Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami on Saturday, after U.K. prosecutors filed a wave of new charges against them. Andrew is facing 42 in total, including rape, sex trafficking, assault, and offenses relating to indecent images of a child. Tristan is facing 17. They are now in custody awaiting extradition to Britain, where seven women reported them and where police have spent 16 years building a case, which is to say that seven women have been waiting much longer than the internet has.
That is the news!! But here is the detail the internet cannot let go of, and I am not going to pretend I am above it, because I am not: Andrew Tate met this moment in a kicky purple number with an open neckline, cropped pants, and slip-on shoes. An outfit your aunt definitely wore to a wine tasting this summer. A man who spent years announcing that women belong in the kitchen, arrested in an outfit that belongs absolutely nowhere.
It matters that the Tate brothers were arrested in tight purple capri pants, because the Tate brothers’ entire identity depends on a masculinity that has to be performed constantly because it does not exist anywhere else. A thing that is real does not require this much production, this many ring lights, this many bot accounts manufacturing a populairty you do not have. But on Saturday, with no warning and no time to get into costume, the world saw what the Tate brothers look like when the performance is off: two guys in tight pants and little shoes, doing exactly what the officers told them to do. This is not who they have been pretending to be to the young impressionable men they robbing blind with scam classes and fake universities.
Andrew Tate has spent years insisting that there is one correct way to be a man, and that he would sell it to you. He sold masculinity as a members-only club with him as the body guard standing at the door. But then the photo drops, and he is standing there in unflattering purple capris and loafers. Andrew Tate looks less like an apex male and more like a millennial woman in 2014 meeting the girls for happy hour straight from the office, moments away from ordering an espresso martini and asking if anyone wants to split a caesar salad.
And we know it’s a lie. We’ve done the research. Your subscription funded it! His ex-girlfriend, who sued him for assault and battery, came on our podcast and said he does not even believe what he himself says. That it is all a show, and the show is for money. Which is the real thing the capri pants tell us: Andrew Tate is not an alpha male. Andrew Tate performs a kind of drag of the alpha male, an exaggerated costume of manhood, staged for an audience of unsuspecting young men who pay him for the privilege of believing the costume is real. She would know. She saw him with the costume off long before the U.S. Marshals did. You can watch that conversation here.
That’s the thing about the manosphere’s masculinity: it is drag. It is exaggerated, costumed, hyper-stylized gender performance, staged for an audience, sustained by props. The cars, the cigars, the sunglasses indoors, the brother beside you in a matching outfit the camera that can never ever stop running. RuPaul has said that we are all born naked and the rest is drag, and no one on earth proves the point harder than a man who cannot appear in public without his full masculinity costume assembled. The difference, and it is the only difference, is that drag queens know. Drag is honest about being a performance. That honesty is the art. Andrew Tate performs womanhood’s exact mirror image, manhood as wig and padding and contour, and then sells tickets by insisting it is not a performance at all, that it is simply what a man is, and that your teenage son can have it for a monthly fee. A drag queen would never.
So yes, Andrew Tate getting arrested felt great. But Andrew Tate getting arrested in an outfit you wore on a 2007 girls' trip, in a middle seat on Spirit Airlines, feels even better. Women have always known that his masculinity was drag. Now the whole world has proof too.
Sorry But the Manosphere is the Gayest Thing on the Internet
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Mar 17
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