Andrew Tate and the Crisis of Masculinity: What Boys Actually Need

A few weeks ago, in a courtroom near Seattle, a young woman stood up and described what life was like inside what local media have dubbed the “OnlyFans House.”

“I watched manipulation become normal,” she told the court. “I watched violence become normal. I watched controlling women become normal.” And then: “I will never forget looking at someone I loved and hearing him tell me if I ever spoke about what I had been through and if I ever opened my mouth, he would kill me because I knew too much.”

The man she was describing is Nikita Tyukalo, a 22-year-old who ran an outfit called Nova Talent Management. According to prosecutors, Tyukalo operated a human trafficking ring out of a series of luxury rental mansions in Bellevue, Washington, where young women were imprisoned and coerced, under threat of violence, into producing pornography, for up to twelve hours a day, for paying subscribers.

Police began investigating after receiving more than one hundred complaints and 911 calls. Tyukalo now faces four counts of human trafficking along with money laundering and leading organized crime. Some of the women say he began recruiting them when they were just sixteen.

On the morning of June 4, 2026, a SWAT team burst through the gate of a lavish house in the wealthy Seattle suburb of Bellevue, and arrested a 21-year-old man named Nikita Tyukalo. Prosecutors charged him with four counts of human trafficking. In only a few years, it seemed,… pic.twitter.com/I201brF27a

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) August 2, 2026

Prosecutors say he kept the women in line with beatings, threats involving weapons, and warnings that explicit images would be sent to their families. Court records also describe a pattern of intimidation: prosecutors say that in 2025, Tyukalo sent a man to the homes of people who had reported his activities to police and sought restraining orders against the concerned parents of his alleged victims.

The case is ongoing, and Tyukalo denies the charges. His attorney offered the court a summary that deserves some kind of prize for understatement: “The allegations are essentially wage theft.” Wage theft. As if young women describing death threats and virtual enslavement were complaining about a missed paycheck.

The Tate Brothers’ Playbook

So, where does a 22-year-old man learn to set up a multi-million dollar “agency” controlling dozens of women? A recent feature-length investigation by Ezra Marcus in New York Magazine’s “The Cut” traced the answer, in large part, to a familiar name: Andrew Tate.

The piece documents a booming subculture of “OFM” – OnlyFans Management – in which young men, discipled by Tate and his imitators, recruit young women to produce pornography and take a manager’s “cut.”

For those blessedly unfamiliar with him, Andrew Tate is a former kickboxer who became one of the most-watched men on the internet by selling teenage boys a vision of masculinity built on money, muscle cars, and the domination of women. He and his brother, Tristan, built their fortune on a webcam pornography business, and Andrew has boasted openly of the manipulation techniques it ran on. Investigative reporters have documented the brothers’ grooming playbook in detail, including techniques for luring church-going girls into the industry by deliberately separating them from their families, and then controlling their phones, passwords, and access to the outside world.

Andrew Tate then sold the method to boys through online courses with names like “Hustler University” which provided what he called the “Pimping Hoes Degree” (PhD).

The Tate brothers currently face charges in Romania for human trafficking, trafficking of minors, rape, forming an organized criminal group, and money laundering, with further rape and trafficking charges awaiting them in the United Kingdom. They deny it all, casting themselves as martyrs persecuted by “the matrix,” i.e. the system of “woke” authorities, which wants to keep them under its thumb.

The Culture War Cannot Blind Us to Violence and Exploitation

Particularly disturbing to me is that parts of the political right have embraced the Tates as allies in the culture war, celebrating such things as their defiance of feminism, while waving away the evidence of their predation. Podcaster Candace Owens has given repeated, fawning interviews to Andrew Tate, attacking his victims, and crediting Andrew with opening her eyes to problems with the culture.

Jonathon Van Maren, writing in First Things, in a piece entitled Andrew Tate and Conservative Hypocrisy, lambasted the likes of Owens and Tucker Carlson for being bamboozled by Andrew’s anti-woke stance, and turning a blind eye to his predatory behaviors:

Despite dozens of hours of online video footage featuring the Tate brothers boasting about their webcam operation, their physical abuse of women, their views on women in general, and in-depth investigative reporting detailing, step-by-step, their grooming tactics—including how to manipulate girls from Christian homes into doing pornography—some alleged conservatives consistently champion the Tates as victims and even ideological fellow travelers. In interviews with both Carlson and Owens, Tate smoothly misrepresented most of the documented facts, and both eagerly bought what he was selling. It is difficult not to conclude that they wanted to.

He concluded, succinctly:

The Tate brothers are a litmus test. Those who support the Tates are defending pimps and pornographers with self-confessed contempt for girls and women. … When it comes to violence against women, sexual exploitation, and genuinely predatory men, there should be only one side.

Young Men Are Drawn into a Culture of Digital Pimping

Tragically, neither the Tates’ nor the Tyukalo case is some isolated horror. It is the criminal edge of a practice that is spreading right in full view. This is thanks to Andrew Tate and imitators like Tyukalo, who have supercharged this phenomenon by showcasing their lives to millions of followers on Instagram feeds filled with flashy cars, private jets, and plentiful young women.

The Guardian recently investigated what it called the “malignant rise” of OnlyFans “managers”: men who promise to grow a woman’s online audience and instead seize control of her accounts and passwords, take as much as 50 to 70 percent of her earnings, and use coercion and threats to keep her producing pornographic content when she wants out. As The Guardian’s own editors observed, such reports rather undermine the industry’s “rhetoric of empowerment.”

Let us call this what it is: pimping. A “manager” who lives off the sexual exploitation of women is a pimp, whether he works a street corner or an app, and no login screen or limited-liability company changes the nature of the transaction.

