How Andrew Tate smashed the patriarchy

What happens when you stop honouring men for self-restraint

Mary Harrington

I wrote earlier this week at UnHerd about the direct line between the erosion of sociocultural guard-rails at the hands of liberal philosophy, and the antisocial posturing of masculinist ‘influencer’ Andrew Tate, recently arrested in Romania in connection with a people-trafficking investigation.

In that essay I teased out the paradox of treating Tate’s moral failure as a falling-away from liberalism, when the values he cites to justify his behaviour are really John Stuart Mill’s hyper-individualism without the harm principle. But I found Tate still on my mind having written this, for another unexamined paradox he embodies: the fact that he’s a product not of too much patriarchy, but not enough of it.

To explain, I probably need to clarify what I mean by ‘patriarchy’. For this phenomenon is so regularly and casually referenced by magazine feminism today that hostility to it is practically a consumer identity - while becoming near-meaningless as a term. There are, for example, over 15,000 listings on Etsy at present for ‘smash the patriarchy’ related merch. Tate’s performance of cartoonish hyper-masculinity, in an exaggerated key that my brilliant friend Katherine Dee dubbed ‘male-to-male transsexual’, leads many to cite him as evidence of patriarchy’s obdurate and noxious effects, or as someone ‘bringing the patriarchy back’.

But what is ‘patriarchy’? The case against this mysterious and all-pervasive ill is well-trodden: incentivising violence, hoarding resources, cramping women’s potential, fomenting generational injustice, militarism, compulsory heterosexuality, and so on. It’s often referred to as a kind of self-evident, eternal male conspiracy to subordinate women, sometimes extended to include everyone who reads or wishes to be read as feminine.

But I’ve grown steadily more convinced that the ‘patriarchy’ is better understood as what elsewhere I have called “the aggregate result of historical human efforts to balance the conflicting interests of the two sexes”. In other words, a set of complex emergent patterns with material, cultural and historical components, that arise in part due to the irreducible asymmetry of the sexes and in an attempt to navigate that asymmetry.

In this light, it’s possible to read ‘patriarchal’ phenomena as having a positive intended outcome other than the hostile one of hoarding resources, preserving male supremacy etc. For example women and children are, normatively speaking, almost always physically weaker than adult men. And many of the informal social norms that come under attack as ‘patriarchy’ - sexual self-restraint, opening doors and walking between a female partner and traffic, ‘women and children first’ in emergencies - boil down to a negotiated contract between the sexes that honours the class of humans that are normatively the strongest and most aggressive, for adopting a protective stance toward those weaker than themselves.

Viewed thus, in other words, “patriarchal” social codes are often not codes that entrench male supremacy so much as modulate untrammelled male aggression and sexuality in the interests of women and children. No doubt there are times when such codes fail resoundingly, or are actively counter-productive, but it seems clear to me that this is at least part of what ‘patriarchy’ sets out to do, at least (as Louise Perry argues) within the Christian cultural frame.

I can recall times when I’ve chafed on the receiving end of such treatment. It can feel irksome to have someone grandly do something for you that you can do perfectly well for yourself. But as I argue in Feminism Against Progress, it’s a mistake to read this as a moral change. Rather, the list of things women can do perfectly well for ourselves is considerably longer than in premodern times largely as a consequence not of moral advancements but technology.

Automation, de-industrialisation and the digital revolution mean many jobs may now be done by either sex, while in a relatively orderly society with a police force, male strength and protectiveness may come to seem obsolete. Buoyed by the tech-enabled reduction in this obvious disparity, some feminists have argued that ‘patriarchal’ social codes that incentivised men to place their objectively greater physical strength and aggression at the service of women and children merely implied that women were weaker and therefore inferior - and that these ought instead to be replaced by ‘equal’ treatment.

But in practice, as Nina Power argues, dissolving such norms has less abolished ‘patriarchy’ in the sense of eliminating male physical or sexual aggression, than it has undermined social norms that wove such traits into a web of obligation, authority, submission to authority and respected service to dependents and the wider social fabric. From this perspective, we really don’t live in a ‘patriarchy’ any more: if we did, as Power puts it, we’d see far greater honour accorded to those men ‘taking responsibility for their families and for society at large’.

As Power argues, quoting feminist scholar Juliet Flower McCannell: “what we have in the place of the patriarchy is the Regime of the Brother.” That is: an order where men and women interact as siblings, governed only by a dog-eat-dog rubric of individual competition and advantage.

