Andrew Tate’s bruised masculinity The Bottom G will leave no legacy

If you were to ask Labour’s Minister for Safeguarding, Jess Phillips, what “patriarchy” looks like, she’d probably gesture in the direction of Andrew Tate. The bête noire of school teachers and feminists, this self-styled “misogynist” influencer is notorious for a message of aggressive masculinity, flashy moneymaking, and contempt for women. And he evidently lives rent-free in a lot of Labour heads. The £20-million package recently announced by Phillips, to train teachers to “spot and tackle misogyny” in the classroom, explicitly mentions Tate’s large fanbase as evidence of how widespread these attitudes are.

But how convincing a patriarch is he, really? This week, he made headlines not for inciting misogyny, but for losing a fight. He was an MMA fighter long before he was an influencer or porn producer, and has always traded on his physical prowess. But this week, after a five-year break from the ring, Tate went up against the boxer Chase DeMoor in Dubai — and was brutally outmatched.

Taller, stronger, and 10 years younger, DeMoor taught Tate a lesson so conspicuously absent from Tate’s own brand of “patriarchy” as to disqualify it from being properly patriarchal. Namely: it doesn’t matter how aggressive you are, as a young man. Eventually you will get older and lose physical dominance, and you need a plan for holding onto power when younger and hungrier rivals come snapping at your heels.

In patriarchy properly understood, the core of this is “succession planning”, which is to say training a loyal heir. The 21st-century’s foremost storyteller, Taylor Swift, captured this dynamic in the recent song “Father Figure”, sung from the perspective of a mafioso-like patriarch:

I showed you all the tricks of the trade
All I ask for is your loyalty
My dear protégé

A patriarch may be an adoptive “father figure”, as in Swift’s telling, or else a literal father — as, for example, in historic royal families, or more recently the Murdoch, or Kennedy, or Trump families. Whether the family trade is running an organised crime network, a real estate business, a media empire, or a country, a patriarch of this kind will ensure his kids are taught to manage the family concern. If he doesn’t have kids, successors will be identified, groomed, and in time granted power and responsibility.

In this spirit, Rupert Murdoch’s children have largely taken over from the ageing tycoon. George Soros has handed over his global social-engineering activities to his son Alex. Trump’s offspring are often seen in his entourage, and play important roles in his commercial and political activities. These are all patriarchs in the old pattern. But where is Tate’s dynasty?

Reports vary on whether he has kids, or how many. But there are no reports of any family visits during his incarceration in Romania. The inference is that however many kids he has, they don’t live with him. This would make sense: it would, in fact, replicate Tate’s own upbringing.

When Tate mentions his father, the American chess player Emory Tate, it’s usually in admiring terms — for all that the anecdotes often describe what sounds like a cruel, violent narcissist. This determination to deify his father’s memory has always seemed piteous to me, for Emory abandoned Andrew and his siblings in 1997, just as Andrew approached adolescence. In their father’s absence, Tate and his siblings grew up in a single-parent home amid Luton’s grim, crime-ridden council estates.

Tate’s escape shows genuine grit and ability. It also sheds a light on how Tate’s own potential was crippled by his own father’s failings. But to grasp this, we need to bracket the assumption, axiomatic among the world’s Jess Phillipses, that “patriarchy” is bad by definition in all its manifestations. For while there are forms of patriarchy I would not wish to embrace, such as the kind that legitimises child marriage or “honour killings”, some traits may have been decried as “patriarchy”, or even just “toxic masculinity”, that are better understood simply as average sex differences — and which come in positive, prosocial forms as well.

It is, for example, not an effect of “patriarchy” that on average boys are more wilful, aggressive, and high-energy than girls. I’m not going to waste paragraphs citing statistics; naturally there are outliers, but on average this is simply true and obvious. It also has implications for the socialisation of boys; implications that were well understood until about 10 minutes ago. Boys benefit from clear boundaries; plenty of exercise; and, especially as they get bigger and bolshier, authoritative older men to keep them in check. Among the kind of common-sense people who don’t generally get to write newspaper columns, this folk wisdom is amply conveyed by the phrase “Boys are like dogs”.

To be clear, I don’t mean this rudely: I like dogs, and I like boys and men too. But on average they’re not interchangeable with girls. In the case of both boys, and dogs, the liveliest ones need clear boundaries. Sometimes enforcing these requires someone big, strong, and authoritative enough to make those boundaries clear. And when we set about smashing “patriarchy”, one of the things that got smashed with it was a healthy appreciation of the contribution made by older men to this aspect of young male socialisation.

