Reality paradigms, the ‘mainstream’, and Tate

Journalists and governments have highlighted growing concerns over the mainstreaming of misogynistic ideologies due to manfluencers like Andrew Tate. Yet, little linguistic research has been done to confirm Tate meets the criteria for being (or even wants to be considered) mainstream. This paper begins to address this gap. We use the reality paradigms (RP) concept in combination with key semantic field analysis to analyse Tate’s professional website, “Cobratate”, comparing it with comments about him/his views taken from 50 ideologically diverse sub-Reddits and the British Press. We thus focus on instances of Tate attempting to manipulate the RPs of others for his own egoistic gain and what the posters/journalists’ language use tells us about their perceptions of Tate. While all regularly discuss similar topics around women, money, maleness, veracity, etc., the posters/journalists overwhelmingly critique the manfluencer’s views on them. We go on to suggest that discussions around the extent of Tate’s “mainstream” status would, therefore, benefit from being more nuanced than they appear to be currently. Such discussions might consider whether he needs to appear frequently in traditional media outlets and have the content of his ideas accepted by the same/their readership to be considered truly mainstream or whether it is enough for him to have a “celebrity” presence, albeit a controversial one. If the latter, discussions might further consider what an influencer like Tate gains from being “mainstream” for a certain (younger) audience only, because of his online presence, while still being critiqued by the population more generally.