Kids These Days Dep’t: You may have seen a study making the rounds in recent days decrying the corrupting grasp of Andrew Tate on
titled “‘Trying to talk white male teenagers off the alt-right ledge’ and other impacts of masculinist influencers on teachers.” It gives the impression that roving junior Vikings have taken over classrooms, backing their female counterparts into a corner as they try to learn. It’s a distinctly racial problem and a distinctly male problem, one that teachers are fighting to no avail.
Tate, I should preface, is a terrible figure of influence, at 10 million Twitter followers: he advocates for
and refers to his alleged harem of (possibly fictional) wives as “baby machines”; he’s
of sex trafficking and rape in multiple countries; he runs a scammy
. He’s not a conservative in the slightest (though it’s been said), as his beliefs run completely counter to the traditions of western culture.
But this study about his supposed impact on classrooms sits on shaky research foundations and is notable not for its findings, but for its contribution to the growing body of media that vilifies boys.
The researchers — one Master’s student of social justice out of the University of Toronto, and one professor of “recreation and leisure studies” out of Dalhousie — pulled all posts and comments from Reddit’s r/Teachers board between June 1, 2022 and January 31, 2023, for a total of 2,364 snippets of content.
The authors carefully sidestep any questions about quantity, leaving out a by-the-numbers breakdown about the number of posts complaining about “discourses of misogyny championed by Andrew Tate.” They do, however, state that Reddit posts about these issues can be sorted into three themes: one, the impact on teachers; two, the impact on the classroom; and three, proposed solutions.
Teachers, found the researchers, struggled with the gender dynamics of a misogyny-steeped classroom. Thirteen-year-old boys weren’t respecting their 24-year-old woman teachers, and in one case, a user reported that a group of troublemakers told the vice-principal that they would only behave in a class taught by a man. Another user complaint, summarized by AI, read as follows: “Seemingly, ninety percent of my work is trying to talk white teenage boys off the alt-right ledge.”
The authors go on to assert that exposure to Andrew Tate’s rhetoric can impact the safety of a classroom and seed misogyny, citing one example of a nightmare classroom: “My (brother-in-law) teaches 7th grade and said the boys in his class have taken to calling all women and girls ‘holes,’ and any boy who is friendly or polite to girls a ‘simp.’ One boy was bold enough to ask his female coworker how she’d keep her husband if she didn’t have that wetwet, to roaring laughter.”
As for solutions, some teachers noted that girls in some classrooms will ridicule any boys who bring up Tate, and suggested letting the children police themselves. Other teachers, summarized the researchers, described “violence” — but the researchers never reproduced any accounts of those.
Four paragraphs of discussion on misogyny, inceldom and Tate lament male supremacism and the “machine of ‘naturalized’ male power.” Overall, it looks grim.
But what it lacks is a sense of context. The unverified accounts of classroom sexism were terrible, yes — something that no teacher or female pupil should have to go through. But they weren’t quantified; and even if they were, a mere sample from Reddit wouldn’t be statistically representative of the classroom experience. Self-reported tales of woe are more likely to be told in such spaces, as with any public message board since Roman times. We also have to assume there are false positives: cases when oversensitive teachers take grave offence to ironic humour typical of teens.
Reddit discussions can be useful and informative, particularly in gauging a community’s temperature — and for that reason, I cite them in columns from time to time — but they can’t be the sole basis for academically gauging the prevalence of a problem.
So, is Tate-fuelled violence (by white boys in particular) really a problem in Canada? It’s an objective fact that violence in school is a growing problem, with many major school boards
a statistical rise in incidents compared to before the pandemic. Teachers report
with “complex needs” without adequate supports;
; and, as a result, the
. Compounding these problems are the
of parent activists who
to keep police officers — one source of protection — out of the schools that need them most.
But these reports lack demographic information, and they don’t include motive. The information that is out there throws the Reddit vignette into question: in the United Kingdom, one survey
that Tate was most likely to be viewed positively by Black youth aged 16 to 25 (41 per cent of whom approved of the man); and was also rated positively by 31 per cent of Asian (including South Asian) youth. Only 15 per cent of their white male counterparts felt the same — a group that, at the same time, has become the face of misogynistic violence through popular culture. Netflix’s
Adolescence
,
?
Where it surfaces, Tate-fuelled misogyny is a problem. But we don’t actually know where that is in Canada, or in which communities — at least, based on this six-month qualitative snapshot of a teachers’ subreddit. Maybe that’s something our social justice scholars can look into before they start another round of finger-pointing.
National Post
