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In Andrew Tate’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the popular influencer and masculinity guru defended himself against accusations of human trafficking that have recently dogged him in Romania. Tate is currently under house arrest for the charges of rape, sexual assault, and forming an organized criminal network to sexually exploit women. Tate and his brother Tristan are accused of luring seven women to Romania through false promises of marriage, and then forcing them by means of intimidation, surveillance, and physical and sexual violence to make inappropriate contentographic videos.
Tate’s fame as a defender of “masculinity” goes hand in hand with his excoriation of feminist ideology and its ubiquity in elite Western institutions—what he frequently refers to as “the Matrix.” Against such ideology and its ostracizing effects on men, Tate has popularized a brand of lifestyle that is attractive to young men on account of its apparent exaltation of masculine virtues like strength, discipline, and independence. According to his admirers on the right, the charges against Tate in Romania amount to an attempt to “cancel” him for his dissidence, making him into a symbol of the fight for free speech. It was ostensibly just this framing that justified his appearance on Carlson’s new Twitter-based show.
Few among those who defend Tate—including Carlson—have attempted seriously to examine the evidence supporting the charges against him. The strongest witness against Tate, it turns out, is Tate himself. In response to the Tucker interview, one Twitter user produced a video juxtaposing Tate’s defense with several other clips, in which he proudly admits that he and his brother Tristan first “got rich” as pimps running a “webcam business.” Tate boasts, “My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.” He insists that his female victims secretly enjoy his violence toward them, examples of which feature in the video. He also brags about leveraging the affection young men develop for his female performers to get them to sign over “their houses, life savings, loans, all of it to me.”
If Tate’s own words bear any truth, then the “masculinity” he preaches is little more than a cover for something deeply perverse and abusive, which no “conservatives” worthy of the name—especially not Christian conservatives—should have any business defending.
In an article for Compact on Tate’s cruel worldview, Louise Perry points out that the Christian ideal of sexual chastity was perceived as a sharp mortification to the male ego in the setting of the ancient Roman Empire. Indeed, not only in the celibate vocation of many early Christians and their monastic disciples, but also in the strict monogamous discipline of marriage, the practice of chastity was a rigorous asceticism to which the elite male class of Rome was radically unaccustomed. This is corroborated by the extensive research of Michel Foucault, in the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, where he describes Christian marriage in the early Church as an ascetic discipline nearly on par with monasticism. On this view, the very purpose of marriage was to discipline the concupiscence of the flesh that afflicts human nature as a result of Adam’s fall.
Continued below.
www.firstthings.com
Tate’s fame as a defender of “masculinity” goes hand in hand with his excoriation of feminist ideology and its ubiquity in elite Western institutions—what he frequently refers to as “the Matrix.” Against such ideology and its ostracizing effects on men, Tate has popularized a brand of lifestyle that is attractive to young men on account of its apparent exaltation of masculine virtues like strength, discipline, and independence. According to his admirers on the right, the charges against Tate in Romania amount to an attempt to “cancel” him for his dissidence, making him into a symbol of the fight for free speech. It was ostensibly just this framing that justified his appearance on Carlson’s new Twitter-based show.
Few among those who defend Tate—including Carlson—have attempted seriously to examine the evidence supporting the charges against him. The strongest witness against Tate, it turns out, is Tate himself. In response to the Tucker interview, one Twitter user produced a video juxtaposing Tate’s defense with several other clips, in which he proudly admits that he and his brother Tristan first “got rich” as pimps running a “webcam business.” Tate boasts, “My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.” He insists that his female victims secretly enjoy his violence toward them, examples of which feature in the video. He also brags about leveraging the affection young men develop for his female performers to get them to sign over “their houses, life savings, loans, all of it to me.”
If Tate’s own words bear any truth, then the “masculinity” he preaches is little more than a cover for something deeply perverse and abusive, which no “conservatives” worthy of the name—especially not Christian conservatives—should have any business defending.
In an article for Compact on Tate’s cruel worldview, Louise Perry points out that the Christian ideal of sexual chastity was perceived as a sharp mortification to the male ego in the setting of the ancient Roman Empire. Indeed, not only in the celibate vocation of many early Christians and their monastic disciples, but also in the strict monogamous discipline of marriage, the practice of chastity was a rigorous asceticism to which the elite male class of Rome was radically unaccustomed. This is corroborated by the extensive research of Michel Foucault, in the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, where he describes Christian marriage in the early Church as an ascetic discipline nearly on par with monasticism. On this view, the very purpose of marriage was to discipline the concupiscence of the flesh that afflicts human nature as a result of Adam’s fall.
Continued below.
The Pagan Asceticism of Andrew Tate | Jonathan Culbreath
There is little space in the Christian ethic for the brutish “strength” of a Tate-esque masculinity. On the contrary, Christianity requires precisely weakness.
www.firstthings.com
