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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MR. LONELY  
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Zoë Hu
February 1, 2025
Dissent Magazine [[link removed]]


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_ Some have suggested that young men are drawn to Andrew Tate because
they suffer from a dearth of social contact. Yet men go to Tate not to
alleviate loneliness but to intensify it. _

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Clown World
Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea
Mobius
ISBN: 9781529437829

When asked in 2023 what “men want in women,” the notorious
influencer, professional kickboxer, and accused human trafficker
Andrew Tate gave a predictable answer
[[link removed]]: “No one’s
going to respect the man who’s with an ultra-promiscuous woman. No
one is going to respect the man who’s with a woman who is
back-talking him or horrible to him in public. No one is going to
respect the man who’s with a woman who clearly isn’t interested in
him sexually.” What a man wants is the respect of others, which a
woman can only convey, vacantly and impersonally, the way an electrode
carries a current.

It is this inflamed, anxious kind of notion that has made Tate an
inescapable figure of the online right. In his videos and social media
posts, Tate has fueled the contemporary anti-feminist backlash by
repeating, again and again, its galloping litany of fixations: the
defense of male honor and the fear of female sexual freedom and social
censure. Andrew Tate knows his script and how to hit its most
advantageous beats.

What is striking, however, is that having made his name as an
influencer—someone who supposedly knows something about life, or at
least lifestyles—Tate can issue only the most timid and uncreative
prescriptions for heterosexual romance. According to Tate’s
statement, a successful relationship is one in which a woman refrains
from cheating on, or being mean to, her partner. It is one where she
doesn’t not want to have sex with him. This is a narcissistic,
childlike understanding of love: stripped of conflict and, like all
juvenile fantasies, either consecrated or menaced by a powerful,
imaginary audience.

In _Clown World_, a recent insider account of his malodorous career as
an alt-right celebrity, Tate is constantly performing before
audiences. He performs on TikTok, on Fox News, and for the two
journalists, Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin, who tasked themselves with
chronicling Tate’s career. Since the 2010s, Tate has pursued power
primarily through a series of online gambits, which, with the pandemic
as an accelerant, have made him a spokesperson of right-wing hate,
anti-vax conspiracies, and raw misogyny. _Clown World_ focuses on
Tate’s War Room, a costly, membership-only network of male
associates whom Tate trains to “achieve the pinnacle of masculinity
and wealth.” As the book shows, the Tate brand is rooted in the
American promise that any man can become as heartlessly successful as
Tate, so long as they follow—that is, purchase—his teachings. This
explains Tate’s popularity, as well as the danger he poses.

Tate is a man who claims he has “never met a woman who will not do
the basics of what [he says].” For him, power is a vehicle to
admiration, and admiration is at variance with intimacy. To be admired
by someone is to forever be at a distance from them, and this is where
Tate prefers his women. What men and boys learn from Tate, in other
words, is how to optimize a life bereft of love or friendship. In
_Clown World_, Tate declares that men “should never be friends”
with their sisters: “When I see a brother and sister who are really
close, it’s just weird.” Tate also maintains that he “will never
live alone exclusively just with a woman,” because “that’s where
men go soft.” Women are accessories that signal status and must be
kept out of the house. In this way they are just like sports cars,
another Tate obsession.

This blend of machismo and individualism differs greatly from a more
old-fashioned sexism in which men denigrate women yet demand their
care and companionship. Patriarchy used to position women as natural
caretakers and dependents; women were fitted into a domestic sphere in
which they played necessary if inferior roles, bartering obedience for
security. Tate’s misogyny is much simpler and much lonelier. The
fraught bliss of the shared home is missing from the aspirational
fixings of Tate’s influencer image. Women and property are viewed
simply as financial assets. There is no marriage or romance, however
false and abusive, in Tate’s world—just girlfriends who are
allowed to stay with him for “extended periods of time.”

