Do you feel like a failure?

Last a​utumn, during a particularly enervating phase of the United States presidential election, it became clear that one of the themes of the campaign was going to be men. Never mind the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the demonisation of immigrants and the plans to put thousands of them in for-profit jails, the genocide in Gaza, climate change. The Democrats, according to the polls, had lost their appeal to men. We read about the voter gender gap. We read that the disparity was greatest between divorced women (who lean heavily Democratic) and divorced men (who tend to vote Republican). We read that Black men were no longer loyal to the Democratic Party, that they were going to vote for Trump or not at all. Men, men, men: their diminished career prospects, their loneliness crisis, their suicide rates. In the final stretch of the campaign, the Democrats made a desperate attempt to appeal to them. The film director Tyler Perry gave a speech about being a self-made billionaire; Michelle Obama gave a speech about the person bleeding out in the delivery room being your wife. Kamala Harris promised to ‘protect crypto’. It didn’t work.

Donald Trump was better at pandering to the mythology of the patriarchy. Men didn’t need to listen to a lady lawyer lecturing them about how to live their lives, nor did they need a social safety net. A real man didn’t care about the minimum hourly wage or Medicaid. He was an independent agent. His windfall was always just around the corner, with the right crypto investment, the right sports bet, the right meme stock. It was the sweepstake election, with Elon Musk handing a giant cardboard cheque for a million dollars to a real estate agent called Jason who homeschools his six children in Michigan. No, it was the podcast election. We read that the left needed more podcasts, more men offering hour after hour of meandering banter that made listeners feel as if they were hanging out with the bros. ‘Whatever happened to the strong silent type?’ a friend of mine grumbled. A few months later, we learned that Democratic Party operatives had proposed a project called ‘Speaking with American Men’ to study male ‘syntax, language and content’.

Among my friends, the sort of women J.D. Vance likes to mock as miserable losers, the male loneliness crisis became a bitter joke. We discussed possible cures: becoming a Deadhead, getting into cycling, poker nights. We made approving comments when we saw straight guys doing things together, like the time a group of dads showed up at someone’s Pilates class. There were movies and TV shows about the problems of contemporary manhood, some concerned (Adolescence), some satirical (Friendship). Mark Zuckerberg, whose male-to-male transition included bulking up, putting on an XL T-shirt and a gold chain, and becoming a fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is ‘culturally neutered’ and needs more ‘masculine energy’. He has proposed AI friends as one solution.

On the dark edge of all this has been the manosphere, the network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels. The manosphere is confusing, because it’s a place where one can find both benign advice about protein consumption and ideas that have led to mass shootings. Its theories of evolutionary biology, mostly concerning what women were ‘built’ to do, are reposted on social media by people such as Musk. It’s annoying to have to take it seriously, just as it’s annoying to have to take the Taliban’s gender theories seriously. But in recent years the manosphere has forced us to pay attention through acts of extreme violence, and many of its advocates and theories have been taken up by democratically elected governments.

The men’s liberation movement emerged in the 1970s. In books like Warren Farrell’s The Liberated Man, male writers sympathetic to second-wave feminism explored the way systemic sexism affected their own wellbeing. But when feminism turned its focus towards male sexual predation and sexual harassment, some of these authors began to push back. In 1993, Farrell published The Myth of Male Power, which argued that men were in fact the victims of a culture that privileged women. As feminists tried to rewrite traditions of courtship and seduction, books such as Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists (2005) responded with a new and fundamentally hostile approach to gender relations, emphasising the need for deception and manipulation in romantic matters. The archetype of the chivalrous suitor, or the suave 1970s playboy mixing cocktails, was now replaced by the pick-up artist’s tactics of ‘negging’ and ‘peacocking’.

I was in my twenties when The Game was published. Its language and strategies were pervasive at the time. What I had been lucky enough to grow up with as a teenager – liberal ideals of gender equality which seemed to be widely shared by young people in the 1990s – was replaced in the 2000s by a palpable sexual antagonism. The sudden mass availability of video streaming, including an inundation of pornography, seemed to affect young men’s ideas about what kind of sex they should be having, and what women wanted from them. Online, new ideas about masculinity began to coalesce into what we now call the manosphere, a term that first appeared in 2009. Misogynistic language and theories about sex and gender developed in communities such as PUAHate (a site originally intended to expose pick-up artistry as a scam but which became a forum for male grievance), Sluthate, Lookism, the False Rape Society, A Voice for Men and the Men’s Rights subreddit. In 2014 Elliot Rodger, enraged that no woman had yet wanted to have sex with him, went on a killing spree in Southern California, murdering six people. Rodger left behind a 137-page document that introduced a new kind of person to the world: the involuntary celibate, or incel. Four years later, Alek Minassian drove a van down a crowded street in Toronto, killing ten people. ‘The incel rebellion has already begun,’ he wrote on Facebook shortly before the attack. ‘All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!’

