Controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate was released from a Romanian jail on Friday and placed on house arrest pending investigation into sex trafficking charges, which he has denied.
But even though he’s been booted from TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram for, among other reasons, hate speech, Tate is still reportedly reaching young men and boys through the accounts of his disciples.
Self-described misogynist Tate offers his followers “wisdom” like asserting that women are “intrinsically lazy,” that rape victims “bear some responsibility” and that women are property.
He had nearly 5 million followers on Instagram before being banned and his YouTube videos have been viewed more than 7 million times.
And, teachers and parents fear, many of those are kids — usually boys — some of whom are 12 or younger.
“I would say he has definitely reached young minds, one Brooklyn teacher told The Post. “It definitely scares me.”
The question is, why?
The answer may be that boys have been left to fail.
Although our society has been rightfully concerned with the advancement of girls and women over the past several decades, we’ve simultaneously ignored glaring warning signs that something is wrong with boys.
On educational, economic and health metrics alike, they’ve been falling further and further behind women.
As parents, partners and friends, we should all be coming together to discuss why our young men and boys are struggling.
But, instead, we find ourselves embroiled in a culture war over toxic masculinity that leaves no one speaking to boys’ plights.
In fact, they’re being beaten over the head with overtly anti-male rhetoric that asserts just about any of society’s ills can be blamed on men.
Headlines like “Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us” and “Toxic Masculinity Is Costing Us About $15.7 Billion Every Single Year” and book titles like “How to Date Men When You Hate Men” are countless.
Even Scientific American joined the conversation in 2019 with an article entitled “How to Fight Toxic Masculinity,” and the American Psychological Association has declared that “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful.”
Economist and Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves says this sort of rhetoric is enticing some boys to the opposite extreme.
“Young men are being pushed into the arms of reactionaries … to maintain their masculine identity,” Reeves told The Post. “It’s forcing a false choice on a lot of boys and young men which says you have to choose either masculinity or equality.”
While our culture has inspired young women with catchphrases like “girl power” and “the future is female,” their male counterparts have been told there’s something intrinsically wrong with their masculinity.
“We’ve torn up the old scripts for what it meant to be male and female,” Reeves explained. “We put a powerful new script in the hands of girls and young women and failed to replace the one for boys and young men. We just told them what they can’t be. But we haven’t told them what they can and should be.”
The result is masses of dejected and alienated men.
In his 2022 book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It,” Reeves argues that society is failing to meaningfully address their struggle.
As early as grade school, it’s already obvious boys are falling behind.
Over the course of the last century, girls caught up with them on most academic measures — and then far outstripped them.
Around the world, boys are 50% more likely than girls to miss basic benchmarks in reading, math and science.
Overall, it turns out that boys might be naturally disadvantaged in classroom settings.
One 2015 study argued that “the current school environment or climate might in general be more attuned to feminine-typed personalities, which makes it — in general — easier for girls to achieve better grades at school.”
These trends persist up through higher education, where boys are falling behind on just about every measure.
Just four in 10 college students are men — and the drop in college enrollment during the pandemic was seven times greater among boys.
Of the country’s 18- to 24-year-olds who aren’t in school, one in six also aren’t working, meaning there’s a growing mass of young men completely adrift in society.
And they’re filling their days with lonely pastimes.
Reeves says boys are experiencing “a very different mental health story” from girls “which is more about isolation and retreat.”
Some major screen-time contributing factors: pornography, video games, and online gurus like Tate.
Indeed, three in four young men regularly play video games, and they are four times as likely as girls to say they spend too much time on them.
And more than nine in ten men report watching porn in the last month.
Habitual pornography use has long been speculated to cause loneliness and disincentivize relationship formation.
And all of this may have coalesced in what Daniel A. Cox of the American Enterprise Institute has dubbed the friendship recession.
While Americans across the board have experienced a shrinking circle of close friends and a rise in loneliness, it’s hitting men harder.
Cox found that only 27% of men have at least six close friends — half as many as did in the 1990s. And 15% say they have no close friends at all, which is five times as many as 30 years ago.
This epidemic of loneliness is coalescing in untimely deaths.
In fact, men are vastly overrepresented among so-called “deaths of despair.”
Three in four deaths by drinking are male.
Seven in ten opioid overdose deaths are male. And four in five suicide deaths are, too.
The pandemic exacerbated these trends, especially among young men.
According to the CDC, the number of 15- to 24-year-old men who took their own lives in 2020 to 2021 skyrocketed by 8% in just a year.
Meanwhile, their female counterparts had no significant change.
The warning signs are glaring.
Young men are falling behind — from their education to their relationships to their untimely deaths.
Yet there’s a false sense that speaking out in defense of them is somehow anti-feminist or anti-woman.
“Most people don’t want to live in a world of zero-sum thinking,” Reeves says. “It’s the equivalent of saying to a parent of a son and a daughter, which one are you going to care about?”
If society continues to ignore men’s issues, opportunists will co-opt the legitimate concerns of disaffected men and pull us all further from any real solutions.
We need to show boys that there’s a space between Andrew Tate and the war on “toxic masculinity.”
