After speaking to audiences at colleges and high schools across the country about his research into marriage and family formation, the sociologist Brad Wilcox observes that young men have repeatedly been asking him a disturbing set of questions. These seem to emerge from a strange corner of the Internet called the “manosphere” because of its appeal to men and, supposedly, their specific concerns:
Isn’t marriage a trap, mostly for men? Don’t most married couples end up getting divorced? And aren’t most men happier when they’re single? . . . I don’t need to ask where these men heard that marriage is a trap. It is a message invariably repeated on the online right, usually by Andrew Tate, and it’s reaching a lot of teen boys—even a group of Mormon boys that I spoke with last month in Salt Lake City.
If you haven’t heard of Tate, he is the biggest voice in the online manosphere today—with more than 11 billion views on TikTok alone. A thirty-seven-year-old former kickboxer who has been described as the “king of toxic masculinity,” he believes the institution is a bad deal for men in our egalitarian age. (He was also charged in 2023 with rape and human trafficking in Romania.)
Tate is joined by Pearl Davis, a female anti-feminist online influencer who recently posted on X, “I am anti marriage as it is today. I think it’s silly to think marriage is a good deal for most men today.” She claims that about 67 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that because most divorces are initiated by women, scores of men are divorced unwillingly and unjustly. (This is also why she believes that divorce should be illegal.)
The anti-marriage chorus is also rising on the opposite end of the political spectrum. But this group believes marriage is a bad deal for women. Consider this recent headline from Bloomberg: “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer.” Or the Atlantic in 2019, offering “The Case Against Marriage.”
The arguments about marriage made by Davis and Tate have much common with those endorsed by the alt-right provocateur Costin Alamariu (a/k/a Bronze Age Pervert). The three share something else in common: anti-Semitism. Tate blames Israel not only for committing genocide in Gaza, but also for the coronavirus vaccine, which he believes to be particularly evil. And he’s suggested that the Nazis might not have been so bad after all. Davis raised a similar question in her cleverly titled song, “Why Can’t We Talk about the Jews?”
Of course, Davis seems committed to making outrageous statements to attract attention and controversy. It’s as if she’s following David Irving’s advice: “You’ve got to be tasteless about it.”
Read more on Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/why-you-should-get-married