Greta Thunberg Doesn’t Have To Be Nice About Your Dick
This, “male self-help,” and a few more incredibly obvious lessons from Andrew Tate’s downfall.
Andrew Tate hurts women. This is the most well-known thing about him. On his wildly popular social media accounts, he’s admitted to breaking a woman’s jaw in a bar fight, recommends choking and beating disobedient girlfriends (“bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch”) and claims he moved to Romania because it would be easier to avoid rape charges. Easy or not, he is now facing rape charges in Romania, and has been arrested on suspicion of running a sex trafficking operation.
A few weeks ago Andrew Tate decided to harass 19-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg on social media. She replied that he could “email me at [email protected].” Tate got angry enough to make an entire response video, during which he ate pizza from a Romanian pizza joint, thereby alerting authorities to his location, leading to the aforementioned arrest. It’s only natural that, in the wake of these spectacular events, social media was consumed with questions about power and gender. Namely: Is it ever okay to insult a man by saying he has a small dick?
No. Seriously. That’s what some people got mad about. Look, here they are:
Elsewhere, the conversation extended (ha) beyond dick size, to encompass the question of whether the entire culture was mean to men, and, if so, whether misogyny itself might not be a mere side effect of people not being nice enough to men and boys. Again, it is not hard to find these takes:
Look: Let’s deal with “small dick energy” first. Lots of people, including me, have uncomfortable relationships with their bodies. In particular, lots of people (including me!) worry about how attractive they are, and for men, the idea that your desirability as a partner comes down to the size of your dick is pretty ingrained. Some of the people complaining about the phrase “small dick energy” are trans men, for whom the equation “dick size = masculinity” actually does play a major role in their oppression. I get why people react strongly. It is, so to speak, a sensitive place to hit.
That’s why it’s good that Thunberg hit Tate there. This was an alleged serial rapist and batterer of women, menacing a 19-year-old kid; I support her using the phrase “small dick energy” in the same way that I would support her jamming her car keys into his eye sockets if he approached her in a parking lot. When you’re under threat from a guy like that, you don’t stop to reflect. You hit the most vulnerable spot you can, as hard as you can. You do whatever it takes to make him stop. In this case, Thunberg stopped the guy so hard that he put himself in jail. It was an impressive showing.
So: Is there a situation where it’s okay to say “small dick energy?” Objectively, yes, and this was it; judging purely by results, Greta Thunberg typing “small dick energy” in response to Andrew Tate worked. Even if you take issue with the phrase in other contexts (I do), complaining about it here is small-spirited and ungenerous. You can buy a bigger cock at any sex shop, but you can’t buy a bigger soul.
Yet even in situations where it’s comically obvious who the aggressor is (“serial rapist sex trafficking lifestyle influencer vs. 19-year-old autistic girl who saves the planet” is a conflict so black-and-white it would feel phony in a children’s cartoon) our instinct is to blame and judge the girl for her word choice rather than deplore the violence being aimed at her. Even in the face of an organized MRA movement which advocates the violent assault and subjugation of women, our instinct is to wonder whether the culture cares enough about men.
Unsurprisingly, Andrew Tate is wrong on this one. We’re often told that men are expected to “repress” their emotions due to “toxic masculinity,” but in fact, our world revolves around men’s feelings pretty much exclusively, because men are the only people acknowledged to have feelings worthy of consideration. We regard men as human beings with full interior lives, and women as objects that men can use to fulfill their own needs. When men fuck up, or act out, or hurt people, we look for their reasons; we assume compassion and empathy are necessary and useful responses. Yet, even when a woman is under violent threat, she is expected to mind her tone and phrase her objections in a way that doesn’t bruise the feelings of any man who might overhear her. When it comes to her, compassion and empathy are not necessary; only rules about good behavior, and our presumed right to punish and shame her if she breaks one.
If a woman fights for herself, instead of prioritizing men’s comfort, she’s not performing her function, which is to make men happy. If she cares about ending the violence aimed at her, rather than appeasing the man who perpetrates that violence, she is broken. This, like it or not, is the exact same logic that underlies the incessant calls for more “male self-help” whenever MRAs make the news.
There are a lot of depressed and lonely guys in the world. They might drink, or self-isolate, or numb out playing video games; they might even start bar fights or Twitter arguments. I sometimes have. What depressed guys don’t do, however, is accidentally join political movements aimed at the violent subjugation of women. That only happens if they’re already misogynists. The problem is political, not psychological; not loneliness, or sadness, or a lack of self-help books at Barnes & Noble, but a conscious investment in patriarchal structures of power.
Those structures, for what it’s worth, are gender-agnostic as to who they recruit; there are a lot of misogynistic and patriarchal women out there, and in a sexist culture, we all internalize a certain amount of misogyny as part of our upbringing. The structures and movements are, however, explicitly intended to benefit men. (White, cisgender, heterosexual, non-disabled, Christian men, at least.) That’s why it’s wrong to frame MRA ideology as something that happens to men, rather than a political strategy to build and keep unjust power.
When I say “wrong,” I mean tactically as well as morally: The core promise of MRA movements is that they will place (some) (privileged) men at the center of the universe, and force everyone else to cater to their whims. “The left” can’t fix that by promising to pander to those men even harder, because any genuine progress involves breaking that promise — justice means sharing power, and sharing power, for the privileged, means giving up some of what they already have. Even bad people are rational actors. Misogynists, like Tate and his audience, do what they do because they’re getting something out of it. You can’t appeal to their better nature, because they haven’t got one, and they already know that “the left” cannot offer them a bigger bribe.
What you can do is dismantle the sense of entitlement that leads people to seek unjust power in the first place, by teaching boys — and all children — that they are not automatically entitled to more than other people because of their gender. That has to start early, from the first days of their lives, because by the time they’re applauding Andrew Tate for breaking a woman’s face, it’s probably too late.
As for the rest of us, we can strive for self-awareness, and for the ability to recognize our entitlement when it shows up — for instance, when we watch a teenage girl fending off a predator and decide to make the whole thing about the phrase “small dick energy” and how it makes us feel. No matter how impressive your dick is, it will never be relevant to every conversation. Stop poking it into this one, and give the world a chance to think about something else for a change.
