How the Far-Right Weaponized the Masculinity Crisis

Why would Andrew Tate tweet something like this?

Tate is mostly—almost exclusively—known for his misogyny. But the mistake that people make, to the extent that they can stomach knowing anything about him at all, is identifying him as some sort of pickup artist or sex guru, an antidote to the so-called and oft-cited “male loneliness epidemic.”

 The truth is much more sinister. Andrew Tate grew out of the petri dish of pickup artistry but that culture, with its wacky hats and corny nicknames, died some years ago and was replaced evolutionarily by the disease that Tate and similar figures comprise. They are not the cure to male loneliness, they are its source, and it is their nutrition.

It can slip your notice, but you can see how the right-wing discourse is shifting when it comes to men and women, especially now that the far-right is gaining in influence over traditional conservatism. The shift is deliberate, tactical, and frightening.

 When Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes tell you that having sex with women is gay:

You might be surprised to learn it has a lot to do with this:

And also, a lot to do with this:

But let’s back up.

 For basically the whole 20^th century the conservative position was the nuclear family ideal. The “tradwives” thing is still obviously prominent on the right, particularly the elements that still strongly emphasize Christianity, but this is less common among the new right, the far-right.

 Donald Trump’s marriage isn’t hugely emphasized the way that other presidents have made efforts to promote themselves as family men, and in fact his forthright disdain for women is considered part of his appeal. Trump has two daughters and three sons across three different women, and although Ivanka played a prominent role in his 2017-2020 term, neither she, nor Tiffany, nor much of Melania, have been heard from in 2025.

 Elon Musk has impregnated five women that we know about, but they were almost all conceived via IVF, selecting for male children. Apart from a few photos of him hanging out with Grimes, Musk is never known to associate with women or enjoy their company. Of his 14 known children, I think only one was born female, while his most famous offspring, Vivian Wilson, drove him to incandescent rage with her gender transition. Not a fan of girls, is what I’m saying. 

What’s happening is that the traditional right-wing vision of the male and female social roles—a monogamous lifelong marriage, the man the breadwinner and societal engine, the woman the childbearer and homekeeper, her husband ideally her first and only sexual partner—are falling away in favor of the masculine ideal being the incel, and women being… well, a bug to be worked out of the system, frankly.

 This is the really dire modern trajectory of a predatory culture of male entitlement that has always seen women as a problem to be solved. The early 2000s fad of pickup artistry—which had existed in some form for at least a century as an underground thing, but was made mainstream in 2005 thanks to Neil Strauss’ bestseller The Game—was all about solving single men’s trouble with women by selling them the secrets to the female mind. It’s called “artistry” but it was treated as more of a science, the idea that women’s minds can be hacked, and that winning sex with them is a solved game, hence the activity literally being called “Game.”

 The PUA grift, which had been chugging along sleazily but relatively harmlessly for a hundred years, didn’t survive mainstream exposure and the subsequent boom, but I believe it did incredible damage to society during that boom.

 By which I mean, I don’t think Neil Strauss should be tried at the Hague for his book, but I’m also not far from thinking that. There is, it turns out, no secret cheat code to the female mind. Most of the successful advice that the PUAs sold amounted to dressing well and approaching women. For those who weren’t able to make Game work for them, there was the red pill, then the black pill, then the incels.

 The hucksters of bottled masculinity had to find a new grift to adapt to their changing audience.

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“Incel” is short for “involuntary celibacy” but this is really a misnomer to which I prefer encel—enforced celibacy. In a way that wasn’t possible before the internet, these guys formed communities that generated feedback loops that concentrated misogyny like a reduced stock, and now fiercely enforced celibacy in their community to the point where any incel who winds up admitting to getting laid is a traitor subject to all the doxing and swatting the modern deep internet is notorious for. They created a psychological nightmare for themselves in which they were actively heterosexual but absolutely despised women, which is like being allergic to food.

 It was also extremely hard-right radicalizing, and for the new populist far-right, anything that gets young men thinking in that direction is of course to be encouraged and fostered.

 Influencers like Andrew Tate are the overseers of a movement for the type of people who took all the wrong lessons from Fight Club. That was itself in part a dark parody of men’s clubs like the mythopoetic men’s movement, and the difficulty of fostering these movements (particularly if you’re trying, as the new right are, to use it as a right-wing incubation chamber) is solving the paradox: How do you build an all-male movement to channel and discharge pent-up sexual energy without it being gay?

 One solution is to look to the Roman Empire.

Rome was extremely masculine, and very importantly, it wasn’t gay. Even when men were having sex with each other, which was very common, it wasn’t gay. Rome was the ultimate masculine conquest fantasy. The meme trend a couple of years back about men thinking about the Roman Empire more often than they think about sex was, I think, mostly a joke, but one that’s based on something true.

 Of course, we’re not talking about the actual Rome, here. We’re talking about a fiction sold by Hollywood. But so many tenets of the far-right are based in fiction.

 Still, although there’s no truth to the impression that women were almost entirely absent in Rome, they were stigmatized. In the Roman Empire, one of the worst things a man could be was feminine, and being feminine entailed being submissive. Women couldn’t vote or hold public office. In sexual matters, men were judged not necessarily by the gender of the person they were having sex with (again, they didn’t really have the concept of “gay”), but by whether they were submissive in the act. In sex between two men, it was the submissive partner who was shamed and vilified, and as such, free Roman citizen men weren’t openly sexual with other free Roman citizen men. (Slaves were fair game).

