Objectively, Andrew Tate isn't physically repulsive (despite the fact I think he looks like the illegitimate lovechild of a billiard ball and a llama), but he is a very ugly man. Here's why, in a horrific and depressing way:

[Content Warning: Misogyny and Sex Trafficking]

Despite losing to Greta Thunberg in a spat on Twitter (one of the most popular tweets of all time), Andrew Tate (a man with small dick energy and in dire need of getting a life, even before being arrested) is not a well-known entity in every social circle, so people don't totally understand his cultural influence. However, Tate is hands-down one of the most alarming recent presences in pop culture.

He's an insanely popular figure with the Incel crowd. That's not the alarming part. The alarming part is, he says the quiet parts out loud (the things usually reserved for the inner voice), and nobody minds (or seems to, anyway). He's not just pick-up artist level bad, even though pick-up artists suck. He's not even red-pill incel levels of bad — and incel red-pills are responsible for a hell of a lot of mass shootings. Tate flat-out espouses "Might Makes Right": He encourages predatory and abusive behaviors towards women, and calls them preferable to behaving in any other way.

Incels had this conspiratorial basement-dweller layer to their woman-hating: Women are scheming, or colluding with sexier and more confident men, to make you lonely. Tate, on the other hand, flat-out says that it's a bad thing to consider a woman's preferences or feelings over your own, and his vision of "powerful men" is "psychopath who doesn't consider women to be people". In his world view, women aren't out to get you; they just don't matter, and decency and monogamy are just lies that the weak tell themselves in order to justify "losing" the game.

He pitches his sex trafficking literally out loud, in front of his audience; he describes it as "identifying high-quality girlfriends" and then making them do cam-girl shit (and likely more — I don't look too closely) in order to make him money. His vision of a "relationship" is one in which a man pushes a stable of women to produce sex-based money for him, without any consideration of them beyond whether they can be easily pushed into those schemes. (A major part of the "philosophy" he espouses is that a "high-quality woman" is both attractive and easy to manipulate into, again, literal sex trafficking schemes.) That's why he was arrested, in Romania, on sex-trafficking charges.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, this message of Tate's is targeted at underage teenage boys (Tater Tots, if you will). He's targeting the sort of kid who'd likely have been into someone like Hulk Hogan, I suppose, a few decades ago: Action-hero-type male iconography. (Tate is a kick-boxer, in case you didn't know.) He's directly pitching this monstrous shit to them, without even bothering to hide it in euphemisms or subtle language.

One of the big stories in the Twitch/TikTok/OnlyFans world this year was Amouranth, who's probably the single most famous streamer in that community, revealing on camera that she was married to a man who forced her to stream, pushed her into pornographic territory, and controlled her finances, along with all that run-of-the-mill abuse stuff. This is a bigger deal than you maybe realize, if you don't pay attention to how the Internet has evolved. "Influencer" has warped into something that's either borderline pornographic or flat-out porn, and the machine of abuse that existed around Britney Spears (and her sex appeal) back in the day has evolved into something far more anonymous, with far fewer regulations. It abuses "sex positivity" to coerce barely-legal or underage girls into aspiring towards this as their version of a "hustle" and that opens the door to men who prey on and exploit those girls and women in a manner that's identical to sex trafficking — because it is sex trafficking.

I am a member of a community that dips into OnlyFans territory. (Hi, FuckboiclownLife; I am referring to you here!). In the several years that I've been a part of it, I've seen some truly unbelievably horrifying shit, of the "sexual predator" and/or sex offender variety: Men using young women as lures to pull in even younger women and girls, making those women present themselves as friends and guides (when they're anything but), because women will be trusted more. (It's a race between the mentors and predators to reach the newbies first, complicated by the fact that many predators pretend to be mentors.) Men are using those same women to build up walls of alibis and to make accusations against anyone who speaks out about them. It's no longer just the Harvey Weinsteins of the world pulling this shit: OnlyFans, Twitch and FratLife, FYI, are like Airbnb for sex traffickers. Think of how badly Airbnb renters have fucked up housing markets, and then imagine that extended en masse to an entire generation of online women. (To be clear, I am not throwing hate at the OF crowd here; people have got to eat and pay their bills somehow.)

Andrew Tate is the equivalent of the guy writing "You can do it too!" guides in sleazy men's mags, for young men who want to "get into the business" of fucking women over. It's well beyond Tom-Cruise-in-Magnolia levels of "crush them and use them" territory: He's propagating an idea of "masculine identity" as systemically preying on women, not out of some perverse loneliness or insecurity, but out of a sense that women are just another kind of capital, and exist to be acquired and spent like real estate. He pitches this, again, not just to lonely dudes in basements, but to impressionable teenage boys browsing TikTok looking for fun or interesting content.

I am both a jaded Internet user, cishet white man and an indefatigable pessimist, and Tate's somehow the rare dude who still managed to set off massive and immediate alarm bells for me. The guy is worse than cancerous. He's virulent, too! I hope he goes down in jail and stays there to rot for the rest of his days.

Warning: I really do not want to spend the next day/week discussing the villainy of Andrew Tate with online strangers, so anyone who feels compelled to leave nasty comments will be yeeted.

Thumbnail image: Photo of Andrew Tate, copyright BBC