This story caught our attention at Jacobin partly because many of us didn’t realize that Andrew Tate isn’t just an ideological figure — he literally provides his followers with a blueprint for running a pimping operation. That’s alarming enough on its own, particularly given how massive his global audience is among young men in particular. But then to learn that twenty-one-year-olds are successfully implementing this blueprint to exploit girls their own age and younger is beyond shocking. So it bears some discussion.

Can you give a quick explanation of the Tate phenomenon? Why is this guy so popular?

The focus with Tate has mostly been on his sexist language, not on Tate as an entrepreneur and mentor to other aspiring entrepreneurs. I think that’s a mistake, because people aren’t drawn to him only because they agree with his ideas about women. They’re drawn to him because he embodies a possibility of success, of rising and becoming something else.

If you look at Tate’s movement not only as an ideology of misogyny but also of male self-improvement, it makes much more sense. Social mobility has stalled; wages are stagnant. The sentiments of meaninglessness and blocked mobility that Tate speaks to are real. The ideological move is to redirect those sentiments away from an analysis of social relations, and toward hating women and hating weakness in general.

Tate even has, for example, a truly intense hatred of people who are gluten intolerant. And this is where his worldview simply reinforces capitalist ideology. You are self-made; you can never blame anyone or anything for your lack of success. Likewise, your gluten intolerance is just a question of attitude. You’re passive, you don’t really want it enough, and this is why you suffer.

But what’s interesting about this article is that it suggests fractures in the picture. We tend to talk about the manosphere as one totality — the incels, the looksmaxxers, Andrew Tate, all part of the same awful phenomenon. But I think Tate’s intense hatred of weakness actually creates a real difficulty for men like the simps and incels, who are in many respects self-defined by their weakness or suffering or unmet desire.

Tateism taps into a fear among young men that the world is strictly bifurcated into male winners and male losers. You see this among incels too — they believe it just as much as Tate does, the only difference being that they identify with the losers. Tate is not for incels; incels have essentially given up on joining the ranks of the Übermenschen. Tate is for the strivers, the men who believe that if they keep grinding, they can ascend. And the only way to ascend in this vision, or to validate yourself as a “high-value male,” is to establish an undeniable hierarchy over other people, to dominate and exploit them.

Tate is living out the theory of male dominance, and the way that looks in practice is utterly sociopathic. Tate himself is probably a born sociopath. His most adept imitators, like Tyukalo, probably are too. But most of the young men interested in Tate’s ideas are not. They’re actively attempting to cultivate sociopathy in themselves, because they’re afraid that if they don’t, they’ll end up the losers of the intrasexual competition game.

What’s fueling all of it is a mass panic that there is such a thing as an irredeemable loser guy, and each man’s private terror that it might be himself.

Money is a major validator of male status, and so is control over women. Tate offers a blueprint for acquiring both. But ultimately those are means to an end. The linchpin of the whole thing is a cutthroat, zero-sum view of male worth.

I agree, and it’s clearly a men’s game. The women in it have no real role except as tools. But here’s what’s interesting: within this game, Tate and his followers effectively tell the simps, “You are the real losers.” And when he pushes them down that deeply, it becomes impossible for them to relate to him.

There’s a power struggle going on that breaks down any idea of a male collective. The competition is supposed to remain a competition among men, with women serving as simple currency. But push some men low enough and the whole structure stops working on them. In the case of the White Knights, they started identifying with the women instead.

This article is the story of men who have essentially fallen into the loser male category — they literally spend all day chatting on a forum called SimpCity about their favorite porn streamers — and found a kind of redemption by disaffiliating from male exploitation. Sure, they’re mobilizing another male archetype familiar to patriarchy, the benevolent protector. But the article makes it clear they started to see these women as subjects with interior lives, began to genuinely worry about them, and were moved to intervene in their abuse.

