Much of the world recently had a laugh at the expense of former professional kickboxer Andrew Tate. In case you missed it, Tate garnered attention as the latest poster boy for brutal internet misogyny — until he made the mistake of baiting climate activist Greta Thunberg. The result? He was swiftly bested by her and, later, arrested.
Sweet comeuppance to be sure, but you might want to hold that snigger. Tate’s tantrums lifted the lid on a movement all around us, and it’s no laughing matter.
Tate is one small node in a global swell of sentiment that has become so galvanising and consequential, it deserves its own name: ‘aggrieved manhood’.
Aggrieved manhood refers to the conviction that masculinity is under attack: and the argument states that, in order to set society right, it must be restored. In plain terms, it’s the gnawing feeling that ’real men‘ — especially the straight white Western Christian kind — have been getting a bad rap and shouldn’t take it anymore.
Above all, aggrieved manhood is reactive. Although it presents itself as primal and raw, Tate’s brand of grievance is actually part of a rising backlash which reframes society’s increasing awareness of ’toxic masculinity‘ and ’white male privilege‘ as itself persecuting white men. Sociologist Michael Kimmel terms this clever reversal ’aggrieved entitlement’. Andrew Tate made his fortune by embodying it.
He did so by hawking a potent sentiment. Aggrieved manhood is all about sensation, about spiking the pulse, clenching the fist and clicking on another vengeance video. It’s an approach that has opened wallets big and small. In Tate’s case, stoking this sensation seems to have gone to his head. Only time will tell if he manages to spin his downfall into another lucrative narrative of his own victimisation.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the online ’manosphere’, Tate is just the tip of the iceberg. With the rise of participatory platforms over the last decade, the manosphere has exploded into a vast and thriving global economy peddling manly grievance in all its varieties: misogyny, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy and more. It serves up one basic sentiment — rightful virility, wrongly denied — in heady brews that range from ’decaf‘ anti-feminist irony to full-strength virulent violence.
All this is disturbing enough. But it isn’t the main reason why the online manosphere truly demands our attention.
In truth, the manosphere is also the international engine of the far-right. Worldwide, right-wing populists and far-right extremists adhere to the manosphere’s culture-war playbook and count on its unique capacity to superspread outrage. Politicians (think: Trump and Bolsonaro), pundits (US TV host Tucker Carlson), and strategists at the highest levels (such as Steve Bannon and Chris Rufo) do so purposefully, tactically and blatantly. By letting bit players like Tate bask in our attention, we make it easier for the most dangerous elements of the manosphere to hide in plain sight – until they erupt at events like the January 6 2021 US Capitol insurrection (aggrieved manhood’s fullest display yet) and now, two years later, in January 2023 in Brazil.
Aggrieved manhood is everywhere these days, a throughline linking many confounding recent events including COVID anti-masking and lockdown protests, the spate of anti-trans bills, sudden panics over ’critical race theory‘ and ’groomers‘ in schools, climate denial, election disputes, insurrections, mass shootings and other supremacy crimes — the list goes on. So why have so many pundits and commentators failed to recognise it for what it is?
For one thing, anyone can feel manly grievance or take up its mantle (as far-right US politician Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk keep reminding us), hence the misnomer ’populism’. But something crucial is missed when (for example) journalist Thomas Edsall’s detailed NYT op-ed about the psychopathy of today’s far-right populists makes no discernable mention of masculinity as a factor. Omitting aggrieved manhood means overlooking the clear thread that binds all these apparently ’personal‘ and ’individual‘ traits together. Can we start to call aggrieved manhood by its name?
If for no other reason, here’s why we should. Manly grievance is now in the water, so to speak. Thanks to the manosphere, Andrew Tate and others like him , tainting their most intimate and vulnerable encounters with the world. We may never know why a 6-year-old boy in Virginia recently pulled the trigger on his teacher, but we do know that school shooters — most of them teenagers — nearly always show signs of aggrieved manhood. Alongside calls for gun safety and mental-health resources, we need to flatten the curve of this feeling. But we won’t be able to do it until we take manly grievance seriously.
This is not a call for empathy with entitled rage: at this point, it wastes time to try and understand, much less argue with, those who feel it (there are too many). Rather, taking it seriously means recognising aggrieved manhood for what it is — a public health problem — and admitting that its risks are escalating quickly. Everyone is vulnerable to it, including people of all politics. Worse still, children are regularly exposed to a passionate fury they can absorb and act out without ever comprehending the politics entailed.
It’s time to admit that our vocabulary needs a booster vaccine. Aggrieved manhood is an infectious strain of viral — not just toxic — masculinity, which is a major challenge of our time. When we savour its comedy instead of slowing its spread, we fail to perceive more tragedy on the way.
Karen L. Ashcraft is the author of Wronged and Dangerous: Viral Masculinity and the Populist Pandemic. She’s a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and grew up in the lap of evangelical populism.
Wronged and Dangerous by Karen Lee Ashcraft is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £19.99.
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