Questions about misogynistic masculinity
Rebecca asked me some questions. I gave her answers. It seemed to go well :)
Thanks to Rebecca for asking me some great questions about Tate-ism and the rapid spread of toxic masculinity online.
What prompted you to start writing Death of a Gentleman?
Watching young men I’d never met grieve a version of masculinity they were never offered in the first place. The book started as a clinical observation and turned into something more personal once I realised how many of the men presenting with depression, rage, or quiet collapse were not failing at being men — they were failing at being a kind of man that nobody had taught them how to be, in a culture that had stopped agreeing on what the word meant. I wanted to write something that took the confusion seriously without handing it over to the people currently profiting from it.
To what extent do you believe that social media platforms play a role in the spread of misogyny?
Considerable, but not in the way most coverage suggests. The platforms didn’t invent misogyny, and they don’t hold opinions of their own. What they do is reward engagement, and contempt is one of the most reliably engaging human emotions ever measured. When you build a system that pays creators in attention, and attention flows fastest toward outrage, certainty, and resentment, you end up with an economy that quietly subsidises the worst version of every argument. Misogyny isn’t the bug. It’s one of several products the machine happens to be very good at selling.
Why do you think misogynistic content performs so well online?
Because it offers a complete worldview to people who feel they’ve been handed an incomplete one. A young man who is lonely, underemployed, sexually anxious, and quietly furious doesn’t need a research paper — he needs an explanation. Misogynistic content provides one: your suffering has a cause, the cause is women, and here is a man on a podcast who will validate that for ninety minutes a day. It performs because it works as a psychological painkiller, and painkillers always sell well in cultures that have run out of better answers.
Do you think the misogyny online reflects attitudes that already exist offline, or is social media intensifying these attitudes?
Both, and the distinction matters less than people think. The attitudes were always there — anyone who grew up in a Western working-class environment in the seventies and eighties can confirm that the locker room did not require Wi-Fi. What’s changed is the feedback loop. Offline misogyny used to be socially expensive: someone would push back, a partner would leave, a workplace would notice. Online, the same beliefs get amplified, monetised, and reflected back as community. The intensification isn’t that men believe new things. It’s that the believing now happens inside a structure that rewards them for it.
Are young men being radicalised because of online culture and algorithms, or are these misogynistic beliefs intentional and chosen?
This is the wrong binary, and I’d gently push back on the framing. Radicalisation and choice aren’t opposites — they’re the same process viewed from different distances. Nobody wakes up and decides to hate women in the abstract. What happens is more ordinary: a fifteen-year-old searches something innocuous, the algorithm offers him three increasingly sharp videos, he watches because they’re interesting, and six months later he holds opinions he didn’t know he was shopping for. The choice was real at every step. The architecture made certain choices much easier to make than others. Both things are true, and pretending only one of them is, is how we keep getting this wrong.
What are the most concerning factors about the current widespread misogyny? What could the future look like if this continues?
Four things concern me, in roughly this order. First, the loneliness underneath it — we are producing a generation of young men with fewer close friendships, fewer mentors, and fewer trusted adults than any cohort in living memory, and lonely people are easy to recruit. Second, the political downstream — these beliefs don’t stay in the bedroom; they show up at the ballot box, in workplaces, in family courts, in legislation. Third, the women and girls living inside the consequences, which is the part most easily forgotten in panel discussions. Fourth, the slow normalisation of contempt as a default register for talking about half the species. If it continues unchecked, the future looks like more partner violence, lower marriage and birth rates, sicker men, sicker women, and a generation of children raised by parents who can barely tolerate each other. None of which is inevitable, and all of which is already partly here.
Have you noticed misogyny in Đà Lạt? How does it compare to the West? Would you say misogyny has been brought over from Western men, or was it rooted there already?
Yes, though it wears different clothes. Vietnamese culture carries its own long history of patriarchal assumption — Confucian inheritance, wartime gender roles, the quiet expectation that a wife will manage a household, a husband, children, and her in-laws while holding a full-time job, maintaining a certain level of physical attractiveness and personal hygiene, not causing any man in the room any discomfort, let any man in the room be right even when they are demonstrably not, and be sexually available across multiple decades. That’s not a Western import.
What I have observed in Đà Lạt’s expat community is something separate and uglier: a particular subset of Western men who came to Vietnam specifically because they could no longer behave the way they wanted to behave at home. They didn’t bring misogyny here — Vietnam had its own — but they did bring a sharper, more entitled, more transactional version, and they speak about Vietnamese women in ways that would end careers in Sydney or London. The two systems coexist. The local version is hierarchical and often suffocating for the women inside it. The expat version is predatory and largely unaccountable. Neither is helped by pretending the other doesn’t exist.
Thankfully, the percentage of expats with these attitudes is small, very small. But it is growing amongst the younger expat community online.