To quell the problem, we must name the problem: the role of social media ‘manfluencers’ in boys’ sexist behaviours in school settings

KEY POINTS

What is already known about this topic:

• (1) Sexism and sexual harassment are longstanding issues in schools, identified by decades of research.

• (2) Young people who view social media masculinity ‘influencer’ content are more likely to normalise controlling and other harmful behaviours.

• (3) Narrow and limiting social constructions of masculinity are harmful for boys and young men’s mental and general health.

What this topic adds:

• (1) Content by the most prominent masculinity influencer, Andrew Tate, has infiltrated classrooms across Australia; his tropes, quotes and ideas are invoked regularly by students.

• (2) Women teachers report a noticeable shift in boys’ behaviour and attitudes towards women and girls that they attribute to Tate’s influence.

• (3) Women teachers need greater support from school leadership to address boys’ concerning attitudes and behaviour to make their workplace safe.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexism
• women teachers
• social media
• masculinity
• boys
• misogyny

In early 2023, informed by our mutual concern for the pursuit of gender equality and our respective interests in contemporary masculinities (for Steve) and the emergence and spread of “post-truth” logics (for Stephanie), we sat in conversation, reflecting on the then-recent arrest of Andrew Tate – the social media masculinity influencer, or “manfluencer” – on charges of organized crime and human trafficking of women. The arrest marked a high tide in public notoriety, evident in a spree of articles in the English-speaking media, mainly in the UK, but a few in Australia and USA, about Tate’s appeal to boys and young men and the implications for girls and women in their proximity. Some of these news pieces included the voices of women teachers, expressing concerns about growing rates of sexism and its articulation in a style they associated with Tate’s tropes (e.g., Fazackerley, 2023; Okolosie, 2023; Will, 2023). There was, we realised, no academic research on whether Tate or other similar manfluencers inform women teachers’ concerns about and experiences of misogyny and sexual harassment in schools. This was a surprise to us, given the emerging media coverage, and so we set out to explore this phenomenon in Australia, building on a long, generative tradition of education research that has centred women teachers’ accounts of sexism but with a contemporary focus.

After issuing a call on social media for participants to talk about Tate and the classroom, we interviewed 30 women¹ teachers from across Australia, including representation from the Independent, state and Catholic sectors and at primary and high school levels. Much to our collective chagrin, our findings (for details see Wescott et al., 2023; Zhao et al., 2024) echo studies by feminist education researchers for over 35 that have documented boys’ sexist behaviours towards girl peers and women teachers (Acker, 1988; Horeck et al., 2023; Kenway, 1996). However, our data also unambiguously illustrates women teachers’ concerns about a recent uptick in sexist behaviour and its contemporary particularity. Sexualised groaning, gaslighting and physical and verbal intimidation are all deployed by a significant minority of boys in conjunction with their espousal of Tate’s “alpha mindset” tropes related to wealth, dominance and men’s presumed superiority over women. This is the current manifestation of the “different strategies that boys and men adopt in order to reassert their ‘superiority’ and control” (Kenway, 1996, p. 447) that research has signalled as likely for decades. It is not just a case of “social media is bad” or that young people simply observe and parrot media that they consume. Instead, the current situation reflects a cocktail of Tate and the ubiquity of social media, but also other drivers.

Most notably, Tate’s surge in popularity coincides with the post-#metoo moment, and the uptake of his ideas about traditional masculinity in “real life” can be located as a (predictable) extension of the backlash to gender equality progress first observed in digitally mediated contexts.² We situate the sexism experienced by the women in our study as a resurgence of overt discourses of “male supremacy”, which functions to reassert traditional, patriarchal modes of masculinity. The collective, normative and frequent nature of the behaviour suggests a need to understand this as cultural and social in origin, and demands much more than being labelled as individual-level forms of “disrespect”; the problem of misogyny needs naming if we are to make serious efforts to quell what we suggest is a slow but problematic radicalisation of boys.

This issue, we suggest, is a matter of huge relevance for education and developmental psychologists and practioners. The presence and expansion of the problem of “manfluencer” discourses in schools constrains the pursuit of optimal learning, development and wellbeing, not just for women teachers, girls and gender diverse people on the receiving end of the contemporary sexist language and practices. The implications here are stark, too, for boys in schools. The restrictive and regressive gender norms promoted by masculinity influence like Andrew Tate are demonstrably linked with heightened chances of addictive behaviours and feelings of depressions, loneliness and hopelessness (Men’s Project and Flood, 2018).