Extremism and Radicalisation in the Manosphere by the American criminologist Deniese Kennedy-Kollar is an overview of the language and ideology of contemporary male supremacism. Kennedy-Kollar divides the manosphere into subgroups. Pick-up artists focus on the strategy and psychology involved in convincing a woman to have sex. Their online forums counsel men to ignore attempts at rejection, with the more extreme examples becoming guides on how to rape. Men’s rights activists seek to reclaim the legal advantages they say have been granted to women at the expense of men. Their main concerns are the treatment of men in divorce and custody battles and the sexual harassment laws they claim discriminate against the free expression of masculine sexuality. The Men Going Their Own Way movement promotes male separatism and celibacy as acts of protest. Incels, whom Kennedy-Kollar identifies as the group with the greatest propensity to violence, blame feminism and a culture of liberal sexuality for their failure to form sexual relationships. There’s also the idea of the red pill, a reference to the scene in The Matrix where Neo must choose between the blue pill, which would allow him the solace of a false reality, and the red pill, which would throw him into the pain of understanding the world as it really is. Red-pilled men, Kennedy-Kollar writes, ‘believe that they have learned the secret of the real nature of women and the true nature of male/female relationships’, knowledge that allows them to ‘flip the script’ and manipulate and dominate women.

The ideology of the manosphere as Kennedy-Kollar describes it centres on an economic theory of heterosexuality. ‘The manosphere largely defines a person according to the Sexual Market Value (SMV), or level of sexual desirability,’ she writes. ‘Alpha males and young, attractive, virginal women enjoy the highest SMV. Beta males and post-wall women have very low SMV and will generally have to settle for less appealing partners.’ (The ‘wall’ is the loss of sexual desirability women supposedly hit in their thirties.) The notion, she continues, is that

if women are allowed to choose their own mates, the majority of men will be denied sex and the opportunity to find ideal mating partners. This is because they believe that human females are instinctively drawn to mate solely with dominant, brutish, violent men, leaving most other men out of the mating game due to female sexual choice. In a patriarchal society, this female tendency is held in check by denying women the right to choose their own mate and by severely penalising female sexual expression.

There’s more. We learn about ‘misogynatomy’, pseudoscientific theories about the determinative power of oxytocin and the effect on women’s bodies of having multiple sexual partners. In incel forums, women are often referred to as ‘foids’, short for ‘female humanoids’. Foids are believed to exist in a state of false consciousness; since they don’t know their own minds, their utterances, even their most plainly stated desires, can be ignored – only men know what women really want. Male-female friendship is discouraged in the manosphere, viewed as the ‘friend zone’: a sexless purgatory to which foids consign men they don’t take seriously. ‘The ideology of the manosphere may be particularly attractive to white, heterosexual men because it appeals to and reinforces their sense of aggrieved entitlement,’ Kennedy-Kollar writes. ‘Their dissatisfaction and anger stem, ultimately, from the feeling that they are being denied something to which they are entitled, namely women and the masculine identity marker that sexual success ensures. What they feel deprived of, and what they feel so entitled to, is hegemonic masculine identity that they cannot achieve without female co-operation.’

In the last few years, the 38-year-old Anglo-American influencer Andrew Tate has emerged as the manosphere’s figurehead. A former professional kickboxer and Big Brother contestant, Tate has said that wives are the property of their husbands, rape victims are responsible for their own assault and men shouldn’t let their girlfriends go to nightclubs without them – standard stuff, along with a lot of ‘it was just a joke.’ (In one memorable tweet, Tate suggested that men who have sex with women without getting them pregnant are gay. ‘Oh my pee pee feels good this is great!’ he wrote. ‘All that feel-good pee pee sex and hardly any genetic legacy?’) In the taxonomy of the manosphere, Tate began as both a pick-up artist and a red-pill influencer. He promised to reveal the truth inaccessible to the blue-pilled masses living in what he sometimes refers to as ‘the matrix’ and at other times as ‘Clown World’. He has advertised himself as the ‘most competent person on the planet to teach you about male-female interactions’, and acquired an online following by recruiting men to courses that claimed to teach the science of seduction. He has been charged with rape and human trafficking in Romania and the UK, and has been the subject of civil lawsuits in the US and UK. (Tate has denied all the criminal charges against him; he will be extradited to the UK to face 21 charges there after his case in Romania is resolved.)

Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea’s Clown World follows the authors through the making of two documentaries, The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate and Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed the World. Tahsin, a self-described ‘mid-90s millennial Vice journalist who spent his time trawling the internet for cults and conspiracies’, first heard about Tate in 2019 from a colleague who knew of a young man who had fallen under his spell. At that point Tate was still relatively unknown, although he was already skilled at acquiring followers by generating a particular kind of internet pile-on. In 2017, he responded to a comic book artist who was raising money for his son’s operation by tweeting: ‘Do you feel like a failure that the amount you need to help your own son is less than a quarter of what I spend on one of my five cars?’ Having presented himself as an avatar of free thought, Tate then encouraged his followers to sign up for a PhD (Pimping Hoes Degree), with the promise of teaching them the secrets of the female mind (‘make them do anything you say’). A supplementary course, Webcam Dreams, told them how to turn their girlfriends into a steady source of income.

Tahsin and Shea made contact with Tate in an attempt to get him to agree to appear in their documentary. As they courted him, Tate, speaking with an accent they describe as ‘a grating mix of Luton and Chicago’, alternated between hazing and flattery, at times boasting about the documentary on social media, at other times taking a more bullying tone. Finally he agreed to let them attend a meeting in Romania of the War Room, a private network available to men who pay just under $8000 to be trained in Tate’s techniques of seduction and entrepreneurship. (The War Room is advertised on his website as ‘a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration’.)

The trip to Romania was delayed for two years by the Covid pandemic. In the meantime, Tahsin and Shea continued their research. It soon became apparent that Tate wasn’t just a grifter who liked to use shock tactics, but someone whose fortune was built on the sexual labour of women whom he exploited on webcam sites, by means of what appears to have been a mixture of coercion, manipulation and violence. The curriculum of the Pimping Hoes Degree includes strategies to attract women, have sex with them and make them fall in love with you. The next step is to convince them to start ‘camming’ (performing sex acts on a webcam), isolate them and control the passwords to their bank accounts so they can’t access the money they earn. ‘Tate’s empire is built on making men feel deficient,’ Tahsin and Shea write, ‘and then offering solutions that require buying further into the group’s ideology.’

In 2022 they finally travelled to Bucharest to meet Tate and his younger brother, Tristan, at their compound. (Tristan is thought to be Tate’s closest confidant. Romanian prosecutors have alleged that he played a key role in the recruitment of women to perform on webcam, which he denies.) ‘Women in stilettos cleaned surfaces as soon as our cameras started rolling, then disappeared when the cameras were off.’ A painting of Tristan Tate hung on the wall; a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce were parked out front. Meals were ‘black plastic boxes filled with steak and chicken’. The authors pointed out to Tate the strangeness of ‘two brothers in their mid-thirties’ living together in ‘this compound that felt like a reality-TV set’. ‘I will never live alone exclusively just with a woman,’ he replied, ‘because I think that’s where men go soft.’

Things got weirder when the authors attended the War Room seminar at a hotel in Transylvania. They were introduced to Tate lieutenants dressed in tight suits who had nicknames like Alpha Wolf and Sartorial Shooter. At workshops they learned that ‘being a good man was more important than being a good person.’ ‘For a woman to be fulfilled,’ they were told, ‘you’ll be better served in terms of your happiness if you listen to the oestrogen and oxytocin in your blood, which lead you towards feminine-based gender roles: which is nurturing, which is caring, which is listening, which is raising a family.’ Having paid $5000 for the workshop, the attendees were presented with a test: a cage fight against a professional fighter. Those who, like Shea, agreed to take part trained for three days and got pummelled. Those who didn’t spent the next few days being lectured about it: ‘their first task was to face a wall for hours, making a list of all their inadequacies, and the ways they felt they had failed as men.’

