Beyond the clickbait: Analysing the masculinist ideology in Andrew Tate’s online written discourses

There is now an expansive literature on the manosphere – the loosely connected groups of digital communities that revolve around men’s rights, aspirations and entitlements, and the perceived constraints upon these. Such studies have produced important critical insights into the collective and organized dimension of the networked harassment of women in digital settings, as well as highlighting the manosphere’s craving to reanimate regressive modes of masculinity. At this time, however, scholars have written relatively little about the manosphere’s high -profile key figures; so-called ‘manfluencers’. While ‘manfluencers’ are symptomatic, rather than a cause, of unequal gender relations, their cultural traction and their role in amplifying misogyny situates these figures as worthy of sociological investigation. In this article, we are concerned with Andrew Tate, the globe’s most prolific and most followed social media producer of masculinity-related content. Building on studies that analyse Tate’s viral video content, here we centre his written discourses, providing an empirically and theoretically driven analysis of his longer-form written content appearing on his website (16,029 words across 64 webpages) and on his Telegram messaging platform (150,288 words across 2191 posts), domains where his more committed followers access unfiltered and persistent communications. Deploying the concept of masculinism as a framework, we combine computational keyword and keyword co-occurrence analysis with a qualitative, close reading of a purposefully derived sub-sample of data. While somewhat subtler compared to his video content, our analysis exposes how Tate’s emphasis on self-help advice for boys and men and his glorifying of essentialism, gender hierarchy and individualism operates as the insidious ideological scaffolding that allows for, leads to and celebrates misogyny, and does so in ways that permits it to be taken up by young men trying to make sense of a context in which previous norms that privileged them are being challenged.