The Bluestocking, vol 254

less Voldemort, more Hermione Granger

Happy Friday!

This week, I went on the BBC’s Media Show to discuss misogynist influencer Andrew Tate—whom I was invited to “debate with” by a podcast last year. (I declined.) Also appearing with me was Matt Shea, who has made a clever Vice documentary about Tate, which is out in the UK soon.

I say clever because Shea weaves together the Theroux-esque sensationalism of him visiting Tate’s Romanian compound, and Tate’s $5,000 manly retreats in the Transylvanian mountains—where Shea is made to cage-fight to prove his masculinity—with first-person testimony from women who allege that they were raped by Tate. (Tate denies the allegations.)

As I say in the Media Show, this feels like a very good answer to the question of how to platform people like Tate, or Kanye West, or Alex Jones: instead of doing a sit-down interview which allows them to showboat—their number one skill, the whole reason they’re internet famous—make something which puts them in their proper context.

The big question about Tate was always why he became so ubiquitous last year (at least to teenage boys with social media accounts). The answer is that he created a website called Hustler’s University, a pyramid scheme where users paid just under $50 a month (!) to “learn how to get rich,” and then were actually just given access to online courses on drop-shipping and e-commerce. (Here’s a very funny video by YouTuber Coffeezilla deconstructing the scam.) The real money came from getting other people to sign up, because you would then get 48 per cent of their monthly fee.

So what happened? Teenagers cut up and remixed the most provocative (and thus engagement-driving) of Tate’s misogynist content—of which there is plenty, the man knew what he was doing, his podcast was called “Tate Speech”—and shared it on TikTok and elsewhere. In their bio, the teenagers put an affiliate link to Hustler’s University. And suddenly you have teenagers making hundreds of dollars effectively as Tate’s freelance social media managers.

Basically, Tate is the first person to harness the optimised-for-engagement algorithm, one of the most significant inventions of the 21st century, and the multi-level marketing scheme, the premier low-effort grift of the 20th.

Smart. Horrifying, but smart. He has now been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking in Romania, which he claims is “the Matrix” getting its revenge.

Tate studying the blade, with Matt Shea

One more thing: what strikes you watching the Vice documentary is how the whole Tate lifestyle—the aspirational dream he used as marketing for Hustlers University—is profoundly adolescent. Big man got a Lambo! At one point he picks up a sword lying on his sofa and goes into a reverie about how it would be better if men had swords all the time, because then if your woman watched the TV and started crying about how she would like to wear a coronavirus mask, you could brandish your sword and explain you weren’t afraid. (I’m not sure how big Andrew Tate thinks viral particles are??)

Later, one of Tate’s posse introduces himself to Vice with the words: “Hi. I’m Alpha Wolf,” which made me hoot. No wonder they need the constant implicit threat of violence. They must be terrified of being laughed at.

Even the extreme misogyny is tragic, as well as repellent. It’s a Grand Theft Auto vision of the world, and it has the same pixel-deep quality. Off his talking points, Tate looks bewildered, and then angry and humiliated.

I’ll post the link to the documentary itself next week, and in the meantime you can listen to Nicky Woolf’s podcast from last year for more.

Best wishes,

Helen

PS. My podcast lap of honour continues. Here I am talking to Hugh Linehan (no relation, AFAIK) for the Irish Times about The New Gurus and whether all opinion columnists eventually go mad.

PPS. I also talked to Matt Forde about… well. Matt is a fellow leftwing politics nerd so we did talk about gurus, but only after a light therapy session about my experience covering British politics from 2010-2019—taking in the SNP’s failures, Corbyn’s cult of personality and my strong beliefs about how journalists shouldn’t get cosy with politicians. We also danced through several other completely uncontroversial subjects, like the GRR. Listen here.

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A Modern History of Groomer Politics (Reason)

“Progressive opinion has not just turned against the idea of sex with minors; it has been extending its concept of who counts as a minor. Even as [anti-woke activist Christopher] Rufo was stretching the definition of "grooming" in one direction, some left-leaning voices were using the word to describe manipulative or exploitative relationships between older men and young adults. Jezebel, for example, reported in early 2022 that three women had accused director Cary Joji Fukunaga of attempting to groom them. One of the women was 18 at the time he allegedly started to pursue her. The other two were 20.

On that topic, mainstream opinion isn't far from progressive opinion. CNN's Harry Enten recently examined U.S. Census data to see how many weddings each year have broken the old rule of thumb that men should only pair up with partners who are at least seven years older than half their age. The total had dropped sharply, from 28 percent in 1900 to just over 10 percent in 1980 to about 3 percent in 2021. (That's 3 percent for heterosexual unions. For gay couples, it was 15 percent—higher than the hets, but still substantially lower than the standard used to be.) But the more important change he found ran deeper. It was only in the last few decades, Enten discovered, that popular culture had started offering that rule as the largest acceptable discrepancy in a couple's ages. Originally, it had been offered as the ideal age gap.”

