Andrew Tate on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored: A Win For Tate?
Unfortunately, yes.
An intense nighttime discussion with my partner, brought on by the audacity of Andrew Tate, would not leave my mind as I questioned the phenomenon of this “alpha male.” His hateful commentary got him banned from Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, and Facebook, so his October 4th interview on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” was one of his first public appearances in a while. The 1 hour and 15-minute interview gave Tate a chance to speak about his multitude of accusations of offensiveness and misogyny.
And, oh was it successful.
The disappointing and overwhelming support and defense of Andrew Tate by men on social media only grew after the interview, with many of the 50,000+ comments stating their newfound respect for the censored influencer. YouTube is littered with clips from the interview, stating how Tate “DESTROYED” Morgan and how all of the bias against him is just that, bias.
The rising sigma-male influencer is not, after all, a blatant misogynist, and the discriminatory and prejudiced commentary about women on social media was actually neither discriminatory NOR prejudiced. At least, that was the takeaway for thousands who took Morgan’s pitifully under-prepared interview/interrogation and Tate’s responses at the surface level. It was a “win” in that Piers Morgan’s repetitive questions, empty responses, and frequent interruptions made Tate sound significantly better. Yet, despite the conversational eloquence of Andrew Tate, digging just a little deeper into the conversations shows that while Morgan got “owned,” this has more to do with the lack of efficient pushback and less to do with Tate’s reasoning.
To disagree with everything Tate has said would be willfully ignorant, but many of his arguments were baseless or isolated. I would recommend watching the whole interview to form your own opinion (time markers cited), but in the meantime, here’s a rundown of why this isn’t exactly the Tate win many people think it is.
- His Growth on Social Media
The first misleading thing Tate says was accrediting his extremely fast and large popularity growth to the fact that he was saying what so many men think and feel (3:33). He leaves out the affiliate marketing tactic of Hustler’s University, his online course offered to his followers for $49.99 a month where, apart from the innocent financial information, an affiliate marketing program provided commission when others signed up (many youtube reviews of HU seemed to have an affiliate link attached). An Observer Investigation also stated these members were pushed to share videos of Tate on social media which contributed to growing his fame. From there, the internet took control, further sharing his controversial videos. Oh well, small fact.
- Taken Out of Context
Andrew Tate argues that when hours and hours of videos have been cut down to seconds, it’s easy to paint a bad picture and say that he’s “misunderstood” (5:55). Piers Morgan shoots back that essentially, some things he’s said needn’t be misunderstood because they’re just blatantly misogynistic. Tate challenges him to give examples. Morgan brings up one of his first controversial quotes about rape and the #MeToomovement:
“This is probably 40% of the reason I moved to Romania. In Eastern Europe, none of this garbage flies, you go to the police to say he raped me back in 1988, they’ll say you should have done something back then.”
Andrew shoots back that “if we look at Amber Heard and Johnny Depp there’s been a lot of high profile cases where men have been accused of things they did not do without evidence and their lives have been completely and utterly destroyed (6:30).” Fair point. Except, the rate of false accusations is 2-10% compared to the approximate 69% of sexual assaults that go unreported. Less than 2% will go through the entire justice process and be incarcerated in the US which is similar to the statistics in the UK. Fair point, until you realize that in the US, 90 percent of perpetrators of sexual violence against women are men. Moreover, when men are victims of sexual assault (an estimated one in 71 men, and one in six boys), 93 percent reported their abuser was a man. Fair point, until you realize that Tate is inflating the minuscule problem of false accusations to defend statements that say he favors countries that do less to protect the relatively large number rape victims. To say that this is “giving women the power to control men” makes no sense when it is wildly disproportionate to the number of men who use their power to assault women, men, boys, and girls every day. It’s like giving a person a knife and saying “they’re dangerous to me because you gave them that knife” while the other person has a gun that they use way more often.
He additionally says he thinks rape perpetrators deserve the death penalty, a statement that means little when he stated in a deleted tweet “[I]f you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare some responsibility,” which Morgan somehow failed to bring up considering this is one of his most controversial statements.
- Women As Property
While the misogynistic implications of viewing women as property are obvious, this one is not just on Tate. The arguments in this particular section surrounding property and authority are deeply rooted in religion, and while I vehemently disagree with them (and question his religiousness), these beliefs are wildly popular in the church, having heard them and been taught them many times myself. Nonetheless, he doesn’t seem to stick to one argument. Tate uses a father giving away his daughter at a wedding and her taking the husband’s last name as an example of transference of property, citing the bible as his basis. He believes a woman is a “sovereign individual”, men “don’t own any sovereign individual” and it’s only his prerogative that a wife will be handed over to a man by her father.
