I Read Every Comment On My Andrew Tate Article. My God, You People.

A follow-up on what happened when the internet showed up to argue

So I wrote a thing.

The original post can be read here: What Andrew Tate Taught Me About Myself (And I’m Not Happy About It)

You know how sometimes you throw a stone into water expecting a small ripple and instead you accidentally detonate something? That. Over 50 comments. Hundreds of DMs. Responses that spawned their own responses that spawned their own arguments that probably spawned therapy sessions I’ll never know about.

And I have been sitting here for three days reading every single one of them, because I said I would look clearly at things and I am not about to stop now just because it got inconvenient.

Here is what the comments section actually taught me. Buckle up. I’m going to be honest and it is going to annoy approximately everyone, which at this point feels like my brand.

The Men Who Got It Immediately Were The Ones Nobody Talks About

Let me start here because it matters.

There is a type of man in these comments who reads as quietly devastated by what Tate represents. Not because they follow him. Because they don’t, and they watch the ones who do, and they feel something between embarrassment and grief about the whole thing.

Trahern said it. James Wilson said it. Traverse Davies wrote what I think is the most quietly devastating comment in the entire thread, a man who nearly got pulled into the manosphere after an abusive marriage, who climbed out through reading actual feminist theory instead of what the internet claimed feminist theory said.

That comment stopped me completely.

Here is what strikes me about these men, they are not looking for applause. They are not positioning themselves as the good ones for contrast. They are sitting in the mess of this alongside everyone else, genuinely uncomfortable, genuinely trying. And the internet gives them almost no oxygen because they are not dramatic enough to go viral.

Tate figured out that drama is the algorithm. The quiet, decent men didn’t get the memo. That is not their failure. That is a structural problem and we should probably talk about it.

The Elle Beau / Mike Ver Hagen Exchange Is The Whole Conversation In Miniature

I cannot stop thinking about this thread.

Elle Beau made a sharp and important point, the alternative to Tate requires self-inventory, vulnerability, and genuine work, and that is a much less appealing product than a six-step programme delivered with a Bugatti in the background. She is right. She is absolutely right.

And then Mike Ver Hagen responded, and look, I want to be precise here because precision is the whole point of this exercise. What Mike said was messy and in places frustrating and also contained something real. He was asking for specificity. He wanted to know not just what to dismantle but what to build. And his honest answer to that question was basically, I can’t figure out what you want and the standards keep shifting and I don’t know how to navigate that.

Elle responded, correctly, that it is not women’s job to hand men a step-by-step guide.

And she is right about that too.

But here is where it gets uncomfortable. Both things are true simultaneously and we are so bad at sitting with that. Yes, men need to do their own work. Yes, it is not women’s emotional labour to lead them through it. Also true, if we want different outcomes, someone has to build the map, and saying figure it out to a generation raised without compasses is not a plan, it is a prayer.

Mike circled back at the end and said something I found genuinely funny and also a little heartbreaking. He basically announced he was going back to the bleachers to watch the chaos with his head shaking. And honestly? I get it. Not because it’s admirable. Because it is the response of someone who ran out of bandwidth for a conversation that felt like a trap regardless of which door he opened.

That is not victory for anyone.

The Comment That Made Me Sit Down

Bethany, who transitioned from presenting as a man, wrote something that I have now read about eleven times.

She said that her problem was never not knowing what being a man entailed. It was that she found the model itself abhorrent. And she asked the question I think is actually underneath all of this, what if there is no model of masculinity in our culture precisely because patriarchy IS the culture?

I do not have a clean answer to that. I do not think anyone does. But I think it is the more honest version of the question we are all dancing around. We keep asking what should replace the old model of manhood as if masculinity is a software programme that just needs updating. Bethany is suggesting the operating system itself might be the problem. I don’t know if she is entirely right. But I know it is a braver framing than anything I managed in the original piece.

