Should they get elected, the Labour Party have said they will train up “positive male influencers” to go into schools and teach young lads not to be dickheads. This, they reckon, is a necessary response to the insidious influence of internet weirdos like Andrew Tate.
Tate, in case you don’t know, is a buffed-up manchild who chomps cigars and brags about his fast cars on social media. Somehow, he has become a role model to millions of young men across the globe who buy into his daft worldview (based on throwback ideas of ‘tough guy’ masculinity and a fear of women, veiled thinly behind confused, shouty, anti-feminist rhetoric).
He truly is the dick’s dick. The sort of bloke who almost certainly had no mates at school and struggled to ever look girls in the eye. In any just world he would still be living with his mum, binge-drinking energy pop while being catfished by Russian bots pretending to be sexy girls.
But in 2024, Andrew Tate really is rich, famous and admired by a worldwide legion of spod-acolytes.
He is, of course, the symptom and not the cause of this lonely and pitiful brand of modern masculinity. It is a culture inhabited by young men who unironically talk and think like Apprenticecandidates: preoccupied with being dominant. They want to be seen as the best at everything they do: physically strong, mentally sharp, philosophically bold. Most of all, they want to be taken seriously. And that is the biggest shame of all.
When I was a young dickhead I knew I was a young dickhead. Our role models weren’t muscle-men who ate raw meat and never smiled. They were playful idiots like Paul Gascoigne or Jacko from Brush Strokes; happy-go-lucky types who seemed to have a healthy grasp on the fact that life was absurd and none of us had much control over its outcomes, so we all might as well have a laugh. It wasn’t an ideal dogma to live by (Gazza was a drunk with a record of domestic abuse) but I feel as if it was slightly sunnier, at least. It was certainly less bitter, angry and aggressive.
It was also more human. By having a sense of our own irrelevance – a healthy notion of how fleeting and pointless life is – we were able to enjoy the moment. Growing up, I didn’t really feel as if I was in an earnest contest against other boys to be the best, the
