I Hope My Daughter Tells Andrew Tate To Fuck Off : An Open Letter to Prof. Timming.

Prof. Timming, you had a choice and damn if you didn’t make a terrible one. Andrew Tate was arrested for rape and human trafficking and for some reason you felt the response needed was to run to his aid. Not only that, but you chose to do so by mocking Greta Thunberg and telling all women to be more demure.

Your shitty ask reinforced and enabled abuse and misogyny, maybe your point. I hope you are just ignorant. I’m here to tell you, this take not only sucks but is deeply harmful and carries water for much abuse.

First, the language you used minimized both Tate’s harm and Thunberg’s activism. You called Tate, "obnoxious and a poor role model” in a hugely reductionist statement and with an oft-used excuse for abusive men. Somehow you saw a rich abusive human trafficker and a young woman calling him out and thought she needed a scolding.

This is the Tate who, "was kicked off of the reality TV show, Big Brother in 2016 when a video surfaced appearing to show him attacking a woman."

This is the Tate who said, "women should bear responsibility for being raped."

This is the Tate who also, "claimed it’s easier to 'make my imprint' on 18-year-olds because they have 'been through less dick.’" Teachers in Australia reported a rise in sexist incidents related to students engaging with Tate’s content.

Need to learn more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/technology/andrew-tate-banned-tiktok-instagram.html

You, Professor, seem to not consider that harmful, abusive, demented, evil, criminal, hateful ... but called it "obnoxious", as if it’s about how, now what he has done. It seems you think a better polish would help, and not that the core of his abuse deserves strong accountability.

We don't want more civil abusers.
We don't need savvier traffickers.

We need to be aware of and stop misogyny and sex abuse.

Why did you choose a minimizing language that lets him off the hook?

You minimized Greta Thunberg’s activism and asked women to be more demure. Your shock is not with Tate’s misogyny or abuse but with her language. You put the onus on the woman, not the abuser in rhetoric that only furthers a system of more abuse.

"If she only acted better," has been male bullshit to excuse and justify much against women for a long goddamn time.

Too long.

Getting personal, I have a daughter in elementary school. I absolutely want her to look to Greta as a role model for many reasons.If my daughter is ever confronted with someone like Andrew Tate, I hope she has the courage to tell him to fuck off, at a minimum. We need more strong and courageous women/femmes/girls/boys/Trans/nonbinary folks/men/dads/dudes to call this shit out.

We don’t need to teach girls to be more civil in the face of men who marginalize them.

We don’t need to teach girls to hold their tongue in the face of abuse.

Scream.

Punch.

Fight back.

Fuck them up.

Folks clutched their pearls about Rep. Tlaib when she said she wanted to "impeach the motherfucker,” referring to Trump. Those same folks rarely said a mumbling word about that same motherfucker’s evil.

Don’t ask women to hold their tongue. It’s on you to listen and act. Mad about it? Stop dudes from being abusers.

Need a place to start learning? I have been learning a ton from Breanne Fahs and their book Burn It Down.

In that book, Fahs quotes Valerie Solanas, about the, "real politics of the gutter... ‘the garbage pail that men have made of the world’- where a trashy, scrappy, fed up, angry vision of tomorrow emerges... We need a fuck-up force."

I hope my daughter follows Thunberg and Tlaib and Fahs and Solanas’ call here and tells abusers like Tate to fuck off.

You have another choice, you and I can listen and help or get out of the goddamn way. Choose.