It’s close, in fact, to what I’ve called ‘sexual Thatcherism’: a war of all against all, in which slight-but-persistent sexed differences are weaponised as competitive advantages in the pursuit of personal gain. And as it turns out, what this produces is what markets always produce: not utopia, or a true equality between all parties, but a cartoon version of persistent asymmetries. In the case of relations between men and women, two especially salient asymmetries between the sexes concern violence and sexuality. And abandoning patriarchy for fraternity has not just loosened the constraints on physical and sexual aggression, but done so within an envious, competitive fraternal regime largely shorn of the obligations that came with old-fashioned patriarchy: the duty to protect the weak, to submit to discipline and hierarchy, to act with honour, and to consider the past and future - that is, the duty owed to ancestors.

Andrew Tate is the Regime of the Brother, writ extra large and with the vulgarity you’d expect of a man who once declared ‘I’m too smart to read’. For his angry, alienated young male followers, he propagates a violent, kinetic, anti-intellectual presentation of manliness, where women are props, status is everything, and there is no past or future - just naked competition.

Thus, in the Regime of the Brother, there’s little honour in chastity or sexual self-discipline: just look at the way men who seek to escape porn addiction are smeared in mainstream magazines as ‘far right’. No wonder Tate is the subject of numerous allegations of rape and sexual assault. Nor is there any dividend of social status to be had, for men, from pulling their punches: no wonder one of Tate’s former cam girls reports how Tate routinely strangled the women who worked for him, simply because he could. Once, she says, he walked into the room and mused “Which one of you hoes am I going to strangle today?’. Another survivor of Tate’s porn business reports witnessing him beating girls with a belt, just for wanting a lie-in.

Nor, for the Regime of the Brother, is there anything to gain from honouring women more widely - for the rule is always “bros before hoes”. Tate has declared that he’ll never get married; in his view the job of women is to make men look good to one another, as he puts it in one TikTok video:

Men are evolutionarily hard-wired to seek status […] If you want to keep your man happy, you have to think, “How do I make my man look better to the world? How do I make him look better in front of other men? Well, if I just make him two coffees and shut the f*** up, he’s going to look like the big G.”

And unlike for an old-fashioned patriarch, there’s no point either in thinking long-term, or building either a material or familial legacy. For a patriarch, both inheritance and legacy are immensely important, and such a man would use wealth to build assets and influence with a view to passing these on to offspring. It’s an idea cheesily encapsulated by the classic adverts for high-end watch brand Patek Philippe, that depict a father-and-son duo with the slogan "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation."

Tate, though, makes a virtue of having no paternal forebear to honour, talking regularly about how his own father’s abandonment made him stronger. It’s done so, apparently, by empowering him set about replicating it: Tate has fathered multiple children - at least ten, according to Tate himself, with multiple women, but there’s little evidence that he sees paternity as implying any obligation for his offspring’s care or education.

Instead, under the Regime of the Brother, being a big spender doesn’t mean honouring ancestors or building a legacy. It means splurging on consumable symbols of macho individualism, such as cigars, supercars and private jets. Who is it for? Promotional materials for Tate’s courses are heavy on images of him shooting guns, showing off his cars, and sitting around, legs splayed, with groups of other men. And this makes sense: when the patriarchy is gone, the only group whose approval matters is the fraternity.

There are two ways of seeing ‘patriarchy’ then. There’s those persistent sex differences which we can either waste our energy trying to ‘smash’ or do our best to accommodate as constructively as possible. And then there’s the various historic forms of ‘patriarchy’ that comprises pragmatic efforts, under specific cultural conditions, to accommodate those differences as constructively as possible.

We’ve done our best to smash both. Andrew Tate is all the evidence we need that we’ve succeeded. For as well as liberating women from social and cultural norms associated with the female reproductive role, this moral and technological transformation has largely liberated men - including violent, selfish, licentious, and greedy ones - from any widely-held social obligation to assume a protective role or embrace societal responsibilities. This isn’t solely the fault of feminism, but has certainly not been hindered by the frequency with which wealthier women have told men: ‘we don’t need you any more’.

Andrew Tate occasions so much fascination and revulsion because he epitomises masculinity under the Regime of the Brother: in other words, a manhood that has smashed the patriarchy. Our challenge now is to find our way out the other side of this destruction of all norms, toward a new realism about those features of our equally dignified but irreducibly sexed human nature that we need to accommodate. Unless we can manage this, it won’t matter how loudly we all condemn Andrew Tate. We’ll still be living in his world.

Source: Reactionary Feminist