Trigger Warning: Contains mentions of sexual assault

If you are on social media you definitely must have come across a misogynistic public star named Andrew Tate. Over the course of the last few months, his audience grew along with a fan base of generally teenage boys. But his impact has promoted an outdated insufferable patriarchy amongst gen z.

If we know one thing about this generation is that social media plays an immense role in all of our lives. According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, teenagers nowadays spend anywhere between four to nine hours on their phones. Much of it is spent on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and more. 

Although social media first began as an entertaining distraction from reality, many teenagers have found a safe haven in scrolling through social media for advice, company, and comfort. 

But we all fail to see how much our opinions, actions, and thoughts are products of what social media and its influencers tell us to think or feel. One reason for this being group pressure and conformity– adjusting our behavior or thinking to a group standard. When conformity was researched by scientist Solomon Asch in 1955, he found that many students had severe discomfort in having differing responses from others. This was back before social media existed, so now that we have multiple platforms where opinions, thoughts, and movements go viral, people and especially impressionable children are more likely to plainly agree.

In addition, influencer content may also affect minors’ psychological well-being, materialism, body satisfaction, and thoughts. On the other hand, there are certain appeals influencers have because audiences look up to almost anyone with a following on social media. Most likely because the glamorized-looking life whether real or not is so attractive, especially to teenagers who have the same daily mundane tasks and routines. This gives any public star an upper hand, their body language, conversations, and the way they carry themselves are all being observed and possibly mimicked by a younger audience.

Andrew Tate has become one of the most recognizable names on social media over the last few months. The former kickboxer, entrepreneur, and content creator has amassed attention by speaking on a multitude of well-known podcasts to speak about his thoughts on women and the way he views life. He’s commonly seen as an aggressive man that radicalizes others to be powerful by treating others inhumanely, and I’d agree with that. 

“Men who live without self control are the kind of men who cry when their girlfriend cheats on them, ‘cus she certainly does, because she doesn’t respect a little cry baby, and she’s only with you because she’s ugly as f*ck and she has to settle for a little soy boy p*ssy like you,” is just one prime example of the harmful masculinity Tate commonly expresses.

In a TikTok video posted on Aug. 14, a concerned 6th-grade teacher warns parents to monitor what their children consume, as a number of her 11-year-old boys have said they love Andrew Tate.

“I had a boy today, turn to a girl and tell her that she is fat, women need to be thin, and that she sits at home and eats all day like every other girl in the world, and [she] uses men to get money, and he works hard for his money,” said the 6th grade teacher.

A part of that may seem like regular middle school bullying, but keep in mind they are 11-years-old, and before that vocalized their newfound “love” for Tate. With Tate saying paralleling inflammatory language in podcasts and youtube videos, it’s easy to imagine where kids like this young boy can take their own views and language from. 

In recent months a video of him physically attacking a woman emerged. Yet he faced no charges for it and continued to have a platform where he spread his injurious ideas. Multiple users on different platforms of social media did have in my opinion an ethical reaction, and many started to protest that he be removed from social media and convicted for what he’d done. Even other influencers began to speak out once they had seen that anything he says, does, or promotes tends to be harmful. It was no longer a joke, Tate was and is extremely real.

It’s outrageous that because of his privilege he faced no repercussions and to others, this situation was a picture-perfect example of a life without consequence. This lets his viewers believe they can live a life based on outlandish views and that abusing women is acceptable in society. Let me tell you something, it’s not, it’s far from acceptable or understandable.

An anonymous teacher from an all-boys school in New Zealand wrote to the Instagram account @sh*tyoushouldcareabout describing Tate’s influence as a “poisonous addiction” for the students that attend the school.

Part of conversations heard amongst their 13-15-year-olds include: “Women who are sexually assaulted are ‘asking for it’ and “if a woman has had abortions already she loses the right to use the statement ‘her body her choice.’

The content itself of Tate is just damaging though, it is the fact that his tactics of spreading such vile hatred are intentional and abusive. In a recent article by The Guardian, “The coordinated effort, involving thousands of members of Tate’s private online academy Hustler’s University and a network of copycat accounts on TikTok, has been described by experts as a blatant attempt to manipulate the algorithm and artificially boost his content, by also ‘choosing the most controversial clips in order to achieve maximum views and engagement.’”

There are a few claims that most of the time Tate is just joking, and that sometimes he makes that clear after he says something questionable, but because only the controversial parts of him are circulating on social media we are too quick to judge.