How Andrew Tate smashed the patriarchy
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 host...