I’m familiar with him because whenever anyone tries to address the problem of young male alienation and the debilitating effects of loneliness, someone else invokes this nobody’s name as the reason. They’ve been beguiled by him, Jordan Peterson, possibly the Paul brothers; and it’s their own damn fault so fuck ‘em.
Adin Ross is the dumbass who shot holes in his cybertruck.
I think he represents both cause and effect of this problem.
And sadly, no shortage of women who want to date and breed with them.
I am certain I made it to at least 12, but not of anything beyond that.
I suppose somewhat true, but I’m certainly not anti-celebrity. I love pop culture and don’t like to be ignorant about even vacuous things. It’s just somehow I missed him until, probably, this thread.
But I guess a lot of teenaged pop culture doesn’t quite dribble to me until years later. Like Pewdiepie I didn’t until know a couple years of him being the most viewed YouTuber. Yet I know shit like Gamer Gate and various speedrunning scandals, Billy Mitchells’s lawsuits, etc. I guess I can’t realistically be able to be on top of everything.
I don’t think I’m anti-celebrity either. But, if it’s a celeb who is famous among an audience I’m not part of, the only way I’m going to hear about them is if they make the news, or celebs I do watch say something about them.
I likewise never knew about this Andrew Tate guy until he got in legal trouble, and then I started encountering people talking about just how bad he is. I think he wasn’t on a lot of non-14-year-old’s radar until then. Only maybe those who have kids who watch him probably were aware.
I also note that, in the current era, celebrity has splintered a lot more, since we’re all watching stuff on demand rather than all watching the same things. And just how much more content there is that can be consumed. There are YouTubers I follow that I would think would be popular here who no one knows. I’m often surprised at the relative levels of fame of the people I follow.
If you are into podcasts the Behind the Bastards pod did a multi-part series on Tate, diving into how he became who he is and how his influence spread. TLDR: the child of divorce with some serious mommy issues – both parents were abusive but he was essentially raised by his single mom – he blamed his mother for his poor (as in, poverty-stricken) childhood. Being an entiteld narcissistic asshole, he felt that he was owed a better upbringing and placed the blame for not getting that squarely on his mom, and that hatred spread to women in general. As an adult he began preaching misogynistic hate online and the various social media algorithms pushed his messsages to angst-ridden teens who, as teens are wont to do, were looking for someone to blame for all their percived problems.
It’s a fascinating listen.
smegma male
Dan
So a few years ago I decided to purge my social media (facebook and instagram) of people I’ve known, to avoid the feelings of envy and spite that seemed often to generate.
Instead, I’ve tried to cull it to positive things: I like comedians, so a lot of comedy is on my feed. Same with historical pages.
I also periodically follow pages geared toward motivational content. And I’m a divorced guy trying to stay in shape, so a lot of it is geared towards that. So if I see a meme showing some guy maybe climbing a mountain or exercising, or a message to overcome adversity or something, I’ll like it.
I figure it would be good to get that sort of positive imagery into my life.
That is a short leap to Andrew Tate / Jordan Peterson nonsense, which has also occasionally joined my feed.
There’s a line between positive masculinity and toxic masculinity, but it think the messaging of these guys starts out targeting men seeking positive role models. And, initially, telling them things like “you need to take responsibility for your life. You can choose how you live” is a good thing.
But they quickly advance to a stage where they present other men as adversaries to be taken advantage of, and women as commodities to be acquired. Their world is a zero sum game where image is as substantive as it gets. It’s not healthy.
His big thing for a while was that he would grant you access to his super exclusive discord if you helped spread his message so Tiktok was crammed full of all sorts of random channels with excerpted clips of his “wisdom” that were impossible to avoid if Tiktok thought you even had the slightest chance of interest in the topic. He became a meme for just how impossible he was to avoid on Tiktok (and other platforms that pirated tiktok content) which is where the mainstream conversation started.