Behind every successful rapist stands Andrew Tate a host of caring women

Ella Whelan writes about the "shocking" and "mysterious" influence of Andrew Tate.

Schoolteachers in Britain are reportedly now asking for special resources on how to tackle the influence of Tate among pupils.

The Times Educational Supplement ran a feature this week on ‘How to respond to boys inspired by Andrew Tate’. It suggests that staff across schools are in need of professional-development training on how to challenge young men when they say things like ‘women should not fly planes’.

Parents are despairing, too. TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson has said she felt ‘sick’ after finding out that her son had watched Tate’s videos. But as with any teenage rebellion, all this pearl-clutching can surely only backfire – lending Tate even more notoriety and inadvertently encouraging young men to see him as transgressive and interesting.

Despite what many feminists seem to fear, Tate’s appeal says little about society’s view of women – after all, his views seem ‘edgy’ precisely because the vast majority of us do not approve of them. What’s more, there will no doubt be many young men enjoying Tate’s videos for their crassness and outrageousness, rather than sitting down and earnestly taking notes.

It reminds me, as so many things do, of something written by the late great Ted Byfield regarding pussified education curricula in 1989:

In the modern curriculum, however, every effort is being made to eliminate the competitive factor. Even academic contests are being taken away; such things as classroom tests are discouraged because they incite competition between the pupils. Field days in elementary schools are often so designed that no individual ever loses because losing is felt to be too disheartening. As for fist lighting, well that is absolutely forbidden. Fighting is "violence" and we all know how awful violence is. That's why stories of war, heroism and villainy are taken from the course of studies. They "encourage violence." Instead, boys are urged to be caring, sharing, loving, gentle, and nice. Yet the fact is the young male rather enjoys violence, and many are certainly prone to indulge in it. In the perfect university, says an Ontario feminist educator, there will be no football because the game is too expensive. However, she adds, there will be much interest in the girls' touch-football team. She means that if girls can't play the game, then the game should not be played. Similarly, what is meant by non-sexist education is feminine education. We teach little boys as though they are little girls, and we use women teachers to do it.

Then, having deprived boys of almost all significant adult male influence throughout the first twelve or fourteen years of their lives, having systematically thwarted most of their instinctive male inclinations, having given them nothing at all to feed their natural appetite for struggle, adventure, and risk, why should we be so surprised to suddenly find them responding with the kind of rage and fury that must seethe within the soul of a rapist? This surely, is exactly what we should have expected. It is no accident that something like four out of five disturbed children are boys.

Moreover, other warning signs were there. What does the little boy do when he leaves his namby-pamby classroom and arrives home? Answer: he watches rock videos which show women being beaten, mauled, and raped, reads comic books that celebrate sado-masochism, listens to music that pounds his hearing into insensibility, and sees movies which combine make-believe science with barbarian carnage and show females being dragged about by the hair. That is his entertainment. His instinctive appetites having been starved all day, are now fed with poison. Consider this, and you stop wondering why there is so much sex crime. You begin wondering why there isn't more.