Andrew Tate: Why you need to know his name

and was kicked off the reality TV show, Big Brother, that the controversy surrounding him truly began.

According to The Guardian, Tate was ejected from the 2016 Big Brother competition after a video of him hitting a woman with a belt surfaced. This was followed by a second video in which Tate instructed the woman to count the number of bruises she had from him. However, both Tate and the woman involved denied any abuse had occurred.

views on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

Andrew Tate, portrayed as a “selfhelp guru” has been in international headlines for the last few months for the misogynistic comments he makes and the unbelievably large fan base he has created in the process. After being banned by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, Tate’s infamy is one that is internationally recognised and should raise many red flags.

In his twenties, Tate worked as a TV producer while training at a local kickboxing gym. Tate then pursued a professional career in the sport going on to compete on an international level. It was when Tate entered

Tate then came into the influencing world from what ABC Australia referred to as the “manosphere”. The manosphere refers to a group of websites, podcasts and forums that serve as a space for toxic masculinity and for men and boys to complain about the terrible things being done to them by women. Influencers from the manosphere sometimes gain enough traction that allows them to enter into the mainstream world of influencing - and this is what happened with Tate.

Tate’s rise into the mainstream influencing industry is largely attributed to his pyramid scheme-like Hustlers University. According to The Guardian, it was advertised as providing lessons in crypto investing and drop shipping. Among this, Tate also introduced an affiliate marketing scheme which encouraged the members of Hustlers University to post videos of Tate voicing some of his most controversial

According to BBC, some of these controversial views include the belief that as a realist you have to be sexist as that is the reality, that women are intrinsically lazy, that there is no such thing as an independent female and that if a man is responsible for a woman, then he must have some level of authority over her for her to obey him.

Tate targeted mainly young males by saying outlandish comments such as “rape victims must bear responsibility for their attacks” and that “women belong in the home, can’t drive and are a man’s property.”

So, why is it important that we talk about Tate’s rise to fame and ultimate fall? Well, to begin with Tate’s rapid rise to fame pointed out many of the dangerous flaws in some social media platforms. The Guardian pointed out that despite copycat accounts and misogyny being banned on TikTok, the platform did nothing at first to prevent the spread of Tate’s videos. It took other social media platforms banning Tate and public outrage about Tate’s extremely misogynistic content before TikTok made the move to ban all the accounts posting his content. This proved that TikTok, like many other social media platforms, is open to manipulation from bad actors, something which is extremely dangerous for a platform used by so many young people who are easily influenced.

ABC Australia goes on to stipulate that Tate’s rise to fame shows a fundamental issue in today’s society; that men and boys seem to have an insecurity surrounding the sense that women are doing better than them. Tate played into this insecurity to achieve his success and will have probably encouraged many others to do the same in the future.

Tate and his brother have since moved to Romania with his reasoning for the move being partially due to the ability to escape rape charges more easily. In a statement, in which Tate explains this decision, he says that he is not a rapist but rather that he likes the idea of being free and able to do what he wants. In April, Tate’s Romanian mansion was raided by the Romanian authorities on a tip-off that an American woman was being held against her will. This investigation, according to The Guardian, is still ongoing and has been expanded to include both human trafficking and rape allegations.

With approximately 127 000 members of Hustlers University paying £39 a month, Tate made a fortune off of encouraging this misogynistic lifestyle before shutting down the university after being banned from almost all social media platforms. Tate’s extreme misogyny and rapid rise to fame shows just how easy it is to radicalise men and boys to commit harm online something that the feminist movement has been working decades to reverse.