Men who hate women: A new book takes us deep into online misogyny
Real stories from real people
www.irishexaminer.com
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 05, 2020 - 08:00 AM
SUZANNE HARRINGTON
“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.
As well as going undercover in the incel world, Laura Bates also explores PUAs (Pick-up artists: Men who pose as dating experts, charging huge fees to other men in return for predatory 'tips' on how to disregard consent). She reports from the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) community, with its 100,000 Reddit subscribers. These men actively avoid interaction with women, from zero contact to advocating the Pence Rule (named after US vice-president, Mike Pence, who refuses to have one-to-one meetings with any woman who is not his wife).
This tactic has been adopted by 27% of the male US workforce, "a direct result of a deeply misogynistic and deliberate misinterpretation of the #MeToo movement," writes Bates. At the 2019 World Economic Forum, in Davos, attendees spoke about no longer mentoring women, directly impacting female career trajectories.
Bates also looks at the men’s rights activists — not to be mistaken with men’s organisations that support and mentor each other — who "cling to outdated gender stereotypes" and "crusade against the women trying to address those same stereotypes"; one such group, A Voice For Men, founded in 2009, suggested renaming a domestic violence awareness initiative as "bash-a-violent-bitch month". Another MRA blogger wrote how, "Women should be terrorised by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps."
"It’s a mistake to be distracted by extremism [at the violent end of the manosphere]," says Bates.
It is also a mistake to underestimate the scale of the situation, and the depth: "Feminist academics have been sounding the alarm for ages." (Fifty years ago, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch how "women fail to understand how much men hate them".) And that was decades before the instant, global anonymity of the internet. "It’s devastating to realise the sheer scale of these communities, how widespread they are," says Bates. She has personally been trolled to the extent that she has to closely guard her own security, online and off: "I’ve received hundreds of death threats, hundreds of rape threats, even in a single day. I thought I was used to it, but it was harder than I’d expected. Also, in the course of my research, finding pages and pages of hate directed at me personally was much worse than I’d anticipated." She repeats some of the personal threats she’s received, too obscene and violent to share here. All of that for highlighting what is already there for all to see, should we wish to look.
"I had never been so immersed," she says.
It made me feel very low at times. There was one day when I allowed myself to stop and cry.
(This was after reading police reports of an incel school shooting, children hiding in a classroom cupboard, texting their parents 'goodbye' because they thought they were about to be killed.)
Bates persisted, because she "had a real sense of urgency: So few people realise that these kind of communities exist, and their scale. So many boys and young men are being groomed, yet these groups are not even on the police radar, never mind counter-terrorism radars. These are not all isolated, loser weirdos, which gives a sense of distance, of harmlessness — it could be your son’s football coach, your neighbour.”
Unlike terrorism involving white supremacism, Islamist extremism, neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia, terrorism against women is not recognised or even named. "It's an absolute scandal that only one incel terrorist has ever actually been charged with terrorism," she says. Psychological terrorism against women involves stalking, trolling, harassing, persecuting, threatening: Online and offline. Bates examines them all, and how such behaviours are on the increase. So what can be done?
“There is a lot we can do, given how, currently, we are doing nothing at all,” she says. For a start, misogyny needs to be recognised and treated as a hate crime. Parents and educators need to familiarise themselves with the online world, beyond their own internet bubble. It needs to be talked about in schools, sports environments, and places where young men hang out. Teachers need better training. There needs to be more offline spaces for young men to congregate and feel a sense of community and belonging away from online toxicity, and better support for male mental-health issues. Social media giants need to take far, far more responsibility for uploaded content. We all need to wake up. As Bates says, it’s not about pitting women against men, but people against prejudice.
And, most of all, we need to redefine masculinity and what it means, so that young men can grow up without its expectations crushing them and those around them. As the American Psychological Association put it in January 2019, "traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful… socialising boys to suppress their emotions causes damage". That damage spreads outwards, affecting everyone. Online, it’s a contagion.
