How do you solve a problem like Andrew Tate (and four other stories)

Four reads on gender (in)equality and feminism to start/continue the week/year.

I am now firmly back at work, in 2023 and in grey and cold London. It’s so dark out there so early — and so late in the morning. Can we all just agree to start the day at sunrise?

But now, with the sun firmly behind the clouds, here are five reads on gender (in)equality and feminism to start/continue the week, and indeed the year.

1) How do you solve a problem like Andrew Tate?

Everyone seems to be wondering what to do about the phenomenon that is Andrew Tate and his very public misogyny. The “king of toxic masculinity” was arrested in Romania last month for allegedly running an organised crime ring that coerced women into making porn (yes, there’s a real-world consequence to misogynistic views). People have been trying to make sense of the phenomenon of the 36-year-old man who is so emblematic of the backlash against feminism and the problems with the influencer economy. Is he the outcome of a crisis of masculinity, as people like Richard Reeves have claimed, or is he in fact the final gasp of a sexism which is dying out, at least in some parts of the world, as Martha Gill writes? Gill argues that the existence of a man like Tate is not merely the result of men feeling adrift amid greater gender equality. In other countries where there is more inequality, men are arguably angrier and the backlash against feminism fiercer than in Western liberal democracies, she writes. Whichever side of this fence you fall on, it’s worth noting, too, that Tate is young, as are his many followers and fans, a reminder that a new generation is growing up exposed to sexism and hatred of women. (P.s. Kudos to Ms Magazine for trying to turn Tate into a “teachable moment”.)

2) The Taliban’s repression of women should surprise no one

It is now more than a year since the Islamic fundamentalists, well known for their record on strict gender segregation and restrictions of women’s rights, took power in Afghanistan. On KabulNow, James Snell writes that the Western reaction to the Taliban’s repression of women — banning women’s university education, banning NGO’s from employing women, among other measures — has been “remarkable” for how “out of touch it is”:

When the Taliban’s leadership writes that the vision it has for Afghanistan is derived from its view of Islam, and that its view does not allow women to drive, to have jobs, to be educated in a certain way, to go about unveiled – and to have certain civic rights – international figures ought to have listened.

They ought to have understood. This is not propaganda. It is not a lie. It is what the Taliban believes, and what it will try to put into practice now it has been given the reins of power. 

3) “Even a woman can open it”: on the forgotten women of WW2

On Lithub, the author Natasha Lester writes about “the way women were permitted to accomplish so much during WWII but were then told to give it all up—their independence, their careers, their legacies—as soon as the hostilities ended”, which is the subject of her novel The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre:

I soon stumbled upon advertisements targeted at women over the war and postwar periods. You might have seen some of the war office recruitment campaigns from the time, including the famous Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It” posters, and others exhorting women to “Be a Marine,” or with headlines stating “So Proudly We Serve.” And women did serve proudly. In those posters and advertisements, they’re depicted holding their heads high, standing tall and confident, looking as if they could do anything. Because they did do everything. They worked in factories. They took photographs on the frontlines of the war. They spied. They were imprisoned and tortured and killed by Nazis.

But as soon as the men came home, governments the world over ran propaganda campaigns encouraging women to give up their jobs. It was the start of a cultural shift that continued for decades, reflected in advertisements showing women on their knees, serving their husbands breakfast in bed beneath slogans such as, “It’s a Man’s World,” as per a particularly egregious Van Heusen necktie example. See also: an Alcoa Aluminum advertisement of a surprised woman holding a ketchup bottle. The headline reads, “Even a Woman Can Open It.” Or a cigarette billboard from 1967 that says, “Cigarettes are like women. The best ones are thin and rich.”

4) The unintended consequences of publishing your gender pay gap

This piece by Will Dunn for the New Statesman (full disclosure: the NS is my day job) has a very interesting snippet on what happens to salaries when you legislate for gender pay gap transparency:

The one major piece of pay transparency legislation the UK has enacted appears to have had a disinflationary effect. Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says that since the UK required all large businesses to report the difference in pay between male and female employees, some companies have reduced their gender pay gaps – but not by paying people more. “The way this happened was not by women getting higher pay, but rather high-paid men getting lower pay,” Xu explains. “So, taking that at face value, pay transparency is actually reducing average wages.” 

5) Illiberalism – and gender as a political battleground

As I wrote here recently, Israel has a new government and most of its members are far-right, religious and male. Noam, a religious anti-LGBT and anti-Arab faction that is part of the new governing coalition, has reportedly made blacklists of LGBT activists and criticised the influence of “radical feminists” on the army. Following this news, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper has a piece by Andrea Peto from the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Austria, about what Israelis looking on in horror at the erosion of checks and balances on power in their country can learn from the examples of Turkey, Russia and Hungary. Peto writes that gender is often a battleground in the fight against illiberalism.

AND ALSO THIS: If you haven’t listened to it yet, the If Books Could Kill podcast is wildly entertaining and wonderfully, intelligently bitchy. They have an episode on The Game: Penetrating the World of Pickup Artists, the 2005 book by Neil Strauss, in which misogyny plays a starring role (and which almost seems like an earlier (and tamer?) incarnation of the Andrew Tate phenomenon).