Andrew Tate and the Exploitation of Eastern European Women

There is a video from early June of Andrew and Tristan Tate landing in Moscow, greeted at the airport with bread and salt by young women in folk dress…. Six weeks later, they are in a Florida jail, fighting extradition to the United Kingdom.

The charges against the Tate brothers include rape, human trafficking, and other abuse against women. Those are allegations, but Terrell Jermaine Starr and I believe women. The charges and allegations likely don’t even reflect the full list of the Tate brothers’ crimes.

Andrew Tate said on camera that he moved to Romania - an Eastern Europe country, also an EU member - because corruption there is ‘accessible’. And this: "I'm not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free."He said openly that he was less likely to face rape charges in Romania. Well, it’s ironic that he got detained precisely in Romania…

But why is Eastern Europe perceived as the ‘wild wild East’ by Tate and the likes of him?

First, Tate brothers as manosphere influencers tapped into a global permission structure for misogynists, reinforced by russia's impunity as the world's exporter of colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal, pseudo-Christian "values."

The other enabling factor is Donald Trump, a man who has faced legal findings of sexual abuse with no consequences. This kind of impunity became aspirational for a subset of men who cannot find a meaningful way to participate in society on equal terms with others.

Second, there’s a history of imperialism towards Eastern Europe that adds a layer to patriarchal oppression against women.

Eastern European bloodlands (a term from Timothy Snyder denoting the countries that got the worst of 20th century violence, caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) carry a legacy of being undervalued and used as a resource. The Nazi idea of Eastern Europeans as untermensch, a resource rather than a people, did not die in 1945.

As Anastasia Lebedenko writes, citing Asia Bazdyrieva, Eastern Europeans are cast as a lower stratum, bodies for cheap labor and cheap sex, white but not quite, Christian enough that the discrimination doesn’t count as discrimination. This is the background and scaffolding under Tate’s attitudes towards Eastern European women.

And it doesn’t stop at women’s bodies. This perception expands to Eastern European countries. For example - again, as fellow Ukrainian substacker Anastasiia pointed out in Ukraine Is Corrupt? Let’s Talk About It, Ukraine is put into an impossible dichotomy of ‘madonna vs. whore’. Is she a good girl? Is she complying with the standards set by outsiders? And none of it is ever quite enough.

This is the same double bind Eastern European women have been handed: be beautiful but not vain, available but not easy, grateful but not desperate...

But Eastern European women - and countries, for that matter - are complex, multidimensional, civilized, nuanced. Don’t underestimate women, and Eastern European women especially.

There is much fragility under all that "alpha" scaffolding, men so incapable of sitting with their own vulnerability that the only freedom they can imagine is taking someone else's. Tate was exposed as weak. Trump was exposed as weak. russia was exposed as weaker than the world imagined, four and a half years into a three-day war. Prey on women, and you will choke.

If you haven’t read Anastasiia Lebedenko’s /A Personal War/ Heart to Heart with Ana, start with the two essays linked above.

Thank you HoldingTheLine(HTL), Cary Grace ∆, Mary Powers, Michelle A, and many others for tuning into my live video with Terrell Jermaine Starr! Join me for my next live video in the app.