Who’s in the manosphere’s sights this week? Taylor Swift, her cat and anyone in a crop top | Zoe Williams

The messages of Andrew Tate and his ilk are as old as the patriarchy: female autonomy is a threat, and must be punished

It's been a great year for Taylor Swift in many ways, as everything she's touched has turned to gold, and her superfans got their own proper noun, Swifties. But haters gonna hate: when she appeared on the cover of Time magazine as their person of the year, looking staggering, wearing both a catsuit and a cat, a Christian manfluencer called Eric Conn (his Hard Men podcast is tagged Reclaiming biblical masculinity in a world of softness") was quick to react: It's shameful and sad that a hyper-promiscuous, childless woman, aging and alone with a cat, has become the heroine of a feminist age."

I don't want to say the manosphere reached its apogee in 2023, because things can always get worse. But if Time had a person of the year for the dark timeline, Swift's opposite, a character to embody the hostility, alienation and evangelical, triumphant stupidity of the age, it would be Andrew Tate. Figures like Tate and Conn, and their millions upon millions of disciples, have no struggle for content because they feel no duty of originality.