_Clown World_ opens as a sociological effort to understand “the itch
that Andrew Tate and the War Room have been scratching in young
men.” Shea and Tahsin embed themselves in Tate’s milieu, keeping
their pointed questions to a minimum; they absorb Tate’s
self-mythologizing and meet the strange henchmen in his orbit, who go
by names like “the Money Pilot” and “Alpha Wolf.” To earn
Tate’s confidence, Shea agrees to participate in “The Test,” a
cage match that Tate has arranged with a professional MMA fighter who
“has been training for the last eight weeks . . . with the intention
of destroying whoever turns up.” (All members of the War Room have
the opportunity to take The Test if they can afford the $5,000 fee.)
Shea admits that he participates in the fight, which he loses quickly,
not just to maintain journalistic access but as a trial for his own
wayward masculinity. It seems we are in ill-fated gonzo territory: two
white-collar journalists, dallying with the kind of male savagery
they’ve left behind but find darkly compelling.

The book takes a turn, however, once Shea leaves the cage. As they
begin editing a documentary about the War Room and The Test, the two
journalists are contacted by several women who met Tate when he was
still an unknown hustler in England. Here the narrative pivots to
Tate’s robust history of crime and sexual misconduct, and the book
becomes sharper, more dogged. The women we hear from in _Clown World
_dated Tate in 2015 and 2016 and were persuaded to work for a webcam
business he owned at the time. Several were sequestered in his
apartment and forced to cam for paltry wages; Tate has since bragged
about earning “100 percent” of the profit from their sex work.

At least three of the women who knew Tate at the time have since
accused him of raping or physically assaulting them. “I don’t give
a fuck if you call the police,” Tate reportedly told one after she
locked herself in the bathroom. “I’m going to beat the shit out of
you.” Against all odds, the women still tried. They filed reports
and handed over their phones and medical records. After the police and
then the Crown Prosecution Service refused to bring their cases to
court, the women repeat their stories—devastatingly, be-latedly—to
Shea and Tahsin. _Clown World_, which documents these women’s
accounts in all their overlapping details and horrors, becomes the
kind of transparent and robust investigation that the British
authorities never completed. As Shea and Tahsin note, the same Crown
Prosecution Service that received these women’s claims was exposed
in 2019 for throwing out rape cases under the express mandate of
improving conviction rates. If the cage fight’s philosophy is one of
brute conquest—“might makes right”—_Clown World_ also shows
power in its bureaucratic but no less abominable form: organized
abandonment, violence meted out as procedure.

We can assume that this early neglect by the authorities allowed Tate
to expand his webcam business and eventually propagate it like a
bacterial strain. By 2022, Tate is promoting online courses that teach
other men how to coerce women into webcamming. His pedagogical
offerings include the PhD—Pimpin’ Hoes Degree—which directs
students to approach women as sexual conquests before turning them
into business opportunities. Find a woman, date her, and then convince
her to work for you for miserable pay—or, as Tate unceremoniously
puts it, “Inspire a girl to make money and give you the money.”
Shea and Tahsin encounter women who have never met Tate but have been
abused by his students—a circuit of perpetrators and victims that
the journalists conclude is “one of the largest grooming networks in
the world.” One woman recalls how, after her boyfriend persuaded her
to start producing OnlyFans content for him, he forbade her from
keeping “any of the money” and soon “became violent.” Another
woman describes her first time meeting a Tate adept she’d been
chatting with online: “as soon as we got to the hotel room, he like,
shoved me onto my knees and, like, started having sex with me . . . it
felt pretty horrible.”

