womanthismonth.com | JUNE 2025 OPINION 80 Toxic Teachings: Andrew Tate, the Manosphere and the Boys We’re Raising Rachel Radford is an expat teacher in Bahrain. Her column in Woman This Month dives into pivotal issues impacting women, reflecting her unique perspective and experiences. It’s an inescapable truth that we are living in a terminally online world. For most of us, doom scrolling and meme sharing are as much a part of our daily rituals as brushing our teeth in the morning and eating dinner at night. While the benefits of this constant connectedness can be many and varied, there is also a darker more insidious side which we would be remiss to ignore. Understanding the ‘manosphere’ It seems these days more than ever, being online can feel like walking through a minefield of extreme opinions and half-truths. The internet is filled with voices wanting to be heard, and usually those who shout the loudest or have the most controversial things to say are often the ones that get heard. Of these voices, few have garnered as much controversy or warrant as much concern as that of Andrew Tate. If you are one of the lucky ones who has not heard of Tate, please forgive me for being the one to burst that bubble. A self-proclaimed ‘alpha male’ and internet personality, he has become the face of a growing online movement known as the manosphere. And if you’ve never heard of that term before (again, lucky you), buckle up because it’s time we talk about it! The manosphere is a loosely connected network of influencers, bloggers, YouTubers, and self-help ‘gurus’ who claim to teach men how to reclaim their masculinity which they have been robbed of in a world tainted by feminism and political correctness. On the surface, the advice may seem harmless: lift weights, be confident, make money; but when you scratch beneath that surface just a little, what you find is a worldview dripping in misogyny, entitlement and emotional repression. The rise of troubling youth Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably at least heard of Netflix’s Adolescence, a chilling drama that explores exactly what can happen when these toxic ideologies take root. The four-part series follows Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy who becomes consumed by rage after being rejected by his female classmate, Katie Leonard. Spoiler alert: he murders her! While it’s not an easy watch, in my opinion it is a necessary one. It is a portrayal of how some boys (and men) internalise rejection, not as a normal part of life, but as a personal assault on their worth, their masculinity and their inherent right to be desired.
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