For years, our culture has insisted that “sex work is work,” that pornography is empowerment, that OnlyFans is just entrepreneurial young women monetizing their own bodies on their own terms. The OFM boom gives the lie to all of it. Wherever commercial sex goes, coercion follows close behind – because the entire enterprise is built on treating human beings as products.

The piece by Ezra Marcus in “The Cut” includes a section highlighting the spread of OFM. It includes one of the most disturbing paragraphs I’ve ever read. Marcus reported the testimony of one young man who had spent time around Tyukalo’s operation:

“It’s becoming this whole craze in Washington. Nikita was, like, the first guy to do it and then just everyone kind of started following. It just multiplied.” Now, he said, “there are guys that are 16 years old that have models that are 18 working for them.” When he logs on to Snapchat, he says, he sees a nonstop stream of OFM recruitment. “On a typical Friday, I would see, like, 20 different guys posting on their Stories: ‘If you’re a girl and you want to model and make 15, 20 thousand dollars a month, DM me, we’ll get you right.’” He knows middle-school boys who talk of starting their own agencies. “It’s kind of crazy,” he said, “how Andrew Tate in 2020 on your ‘For You’ page leads to trafficking high-school girls.”

Read that last sentence again. Andrew Tate on a boy’s social media feed in 2020 leads to the trafficking of high school girls in 2026. Middle schoolers are planning their “agencies.” Sixteen-year-old boys have “models” working for them.

Marcus’s story contains one more bizarre twist. Tyukalo was brought down, in part, by porn addicts. Users of a forum devoted to discussing webcam performers noticed bruises on the young women they watched and heard crying from somewhere off screen. Calling themselves the “White Knights,” they investigated, archived footage, dug through records, and took their evidence to the Bellevue police.

Even men enslaved to pornography could recognize the evil in front of them, and some unextinguished spark of chivalry in them refused to look away.

When a Culture Fails Its Men, Something Will Fill the Void

Beneath this horror story of abuse and exploitation, and the kingpin behind it all, i.e. Andrew Tate, is a pressing question: why are millions of boys listening to this man? The answer, I think, is fairly straightforward. What young men are looking for is what young men have always needed: motivation, meaning, and purpose.

“What young men are looking for is what young men have always needed: motivation, meaning, and purpose.”

However, our culture has spent a generation telling them instead that they are the problem, that their energy is “toxic,” their instincts suspect, their strength is unwelcome.

Tens of millions of them are growing up without fathers. Schools, media, and advertising offer them no meaningful vision of manhood. And into that vacuum walks Andrew Tate, who tells boys: your strength matters, discipline yourself, reject weakness, get rich, answer to no one. He offers brotherhood, mission, and a hierarchy to climb. It is a counterfeit – discipline in the service of raw appetite – but it is a counterfeit of something real.

What, in the end, is Andrew Tate selling? Happiness. However, the good life, in his telling, is the life of pleasure – money without limit, sex without commitment, power without responsibility. The Church has always taught that this is precisely backwards. Pleasure is a good servant and a tyrannical master. The true good life is the life of virtue, and a man’s happiness is found not in the number of women he has used but in the depth of the love he shows towards those in his life.

Andrew Tate’s anthropology – the anti-marriage mentality, the hookup ethic, the woman as trophy and product – is simply the culture of death. It is the same logic that gives us abortion and the “OnlyFans House”: the human person reduced to an instrument of someone else’s appetite.

Christ Shows Us True Masculinity

The Church knows and teaches the real thing. Authentic masculinity is strength placed at the service of others: the husband who lays down his life for his wife, the father who protects and provides, the man whose discipline serves not his appetites, but the other people that God puts into his path.

As one writer has put it bluntly, Andrew Tate is not masculine – he is a slave to the very passions a man is called to master. Our Lord addressed the question of what a man’s strength is for: the Son of Man “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28). And He warned precisely against the Tate gospel: “No one can serve two masters. … You cannot serve God and money” (Mt 6:24).

Christ is the emblem of authentic masculinity. It was in his sacrifice on the cross that he showed men, for all ages, what true power looks like. Not in the subjection of others. But in looking even upon the men who had persecuted him and put him to death and to pray, “Father, forgive them, for they know now what they do” (Lk 23:34). This is the authentic power of interior freedom: a freedom unfettered by the demands of the world, the flesh and the devil.

Young Men Need Fathers, Mentors, and Models of True Manhood

This is the vision of masculinity that Catholic fathers – both natural fathers and our priests – are called to embody, and to call their sons to imitate. Fathers must give their sons what Andrew Tate merely promises: initiation into disciplined, purposeful, self-sacrificial manhood. Pastors must preach to young men directly, as men, and call them to something harder than Tate ever asks: chastity, fidelity, the daily death of self-gift. Parishes must give boys real brotherhood – men’s groups, service crews, mentors – so that belonging does not have to be found in a toxic influencer.

Our tradition has numerous models to look towards. St. Joseph – silent, strong, hardworking, utterly reliable – protected Christ and the Blessed Virgin, and Scripture does not record a single word he spoke. Every parish has men who live like that. The question is whether we ever put them in front of our boys. This, too, is pro-life work: HLI’s chastity and family programs around the world exist precisely because the battle for life is won or lost in the formation of young men and women long before they ever face a crisis.

I must close by urging parents to please, please be vigilant: Andrew Tate’s audience is not grown men. It is boys – twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old – reached through the same phones we hand them at ever-younger ages. Somewhere right now there is a boy (and it might be your own son) scrolling past Andrew Tate on his phone, deciding what kind of man to become. And there is a girl who will one day cross that man’s path.

Pray for our sons and daughters, that they will not fall prey to the predations of Andrew Tate and his like. And pray for the young women of the “OnlyFans House,” that they may find healing and authentic love.