Because Tate and his followers are so violent, and because they are so
stupid, one is tempted to liken their misogyny to a caveman’s
reflex, a primal loutishness. This would be inaccurate. The Tate ethos
is a wholly modern one, for it magnetizes sexual violence toward the
absolute aim of economic exploitation. Under Tate’s program, women
are transformed into gig workers and subjected to an imperial profit
motive. At the same time, their bodies are open to sexual and physical
torture. They are instruments of financial valorization and also mute
objects for male pleasure and domination; they are both the means and
the ends, and the man who presides over them can have his enjoyment
both ways—directly, through rape, or indirectly, through money. This
doubled harm is not inherent to sex work: the same principle motivates
the factory foreman who docks the pay of his female workers before
assaulting them in the backroom, or the likes of Harvey Weinstein, for
whom becoming a powerful producer involved becoming a sexual predator.
Man, here, is at his ideal form when he is boss and rapist, when a
woman cannot show him, in public or private, that she is a real
person.

Patriarchy teaches men to approach women as sex objects. Capitalism
teaches us that the objects surrounding us are inert and barren of any
human origin. Tate stalks the tectonic ridge where these underlying
worldviews meet: if everyone is a potential possession, sexual sadism
is not an irrational outburst but a supplement to, or workplace perk
of, business mastery. People can be made to obey edicts and whims
because they are not people at all. This fantasy of treating others
like so many movable parts motorizes many of the reactionary beliefs
whirring inside Tate’s internet, which promotes the most gimmicky
and antisocial of sales techniques. Tate’s associates include pickup
artists, who teach other men how to dupe women into sex, and
hypnotists, who insist that what they’re practicing is actually
“neurolinguistic programming.” They see themselves as experts in
the trade secrets of seduction, reducing all people to the one simple
trick that gains their total compliance. These ploys, which draw on
pop theories of human psychology, are vested with a scientific
authority whose flip side is occult charm. To cede all complication
and unpredictability to the supreme mechanics of cause-and-effect—if
I do this, she does that—is to understand science as magic, and the
world as lifeless.

On a supra-individual level, Tate’s domains—the market and the
algorithmic internet—run on this very faith in automatism. But what
works systemically is less assured on an interpersonal level. The
belief that you can force anyone to do what you want requires an
infant’s confidence in one’s own powers, which perhaps explains
why Tate’s associates are so obsessed with the fantastical icons of
boyhood—dragons, myths, and martial arts are all part of the War
Room’s imagery and rhetoric. In _Clown World_, we are introduced to
Miles Sonkin, one of the War Room’s “top generals” and the
moderator-premier of its online chats. (“He never sleeps,” we are
told. “He’s online all the time.”) Sonkin, who appears in the
War Room’s promotional videos shooting fireballs out of his hands,
started out in sales before moving onto pickup artistry. He sincerely
believes that he can rearrange the contents of people’s minds, and
that women are incorrigibly evil. His agenda is to “take over the
world.”

 

Having diversified into various services and online networks, Tate has
developed a superficially sophisticated enterprise in terms of
products and reach. That it is sophisticated does not mean that its
basic idea is not idiotic. And that it is idiotic does not mean that
it is not fearsome. Eighty years ago, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer reminded us that barbarity is not incompatible with modern
reason: in _Dialectic of Enlightenment_, they describe a social order
in which man is “in total isolation from all other human beings, who
appear . . . only in estranged forms, as enemies or allies, but always
as instruments, things.” In other words, Tate is not an amoral
aberration of society but the ultimate mutation of its runaway logic.
For him, everything—from the people he knows, to his business
prospects, to his social media channels—has been streamlined for
easy domination. “Seduction, sex & women,” Sonkin declares, are
“nothing more than tools to be utilized in order to build a man’s
wealth.” In this world, the patriarchal bourgeoisie’s last refuge
from market control—the domestic household—has been annihilated,
its content evacuated into grids of administration. The most important
thing is to “know the rules of the game.”

 

Adorno and Horkheimer argued that men came to dominate nature and, in
the process, succumbed themselves to the “total schematization of
men.” Modern man’s stratagems for control always exceed and
swallow him; thus Tate, too, is a pawn in the ordered game he has
learned. Before his arrest for human trafficking in 2022, Tate’s
empire was based less on his own webcam business than on teaching
other men how to replicate its model. His online courses promised that
wealth and strength were the outcome of methods anyone could perform.
It is a rich irony: by advertising his own masculinity as a teachable,
and thus sellable, process, Tate has lost his status as special
conqueror. He is just another participant in a system that he happens
to know better than most, but which surpasses him anyway. The master
becomes the mastered.

