Photo @cobratate
By Lily Ligeska, Features Editor
Chances are, if you’re on social media, you’ve heard of internet personality, podcaster, YouTuber, British ex-boxer Andrew Tate. And if you’ve heard about Andrew Tate, you’ve most likely heard his views on the female role in society.
“I think women belong to the man,” Tate said in an interview. “Women do certain things and men do certain things,” he said in another interview. “We live in a world now where…if I come along and say women are better with children and men are better with fighting, then I am somehow sexist when it’s clearly true.”
Tate’s definition of the role of women appears to stem from another time, but ironically, it’s 21st-century technology that is allowing the spread of misogyny and stereotypes reflecting attitudes from decades or even centuries ago. While social media has led to a huge leap forward in human communication, with feeds curated for every specific niche of person, traditional female roles are still being reinforced via the new technology.
What makes society bring Tate to the limelight? How does someone with these views of women’s roles get to be so well-known?
“He’s very controversial,” said fashion major Jonathon Hrobowski, 18. “Controversial people spread in the media, and more people probably disagree than agree with him. Hate spreads around faster than positivity.”
Negativity, gossip and disapproval are easily passed along within the teenage demographic, or more colloquially, Gen Z. With social media platforms around every corner, it’s no wonder that when something notable happens, word spreads fast.
“Once someone catches wind of something and spreads it, all their followers get that information,” 20-year-old science transfer Jenna Gustafson said.
Andrew Tate trending gives people a platform to be more openly sexist. People are still definitely sexist in 2022.”
Jonathon Hrobowski, 18
Consumer engagement influences the algorithms used by social media platforms such as TikTok. The more activity a single post achieves, the more feeds the post will be shared to.
“Those feeds are curated for the person who uses them,” said communications professor Carey Millsap-Spears, who teaches a course called LGBTQ Humanities. “So the more you interact with a certain kind of thing, the more of it you’ll see. The algorithms, like on Twitter or Instagram work [in a way] that the more you interact with something–whether positively or negatively [it] doesn’t matter–you’ll still see more of it.”
Tate debuted his fame in 2016 on a British reality show called “Big Brother,” though he was kicked off when video footage surfaced of him beating a woman with a belt. Remaining in the spotlight, the multi-millionaire created “Hustlers University,” a marketing school for young men to make money on Discord, a gaming platform.
However, his money-making skills were not what drew him to the top of everyone’s TikTok “For You” page. It was his controversial views, especially of women, that got people’s attention.
“The masculine perspective is, you must understand that life is war,” Tate said. “It’s a war for the female you want. It’s a war for the car you want. It’s a war for the money you want. It’s a war for the status. Masculine life is war. If you’re a man who doesn’t view life as war, you’re going to lose. Society’s expectations of men [are] much higher than the societal expectations of females.”
The hyper-masculine influencer has recently been banned from creating content on most social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
“If it wasn’t for TikTok, I wouldn’t have known about him,” Gustafson said. “Most of the content that includes him is women talking about him.”
Millsap-Spears explains it this way: If you think back to conversations in basic college courses like Communications 101 and 102, you learned how to incorporate purpose, audience and message in your writing. Messages are constructed to appeal to an audience’s needs and interests. For instance, commercials that run during sporting events may be geared toward young men aged 18-30, and those advertisements are different from ones created for young women.
Andrew Tate on set of Big Brother in London.
“Media enforces gender stereotypes and conformity to those stereotypes,” Millsap-Spears said.
Although most content about Tate is opposing his views, many people wonder how in 2022, women are still misrepresented.
“Andrew Tate trending gives people a platform to be more openly sexist,” Hrobowski said. “People are still definitely sexist in 2022. The idea of sexism is changing, where people are expressing freedom of speech. I won’t necessarily say sexism has gotten better, but people have been doing a better job at hiding it and being subliminal. It’s ingrained into society.”
Sociology professor Katarzyna Blahusiak explained that when she was growing up, even the chores she had to do as a kid were based on gender.
“It’s all about socialization and how every person is taught from the minute they’re born,” Blahusiak said. “Depending on what family, neighborhood, country, it goes from the little micro all the way to the macro settings.
“My feed on Facebook is mostly cooking. It’s just what I watch to take my mind off of a stressful day. I would say though, that those cooking videos are mostly made by women, for more moms and wives to watch, following this gender-specific role,” said Blahusiak.
In the 1950s we had the traditional family where women stayed home. Their job was to cook, clean and take care of kids. Today, even though females go to college and work outside the home, they still often end up working a “second shift” as the primary caregiver for their families. This “second shift” continues to follow females much more than males.
Addressing how society should progress beyond this automatic assumption women will take on this “second shift,” Blahusiak says it lies in the discussions women have with their partners.
“There are different types of lifestyles that weren’t okay in the 1950s that are totally okay now,” Blahusiak said.
Some organizations have formed to help fight the stereotypes and misogynistic attitudes spread through social media. One group, A Call to Men, says it has mobilized “hundreds of thousands of male-identified aspiring allies to women and girls around the world.”
“The messages that the media and culture bombard us with tell us that women are objects, property, and have less value than men,” A Call to Men’s “About” page explains. “Our job is to raise men’s and boys’ consciousness about their collective socialization so that they can think critically about how they might be reinforcing or passing on these harmful beliefs and so they can challenge those beliefs in other men.”