The Comparisons To Actual Fascism

Several commenters went there. The Hitler comparison. The Brownshirts. DavidTS drawing a line between the Allies leaving Germany in rubble in 1918 and feminism leaving men in rubble now.

I want to be careful here because these comparisons can flatten genuinely different phenomena into the same shape until nothing is meaningfully described anymore.

But the underlying observation is not wrong. Certainty is catnip to the desperate. A man who has never publicly questioned himself in forty years is extraordinarily attractive to someone who has questioned himself into paralysis. We saw it in the thirties. We are seeing versions of it now. The product changes. The psychological mechanism does not.

CC Prime compared Tate to Trump and I wrote back something I stand by, these playbooks are identical. Manufactured outrage. Secret knowledge. The enemy is obvious and the solution is me. The difference is scale and consequence but not architecture.

The Comment I Am Still Annoyed By And Also Kind Of Respect

JC said: if you don’t like what Tate has to say, don’t listen to him. If you don’t like the men who buy into it, avoid them.

On the surface this is the most profoundly unhelpful comment in the thread. We cannot simply opt out of a cultural phenomenon that is shaping the boys who will grow into the men who share our world. One in six British boys aged six to fifteen views this man positively. Six. You cannot avoid your way out of that number.

And yet.

There is something in JC’s comment that pokes at the attention economy argument I raised in the original piece. Calling him out keeps the lights on. Every furious article, including mine, is partially feeding the beast. I have no clean answer to that. I wrote the article anyway because I think silence is worse. But I want to be honest that it is a genuine tension and JC, however reductively, is pointing at something real.

The Bit About Mike Complimenting My Brain Wrapped In Backhanded Praise

Mike M showed up twice to tell me I was insanely attractive because of my brain and that he would admire me from the sidelines because I am too young for him.

Reader, I screenshotted it.

Not because it is the worst thing in the world. Because it is such a perfect accidental demonstration of the thing I was writing about. Here is a man who is clearly trying to be kind. Who framed a compliment around intelligence rather than appearance, which he probably thought was the enlightened move. Who then immediately re-gendered the whole exchange by making himself the appreciative observer of my attractiveness. I am not angry at Mike M. I am fascinated by him. He is trying to navigate exactly the terrain the article describes. He does not quite have the map. He got close and then the old reflexes took over. That is not a villain. That is just a person in the middle of figuring something out. We are all Mike M sometimes. That’s the whole article.

What I Actually Learned From 50+ Comments

That the hunger is not abstract. It is in the comments section. It is men asking what they are supposed to be and not quite finding the answer in the responses they get. It is women correctly refusing to do the labour of providing that answer while also, sometimes, not quite building the alternative either. It is both sides retreating to positions that feel principled and also function as a way to stop having to sit in the discomfort.

It is one man who almost got eaten by the manosphere and climbed out through reading Audre Lorde and bell hooks of all things, and being grateful every day for hippie parents who showed him something different was possible.

It is Bethany asking whether the model was ever salvageable to begin with. It is me, writing a follow-up at midnight because the comments section refused to leave me alone and because intellectual honesty apparently has no off switch once you get it started.

The Ending, Again, That I Did Not Plan

I set out to write a piece about Andrew Tate. I ended up writing about the gap. The one between what we dismantled and what we haven’t built yet. The one between what men say they need and what women are willing to provide. The one between calling something out and knowing what to replace it with.

The comments did not close that gap. Of course they didn’t. That is not what comments do.

But they showed me how many people are standing at the edge of it, looking across, wondering if anyone is going to build the bridge.

I don’t have the blueprint. I don’t think any single person does. But I think the conversation in this comments section, messy and infuriating and occasionally accidentally profound, is closer to the actual work than anything Andrew Tate has ever sold for fifty dollars a month.

The Career Ms 💋

Still here. Still looking. Still uncomfortable. That’s apparently what honesty feels like when it’s doing its job.