I have a bone to pick with podcasts. Not only is the market extremely oversaturated, but podcasts can also be dangerous.
Recently, far-right leaning podcasts have become extremely popular, especially within the young male demographic. These shows include violent language about women, minorities and gender dynamics between men and women.
The podcasting boom that has taken place in recent years has made access to this threatening long-form content even easier.
I have seen several clips online from the “Fresh and Fit” podcast where the two hosts spew heavily misogynistic things about women. They promote the idea of a “high-value male” which is intended to target self-conscious young men and turn them against women.
Another example of one of these dangerous podcasts is Andrew Tate’s podcast “Tate Speech.” Tate is a man charged with rape, sexual assault and human trafficking in Romania. His podcast uses similar tropes as the “Fresh and Fit” podcast where he mostly discusses gender dynamics and women.
Netflix recently put out a four-part fictional miniseries called “Adolescence” about a teenage boy who murders a teenage girl after he is exposed to Tate and the “manosphere.” The show does an excellent job exploring the nuanced levels of responsibility that the audience can reflect on and blame social consequences for the crime the teenage boy committed, but it also does a fantastic job of outright condemning these far-right podcasts and illustrating the danger that they can pose.
It’s not just fictional either, studies have shown that since figures like Tate have become mainstream, young boys have changed their behavior. One teacher from Canada writes how he has seen Tate’s brand of toxic masculinity affect his student’s social behaviors negatively.
Despite the common myth there is equal representation for both right-leaning and left-leaning talking head shows, there is actually an overwhelming lean towards the right when it comes to these online shows.
Although not all of these right-leaning podcasts are inherently dangerous, they can be used as tools to place young vulnerable men down the “alt-right pipeline.” This refers to the concept of radicalization content posted on the internet that leads a viewer further and further down a rabbit hole until they’ve found themselves in a harmful place that promotes damaging ideas.
Most of the content at the top of the pipeline is seemingly innocuous enough, but it’s when you get deeper down the line into far-right leaning ideology that it becomes dangerous.
While podcasting is a long-form genre, podcasters will also utilize other techniques in order to get a farther reach and therefore a bigger viewer base. They will take small clips of insightful, funny or “gotcha” moments and then post those clips on YouTube or TikTok, therefore making it more likely for them to go viral.
It is within this clip-sharing format the danger lies, a clip going viral could account for a wider audience, and if the clip happens to be of Tate talking about violent acts against women, that’s a huge problem and could lead to an increase in violent and dehumanizing ideas about women.
So yes, I have a bone to pick with these podcasts, and that may be putting it lightly. They can be used to promote dangerous ideology designed to target vulnerable audiences and may lead to an unchecked increase in harmful ideology. We need to condemn these misogynistic content creators while simultaneously supporting young men by encouraging them to make friends with women as well as men.
