In the early 2000s, while I was working as a family therapist in London, a 12-year-old boy came to see me with his mother.
They looked like any other mother and son perhaps out buying school uniform or getting the groceries.
Except, of course, they weren’t. The young boy was in fact a convicted rapist and the pair had been mandated to see me by a court. The truth is, however, that I guessed their story long before I heard it. For theirs was a tale of inherited trauma, patriarchal abuse and familial failings that I’d heard day in and day out over a decade.
Like many others, I watched Louis Theroux’s compelling new documentary, Inside The Manosphere, and was utterly appalled. But also, I realised that lots of the vile young men featured in the film shared the same backstory as so many of my clients who had also grown up to commit terrible acts of misogyny.
My firm belief, after a long career as a therapist and having watched the shocking rise of the so-called manosphere up close, is that the new breed of toxic masculinity can be boiled down to one thing: absent fathers.
The manosphere – led by the likes of kickboxer-turned-lifestyle ‘guru’ Andrew Tate and livestreamer HSTikkyTokky – is essentially a gang. It is a club of belonging, a place for people with a hole in their heart to be seen and to be loved. And behind almost every disciple of the manosphere you will find a repeated pattern of generational abuse and the absence of a decent masculine role model.
I watched Louis Theroux’s new documentary, Inside The Manosphere, and was appalled
Louis Theroux, presenter of Inside The Manosphere, with HSTikkyTokky (Harrison Sullivan)
Let me first explain how this intergenerational conflict works.
Time after time, mothers would be sent to see me with their sons, typically aged between 12 and 18.
Typically, the mother would have a history of unhealthy relationships with men. Often she had been abused – sexually or otherwise – as a young girl, either by her father or another family member.
A perverse approximation of love, an experience between a perpetrator and a victim, becomes the prototype of what constitutes intimacy in the young mind. And establishes a pattern repeated in personal relationships.
And so these women choose abusive men as partners and subsequently the fathers to their children. But of course, these are bad men. And they abandon their wives and their children. According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, there are 2 million single parents with dependent children in the UK – a quarter of all families. And 89 per cent of those families are headed by single mothers.
What happens next is deeply upsetting, and yet something I’ve seen over and over again. A single mother with a son treats their boy like a prince. They pour everything into their wellbeing and shower them with love. And yet, at the same time, the mother cannot shake the niggling sense that their son, being a male, is just like their abusive father, their abusive ex.
The mother subsequently develops a dual relationship with their son. One minute they love them, the next they push them away.
Inevitably, the son is confused and tries to ‘escape’, often into drugs, gangs or other criminal behaviour. With no male role model to impose disciplinary boundaries, no one with the physical authority to say ’no’, this sort of behaviour all too often ends in predatory sexual behaviour.
Why? Because sexual domination is a way of exerting dominance – indirectly – over the mother. It’s a form of excessive masculinity. It is control.
What shocks me now is just how relevant this blueprint is for those horrific characters forging the manosphere.
Andrew Tate, pictured, and brother Tristan are considered the ‘godfathers of toxic masculinity’
Sullivan, pictured centre, has built an enormous following online where he makes derogatory comments
Brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate are widely considered to be the ‘godfathers of toxic masculinity’ and the subsequent ‘manosphere’ craze that is epitomised by misogyny, ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes such as Bitcoin trading and an obsession with lifting weights in the gym. Of course, all three of those things are actually one and the same, forms of control.
Andrew Tate claims he was ‘raised perfectly’ and ‘could not have hoped for a better father’ despite the fact he saw his father, Emory, just once a year after his parents divorced in 1997 when the brothers were just 11 years old.
Emory Tate – who was allegedly diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder – died in 2015, but not before revealing that his own father, Emory Tate I, was ‘the most savage man in the universe’ who frequently abused him. ‘Beating with the leather belt was all he knew,’ Emory Jnr added.
On a separate occasion, Emory Jnr questioned why it was illegal to have sex with underage girls who had reached puberty.
And then there are the characters in the new Netflix documentary, the spiritual successors to the Tate ideology.
Unsurprisingly, we see in them more broken homes, more inherited trauma, more young men desperate to dominate women.
HSTikkyTokky, real name Harrison Sullivan, 24, has built an enormous following online where he shares gym videos and livestreams conversations with women on chat forums where he makes aggressive, derogatory and racist comments.
Harrison’s father is none other than former England rugby star Victor Ubogu, a man who once claimed he never left the house without a condom. In 2001, Ubogu got Elaine Sullivan pregnant out of wedlock.
When baby Harrison was three, Victor married another woman and went on to have two further children.
Harrison has claimed in TikTok videos to have met his father just ‘three or four times’ in his life and was raised alone by his mother who can be seen in the documentary directing her son to wipe down surfaces and mop the floor.
But perhaps no one better exemplifies my theory of the manosphere than 40-year-old Justin Waller, who also ‘stars’ in the Netflix documentary and was brought up on a trailer park in Louisiana.
‘We were very close to being put in a foster home,’ Waller recalls of his childhood alongside his siblings. ‘There was a lot of violence. My mom, she would just come in sometimes and start punching [my father].’
Later, for reasons that are unclear but might easily be surmised, Waller’s father was prevented from seeing his children and Justin was raised by his mother.
Is it a huge surprise that Waller is now in a one-way monogamous relationship with the mother of his own children – meaning he is entitled to sleep around while she is not?
Or that he now advises young men on how to become ‘alpha males’?
Take one look at Justin Waller, Harrison Sullivan or Andrew Tate. You can see the sadness behind their eyes.
And yet, the next generation of fatherless boys – who themselves lack a masculine role model – are already looking up to these influencers for advice about how to be a man. And the cycle of trauma all too easily repeats itself.
The whole Western world has long suffered from an epidemic of fatherlessness. But only now are we starting to learn of its insidious consequence.
