Boys are adopting Andrew Tate's misogynistic views — and bringing them to class, study finds

Boys as young as 11 and 12 are “idolizing and parroting” the misogynistic rhetoric of Andrew Tate and other masculinist influencers at school, posing a risk to women teachers and the girls who witness it, Canadian researchers are reporting.

Tate, a British-American influencer who has amassed more than 10 million followers on social media platforms, and his brother, Tristan Tate, are facing a string of sexual violence and human trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Romania. Both brothers have denied all allegations against them.

A former kickboxing champion, Tate has described himself as an unapologetic misogynist, women as “inherently lazy” and has suggested women “bear responsibility” for sexual assaults. Since his rise to social media prominence, the alleged sex trafficker’s male supremacism and violent declarations against women have made him a “both reviled and revered” public figure, according to researchers at Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto. Despite a “near-total” ban from posting on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, “Tate’s images, video clips and messages remain easily accessible and almost omnipresent in the feeds of teenage boys and young men,” the researchers wrote in a study published in the journal  Gender and Education.

Tate was his most popular when the 2022-23 school year launched. His name was the most searched name on Google in July 2022. The researchers set out to explore what impact the influencer’s “brand of new-wave misogyny” was having on teachers and classrooms.

Rather than survey teachers who might be reluctant to speak frankly, they scraped data from a free and open online community of teachers from the social media site Reddit.com. The researchers pulled more than 250,000 posts and comments from a subreddit community from June 1, 2022, to Jan. 31, 2023, then filtered the dataset down to the 2,364 posts where Andrew Tate was mentioned in the post title or text.

It’s impossible to know how many in the Reddit teachers’ subgroup are Canadian teachers, but the researchers said most posts and comments skewed heavily towards North American classrooms. In addition, two ongoing studies using Canadian datasets are revealing similar sentiments.

“This rhetoric is very much having an impact on teachers and schools,” said co-author Luc Cousineau, co-director of research at the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies and faculty at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Studies out of Australia and the United Kingdom have reached similar conclusions.

“It’s easy to think ‘that’s a young person’s internet culture,’ and not worry too much about it,” Cousineau said.

“Young men are saying, ‘I don’t have to listen to you or respect you’ to their women-identified teachers, solely because they’re women. It’s an old story made new again by this re-invigoration of really overt and strong misogyny.”

Middle and high school teachers, as well as some elementary school ones, reported that boys were “actively parroting male supremacist rhetoric at school,” devaluing women teachers and making classrooms less safe, the study found.

“There were a group of them, all friends, who to the (vice principal’s) face told him that they would only respect/pay attention in classes taught by men and would not behave in classes taught by women,” one teacher posted.

“If they already have trouble respecting someone simply because that person happens to have a vagina, then they aren’t going to listen to that person with a vagina explain how disrespecting people with a vagina is harmful,” another commented.

“Seemingly, ninety per cent of my work is trying to talk white teenage boys off the alt-right ledge,” according to another comment researchers paraphrased using an AI tool because the user didn’t respond to requests to use verbatim quotes.

Another knew of a 7th grade teacher who said the boys in his class “have taken to calling all women and girls ‘holes’ and anybody who is friendly or polite to girls a ‘simp.'”

While some teachers remarked that female students pushed back and called out male classmates for spouting Tate-inspired anti-woman hate, teachers also worried that the rise in misogynistic rhetoric will lead to “tangible safety threats like gender-based violence in schools,” the researchers wrote.

“I had a student write a paper in graphic detail bout (sic) how SA (sexual assault) victims ‘deserved’ it and ‘all women were asking for it’ and a lot of other extremely alarming sentiments,” one user commented. “The paper topic was nowhere close to anything like this, but he wrote it anyway.”

“I’ve never heard such vitriol from young boys since this Andrew Tate guy came on the scene,” another said.

Some teachers suggested that boys were imitating Tate for attention. “That kind of young boy likes to be ironically edgy because they’re testing boundaries…. Since their intention is to insult and appall the more you resist this kind of behaviour, the more it rewards them,” one wrote.

Teachers sometimes said that when they told their administrators a boy had made lewd or sexual comments towards them or other girls it was brushed off as “boys will be boys.”

“Sometimes it’s a little more overt than that,” Cousineau said. “There are some illusions to folks saying, ‘I think my administrator actually agrees with them.'”

“We really wanted to demonstrate this is happening in real time, and it’s having some significant impacts,” he said. “There are real and tangible dangers to continuing to do nothing. Not recognizing this as a real issue allows it to proliferate and continue.”

This isn’t just the immature actions of some boys. “While it is tempting to be reductionist about a problem like this, we have zero social tolerance for overt racism, especially in the classroom. Why should we tolerate identity-focused hate based on gender,” Cousineau said.

Violent misogyny is never fine. “It only takes one violent misogynist to carry out a Toronto Van Attack or another Ecole Polytechnique.”

In 2018, Alex Minassian drove a rented van into pedestrians on a busy sidewalk on Toronto’s Yonge Street, killing 10. Minassian once told a psychiatrist after the attack that he realized his victims were random pedestrians and was “wishing for more females.”

In December 1989, 14 women in a mechanical engineering classroom were killed by gunman Marc Lépine at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.

How to monitor what kids are exposed to gets into thorny territory, he said. “Do parents know what their kids consume online? Are lots of parents having in-depth, connected conversations with their kids about what they’re consuming and what the implications of that are? Generally, no.”

“These are really hard things to do. But if we don’t know what kids are exposing themselves to, and we’re not engaging with them, that stuff might not come out at home,” Cousineau said. “It might come out at school.”

“We have evidence in this country, and many other places around the world, of the most extreme form of these kinds of violent misogyny, and nihilistic violent misogyny, where young men go out and kill people because of these ideas,” said Cousineau.

Those acts of violence don’t come out of nowhere, Cousineau said. People grow into them. “All of the data we have about radicalized violence show us they develop over time,” he said.

“We need to be addressing it young and at source.”

Emelia Sandau, a master’s student at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, co-authored the study.

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