That’s what’s conjured in the article’s title, “Revenge of the Simps.” Tateism is built like a pyramid, with an apex-predator male at the top. That may work for the strivers who hope to climb the pyramid. But for the other men — the simps, the incels, the broke guys — it’s humiliating, and maybe the thrill of misogyny is not enough to buy them off.

This is why I found the piece so interesting. When I was lurking on the incel forums about two years ago, the way they talked about Chads [superior, “alpha” males] was: Chads are, in a sense, stupid. They can’t see the world as it really is, but they’re winning anyway. The incels saw themselves as smarter, wiser, closer to the truth. That was their way of coping with failure. And that actually puts them in conflict with guys like Tate, who sees himself as a Chad.

But in the forums I studied, the hatred was still directed almost entirely at women, and the solidarity was directed at other men in the same situation. What’s happening in this story is different, which makes me think something may be evolving.

When I followed the incel community, there were constant internal debates. For instance, once they developed the idea of male victimhood, they started making distinctions: if you have mental health issues, if you’re black, if you’re poor, then your victimhood is greater. And others would push back: “We’re supposed to be a collective, and you’re wrecking it by ranking who’s most vulnerable.”

My point is that these forums aren’t just people repeating an ideology at each other. There are real discussions going on, real evolutions taking place, and we need to acknowledge that even while maintaining that the main ideas they work from are awful.

This is the first time I’ve seen a group connected to this incel-adjacent environment really fighting for the women against the Chads. That’s a notable development.

The simps were already interested in cracking the case and protecting these women from the beginning, but their zeal was really inflamed by Tyukalo coming into their chat and denigrating them, calling them losers. He kept calling them the N-word, oddly, which I think was meant to communicate that they occupy the lowest rung of society and thus had no standing to criticize him. He mocked them, and it increased their appetite for revenge. And the form their revenge took was liberating these girls from his trafficking operation.

Instead of mass paranoia about being a loser male — and hatred of women in particular for failing to rescue men from that status by sleeping with them and marrying them — maybe some of these men could get fed up and start to turn on the structures of male domination themselves, structures that are demeaning and humiliating to them personally as well as to women. I’m sure I sound too optimistic, but it’s at least a useful thought exercise to map the weak points in the ascendant misogynist ideology.

There’s one moment in the article where one of the simps reflects on exactly this. He says, essentially: this is all part of a bigger structural phenomenon, and how have we been part of creating it? It was a beautiful moment.

The simp speaks! He basically says that masculinity and femininity are in profound crisis, and that being a simp is the outcome of those crises for him, and simphood puts him face to face with the struggle not to become what he despises. It’s genuinely moving.

As you said, maybe we’re being too positive. But in one sense it would be surprising if this didn’t happen. In Tate’s world, not everyone can ascend. Contrast that with Jordan Peterson: whatever else you say about his ideology, there’s nothing in it that structurally requires most men to fail. With Tate, it’s total. Failure is not only assumed but required for most men.

For there to be dominant men, there must be loser men. Tateism is not a politics of male solidarity. It relies on the continuation of mortal intrasexual combat. And the question becomes: How long can the men at the bottom be bought off with the promise that women, at least, are inferior to them? That’s the only deal on offer, and it may not be tolerable forever.

Plus, men like Tate and Tyukalo may be the women’s pimps, but they’re also the simps’ drug dealers. These men are clearly addicted to porn, and their lives are no doubt suffering for it. It’s not just that the women are being exploited and the men are being humiliated; men’s porn addiction is being cultivated and mined for profit too. That should give them another incentive to break ranks.

Many people will read this story as a sign of the apocalypse. We don’t want to paint too rosy a picture — there’s much to find disturbing. But what you and I are saying is that there’s a surprising little glimmer of hope in it.

Maybe what we should be thinking about is not the revenge of the simps but the emancipation of the simps. Revenge keeps you inside the same frame of combative masculinity. Emancipation implies the beginning of something new. We don’t know if it will happen, but we can see how it might.