Thoughts on Tate

BY ANJALI GOVONI Staff Reporter

In August 2022, Andrew Tate, a new internet sensation, came to fruition. The 35-year-old former kickboxer began circulating TikTok with clips saying absurd things. “I always park in disabled bays, I’m not a bad person, but I’m a quick person, most people are slow and stupid, I’m fast,” Tate said in one video. “Give me a big fat cigar. I’m risking cancer to look like a mafia boss.” A popular quote people often associate with him is, “What color is your Bugatti?” Tate runs a website called “Hustlers University,” offering lessons on how to build a business and make money for about $50 a month. While people are pulled in by his motivational mindset, financial advice, and these entertaining clips, which some could even easily confuse as satire, Tate is also known for more controversial takes. Many opinions go in a different direction, one that demeans women and promotes toxic masculinity, or “alpha” mindsets. “Every woman that is going out with a man, she belongs to that man, that’s his woman, so if she wants to do OnlyFans then she owes him some of that money because she’s his,” Tate said. In another clip, he said, “How are women allowed to drive? How? Females can’t drive.” He made this generalization after recalling one instance where he saw a woman get into a car crash. Ideas such as these can be easily perpetuated with teenagers on social media, so I sat down with some

“I can understand why people like him. I think he appeals to like a lot of the same qualities that a lot of like, alt-right pipeline channels do which is that his audience is generally going to be teenage boys, or boys somewhere on the young adult. scale. So they’re generally feeling less educated, more alone, and probably more susceptible to his kind of rhetoric.”

“I think it’s really disrespectful and that he over-generalizes a lot of things and that his entire channel is useless like an alt-right pipeline tool.”

“I feel like if someone agrees with Andrew Tate on a majority of his takes, then I feel like they’re somewhat misogynistic, and somewhat overly masculine. But I feel like you know, just because they agree with somebody, I don’t feel like that should define them as a person.”

“I feel like [people like him], because he’s himself and he’s willing to express himself on the internet. I feel like everybody likes that. And also his takes, I feel like some people agree with them deep inside, and when he says them, that part of them surfaces.”

“I’ve seen clips[of Tate] and I see a lot of Tik Toks of people providing commentary on things. For example, I follow Drew Afualo, she’s really well known on Tik Tok for calling out misogynists and kind of bullying misogynists. And so I’ve seen a lot of her Tik Toks and tweets about Andrew Tate. So I’m definitely getting the critique side of his videos as opposed to just strictly consuming things straight from him.”

“I think he tries to promote that very traditional mindset that a man shouldn’t be emotional. A man needs to be an alpha man, a man needs to kind of be dominant to a woman and a woman should be submissive and shouldn’t be promiscuous. And a woman shouldn’t showcase any sexuality and if they do that makes them look slutty essentially. Whereas men can kind of do whatever they want and say whatever they want. Without consequence, they can be with plenty of women and that makes them more of a man. Whereas women are not given the same grace.”