“Groomer discourse” has flourished at the same time as we have become far less tolerant even of legal age-gap relationships.

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Photo: Steven Simko for LA Magazine

Bari Weiss’s L.A. Adventure (LA Magazine)

… She’s less Voldemort, more Hermione Granger, if Hermione had been a nice Jewish girl from Pennsylvania.

And yet, for some reason, Weiss is also insanely triggering to a lot of folks, mostly liberals. “The real defining feature of Bari Weiss is how absolutely, categorically stupid she is,” reads one typically nasty tweet from Tom Scocca, a writer who’s made a hobby out of regularly trolling Weiss online. And the hate isn’t just happening on the internet. Before the story you’re reading now was published—before it was written—its author received irate phone calls from progressive friends and colleagues who were furious that Weiss was being given a “platform” in the pages of Los Angeles magazine. One caller hung up in a flurry of obscenities. (Interestingly, though, not one of the Never-Weisses Los Angeles reached out to agreed to be interviewed for this piece).

This is an interesting piece in its own right, about Bari Weiss’ post-NYT career, and the challenges of “independent” journalism outside liberal institutions. But I also picked it for narcissistic reasons. The writer is correct to say that Weiss irritates a lot of people, for reasons they can’t actually articulate. Hmm, what is it about a successful female journalist who doesn’t performatively pretend to be omigod such a klutz, lol, and an uwu smol bean!!! that so winds up some of her less successful male peers? It’s a three-pipe problem.

Disclosure: I just recorded an episode of Bari’s podcast Honestly, out in a few weeks, where we talked about some of this—the difference between a contrarian and a conspiracist; the danger of a style of journalism which always questions the conventional wisdom without acknowledging that the conventional wisdom is usually correct; whether she regrets making Fetch the IDW happen, etc.

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Quick Links

1. You know the anarchist slogan ACAB? It stands for “all coppers are bastards,” and it’s designed to say—power inevitably corrupts. Anyway, may I just offer a small note of appreciation that Julie Bindel has managed to smuggle precisely that argument into the pages of the law ‘n’ order-loving Daily Mail? “The problem is not just that [serial rapist David Carrick is] a bad apple — the whole barrel is rotten. Even the officers who are repelled by the sexual assaults, or the sharing of obscene photographs and jokes on social media, are forced to be complicit.”

2. Worth following: litigation against Stable Diffusion, a generative AI, for infringing on artists’ copyrights. Thanks to Tracy for the tip.

3. More GRR: If you want to get past the sloganeering and into the legal specifics, some good follows on the subject are Michael Foran, Audrey Ludwig, MurrayBlackburnMackenzie, Scott Wortley and Jonathan Brown. All except Ludwig are based in Scotland. Here’s Foran arguing that the GRR does affect the whole UK in Unherd. For the contrary view, look at the feeds of Duncan Hothersall or Kezia Dugdale.

4. “[Claude] Shannon’s work illustrates the true role of top-rate science. When I started graduate school, my adviser told me that the best work would prune the tree of knowledge, rather than grow it.” (Quanta)

5. Tabloid editors rarely speak in public, so it’s interesting to see former Mail Online chief Martin Clarke offer a … punchy rebuttal to Prince Harry’s claims about the tabloids (The Free Press). Is it immensely self-serving? Yes. Does he have a point? Kinda. And I certainly believe this: “As an editor for 27 years, I can assure Harry that nobody sits around in editorial conferences plotting how they can screw over the Sussexes today. In my experience, senior journalists are much more likely to be plotting how they can screw over each other.”

6. Chaser: royal correspondent Valentine Low dug out the contemporary reporting of Meghan’s first engagement with the Queen, which was extremely positive! (Twitter) Yet Harry describes it in Spare like this: “The papers... pronounced the trip an unmitigated disaster. They portrayed Meg as pushy, uppity, ignorant of royal protocol, because she'd made the unmistakable mistake of getting into a car before Granny.”

7. “One company leader recalled the surreal moment of crying about the end of Twitter as they knew it, only to look up and see a person in a Jack Sparrow costume amble by.” Deep dive into Elon Musk’s takeover of twitter, which includes the Halloween party where the staff found out he had acquired the company (The Verge).

8. “England at the turn of the millennium was [Jeremy] Clarkson’s home. It wanted entertainment, and it got it from the Victorian circus of Big Brother and X Factor, and from the sneers and stereotypes of Little Britain. . . But there has come a point when [his] lines aren’t provocative catnip anymore, but an embarrassing commercial risk.” (Unherd)

9. There is no original “Great Wave off Kanagawa.” A fascinating explanation of how ukiyo-e prints were made. One thing I would love to read a piece about is how linear perspective swept through the world; the Dutch brought the idea to Japan in the 17th century. Imagine the first day someone showed you that. (Twitter).

See you next time! By then I will have been on more podcasts!!!