Bates spent 18 months “wading through bile” in the online 'manosphere'.
“Imagine a world in which the hatred of women is actively encouraged, with sprawling, purpose-built communities of men dedicated to fuelling and inflaming the cause… a world in which thousands of men band together, demonising and railing against evil, soulless, greedy women, graphically plotting their rape and destruction. Imagine a world in which some men actually enact such fantasies… a world in which vulnerable men, lost boys, and confused, scared teenagers are swept up and preyed upon by such communities.”
Where are we? A Margaret Atwood dystopia? Nope.
"You don’t have to imagine this world," writes Laura Bates in her new book, Men Who Hate Women. “You already live in it.” Bates founded the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012, and published her first book, Everyday Sexism, in 2014. Her second, Men Who Hate Women, takes us deep into online misogyny, and how it spreads outwards, to teenage boys, to mainstream media, to the White House. It is a shattering read, because when we think about violent, online misogyny, we assume it’s just a handful of creepy losers at the far end of the internet. It’s not.
"What if our desensitisation to low-level, ubiquitous misogyny is preventing us from recognising a full-blown crisis?" asks Bates. Yet, increasingly, mainstream male attitudes are changing, with men now more likely to view themselves not as perpetrators, but as victims. (The Me Too movement, for example, elicited 12m responses from women, but resulted in consequences for only a few hundred men, yet was deemed a witch hunt by the BBC and other mainstream media outlets.)
Bates spent 18 months "wading through bile" in the online manosphere, to places far beyond low level. Posing as Alex, "a disillusioned, young white man…not a hardened misogynist, just a bored guy surfing the internet," she encountered the incel community.
Incels are 'involuntary celibates': Men who are not having sex with women and who subsequently hate women, whom they refer to as 'foids', that is female humanoids. (At no point do these guys join the dots between their misogyny and their celibacy, because they are too busy posting female-directed hate.) They number in their tens of thousands, have forums, podcasts, chatrooms, and YouTube channels. They are almost exclusively white Americans, Canadians, Australians, British; they believe the world is a gynocracy, "a feminist conspiracy and a deeply rigged sexual market place". They use extensive jargon. They hate women, they hate men who have relationships with women, and they hate themselves. Common threads include, 'Should women be considered human?'; 'All women are whores'; 'Women are not sentient'; 'Why I support the legalisation of rape.' The owner of one incel site, which promoted rape, incest, and acid attacks on women, turned out to be a married, 37-year-old father, an accountant and pro-Trump congressional candidate from Virginia.
There have been several incel mass shootings, most infamously the Parkland Florida high-school massacre: The gunman was 'inspired' by an earlier incel killer; such murderers become deified within the incel community, while being treated as disturbed loners by the law, rather than as actual terrorists. "I will slaughter every single, spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see," one mass murderer posted on YouTube. He did just that, at the University of California in 2014. His upload has been viewed more than 1.5m times and liked almost 10,000 times. A month later, a teenager in the UK attempted to murder three women with a knife, writing in his diary how he wanted "revenge" against women because he was a virgin.