70 years ago a guy could graduate high school, get a job that allowed him to buy a car, buy a home and support a family, including college for his kids. They were too busy living a decent life. Then Reagan and the Republicans came to power.
Now, thanks to the vast economic disparity, guys have a very bleak future that makes them easy targets for hate-blaming almost any group of people except the rich who are responsible for their miserable lives.

Life is hard and confusing. Many people are frustrated with the way that the social landscape has changed: relationships, jobs, and economic prospects have all shifted for the worse in developed countries. Young people are the most affected. Every time this happens, a con artist comes along and starts offering easy answers. Sometimes it’s a politician, sometimes it’s a religious leader. Nowadays, it’s often an influencer.

Tate tells men, “it’s not your fault that your life sucks,” and he is right (to a point). After all, people who don’t own houses can’t be blamed for the state of the housing market, right? So who is to blame? According to Trump, it’s brown people. According to RFK Jr., it’s vaccines or food colouring or some shit. According to Tate, it’s women. He tells young men that feminism is surely the reason they are unhappy: the Woke Left is trying to emasculate you! Be an alpha! Follow my simple formula for abusing women and accumulating money and your problems will go away.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. This is not a truth that all people can accept. We can fix some of the problems that we are facing, but it will take time, effort, and cooperation. In the meantime, many men are comforted by Tate’s message: women are the reason you are unhappy, and everything can be fixed by returning them to bondage! If you are very young (or just a little stunted), this message is much more palatable than the admittedly challenging option of actually fixing things.

Hasn’t this always been the case? Men flocking to an idolized image of masculinity with a sense of superiority over women?

Lack of father figures mixed with a regressive world that is admittedly going to shit, whereas millennials and genx were raised thinking they’d be something, with teen angst and rebellion also in the mix. Don’t forget a heaping-helping of Hollywood and mainstream media taking a focus entirely away from men in the last 20 years and replacing it with nothing. Fill in the voids with some toxic masculinity influencers and shake vigorously…

And there you have it, a misogynist that blames everyone else for their problems, with a good chunk of those problems actually being valid.

Lots of stuff. One has to do with modern feminism that has attempted to redefine the female gender role to become more independent and to adopt some traits that were traditionally masculine. This leaves some men clueless in their own identity, as traditional gender roles are a crutch for both women and men to kinda know their place in society. Now women refuse to fit their traditional role, so men have to redefine themselves too instead of relying on how it’s been done in previous generations.

This cluelessness is frustrating and we’ve seen it pop up in different ways in the last decades. However with a more modern image of a woman manifesting, teens who have to figure out anyway who they are in society are affected more, especially young boys who are welcomed to society with no clear “default instructions” because the old gender role is demonized by a society that has largely accepted the new gender role for women, but is still clueless what men are.

Men may be the provider, but women now must be able to work too. Men could be more emotional and may take caregiver jobs, but women are considered better at them anyway and men are not trusted with kids or not taken seriously as caregivers. This is also not easy on women who now have children and need to care about a career. No wonder we have fewer children. And this also gets confusing for young men who go on dates, when they still need to pay for the bill at dates, their income still plays a role, even though women may make a lot of money (or even more than them) too now.

I hope this doesn’t read as a rant, because I see feminism as a positive development even though I acknowledge the new challenges it provides.

Based on this background young, impressionable boys are sucked in by social media algorithms and confronted with the frustration and backlash of these men like Tate, that promote a return to the old gender roles. Many things he says could be something they said to your great granddad. Social media also leads to content and community bubbles, which are harder to penetrate for alternative ideas, so once you are “red pilled” you won’t get off your track.

Additionally social media is not just content, it also publicizes and quantifies your social status and connections with followers and likes. Social status is hugely important for teens who are looking for their place in society. Even when you move, you don’t have a chance to try again with a new group of mates: you still have your account and your status follows you everywhere. This increases the stakes and leads to more extreme behaviors.

I think that’s all the reasons I can think off. Sorry it’s so long.

https://youtu.be/AV59O9H7-KM

This video by Jimmy The Giant explains it better than I can in words.

Kids are being exposed early to social media, the boys watch “stuff for men” and learn “how a man should be”. With that and the help of algorithms, what other out come could someone expect?

One teacher said she’d had 10-year-old boys “refuse to speak to [her]…because [she is] a woman”

Does this come from Tate? This could also be a child from a family with partiarchal values. Tate is not the only source of influence. But one incident shouldn’t be part of an article because it is an exception.

What is the general reason for social development? The elite is creating the cirucumstances for change. Why? Divide and conquer.

On an individual level, masculinity makes sense because going to the gym and being confident makes life much more simple than trying to feel compassion with everybody. For boys, masculinity is the common denominator among all cultures. So in a multicultural society, that’s what is going to be established as the fused culture of the next generation.

