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“There is zero statistical advantage” to getting married if you are a man in America today, Andrew Tate argued in a viral 2022 video on “why modern men don’t want marriage.” Women, he believes, are worthless anchors—“They want you monogamous so that your testosterone level drops,” he posted on X last fall—and your marriage is likely to end in ruin anyway. “If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married,” there are none.
The loudest voice in the manosphere is infamous for many things, including criminal charges of human trafficking, rape, and assault. (Tate has denied these charges.) But he is also notorious for launching a new front in the culture wars over marriage, aimed mostly at teenage boys and young men.
Tate believes that men no longer receive the deference they deserve from women in marriage, and bear more risk in divorce. He argues that men should focus on getting strong, making lots of money, and using—but not investing themselves in—the opposite sex. His evident appeal—clips of Tate garner hundreds of millions of impressions on YouTube and TikTok—would seem to be yet one more sign that our oldest social institution is in trouble.
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Become a SubscriberCritics on the left have been questioning the value of the institution for much longer, albeit from a different angle and with less venom than Tate. The realities of marriage in recent decades no doubt provide fuel for several varieties of criticism. Before divorce became widely permissible in the 1970s, difficult marriages—and even dangerous ones, for women—were by no means rare. Many women’s career dreams were thwarted by the demands of marriage, and some still are today. Many men have been hit hard financially and sidelined from their children’s lives by divorce. Innumerable children of divorce have had their faith in marriage extinguished by their parents’ inability to get along (a pattern that may help explain Tate’s animus toward the institution; his parents divorced when he was a child).