Having loudly and triumphantly promoted his illegal business
practices, thus leaving a public trail of evidence for the
authorities, Tate is now awaiting prosecution in Romania on charges of
trafficking and rape, as well as civil proceedings in Britain. Yet
millions of men still adore him and listen to his teachings. Shea and
Tahsin note that, according to some polling, Generation Z may be
“the most anti-feminist generation in history.” The attractiveness
of Tate’s ideology has been made clear after Donald Trump’s
reelection, which will carry into office multiple—and
oft-incompatible—streams of misogyny. While J.D. Vance crows his
allegiance to more traditional gender roles, Trump’s prospective
cabinet is replete with unabashed sexual predators
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Trump himself has toured among the same influencers and podcasters who
socialize and work with Tate. The president-elect’s new
cryptocurrency venture is being steered by Zachary Folkman, a pickup
artist who once founded a company called Date Hotter Girls LLC.

Some have suggested that young men are drawn to Tate because they
suffer from a “loneliness epidemic.” For what it’s worth, Tate
believes this too, having derided women in his videos for not
understanding the interpersonal isolation that men experience. Yet it
should be said that men go to Tate not to alleviate loneliness but to
intensify it, making it synonymous with power. They accept his premise
that life pits the strong against the weak, that social antagonism is
a universal condition. They forgo mutual recognition or vulnerability
within their relationships, which instead are stacked and arranged for
maximum value and extractive potential. It is lonely at the top. It is
lonely everywhere else.

 

What should we on the left do about these Disaffected Young Men, these
raging crypto-heads and variously pilled trolls, these misogynists
orthodox and heterodox? Whether one believes that Tate’s followers
are scammers or have themselves suffered a scam of cultish
proportions, it is difficult to forgive their hasty defection to
hatred. In the post-election debate about contemporary masculinity and
the right, some commentators have described Tate’s ideology as a
psychological, if not logical, defense for those men whose footing in
society has been shaken loose by late capitalism and feminist protest.
In short, men drift to Tate and Trump because they have been
marginalized by a changing America. They are only protecting
themselves.

 

In this light it is worth remembering that other modes of defense were
once the norm. Stuart Hall described the old working-class cultures of
Britain as xxxxxxs against exploitative bourgeois society. This
culture, with its values of cooperation, communalism, and
self-sacrifice, rose up as “a series of defenses” against a
dehumanizing economic order; its everyday solidarity “sustained men
and women through the terrors of a period of industrialization.”
Raymond Williams, too, noted that working-class solidarity was often a
“defensive attitude, the natural mentality of the long siege.”
Solidarity functioned like a street barricade—erected in protection
but with the effect of binding a community as one.

We should ask why this type of defense no longer feels relevant to
Americans, why so many men latch onto a defensive posture that
dehumanizes others, delights in brute competition, and glorifies the
will of the individual. What new defensive culture can the left muster
as an alternative? For if the left can offer men a plausible defense
against the destabilizing, isolating forces of capitalism, then men
will come closer to accepting positive programs for that system’s
overturn. Such a culture must go beyond new podcasts or samplings of
online content. Any worthwhile defense will be rooted in personal
feeling and social concourse; it will find its affirmation daily—in
institutions, in sustained relationships, in what Hall called a
“hundred shared habits.”

In _Dialectic of Enlightenment_, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote that
“with society, loneliness produces itself on a wider scale.” We
can’t say we were never warned. Today, our enemies are murkier, our
shared interests less volubly named. The challenge is massive. All we
have to start with is each other—if, indeed, we can see that far.

 

ZOË HU is a graduate student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

 

 
 

* Right wing ideology
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* toxic masculinity
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* misogyny
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* social media influencers
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