Andrew Tate, the infamous pimp and pornographer with over 10 million followers on X, went on a rant last week, attacking monogamous marriage. It clocked in at over 500 words, and quoting the entire tirade would be a waste of space. But there are aspects of his overall narrative that are worth responding to because some lost souls still look to this charlatan for wisdom.
Tate starts with the statement, “Monogamy is not natural for men,” which is untrue and can be a confusing claim. Most societies throughout human history have been polygamous. While the vast majority of the world today, about 75%, live in societies in which polygamy is illegal, that wasn’t true in the past. In fact, up until the spread of Christianity, virtually the entire world was polygamous.
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But none of this means polygamy is natural to man. While polygamous empires have dominated written human history since the dawn of agriculture, humans existed in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years before that. While there were occasionally cases in which a man would have more than one wife (most often when a husband died, his brother would provide for his widow, known as a Levirate marriage), virtually all marriages were monogamous. When there was an extra pairing, it was confined to two or three wives.
All that changed with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Some families became wealthier than others, and some tribes became more powerful than others. The most powerful tribes conquered weaker tribes, killing the men and enslaving the women.
Tate hints at what happens next, but he gets his facts wrong. Tate claims, “Statistically only 20-30% of men have ever reproduced, while 80-90% of women have reproduced.”
Tate is actually right about women’s reproductive success. Throughout human history, almost all women, 80%-90%, have had at least one child. But for men, the percentage fluctuates. Before agriculture, about 50% of all men had at least one child. But after agriculture, and with the development of polygamy and slavery, that percentage fell, sometimes to as low as 5%. By contrast, today, in monogamous societies, while women (still around 80%) are still more likely to reproduce than men, men are much more likely to reproduce now (about 70%) than our ancestors did thousands of years ago.
Tate glosses over the coercive aspect of polygamous societies, claiming, “Women were always sharing kings and discarding the serfs.” But how much choice did these women trapped in polygamous societies really have? When the Emperor of Magadha, Ashoka the Great, took his 500 concubines for a walk one afternoon, and they cut the leaves off one of his favorite trees while he napped because they did not like his rough skin, Ashoka had all 500 burned to death. Suddenly, a monogamous marriage to a mere serf doesn’t look so bad when the alternative is displeasing a king, which leads to immolation.
Tate then basically declares that all of Christendom is the work of the devil.
“The ‘One Husband/One Wife’ lie is a SATANIC CONTROL purposed mechanism, a LIE, spread as a disease across Western culture to mitigate societal disruption from inferior low quality men who wouldn’t be able to get a wife otherwise,” Tate writes.
It is not every day someone describes Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians as satanic. Tate then adds, “Western world is over because of this absolute monogamy bulls***.”
And here is Tate’s fundamental misunderstanding of human history. Western culture isn’t great in spite of monogamy. It is great because of monogamy. It is monogamy, which the church forced onto Europe’s nobility, that made the West what it is today. By banning polygamy, inheritance to illegitimate offspring, arranged marriages, and cousin marriages, which were often arranged to keep wealth in the family, the church broke apart the nobility’s clan-based kinship networks.
One recent study compared communities throughout Europe according to their length of exposure to the church’s teachings on sexual ethics. The researchers found that communities with longer exposure to the church’s family policies exhibited more individualism, less conformity, and a greater likelihood of trusting nonfamily members. Communities with less exposure were associated with greater conformity, obedience, nepotism, deference to elders, and in-group loyalty. Each additional 500 years of church influence was associated with a 90% decrease in cousin-marriage rates.
By promoting monogamy, the church set the stage for the creation and growth of non-clan-based mediating institutions that would prove crucial to the emergence and development of democracy and the industrial revolution. Guilds, universities, and charter cities gave people new opportunities to cooperate and learn from each other in a setting not dominated by one despotic patriarch. The dynastic family power of the monarchy was being transformed into a democratic civil society.
The polygamous Islamic world had none of this development. And monarchy is what Tate wants to go back to. “One man. Multiple wives. All children in one big room. It’s called kingdom. It’s only for kings. Peasants wouldn’t understand,” Tate writes.
But what Tate doesn’t understand is that monogamous democratic societies are superior to polygamous monarchies.
Monogamous societies have less domestic violence, less maternal mortality, and less sex trafficking than polygamous societies. Infant and child mortality rates are almost twice as high in polygamous societies as in monogamous ones. Considering how poor a foundation for human development the polygamous home is, it is not surprising that studies show monogamous societies are more populous, less authoritarian, less corrupt, and wealthier than polygamous ones.
That is why the Christian West has been defeating and humiliating Tate’s beloved Islam for the past 500 years: Polygamy is simply inferior to monogamy for organizing human cooperation.
To the extent the West is declining, which Tate claims it is, it is because we are allowing too many polygamous Islamic men to transgress our borders and pollute our culture.
Considering that Tate’s parents divorced when he was young and that he was then forced to live, in his own words, in “the worst area of the worst town” in England (Luton, apparently) and that he rarely saw his father after that, Tate’s antipathy toward monogamous marriage is understandable. Monogamy failed Tate, so it must be a failure for everyone.
Tate’s attack on monogamy is not just historically illiterate, but it is dangerously misleading. What he champions as “natural” was in reality a system of coercion, inequality, and violence that concentrated power in the hands of a few men while leaving most others without wives or children. The Christian West broke that cycle, not by accident but through a deliberate moral revolution led by the church, which dismantled clan‑based monopolies on power and laid the foundations for individual rights, democracy, and economic growth. Monogamy was not a trick to appease “low-quality men,” as Tate sneers, but a civilizational innovation that allowed entire societies to flourish.
Polygamous cultures stagnated under patriarchal dynasties, while monogamous Europe developed the institutions that made modern freedom and prosperity possible. The evidence is overwhelming: Monogamous societies are safer, healthier, more stable, and more prosperous than polygamous ones. Tate may fantasize about a world of kings and harems, but history shows such systems breed only oppression and decline. If the West is faltering, it is not because of monogamy but because we are forgetting the very principles that made us strong. Tate mistakes strength for tyranny and, in doing so, reveals his own weakness.