 There is huge overlap between men who are interested in Rome for masculinity reasons and men who are interested in Rome for white supremacy reasons. If you trawl through Twitter for ten seconds you’ll find neo-Nazi accounts with Roman statues in their profile pictures, or Pepe the Frog in Roman armor.

The connection has become such a pervasive one that classicist historians are in a crisis—there are obviously very important reasons to study Rome for historical reasons, but just being involved in that field paints you as suspicious.

 Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far-right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.”

 The Nazis—the real historical ones—were of course also obsessed with Rome. Hitler referred to Nazi Germany as the “third reich,” the second reich having been the German Empire and the first being the Roman Empire. German nationalists long saw the soul of their nation being forged in Rome (Kaiser, the title of German Emperor, comes directly from the word Caeser). The Nazis were famously a bit racist but they also admired the Roman attitude toward militarism and masculinity: An essential attitude for the soldier, thus the masculine ideal, was men’s deep love for other men. But, it was stressed, not in a gay way.

 To be gay is to be submissive. To be submissive is to be feminine.

 Here’s the paradox: Andrew Tate’s entire thing is pretty homoerotic.

So was Fight Club, when you think about it. Men, shirtless, admiring each other’s bodies, playing full-contact sports, talking about virility. And I know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but come on now.

But men being intimate, even sexual, with other men is not necessarily considered gay. Only submissiveness is gay. In fact, taking the ancient Roman tradition, you could say that what men do with other men is almost completely irrelevant to what’s gay.

 There is a pervasive belief within the right that women have a liberalizing effect on men and society in general. It stems from the belief that women are naturally more “feelings over logic” and thus less rational, and being liberal is being irrational, ergo, the more influence women have, the less rational—more liberal—society becomes, and that’s bad. Many on the far-right blame the fall of Rome (history’s greatest tragedy, as far as they’re concerned) on its alleged liberalization and feminization.

 With the rise of the far-right displacing the traditional conservative, right-wing views including this one become more extreme. Misogyny is starting to lap the sort of “we love our wives but also our man caves” attitude of the Bush GOP. To succeed, the new right believes, women must be virtually removed from public life. A recent video/podcast in the New York Times stirred controversy mainly for its original headline:

This was quickly changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” but the arguments raised still basically honored the original premise, that women’s proximity to men has a feminizing effect on them, and this weakens our institutions.

 The new right’s mission to remove women from the workforce probably reached its most obvious mask-off moment last year with the hysterical internet-wide overreaction to the notorious “Gen Z Boss and a Mini” TikTok video:

The women involved were employees of a skincare company, its products marketed to other women, but the context doesn’t seem to matter at all. This was crossing a line in the sand. Men were apoplectic that this was a gloating victory dance, a message that the office—once a male-only space in the halcyon days of Mad Men—now belongs to women. They saw it as a declaration of war.

 The radical and broad-scaled purging of the federal workforce, under Elon Musk’s idiotically meme-named DOGE department, of anyone deemed woke or DEI (meaning female or nonwhite) was part of this effort to return to the traditional office, one where Don Draper would again feel comfortable.

And it was widely celebrated on the right as exactly that. Because everybody knows on some level that DEI is a euphemism.

 So at the beginning of a new far-right revolution, where you’re trying to immunize society against liberalization via the removal of women from public life, how do you groom the youth—crucially, the embittered young male demographic jaded by the lies of the seduction grifters and radicalized into internet echo chambers—into your project?

 You draw a straight line from the Roman Warrior myth of masculinity to the paradox solution that every incel wants to hear:

 You’re straight. You’re very straight. You’re not gay. Being gay is bad. Being gay means being submissive. Women are liberal. Being around women makes you liberal. Being liberal is being submissive. Being submissive is gay.

 Ipso facto: Being with women is gay. Having sex with women is gay.

 The assassination of Charlie Kirk, if time enough has now passed that I’m permitted to use it as allegory, kind of also represents the death of the right-wing wife guy. The God-fearing family man with his family portrait in his social media profile banner who promotes himself as father first, husband second, patriot very close third. This is a fading concept in the face of the new rising screed: Being straight is mandatory, but acting on it is gay.

 This is a recruitment strategy that’s really great for indoctrinating a far-right incel paramilitary but falls on its face pretty hard in the long-term once you think about it for just a few moments. This new right is also very invested in its mission of outbreeding liberals and nonwhites.

 You see how that’s a problem.

 But the extreme pronatalist faction of the new right are also kind of weirdly asexual. As I mentioned before, Elon Musk, the most prominent figurehead of this movement, chooses IVF as his primary breeding strategy and seems to view wives as an unacceptable liability for wealthy men.

 For a man so deeply concerned about declining birth rates, Musk is weirdly preoccupied with building AI sexbots into his online products, evidently to serve as a substitute for female companionship or to serve as a sexual release. 

Then again, Elon has never been one to think things through too much. What’s clear, and terrifying, is that the calculus on the right regards women as primarily a problem to be solved. Working out the fertility issue is a hurdle. Women who are on the right need to know that they’re not the exceptions to the plan.

I'm writing a book that goes into more depth about this exact topic. It's about how the rise of the internet propelled far-right toxic masculinity to the American Presidency in the space of a single generation. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:

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