It’s not surprising that Andrew and Tristan Tate have daddy issues. Central to their mythology is their father, Emory, a professional chess player and compulsive social media poster who died of a heart attack in 2015. Tate describes his father as ‘authoritarian’, but in a good way: ‘Every single thing around you was built on the back of children getting hit when they make a mistake,’ he tells the authors. ‘The real world does the same thing.’ Clown World is strangely silent on the Tates’ mother, Eileen – we learn only that she is from Luton, and that she moved from the US back to the UK with the boys after divorcing Emory in 1997. There is also a Tate sister, Janine, whom Andrew calls a ‘dumb Bernie supporter’ in a video about why men should not be friends with their sisters.

When the journalists visited, Tate had recently launched an online Hustlers University, which for $49 a month provides access to a chatroom and ‘courses in things like e-commerce, copywriting and trading cryptocurrencies’. Much of Tate’s online success stems from his subscription services, which act as multi-level marketing schemes: social media is filled with mini Tates, producers of imitative social media posts and shock content who receive a commission for any subscribers they refer back to the original. (Tate sees traditional higher education as ‘a lie and … a scam’, telling Tahsin and Shea that people with degrees don’t have Lamborghinis.)

Who’s signing up to this? As the authors put it, Tate appeals to ‘a new global subculture of young and middle-aged men who are now ubiquitous on social media’:

They post pictures with captions like ‘wealth is a mindset.’ They live in places like Dubai and Miami, pose next to supercars (which they often don’t own), post videos of themselves buying Rolexes (or pretending to buy Rolexes) … They talk constantly about working hard to become rich, but strangely the only two methods of making wealth that seem to exist in their worlds are trading cryptocurrencies and forms of e-commerce like drop shipping (selling stuff directly from manufacturers to customers so you never had to spend money acquiring stock). Almost all of them do combat sports.

Many of Tate’s followers are adolescents, drawn by his Grand Theft Auto aesthetic of fast cars, tight suits, women in bikinis and wads of cash. One YouGov study found that 60 per cent of British boys aged between six and fifteen had heard of Tate and 23 per cent of boys between thirteen and fifteen had a positive view of him (a majority had a negative view).

As Tahsin and Shea continued to work on their documentary, they heard from two women who had accused Tate of rape; a third said she had witnessed one of the assaults. One had received text messages from Tate that said ‘I love raping you’ and ‘Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little bit.’ These three women went to the police in 2014 and 2015, but the CPS decided against going to court (a civil case is ongoing). After Tahsin and Shea started making their material public, they began to have run-ins with Tate fans: ‘they all had the exact same look and mannerisms – muscular, perfect posture, speaking in short, terse sentences as the War Room instructs, domineering body language and formal attire.’ They also heard from women who had been ensnared in camming by Tate’s followers. They were leaked logs from a Telegram chat made up of four hundred War Room members, who ‘solicited and gave advice about how to recruit, “train”, and then financially exploit future girlfriends in the online sex industry.’ One strategy is to get women to bring chocolate to a first meeting – those who obey are thought to be more susceptible to manipulation later. ‘This is how you train dogs,’ one post reads.

The reporters learned more about Iggy Semmelweis, a Tate lieutenant who operates as an online propagandist, goading and encouraging Tate’s followers, and advising them to isolate themselves from their families. His real name turns out to be Miles Gary Sonkin. His life follows the recent history of American grifts: high probability selling, neurolinguistic programming, the Rajneesh movement. ‘We’d long started to feel that the War Room resembled a cult,’ Tahsin and Shea write, ‘and given that Iggy, who seemed to be playing a central role within the organisation, had previous experience in an alleged cult, as well as an interest in mind control and hypnotism, it was starting to look as though he had created this cult intentionally.’

One of their sources, a man who lives on a diet of raw meat, raw milk and Red Bull to increase his testosterone levels and hasn’t brushed his teeth for two years, told them about his defection from the War Room. He was surprised to discover that women liked him better when he was sincere than when he tried to manipulate them. ‘You only see the cringe just once you’re outside,’ he admitted.