Fathers are not all perfect, obviously, even when they stick around. But there’s plenty of evidence that their absence is a significant risk factor in young, energetic, wilful men going off the rails. Prison Reform Trust data show that among young offenders, 76% report growing up with an absent father: a vastly more significant proportion even than those growing up in a deprived home (51%). There’s also, unsurprisingly, a strong link between fatherlessness and urban gang membership, as much in the USA as the UK, where one report showed that two-thirds of gang-involved young people came from lone-parent households.

Is this what happened (or rather didn’t happen) to Andrew Tate? A great many lone parents do their best in difficult circumstances, and this really isn’t to criticise. But I sometimes wonder how effective a harried, exhausted, full-time-working single mum can be at disciplining an adolescent son who is now a foot taller than she is and more interested in the approval of his new gang friends than her curfew.

In What Do Men Want?, the philosopher Nina Power argues that much of what the contemporary world decries as “toxic masculinity” is better understood not as patriarchy but its absence: a “regime of the brother” characterised less by orderly power structures than comparatively flat, sibling-like rivalries. We should understand the Tate phenomenon in this context: a kind of online Lord of the Flies fratriarchy, in which lost boys desperate for affectionate guidance from authoritative older men struggle to prove their manliness against one another.

And while Labour is obsessed with Tate as a vector for “misogyny”, really he’s more an accelerant than the cause. For in a “regime of the brother”, without well-defined male hierarchy, what’s the most low-risk way to perform dominance? You don’t attack your bros; you bond with them, by tormenting a group you can be reasonably sure won’t fight back: women. Tate is currently the subject of multiple court cases in relation to such cruelties, but the Tateosphere is hardly the only fratriarchy whose main social glue seems to be hurting women for fun and profit. From the Pakistani rape gangs to the Epstein network, such squalid brotherhoods use violence and sexual cruelty as a form of bonding.

To my knowledge there’s no research on the prevalence of fatherlessness among the boys and men who make up Tate’s fanbase. But I’d bet any money that boys from broken homes are over-represented. His fratriarchal message is perfectly calibrated for this group: emotional numbness and a kind of brutal, venal self-fathering, overlaid with contempt for and performative cruelty toward the women who care for but can’t control them.

But I doubt Labour’s strategy on “misogyny” will ever go there. Notoriously, where the rape gangs are concerned, Jess Phillips has as little as possible to say about male bonding through sexual violence, where this might offend her electoral base. But it goes deeper. The party is enthusiastic about tackling “root causes”, particularly where this can be parlayed into new funding for their favoured NGOs. But addressing fatherlessness as an accelerant of adolescent male misogyny would require definitive, heretical admission that some family structures are better than others. Safer to stick to internet censorship, and tinkering with the curriculum.

Ironically, then, Phillips really is doing her bit to destroy “patriarchy” — even if the fratriarchy now replacing it is even less to her taste. I suspect no one really likes it — not even the bros themselves, whose critical weakness Tate just demonstrated in a boxing ring in Dubai.

For where there’s no father figure, all you can ever be is chief bro. And the trouble with being chief bro is that eventually a younger, hungrier rival will come along. Then what? In Swift’s song, the mafioso father-figure sees off the challenge from his rivalrous protégé, because he’s long since parlayed physical dominance into subtler forms of power:

Whose portrait’s on the mantle?
Who covered up your scandals?
Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card cancelled

Tate, though, is not a boss on this model. He had no father, not even an adoptive father figure, to show him how to ascend from chief bro to patriarch. So when a younger rival beat him bloody this week, the public reaction was the kind of scornful glee you’d direct at a sibling rival. It’s the brittle machismo of the fatherless: both a driver of misogyny, and also evidence of patriarchy’s absence.

Are you building the kind of empire that will outlast you? Or did you stake your reputation on staying top dog forever, and forget that everyone gets old? Tate’s tragedy lies not, or not only, in his noxious online output. It lies also in how his father’s failures blighted his considerable natural potential. He was bright, aggressive, able, and ambitious, but like so many other lost boys had no one to form him. No one to show him what to do, or who to be, so as to become genuinely admired and loved — or even to retain his position, once past his physical peak.

Now, he’s a bloodied loser. But there’s no portrait on the mantel, and no loyal protégé in the wings. His children will grow up as fatherless as Tate himself. There will be no “Top G” dynasty. Save a trace or two in historic UK PHSE curricula, and some Romanian court papers, “Bottom G” will leave no legacy.

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