[imagesource: YouTube]

Andrew Tate is precisely what is wrong with this world.

I don’t usually give space to hate, but by golly, it runs deep and ferociously in my blood when I think about this misogynistic cancer cell.

Even The Guardian notes him as a bigoted fool who blusters and rants his way through life, saying “as much about the cancerous state of our society as it does about him”.

Unfortunately, somehow, he’s become a bit of a brand, and a very specific subset of (mostly) men (mostly those of the toxic and fragile kind) enjoy his violent vitriol.

BBC Three released a short VICE special doccie (small mercies) about the  35-year-old swine, dare we refer to him as an influencer and ex-kickboxing champion, titled The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate.

“You’d laugh if you weren’t already crying”, The Guardian’s three-star review comments, 100% because of the subject and not the execution:

The bathos, at odd moments, is extraordinary. “If more men walked around the house with swords, most of the world’s problems would be fixed,” says the 35-year-old influencer and ex-kickboxing champion Andrew Tate, explaining to his interviewer, Matt Shea, why he has so many swords lying around.

For example, if you get home and your wife has seen something on the news about Covid and is wittering on about it, you can grab your sword and tell her: “I’m brave, I don’t need a mask! I am a commander!” Tate lives with his brother, Tristan – “I don’t have loser friends!” One of his right-hand men is called Alpha Wolf and another is the self-proclaimed “greatest hypnotist in the world”.

Sounds like child play until you realise that his garbage-filled videos have been viewed more than 11 billion times, making him one of the most Googled people in the world.

That has undoubtedly made him very rich, and in certain demographics, very popular, and quite threateningly, unstoppable:

When Shea pushes him on whether his dissemination of such toxic masculinity contributes to a world unsafe for women, and his remarks about rape victims needing to bear some responsibility for being attacked, Tate reacts with a flurry of aggression, nonsense replies (webcamming has prevented more male suicides than anything else in the world, apparently) and more aggression.

The takeaway is that the market for misogyny is virtually limitless, even when the spokesperson is jailed for rape and sex trafficking charges:

…many women who have reported rape and personal physical and sexual abuse by him to the police. “Amelia” has follow-up texts and voicemails from him. “I love raping you,” says one. “I know what I do to you is abusive and controlling,” says another. The CPS declined to prosecute on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

I cannot get through his “noxious spew” but then again, I am a decent human being with not just kindness and care, but mere regard for my fellow humans, especially the female kind:

He is a symptom as much as a cause of an era that is busy ignoring women’s concerns, lifting protections against them, taking away their rights (from the reversal of Roe v Wade in the US to the Taliban’s ban on female education and now contraception) and – even in supposedly civilised, democratic countries – unofficially decriminalising rape.

Tate is truly a “tumour that undoubtedly needs cutting out of the sociocultural body”.

We can only hope that his arrest is the beginning of that excision, but then again, the cancer of misogyny is rampant and seemingly incurable.

Watch The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate on BBC Three iPlayer.

[source:guardian]