Tate​ has for years remained at one degree of separation from Donald Trump. He has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and posted photos of himself with Donald Trump Jr, Nigel Farage and Alex Jones. He has received a warm welcome on some of the podcasts credited with helping Trump win over young male voters. After Trump’s inauguration, Tate tweeted that ‘The Tates will be free, Trump is the president.’ Less than a month later the brothers were released from house arrest in Romania and flew to Florida. They spent a few weeks in the US, during which Tate allegedly sexually assaulted his ex-girlfriend in Los Angeles, before they returned to Romania and registered with the authorities to show compliance with the criminal investigation. The Trump administration didn’t take the credit for negotiating the Tates’ return to the US, but a Romanian official told the Financial Times that their case had been raised by Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell. Paul Ingrassia, a former member of the Tates’ legal team who has described Andrew Tate as ‘the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence’, was Trump’s nominee for the US Office of Special Counsel before being pulled over his past associations with neo-Nazis.

The Tates’ legal problems don’t seem to have affected their operations. Every few days Tate posts videos of himself on the right-wing social media platform Rumble, driving around, smoking a cigar or diving into a swimming pool. Sometimes he’s accompanied by a woman, but usually he’s just surrounded by other men, whom he insults while they act like they enjoy it. Ever attuned to the zeitgeist, he is now selling himself as the only person who knows how to keep making money after AI brings about the collapse of the labour market. ‘Everything will be controlled by the AI autocrats, the matrix will finally close the gates, this is the last analogue generation,’ he intones in a recent video animated with flames. ‘This is the last season of the human series in which people could live an analogue life.’

The anxieties Tate addresses are real, which is part of the reason his sales pitch is so effective. ‘The system is deliberately designed to oppress and keep people working jobs which barely pay their rent and everyone is semi-depressed,’ he tells Tahsin and Shea. ‘But it doesn’t matter because the elites get to do whatever they want. So, the rules are for poor people. And when you understand how to break the rules, then you can find a very easy way to become rich.’ It’s not just rules that are for simps, but manners, decorum and kindness too. Some of his power, like Trump’s, comes from his acknowledgment that traditional paths to economic and social stability are increasingly blocked off, and in ways that undermine traditional markers of masculine success. ‘We live in a world where you cannot play fair any more,’ he says.

In a recent interview in Jacobin, the anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee described the theories of the manosphere and its female counterpart, the tradwife, as ‘individual escape fantasies’ – a dream that there is some way out of material and social reality, and that the key to comfort, protection and meaning in life is deciphering the messages sent by your endocrine system. ‘It’s sad,’ Ghodsee said, ‘because there’s almost a nascent anti-capitalist impulse here being hijacked toward reactionary ends.’ The clips of young mothers with facial fillers wearing eyelet dresses and stirring with wooden spoons, the thick-necked men discussing their paleo diets and their crypto positions – even the videos of the morning dew on a banana yellow sports car – bely a desperation. If the keys to the good life have been discovered, why this incessant gabbing at the camera?

As in the early days of men’s liberation, the manosphere could have gone in another direction and rejected the idea of a gendered fate. It’s often pointed out (if not by the red-pilled) that the Wachowskis directed The Matrix as closeted trans women. Elon Musk wants to put a computer chip in your brain and to colonise Mars, yet sees no value in using technology to alter secondary sex characteristics, and is estranged from his trans daughter. That the futurists who want to break the bounds of mortality are the ones most committed to the immutability of gender says something about how useful the concept is to them. Their insistence on masculine hegemony is an insistence on order and hierarchy.

The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket and watching UFC seems to build gender solidarity. It remains unclear whether young men will do better under Trump, but at least they will feel pandered to. Tens of billions of dollars have flooded into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency this year, creating security-state jobs that are being advertised directly to men: a tweet by the Department of Homeland Security asked ‘Which way, American man?’, an apparent reference to the book Which Way Western Man? by the white nationalist William Gayley Simpson. Hungry for these breadcrumbs, men are voting in ways that hurt others, defining an increasingly narrow corridor of people who ‘deserve’ the benefits of citizenship, healthcare, a home. The embrace of politicians and celebrities who have been accused of sexual assault and mistreating women makes clear that such behaviour has few consequences. The disenfranchised men of the manosphere disdain women, and yet women continue to be asked to feel pity and concern for them. Rahm Emanuel, the longtime Democratic Party operative, wrote recently in the Washington Post that the lack of affordable housing affects men ‘with particular potency’, because, ‘like it or not, American men are still raised to believe that their role is to act as providers and protectors.’ Flatter them or they’ll turn on you.