Andrew Tate's arrest shows the manosphere scam is unraveling

Calling the manosphere gay is good for a cheap laugh, and making fun of Andrew Tate’s arrest ensemble is hilarious, but there is nothing funny about the manosphere or its dangerous and violent style of misogyny. Let’s stop pretending we care about the welfare of boys in America. If we did, the manosphere would already be dead.

Instead, millions of teenage boys are still turning to some of the most dishonest men on the internet for guidance about how to live. These men present themselves as spiritual mentors, over-pumped philosophers, and stalwart guardians of masculinity while selling courses, trading schemes, and personality cults built on humiliation and grievance. And of course, following the arrest and pending extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate, MAGA has been quick to defend the Tate brothers, because given our current global war on men and masculinity, they must be the victims.

For years, MAGA has insisted that America faces an existential threat from predators hiding in our schools, libraries, drag shows, and immigrant communities. "Save the children" is now such an organizing principle that holiday parties have turned into dreaded occasions where someone will undoubtedly wax on existential about how a public school is trying to force someone’s kid to identify as a cat only to be trafficked in Haiti. But when Andrew and Tristan Tate—two men facing accusations in multiple countries of rape, sex trafficking, coercion, and the exploitation of women—entered the movement's orbit, something remarkable happened. Suddenly, the movement that claimed to believe every institution was failing sex abuse victims became deeply interested in the presumption of innocence and deeply concerned about the weaponization of woke against our precious men and boys.

And what has this Frankenculture of machismo and powdered supplements gotten us as a society? A violent, erotic fixation on male hierarchy. Not women. Not ever women. Women in the manosphere are props, punishments, clickbait, hostages, scenery, or proof of concept. They are trophies to display, villains to blame, bodies to rate, or audiences to ignore. And other men are the objects of relentless surveillance. Men’s status. Men’s wealth. Men’s body fat. Men’s testosterone. Men’s jawlines. Men’s dominance. Men’s penis sizes. Men’s humiliation. Men’s approval.

But unlike victims of actual crime, the manosphere does not behave like a wounded constituency waiting to be helped. Its followers treat themselves as persecuted victims, so hellbent on placing women well below domestic pets that many women feel better dating a chatbot than falling prey to an angry-for-no-reason boy-man who is terrified of a woman’s orgasm. The Tates are not an awkward exception to MAGA's worldview. They expose what that worldview prioritizes: a culture of aggression, pseudo-masculinity, toxicity, dishonesty as a means to an end, subjugation, and rape.

It gets us men like Pete Hegseth, who has apparently decided that the United States military’s most urgent medical challenge is whether enough testosterone is coursing through the veins of its aging warriors. Under his newly announced “High-T Department of War,” service members over 30 would be screened for testosterone deficiency and offered hormone replacement therapy when medically recommended. And through some dark magic of head-turning cognitive dissonance, his Pentagon is trying to drive transgender service members out of the military in part because their hormone care supposedly represents an unacceptable medical burden.

It gets us men like Jesse Watters, who responded to Pete Hegseth's testosterone initiative by joking that women on military bases, including “women in Asia,” should “be careful” because testosterone-fueled soldiers would become “wild animals.”Faced with a conversation about male hormones, Watters’ limited mind went immediately to sexual violence. And not just against women generally, but against Asian women specifically, casually invoking a long and ugly history of American servicemen treating foreign women as disposable spoils of war.

This is where the manosphere’s endless sermon about male strength finally leads. Not to safer kids or healthier boys. It leads to a secretary of defense selling government-funded testosterone to an army of increasingly white and male service members.
Like most things in America under Trump, the manosphere is all a scam. The manosphere is what happens when heterosexuality becomes a Ponzi scheme for male insecurity. And like all good scams, it preys on something real. Loneliness, insecurity, the collapse of social trust, feeling othered—those are all real things. Underneath all the posturing and froth and bulging veins, you can see the actual product being sold. A false cure for the shame it has caused its followers to embrace and an antidote for the humiliating complexity of modern life that many young men feel unequipped to navigate.

The scam keeps working because it flatters its customers. It tells mediocre men they are not mediocre but oppressed. It tells insecure men they are not insecure but alpha. It tells lonely men they are not lonely but superior. It tells frightened men that the reason they feel alienated cannot possibly be capitalism, technology, the collapse of civic life, or the psychic damage of being raised online. But who online has been raising them? Andrew Tate has been transformed by the right into a symbol of persecuted masculinity. An innocent man supposedly targeted for refusing to apologize for being masculine. A victim of woke feminism.

Andrew Tate now faces 42 criminal charges in the United Kingdom, including seven counts of rape, three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, three counts of assault causing bodily harm, and 19 charges involving indecent images of children and extreme pornography. Multiple women allege he choked them unconscious before raping them.

Tristan Tate now faces 17 criminal charges, including two counts of rape, sexual assault, and facilitating the trafficking of women for exploitation. Prosecutors allege he repeatedly assaulted women, including choking one until she lost consciousness and whipping another with a belt. The brothers also remain under criminal prosecution in Romania on charges including human trafficking, rape, and operating an organized criminal enterprise to sexually exploit women.

It should come as no surprise that America's president has elevated these men into symbols of modern masculinity. After all, he himself was found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness

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