I came across Andrew Tate’s content while scrolling through my TikTok FYP. At first, I brushed his intimidating persona off with the belief that he was nothing more than a loud man with a podcast. He wasn’t a problem, I thought.

 That is, until I started seeing more of him. His grotesque opinions on women plagued my FYP. I couldn’t scroll more than 10 videos without seeing a video featuring or about him. He became the ever-present figure on TikTok, and people couldn’t get enough. “But,” I wondered, “who is Andrew Tate? Why do people seem so drawn to him, despite his incredibly misogynistic rhetoric?”. So, I dug.

A former boxer and millionaire, Tate carries a chauvinistic and ultra masculine personality that appeals to impressionable teenage boys trying to be “man enough.” Targeting this demographic paid off. 

Tate has shot to the forefront of the public eye in recent months. Tate was one of the most googled people of the year, trumping Beyonce, Kim Kardashian, and Elon Musk.  Even if somebody didn’t actively watch Tate, they knew who he was. 

Tate’s large following paired with his content creates a worrying future for teenage boys. In his posts, Andrew Tate has made it clear that he does not respect women. “If I have responsibility over [my girlfriend], then I must have a degree of authority…You can’t be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you,” Tate said on an episode of the podcast “BFFs” published July 13. Tate comparing women to objects is a recurring theme, a problem that I previously thought society had progressed past. In another podcast Tate appeared on June 26 2022, he called his girlfriend a  “product”. 

Tate’s large following of teenage boys consuming this harmful ideology and seeing nothing wrong with it was creating a new generation of sexism. Something had to be done.

Twitter was the first social media company to take action against his dangerous remarks and ban him. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Twitch followed suit by removing him from their sites August of this year. 

Though Tate’s ban on most major social media platforms is a step in the right direction, his quick rise to fame is a troubling indication of society’s motion backwards. In the climate of 2022, misogyny has been repackaged as “speaking the truth” and “a needed edgy opinion”. 

Being a high school student has given me first-hand experiences with teenage boys and this normalized sexism. Boys openly mocking the feminine pitch of my voice during class, somebody presenting on why Tate is the “voice of our generation”, and athletes treating girls sports as less than boys are just some of what I have witnessed. 

Truth be told, these events scare me. There must be more done to prevent hate speech than just blocking anti-women figureheads. We have to work with teenage boys to reverse the damage done by Tate-like media. Introduce them to strong women role models, teach them about the struggles women go through, and most importantly- call them out when they say something prejudiced. The longer boys go unchecked, the worse misogyny gets.