The Post-Partisan Emporium

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

Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought View fullsize The Proposal by Sir Alma Tadema, 1892 Source:  Quest One winter afternoon I was relaxing with a half-dozen fellow graduate philosophy students discussing theories of law and punishment. About an hour into the discussion, it occurred to me that some moral laws might limit pleasure and enjoyment in the short term but in the long term minimize suffering and maximize human fulfillment.   A few days ago I finished studying  Sex and Culture for the second time. It is a remarkable book summarizing a lifetime of research by Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin.[1] The 600+ page book is, in Unwin’s words, only a “summary” of his research—seven volumes would be required to lay it all out.[2] His writings suggest he was a rationalist, believing that science is our ultimate tool of inquiry (it appears he was not a religious man). As I went through what he found, I was repeatedly reminded of the thought I had as