The idea of #smalldickenergy does not really address the issues surrounding the toxic online presence of Andrew Tate.
As an extremely popular online personality, Andrew Tate is nonetheless a damaged person. But he is speaking to millions of other damaged young men and boys. He is a product of (and producer of) capitalist objectification and socio-normative expectation under the guise of "being a man". He exhibits Absent Father Syndrome and needs help. Not that every family needs a father. But the conditions of separation from the father determine the development of the child. Some children however are better off without their father in their lives.
Tate moved to the UK from the USA with his mother after his parents divorced, when he was 11. He was the oldest of three children. His mother raised them alone, while she worked full days in a school dining room in Luton, England (a town where only 12% of boys read books - https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/17/boys-literacy-schools-ks3). Tate rarely saw his father, the Chess Grandmaster Emory Tate, who died in 2015 in the USA at the age of 56.
Today, Andrew Tate is 37 years old. He currently has 7.1 million followers ( up from 3.4 million a year ago) on X (he was banned but Elon Musk, another trauma merchant of masculine identity, had him reinstated when he bought the company), where he peddles advice on how to "escape the work consume die cycle" and "escape the Matrix". He also runs "Hustler's University" where he sells courses, promotes the "War Room" (a male social network that costs $5000 to join) and manages various OnlyFans sites (he's a pimp). He still lives in Romania (amid allegations of rape) and is worth $370 million as of September 2023 (it was $350 million in December 2022). On 29 December 2022, he was arrested in Romania along with brother Tristan on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group, prosecutors said. The investigation and charges are ongoing.
When a young man matures without positive male role models and under traumatic circumstances, this can result in violent reactions to stress and emotions, resistance and hate towards authority, aggression, early rates of sexual encounters, transference of the mother's negative talk about the father, and pressured ideologies to become the breadwinner (1). This is precisely how Andrew Tate expresses himself.
In a podcast, Andrew has talked about his mother Eileen. He said, “When I first started making money, I retired my mother. I called her up and said, look, because she was still a dinner lady, she was washing dishes and I said fuck that off.” He further added, “Quit, I’ll triple your money. You stay home. And when I told people I did that, they go, you don’t think it’s weird that you look after your own mother? Like she’s a grown-up.” It is easy to see Tate is not interested in empowering or liberating his mother.
Andrew concluded by saying, “Isn’t that as old as the human time where the sons make money to look after the parent? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? I don’t know. I thought that was normal. To me, it was like the western attitude towards the whole thing was so skewed”.
The controversial figure went on to say, “I usually saw my dad about once a year when he would visit and I remember one time they had a massive argument.”
There is a crisis of masculinity in many western cultures. It's more often constructed as a (very confused and contradictory) ideology by 'men' like Tate. The results are misogyny, violence, hate, objectification (and dehumanization) of women, and more.
Nearly two-thirds of LGBTQ adults now say they face discrimination in their daily lives as anti-LGBTQ violence spikes. When in doubt, go after the gays. #RonDoneSantis#SmallDickEnergy
Confirmed, if you attempt to add your Mastodon or Bluesky link to the website field of your Twitter account, it will be refused by Mwitter. #smalldickenergy