The ugly open secret of Andrew Tate's popularity among the right-wing

Algorithms help hide an uncomfortable truth good people do not know or refuse to confront: the hatred of women, their choices, and their agency to forge their own paths (especially paths without men).

Women have shared cautionary tales about toxic men for all time. Until the dawn of social media, the warnings women offered each other were secretive. Whispers. Raised eyebrows. Women pulling each other aside to tell other ladies to watch out and be mindful about a man they’d had direct experience with, or had heard was dangerous. We haven’t stopped. What keeps these messages “secret” now are two fold: the algorithms, and the toxic man’s refusal to believe what women say. If you’re wondering why and how admitted pimp and alleged rapist Andrew Tate is popular, it’s due (mainly) to these two reasons.

We do not experience the same internet, you and I. My browser history directly affects what kind of content is presented to me. Never is this funnier than when someone complains about all the pornographic ads being served on their websites, failing to understand how pesky little cookies work. My ads are for Ariat, hoof boots, and the occasional leather jacket. Because online privacy is as realistic as Sasquatch, my internet looks different from someone seeking butt cracks and bewbies.

The same works for social content. Despite the lamentations of struggling creators, the algorithms work. They work damn well. These social platforms depend on our eyes. The greatest currency we have in 2025 is our attention. The more these platforms garner attention, the more money they make (off of you). Ergo they must consistently serve content with which you will engage.

Engagement doesn’t mean you approve of something. We’re not talking about “liking” here. Engagement means you interact with it via your attention span. On Facebook, for example, watching video for three seconds counts as a view for that video. Facebook takes what and how long you’re watching and figures, hey, that person engages with content about cats. We’ll serve more content about cats.

But let’s say that you watched content about a divorce. You watch the entirety of the video, blowing passed the three seconds or however long YouTube or TikTok (pick your platform) decides is a video view. The longer the content plays, the more the algorithm understands what it should serve next to keep the attention it requires.

Soon you watch content not just about that particular divorce, but divorce in general. Then content about abusive spouses. Narcissism. Red flag behavior. Soon you’re hearing phrases you’d never heard before. Bangmaid. Weaponized incompetence. Married single mothers. Hobosexuals. Et cetera. The more you engage with this content, the more the algorithm learns and adapts to your viewing patterns. Because if you watched content about this abusive relationship, why not watch a video about this other abusive relationship? You may have started looking up information on a particular divorce, and now you have a whole new worldview based on content you didn’t know existed before running that first search.

Down the rabbit hole you go. And yes, this is the rabbit hole I tumbled down.

As it was my intent to learn more, if you’re curious, it is up to you to do the same. Be careful, Alice.

Red pill content works the exact same way. All ideological content does. My experience isn’t new, and I’m not the first to bring up how social media can alter worldviews. Nor am I saying it’s necessarily a bad thing.

But what does this have to do with Andrew Tate? Particularly what women have learned about his popularity?

Everything.

When I first looked up information on that divorce, I followed a digital path I’d never gone down before. And through it I learned that a lot of men (I’m not going to say it’s most or all or a minority even, but a lot) hate women. Hate. Capital H hate.

A lot of these men who hate women still marry women. The men who hate women the most, it seems, are men who cannot attract women. But there are more reasons than that. Men hate women for having jobs (and being independent, how dare they). Men hate women caring for animals (these men feel the energy is wasted and that women should use that energy to care for men). Men hate when women excel. They hate it when women outperform them. They demonstrate this hate by trivializing that in which women do well. Like school, for example. Horseback riding. Online influencing. The minute women dominate in a field, men poo-poo it.

Don’t take my word for it. Look into it yourself.

When you realize, as I have, that men who hate women are everywhere, even married to women and having children with women, you see the signs of it. We all know a man who is married right now to a woman he hates. He says snide things about and to her. He trivializes her interests. He doesn’t listen to her. He doesn’t take her or her concerns seriously. He may cheat on her. He doesn’t help her when she needs it. He may not even help her at all. He wants a wife for what a wife does for him. He sees her as an appliance. A “wife appliance” (another term I hadn’t heard of), even. And when she stops doing what he wants her to do, he will ditch her in search of another. That is, unless, she ditches him first. In which case he will act “blindsided.”

When you see men who hate women offline, when you realize that what these men like most about women is what those women can do for them, then you understand why Andrew Tate exists and is given a pass, if not an endorsement, from otherwise “good” seeming people.

Because a lot of those otherwise “good” people hate women too.

But if you’re a man who loves his wife, his sisters, his daughters or hopes to have a wife he loves, then you may not understand how these otherwise “good” people would excuse or endorse Andrew Tate. If this is you, the problem may be your algorithm. Your worldview hasn’t yet been widened. You may spend more time offline than off. You are not engaging with content that exposes the very real darkness that possesses such men. Why would you?

You’re not being served content about abusive husbands, boyfriends, or “nice guys” who dream that women who have rejected them get raped and murdered (any woman who is online has been told by a man she has rejected that he wants her to be raped and murdered. Yes, any woman online). You are not seeing signs everywhere of men who hate women. You are not attuned to the behaviors exhibited by men who hate women because you have no reason to be. You’ve not bothered to engage with such content because it doesn’t concern you. If you’re a man, another man who hates women isn’t a danger to you.

In fact toxic men make you, a decent man, look even better by comparison. A topic which women online have also discussed at length.

Those discussions are not hiding from you, either. Go seek them out on your own if you want. There are many.

But a man who hates women is a danger to women. And women are keenly aware about men who are dangerous to women. Our survival depends on it.

As Margaret Atwood is attributed to saying: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Andrew Tate is today’s version of Jeffery Epstein. What we’re seeing unfold in real time is how Epstein was allowed to get away with it: powerful friends in high places greasing skids where needed, united through a love of power and a hatred of women.

I’ve written this before, but until men take women at their word rather than needing a man to tell them “how it is” first, we’ll continue these gender wars. Until good men have open and honest conversations of good faith with women who’ve witnessed first hand the hatred of women as demonstrated by men, Andrew Tate and his many acolytes will flourish. Until good men get off the sidelines and hold bad man accountable for their actions, women will eschew relationships with men in growing numbers. As they are now.

Andrew Tate hates women. Those who support Andrew Tate hate women. Andrew Tate is not a role model in a vacuum of male role models, as some would insist we believe. Andrew Tate is a vessel of misogyny in an era when women are free to choose their own life paths. Especially lives without men. Nothing threatens the status quo quite like a woman having the freedom to pick a life that benefits her. The greatest sufferers of women’s freedom are mediocre to bad men who get left behind, to toil alone, to be victimized by bro-content that then blames women for all their ills. It is a vicious, man-made cycle perpetuated by men like Andrew Tate, and his supporters, in order to profit off the misery of pathetic men by keeping them pathetic, while channeling their hatred of women into a societal structure that is slowly losing its grip on patriarchal supremacy.