It’s been a great year for Taylor Swift in many ways, as everything she’s touched has turned to gold, and her superfans got their own proper noun, Swifties. But haters gonna hate: when she appeared on the cover of Time magazine as their person of the year, looking staggering, wearing both a catsuit and a cat, a Christian manfluencer called Eric Conn (his Hard Men podcast is tagged “Reclaiming biblical masculinity in a world of softness”) was quick to react: “It’s shameful and sad that a hyper-promiscuous, childless woman, aging and alone with a cat, has become the heroine of a feminist age.”
I don’t want to say the manosphere reached its apogee in 2023, because things can always get worse. But if Time had a person of the year for the dark timeline, Swift’s opposite, a character to embody the hostility, alienation and evangelical, triumphant stupidity of the age, it would be Andrew Tate. Figures like Tate and Conn, and their millions upon millions of disciples, have no struggle for content because they feel no duty of originality.
These messages are as old as the patriarchy. Nobody needs to update “cat lady” for the modern spinster, even if the younger feminist might now favour a ferret. The internal logic has remained constant: female autonomy is an insult to the natural order, and the punishment for the offending woman is that she’ll be shunned, and die alone, her maternal destiny unfulfilled. Truthfully, even at the dawn of time, this line of attack must have felt a little circular.
There’s a primitivism in the gender wars, as they play out on the socials: while Bible bros tear into Swift, other soldiers of the manosphere roam through Instagram, and TikTok, looking for images of young women on a night out, then decrying them as emblems of society or civilisation or empire’s breakdown. It’s never completely spelled out what the source is of the young women’s destructive power, whether it’s their skimpy clothes, their inebriation, the fact that no men are squiring them or the simple audacity of enjoying themselves without permission. There are always enough feminists with the energy to leap in and rip these moral guardians to shreds, and that’s quite enjoyable to watch, but the fun of the firefight can’t clear the choking black smoke.
Without question, sexist tropes online are getting baser and more elemental. Tate and his followers talk relatively freely (as detailed in Matt Shea’s brilliant BBC documentary earlier this year) about women as, ideally, a slave class. We know it has an impact in real life, from the teachers who describe radicalised 14-year-olds telling them to get back in the kitchen. We know it’s socially divisive from the Hope Not Hate survey, which found that among 17- and 18-year-olds, only 1% of young women but 52% of young men had a positive view of Andrew Tate; that’s quite a fissure, but not to worry, huh, it’s only sexism. We know, of course, that the Romanian authorities are prosecuting Tate and his brother for the real crimes of sexual assault and human trafficking, although both deny the allegations.
Yet it’s still hard to know what the right reaction is as a citizen. Plainly, all of this output, whether it’s deploring a young partygoer, or cursing the world’s most successful recording artist of all time, is a provocation. If it doesn’t generate feminist outrage, it’s meaningless, its adherents are nobodies. The first time I asked my teenage son what he made of Tate, he said, “that man is exactly where he wants to be; being talked about by people like you”. The obvious response, then, would be none.
But the “ignore it and it will go away” principle no longer works, and we may not have realised how valuable, if drab, it was until it was gone. The biblical podcasting bros don’t need the outrage of the “soft” world in order to survive; if they get it, that’s just a bonus. Systematised shunning doesn’t work, either: Jordan Peterson, another of the manosphere’s prophets, was kicked off Twitter (now X), and Tate was kicked off multiple platforms, with no detriment to either man’s brand recognition or following, even before Elon Musk let them back on again.
The gatekeepers, in other words, can’t keep control of the gate even when they’re working in the interests of society, which they aren’t, necessarily. We’re witnessing the dissemination of misogyny which can’t be reasoned with or persuaded, can’t be ignored, can’t be frozen out; which often sounds trivial but chimes with many people, which may largely be without consequence, but has consequences enough.
The solution isn’t obvious, though a working iteration of non-toxic masculinity would help (the podcaster Blindboy, musing on the death of Shane MacGowan and the “themes of masculinity within the myth of Cú Chulainn” defined it as “drinking, drinking, drinking and punching fascists in the face”, and I’d take that). As for the young women destroying civilisation by having too much fun in boob tubes and subzero temperatures, as for Swift having too many cats (which is any), my best guess in meeting the dark times is, keep doing what you’re doing, only more.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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