Who agrees with Andrew Tate? (and four other stories)

Your five weekly reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism.

If, like me, you are running out of patience to find out how Succession is going to end, you might be trying to work out what the pay off is going to be. It has to be huge, right? My money is on the Swede getting one over on everybody else. Is that too obvious? Who’s with me? We’ll know who was right when the finale is out next week.

And now to this week’s reads…

1) The data on what Britons think about Andrew Tate

YouGov has commissioned polling on British attitudes to the TikTok-era’s emblem of toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate. The total percentage of those polled who agree with his views on women is low — 6 per cent — but the findings imply that young men are more aware of Tate and that Tate-esque opinions are more prevalent among that age group.

Some 93 per cent of men aged 18-29 who were polled had heard of Tate, compared to 68 per cent of men in general, and 63 per cent of all Britons. Meanwhile, 27 per cent of men aged 18-29 had a favourable opinion of him, compared to 12 per cent of all men, and 6 per cent of all Britons, and 35 per cent of men aged 18-29 agreed with “the sorts of things that Andrew Tate says”, compared with 14 per cent of all men, and 9 per cent of all Britons.

Where it gets more disturbing is in the data on those who say they agree with Tate’s views on women. The column furthest to the right (see below) is 18-29-year-old men, the central one is all men, and the furthest left is all Britons. Those percentages at the far right don’t necessarily correlate with total agreement on those views, but those higher percentages among younger men across the board seem worrying.

If you are looking for reassurance,

Alice Evans

says Tate does not reflect a wider trend of growing misogyny. *UPDATE: This new post from

Alice Evans

on the polling says that Tate is “far more popular than I anticipated”.*

And…for those who want to go deeper into the manosphere, @James Bloodworth has this long read in the The New Statesman, about his time in a bootcamp for alpha males. He writes:

The word that always comes to mind when I’m in this world is emasculation. They won’t say it out loud, but the men on these courses feel enfeebled in some way. Why else would you pay a guru large sums to teach you how to be a “real” man? Some feel emasculated by women’s economic independence, others feel emasculated by women’s sexual liberation; there is always a chance that a woman has had better than you.

But they also feel emasculated by post-industrial society, by the unrewarding white-collar jobs they are supposed to embrace, and by the prospect of growing fat and stale like the older men in their lives, watching sport in dive bars with another man’s name emblazoned across their backs. To young men brought up listening to Tate, this kind of existence – what he calls that of a “wage-slave brokie” (as in, someone who is broke) – is deeply emasculating, and the glossy promise of Instagram has created an appetite for something better.

2) In Mexico, a semblance of justice

Over the weekend, prosecutors in the State of Mexico announced they were withdrawing the case against a Mexican rape victim sentenced to six years for killing her perpetrator while he attacked her in 2021. She had also been ordered to pay thousands of dollars to the attacker’s family. According to the AP report:

Feminist groups, which have supported Ruiz's defense, angrily protested, saying the ruling was criminalising survivors of sexual violence while protecting perpetrators in a country with high levels of gender-based violence and femicides. Protesters in Mexico City carried signs reading “Defending my life isn't a crime."

Ruiz, an Indigenous woman and single mother, told reporters after the court's ruling that she had received death threats because of the case and that she worried for her family's safety, particularly the life of her 4-year-old son.

“This isn’t justice,” she said. “Remember I am the one who was sexually assaulted by that man, and after he died because I defended myself … because I didn’t want to die by his hands.”

3) NatCon 1

Last week, much political coverage in the UK was dominated by the three-day National Conservatism Conference, where attendees battled over the future — the soul??? — of conservatism in the West.

National Conservatism, a US import, is a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation. Number 8 on its statement of principles is “Family and Children”:

We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

And indeed, various speakers at last week’s event extolled the virtues of the family unit and urged Britain to do something about the the falling birthrate. Danny Kruger MP, for one, urged unhappy couples to stay together in service to the nation. He said:

The normative family, the mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children, is the only basis for a safe and functioning society. Marriage is not only about you, it's a public act to live for the sake of someone else.

Robert Hutton at The Critic had this sketch on Nat Con’s obsession with “getting down to business.”

4) A feminist foreign minister in Saudi Arabia

Earlier this year, Germany announced a new feminist foreign policy. The Financial Times has a report by Laura Pitel on how Annalena Baerbock, former leader of the Green Party and Germany’s foreign minister, balances feminism and pragmatism in her dealings with other leaders:

During a press conference with her Saudi counterpart last week, Baerbock praised the country’s efforts to find solutions to crises in Yemen and Sudan and hailed its “incredible potential” for partnership on renewable energy.

But she also cautioned that it was “no secret that many things still divide us” in the field of human rights — and handed the minister a copy of her 80-page handbook on feminist foreign policy.

But this anecdote was my favourite:

She also takes pleasure in goading powerful men. When the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov tried to persuade her to join him in vodka at noon during a meeting shortly before the Ukraine invasion, she ridiculed the notion that daytime drinking could be a test of toughness for someone who had given birth to two children.

5) Impatience with gender norms grows

On Lit Hub’s First Draft podcast, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has this to say about what happens as women get older:

I think a lot of times as women get older—although it would be interesting to think about if this is generation specific—but a lot of women I know, who are my age, I think, feel more actively frustrated, or less patient with some gender norms that feel like they’ve existed for our whole life. Maybe we put up with them more at one point, or, maybe the election of Donald Trump brought them to the fore in this way where we’re just kind of blunter in discussing them now.

I don’t know about you, but as I hit my forties I can definitely feel my impatience with sexism growing — as well as my disappointment that it is something we still have to reckon with.

BONUS: The play that reignited my faith in life and art | Alice Sebold and Anthony Broadwater, the man wrongly convicted of her rape | One of the 100 French women who co-signed an anti-Me Too manifesto in 2018 says Cannes is “anti-woke”