Girls have the same problems, but their answer, being pretty and doing makeup, doesn’t cause trouble and is thus ignored.

To change this, new forms of education must be developed because math and geography don’t teach the necessary skills to deal with this complex world.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’d abstract it to “losers in a shameless culture”.

Generally our society would have time to correct itself and face saving would be important enough to contain the losers in their own circles. However the current western culture is completely shameless and incredibly fast meaning that being a loser is kinda ok and easily justifiable. This leads to a bunch of losers getting together and cognitive dissonance themselves into some sort of dumb pointless ideology that’s wouldn’t be sustainable otherwise. Add money into the mix and you’ve got yourself real growth.

I lived in Japan for a while and still come back there every now and then and its such a good illustration of this concept. It’s an extreme face saving culture. So you have this Tate-like world of Japanese incels hiding under internet anonymity but if you are not Japanese you will never see this because the losers are contained as they’d never dare to display themselves in public.

That being said, I’m quite optimistic and I think cancel culture and western face will come back from the current slump and restore some balance eventually.

I could be wrong but I think it’s the end result of hyper-competitive free market capitalism and social media algorithms that boost outrage content. The rise of neoliberalism and globalization in the 90s led to a rise in high-paying executive positions in the corporate world. Just one problem: there’s only a finite amount of those positions to go around. This creates a environment of competition and many don’t make the cut. Business education is expensive and connections are hard to come by. This left many talented men unable to get not even decent paying, let alone high-paying, jobs that would allow them to advance in life.

The rise of mainstream social media platforms in the 2010s also gave a voice to misogynistic and reactionary content. Men who wouldn’t have been exposed to such content otherwise were now inundated with creators telling them (falsely) that the world was against them. At first, it wasn’t much of a problem. Take fitness Youtube for example. It was mostly educational content about things like growing a certain muscle group and increasing one’s 1RPM. Think of guys like Scooby1961 and Scott Herman. Rarely was there outrage content associated with fitness content. Guys like the Hodge Twins and the more overtly right-wing Golden One were the rare exemptions. Little did we know that the rare exemptions would be the progenitors of the ‘manosphere’ (i hate that term). Sometime during the late 2010s and early 2020s (I forget we’re halfway into the decade), ‘gym bro’ content merged with reactionary content. This meant that any guy who was looking for content to help them with their physical health and physique were suddenly recommend videos by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. Couple this with my previous paragraph, a decrease in critical thinking skills and media literacy and you have a perfect (shit-)storm.

There were also two smaller factors: Gamergate and increased mobility of women in Western, liberal democracies.

I’m not to rehash the entire history of Gamergate here but, needless to say, it brought out a lot of ugly characters. Carl Benjamin, Rageaholic and Thunderf00t being prime example. Bogus yet widely believed conspiracy theories like Cultural Marxism were touted as being responsible for all of society’s ills.

As for women’s increased mobility, this actually predates the internet. Women were taking birth control, pursing education and careers, having more causal sex and thus were less focused on domestic affairs and institutions like the church or the mosque. But with the rise of misogynistic/sexist and anti-feminist voices online, women’s freedoms were caught in the crosshairs.

Ultimately, you have to remember that Andrew Tate and his ilk insert themselves into otherwise innocuous content (gaming, fitness, self-improvement, etc.) and exploit a volatile time in our shared history. They want to create an environment of discontent. They want us direct our anger and disillusionment to the wrong target. Whether they’re true believers of their own output and simply grifting, I don’t know but it’s had devastating consequences.

I can’t help but feel that the amount of people following the likes of Tate did not change much, they just got an opportunity to get more vocal, being less afraid of a pushback.

They are a now vocal minority, similar to how there was a rise in Neo-Nazi speech, for example.

Because it’s all too easy to abdicate responsibility, let other people look after you and be a shit. If we empower any sort of crappy behaviour, that behaviour grows.

Insecurity exacerbated by the rise of social media. It’s really easy for impressionable teens (not just them, but they are the most vulnerable group) to be affected directly by the consequences of social media. Toxic masculinity allows them to fall into the andrew tate trap because it tells them that this is the easy solution to the insecurities they face. I’d argue covid also made this problem worse as well

The Innuendo Studios series’ on YouTube Alt-Right Playbook and Why Are You So Angry especially illustrate this well and I highly recommend watching. It’s very similar to what happened during gamergate. A lot of men who are frustrated are misled by these reactionary campaigns. Just like everyone else, they face the struggles of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, capitalism, etc. But Andrew Tate tells them it’s not their fault, and reassures their insecurities that they’re good guys, and tells them that the problem is women.

Who else is talking to them?