However, he partially backtracked on his statement saying, “If I have responsibility over a woman I must have a degree of authority over her…(like a) child (14:15),” but then doubled down stating, in the example of safety, he should have the authority to say he won’t let his woman walk alone at night. He states, “if I’m responsible for her safety and I’m the person who’s burdened with making sure she is safe, I should have the authority to make sure she’s not in that situation (15:24).” However, he backtracks again, saying he can’t actually force her and gives a self-made and objectively incorrect definition of what authority is. He then compares Morgan’s legal authority over his children to Tate’s own perceived authority over a woman (16:10). He finishes off that segment by saying that if his woman asked if she should go out at night alone, he would say no. Morgan states his agreement with that particular statement ( as most people, men and women, would also agree) but Tate tries to say they were arguing semantics, as if authority to control someone is no different than an opinion or recommendation (16:40). They continue to argue over voluntary authority, though to give someone the ability to make decisions for you is nearly antonymous to the definition of authority. If you don’t have the power to tell someone they have to do something, that is not authority. He either believes he has this power over women or he doesn’t. Regardless, it took nearly five minutes for him to leave us with no conclusive answer.
- On Young Women
When asked if 18 and 19-year-old women are more attractive than 25-year-old women, Tate responded with, “that’s a loaded question.” The question was in reference to a quote which, in summary, stated these younger women have “been through less dick” and the older women have been “fucked” and dumped more times and are more of a “mess to clean up (20:24).” He argues this isn’t misogynistic to which Morgan mistakenly and unintelligently argues back anything anti-women is misogyny, which is of course untrue. Tate says that he was being attacked for toxic masculinity and that the leftist feminist crowd takes these small clips and tries to twist his words (23:27). He says in the context of that particular quote, he was mediating between a Muslim guy saying why youth and innocence are coveted around the world and a feminist, but this single clip twisted his words (25:32).
Out of curiosity, I went to go find 10 more minutes of this conversation to form some context and give him the benefit of the doubt. Within a span of five minutes of this particular quote, Tate tells women if they want to get a man they should act like they haven’t done much and don’t know things, and “he was going to bang you anyways, but if you want him to love you, you learn to shut the fuck up.” He also says women who’ve slept with 100 dudes can’t be controlled, asserts with confidence that virgin women do not want virgin men based on…his opinion, and he’d rather use his status to find “one or five women of innocence and keep them” as opposed to sleeping with a bunch of women. He expects virginity from these women, but not for himself. Each of these comments blatantly demonstrates a misogynistic double standard for what is expected of women, with no mention of the purity or innocence of a man. Not exactly sure what he’s mediating there. So much for context.
- Traditional Masculine Values
Back to the topic of responsibility, Tate mentions dying for a woman and the “traditional masculine values” he holds, such as the duty to protect and provide for a woman, be responsible for her safety and have a certain degree of authority over her (33:40). Though, still not sure if we’re utilizing his butchered definition of authority. Tate continues to argue that the problem is people in this world have issues with these values, and I’d have to only partially agree.
While the essence of feminism is the absolute equality of women, I believe a part of that is the ability of women to make choices for themselves, the same as men can so easily. Now, if this choice is prescribing to the antiquated idea that a man should protect and provide for a woman, we can acknowledge the patriarchal roots of this belief, but the choice to conform to them is ultimately up to the woman. I think this is difficult for many modern feminists to grasp, and to ignore the fact that there are many women who prescribe to that ideal would be naive.
However, there is a crucial difference between allowing someone to do these things for you versus having them assert, despite your beliefs, that they will do these things for you. This is where the issue arises.
Likewise, these supposedly “traditional masculine values” coupled with the constant insults, infantilization, victim blaming, and degradation of women also are also cause for concern. Are these traditional masculine values or hate under the guise of masculinity? Either answer calls for a revision of what it means to be masculine.
Though this is only half of the interview, the abhorrent longevity of this article, restrictions of the site and the pity for my editors guilt me into temporarily ending it here; the ramifications of Andrew Tate’s behavior is to be continued in another article. The first thirty minutes, however, can speak for themselves.
Misogyny, toxic masculinity, and the mention of the whole gender-relations “thing” are enough to clear most men in a 10-mile radius. The increased usage of these phrases has demoted them to mindless buzzwords, hyperbolic and definitionless. Such is the disdain for these ‘buzzwords’ that it seems that their importance has been lost and their objectivity forgotten. I want to point out that these words are so heavily used because they best encompass the issues at hand.
And Andrew Tate is an issue.