the solution?

Marcus Maloney: What’s happening here is that a few people with a large reach are very skillfully misdirecting people’s frustrations with the status quo towards women, feminism, progressivism and migrants and away from a capitalist system that has left them behind.

So if there’s a solution to this it involves making young men realise how misdirected their anxieties and frustrations have become, and offering them a credible alternative.

This has to start with connecting. When it comes to young people, we simply need to listen to them.

In fact, this is a bit of a theme in Adolescence. There’s an echoing subplot to the main story, where the detective’s relationship with son is a bit strained and distanced. And this son has to point out to his dad that he has wildly misinterpreted what’s happened by not understanding the tone of an Instagram post.

There’s this sense here that adults are not adequately listening to or trying to understand young people – they are too quick to try and fix them, fix the situation.

We need to take a step back and try to learn more about the young people in our lives. And that’s not as easy as it seems. You have to enter into that honestly and genuinely and as an equal partner. It takes a degree of humility to genuinely look at them as an intellectual equal.

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news:

1. 👂 Women around the world have significantly better hearing than men, new research has found.
2. ❤️ A global study of 800 young adults from has concluded that men tend to fall in love more quickly than women, whereas women have a higher intensity of romantic love.
3. 💒 Getting married triples the risk of obesity for men, but does not affect women, a study of 2,400 people has found.

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.