Wanted: more studies, and more nuance

Critical digital media scholarship has been instrumental in enhancing our understanding of the so-called “manosphere”, referred to by Farrell et al. (2019) as the “group of loosely incorporated websites and social media communities where men’s perspectives, needs, gripes, frustrations and desires are explicitly explored”. Manosphere research for the most part documents the ways these communities discuss, other and/or target women and girls (and sometimes people of diverse gender identities) through, for example, rationalising gendered harassment and denouncing feminism for disrupting the “natural” gender order such that heterosexual men are seen to be the new de facto oppressed group (e.g., Jones et al., 2020; Menzie, 2022). This field of research is nuanced, also exploring how: such spaces are sites of gender contestation (Maloney et al., 2019); can be populated by those who (mistakenly) feel they have no other place to turn (Maloney et al., 2022); and how men learn to exit such toxic environs (Thorburn, 2023). However, research on the “real world” effects of consuming manosphere content is relatively embryonic, with most such research dedicated to extremes, such as mass shootings (e.g., Haider, 2016; Witt, 2020). Very recent research by Women’s Aid (2023) illustrates that children and young people who have viewed Tate content normalise controlling behaviour and are five times more likely to believe “it is acceptable to hurt someone if you say sorry”.

School-based research, while abundant in its focus on sexism, is relatively quiet on the matter of specific influential figures. We think that can change. We concur with scholars who note that “it is crucial to continue to look at the wider – and long-standing – gender issues at stake in the entanglement of online and offline misogynies” (Horeck et al., 2023, p. 15). We also want to avoid reifying any ideas of a “crisis of masculinity” as an explainer for Tate’s cultural traction, given that the very proposition of crisis has been invoked every decade for over 150 years (Roberts, 2018). Manfluencers are a symptom rather than cause of sexism. However, and given the role Tate’s discourses play in inspiring the current “frontline troops of patriarchy” (Connell, 1995, p. 79) and that schools are important sites of masculinity formation and expression, more research is needed in our view on how different women teachers – through intersections of “race” and Indigeneity, sexuality, gender identity, age, urban vs regional/status, subject expertise, etc. – experience the impact of high profile manfluencers, and just how widespread that impact is.

Relatedly, we see a need to document which boys are embracing “manfluencer” tropes and perpetrating harmful behaviours. There is a tendency, both in the public and academic imagination, to assume that low socio-economic and/or Black or Brown boys are chief culprits of harmful practices of masculinity (Roberts & Elliott, 2020). This imagining is sustained despite evidence in the media and in research findings that elite boys’ schools incubate sexism and masculine entitlement (Variyan & Wilkinson, 2022) in ways that somewhat parallel the practices among boys in – or heading towards – working in manual trades. The question of class and its intersections with race requires careful unpacking if we are to avoid whiteness being presumed to offer some degree of inoculation to manosphere and manfluencer “masculinity in crisis” proclamations, or even that such proclamations have similar effects for all ethnic groups (see e.g., Ghumkhor & Mir’s, 2022 troubling of the alignment of Western-oriented crisis talk with Muslim men).

Whether or not such research takes up the concept of “toxic masculinity” in theorising this issue is to our mind an open question. It’s certainly a contested idea. Psychologists have long used it to conceptualise men’s harm to the mental and physical health of themselves and others (e.g., Kupers, 2005), and while it is still deployed extensively, some in the discipline have insisted that the term alienates boys who need to be engaged in the fight for equality (see e.g., public advocacy and commentary by Zac Seidler). More sociologically-driven analysts raise concerns that the concept “individualizes responsibility for gender inequalities to certain bad men” (Harrington, 2021, p. 245). While our own work is informed by attention to social and cultural drivers of gender inequality, we do not see these points as mutually exclusive. Indeed, and moreover, we want to prioritise documenting and subsequently naming the problem of sexism and sexual harassment by boys – something that our own data suggests is actively avoided. Instead, school leaders and (usually men) colleagues typically play down the seriousness of such issues and even level that women teachers’ behaviour management capabilities are at fault. Preservation of the reputation of the boys and the school, teachers told us, is paramount.

There is little appetite for naming boys’ behaviours as sexist. Further compounding this point, it is often the case that school management systems – not just people – do not allow for its naming. Instead, women described how e-systems such as Compass and OneSchool have no option to label behaviours as sexist and instead consolidate such experiences under the more gender-neutral heading of “disrespect”. If we do not name the problem, we cannot measure it. If we cannot measure it, we cannot act upon it. Beyond the basic level of dignity and safety that women deserve in their workplaces, a failure to name and act upon the problem will also likely exacerbate teacher workforce shortages, currently so stark in Australia and England, and impede student wellbeing staff from addressing a rising tide of dissatisfaction/mental health concerns among schools (Brennan et al., 2021).

Over 35 years ago, the sociologist Sandra Acker (1988) argued that feminist futures were “grim” given that neither government dictates, nor conventional ideologies about gender among teachers and leaders, nor conditions of work promote and support antisexist innovations. She wasn’t wrong. However, recognising and generating more evidence on the relationship between “Tate speech”, its circulation in the wider culture, and sexism in schools could offer an opportunity to develop innovations, cultivate allyship and manifest the collective will to name and address misogyny in school settings. This could positively aid educational and developmental psychologists and practioners in their professional pursuits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Over 60 women signed up in a matter of a few weeks.

2. See e.g., Trott (2022) on men’s reaction to the famous Gillette advisement.