With surveys reporting that an increasing number of young men are subscribing to these beliefs, the number of women finding that their partners share the misogynistic views espoused by the likes of Andrew Tate is also on the rise. Research from anti-fascism organisation Hope Not Hate, which polled about 2,000 people across the UK aged 16 to 24, discovered that 41% of young men support Tate versus just 12% of young women.
“Numbers are growing, with wives worried about their husbands and partners becoming radicalised,” says Nigel Bromage, a reformed neo-Nazi who is now the director of Exit Hate Trust, a charity that helps people who want to leave the far right.
“Wives or partners become really worried about the impact on their family, especially those with young children, as they fear they will be influenced by extremism and racism.”
Social identity is one of those things we never talk about, it’s something most people don’t even believe exists. But it’s so fundamental to who we are as a species that when it’s taken away, people will lose the will to live entirely even if they’re not depressed or have any mental illness. This has been researched to a great degree and we’ve made laws pertaining to how we treat prisoners because we’ve collectively determined that to take someone’s social identity away is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment.
Meanwhile, we have all built an interconnected palace to finding ways to dismantle our own social identities online. It doesn’t matter how “introverted” you think you are or how reclusive you feel, you need a social identity to survive, you need other people, you need to define yourself in relation to others. It’s hardwired.
And scrolling on the internet doesn’t fill this gap. You can’t get that self-inflection from reading other people’s thoughts in your own head. You have to engage with others to find yourself, and if you don’t, you slowly become more and more withdrawn and distant and you start to blame these dark feelings on everything else, because how do you even identify a cause or a syndrome that we don’t even have language for in most cases? How many 18-year-old boys who don’t know how to talk to girls are thinking “I need to exercise my social capacity to better find my own values”? When it’s so much easier to find a forum that says you’re the one who’s right and true and honest, and the world is against you.