In a rare instance of cracking down on Muslim rapists, the United Kingdom is seeking the extradition of influencer Andrew Tate from the United States. After much time allowing the alleged rapist and human trafficker to hide out on American soil, the U.S. has finally arrested him and moved forward with extradition. Tate’s saga, and the ideas and trends that made him famous, reveal the sorry state of guy-girl relations today.Sitting at over 10 million followers on X, Tate is a manosphere kingpin, influencing a subculture of men whose opposition to feminism often spills over into misogyny. Tate’s particular contribution to the community is teaching men how to make more money, many of those ways questionable. He’s a self-help guru in a long line of hucksters for sad sacks.Unsurprisingly, he isn’t a big fan of marriage. “How big of an idiot is a guy who gets married?” he asks. “The forcing of a monogamous society mitigates the true distribution curves of mating pairs,” he says.
There is an incredible irony here. By being disinterested in family life and focusing on making money, Tate and his fellow “G’s,” or gangsters, sound a lot like the feminists they despise. Specifically, the second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s.Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique launched second-wave feminism in 1963. Friedan claims the role of housewife puts women in a “comfortable concentration camp” and encourages women to instead pursue careers.Here, we have a movement popular with men that devalues family life and emphasizes work (or the “grindset” as they like to call it), and a movement popular with women that devalues family life (the “comfortable concentration camp”) and emphasizes work. The parallel is uncanny.Andrew Tate gestures, next to his brother, Tristan, outside the Bucharest Tribunal in Bucharest, Romania, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
