How awful is Andrew Tate, exactly? How long have you got?

WHEN, EARLIER THIS month, social media star Andrew Tate was denied bail by the Romanian police who’d previously arrested him on charges of rape and people trafficking, news platforms largely reported it through the ‘This is the most famous influencer you’ve never heard of (but your teenage son has)’ angle. But I had heard of him (not from my teenage son. I don’t have a teenage son). Six-ish months earlier, a female friend showed me a Youtube video of Tate proclaiming that when women cheat on men, it’s just worse than when men cheat on women (NB: Tate has described sleeping with someone other than his girlfriend as ‘not cheating, [but] exercise’).

Shortly after, a male friend (clever, handsome, not a teenager) patiently laid out for me Tate’s argument that we women are only attracted to men with status, which is what’s wrong with us and why we deserve everything we get. ‘Not me!’ I replied. ‘I’m uniquely attracted to hotness!’ (Tate has yet to address this aspect of female psychology.)

Then I watched Tate’s Talktv interview with Piers Morgan, and read his Times interview with Hugo Rifkind. I learned that Tate says things such as, ‘The reason 18-year-old [women] are more attractive than 25-year-olds is because they’ve been through less dick,’ and that he ran an online educational institution called Hustlers’ University where, for 50ish quid a month, he’d teach young men how to make so much cryptocurrency they could live as he once did – in a luxury compound in Romania, filled with supercars and guns and dickincognisant 18-year-old women (NB: this was before his arrest. Not sure anyone wants to live as Tate lives now).

So, by the time Tate got nicked, oh, I was familiar with his oeuvre. What did I make of him, this 35-year-old kickboxer-turnedsocial-media-influencer who got booted out of the 2016 Big Brother house, this selfdescribed misogynist, this… bloke? He’s interesting. Awful – but interesting.

For starters, he’s technically goodlooking, yet physically repulsive, which not many people can pull off. Then, there’s how he games le tout social media to make himself Just The Thing, shrouding ancient ideas (women shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house or drive, if they accuse their man of cheating: ‘It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face, and grip her by the neck. Shut up, bitch!’) in a slickly produced, brittle kind of glamour. How he blends internet-friendly inspo philosophising about getting off your arse, fulfilling your potential, etc, with pulpy, easily grasped, empty pseudo-insights into female psychology. How he channels the outrage his utterings provoke as smartly as he does the admiration, riding both to the top of the Tiktok charts. How he harnesses and monetises confusion over free speech – and women.

Yeah, I’d say he’s awful, but interesting, all right. Unless – do I mean: interesting, but awful? I do.