“I think this is the biggest generation gap we’ve seen,” says Laura Bates. “It hasn’t happened before, and it might not ever happen again.” Five minutes into a conversation that lasts nearly two hours, Bates is crisply reminding me of one of the key things that define this bit of the 21st century. We have met to talk about misogyny, the online gathering grounds known as the manosphere, and Andrew Tate, the Big Brother contestant turned influencer responsible for webcam pornography businesses and a great splurge of misogynistic rhetoric. But the conversation also keeps returning to the huge gap between the younger generations, Z and alpha, who have never known anything other than the chaotic, sense-distorting, internet-defined reality of the 21st century; and the parents, politicians and journalists who are still running to keep up.
Older people, she says, tend to be resident in a world where YouTube is reducible to “movie trailers and cat videos” and social media largely means Facebook. Bates is 36, and from the cohort that cut its teeth on MSN Messenger and Myspace, and became immersed in the online world, but was spared the kind of adolescence that would soon be completely dominated by phones, platforms for constant communication, online porn and internet videos. Today’s teenagers, by contrast, know nothing else.
For millions of girls, what that means is now terrifyingly clear: “Just the impossibility of escaping from harassment, revenge pornography, deepfake porn – just a whole bombardment,” Bates says. “I was talking to a 14-year-old girl at a book event the other day. She said 10 boys had messaged her, pressuring her to send them nude pictures, in a single night. That landscape of what teenage girls are navigating is completely new.”
The other key aspect of this new reality was the subject of the brilliant, sobering book that Bates published in 2020: Men Who Hate Women, subtitled The Extremism No One Is Talking About.
Over its 350 pages, Bates introduced her readers to “incels” – “involuntary celibates” – who see their romantic failure and loneliness as a social injustice wrought by all-powerful women, and whose ideas shade into violence (Jake Davison, who murdered five people in the Keyham area of Plymouth in 2021, was obsessed with incel culture). She shone light on the self-styled pickup artists who “portray women as little more than objects whose sole purpose is to provide sexual pleasure to men”. She also explored the cult of Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW: those whose hatred is so deep-seated that they try to live as if women don’t exist.
There was also compelling material about a category summarised by Bates as Men Who Exploit Other Men: grifters and influencers who trade on misogyny and male inadequacy to feed growing cults of personality, online and in the more traditional media. All this, she pointed out, is poured into the lives of boys and young men by the algorithms of online video and social media companies, and clumsy – and often implicitly sympathetic – coverage from conventional journalists and broadcasters.
A small part of this story spectacularly burst into the wider culture last summer, when Tate’s 11bn-plus viewings on TikTok and women-hating pronouncements – claims that women should “bear responsibility” for rape and be men’s property, and such references to violence as “bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck – shut up bitch” – suddenly became a huge news story. Since he was arrested in Romania, where he is being detained on suspicion of rape, organised crime and human trafficking, his infamy has inevitably increased.
The danger, Bates says, is that because so many media gatekeepers know almost nothing of the reality of contemporary online life, a whole world of prejudice, hatred and violence is being reduced to the story of one man.
“If it’s all focused on Andrew Tate rather than the much broader problem,” she says. “If he does end up being jailed or losing his social media access, there’s a real risk of people saying: ‘Brilliant. Problem solved.’”
Bates – who is originally from Taunton, in Somerset, and has an English degree from Cambridge – is so across her brief that there seems to be nothing you can ask her that she has not thought about in great depth. She talks about Tate and the stories that swirl around him with a mixture of caution and weariness. A key problem, as she sees it, is that even well-intentioned coverage of Tate only boosts his profile – and, in the minds of his followers, justifies their sense of persecution and paranoia. (His online admirers believe in an anti-Tate conspiracy orchestrated by something they call “the Matrix”.) As with Donald Trump, this is the nature of the cult he speaks to.
Tellingly, she says she wasn’t aware of Tate until last year. “His name hadn’t come up in school visits I did until it came up in the mainstream media,” she says.
And here is what she sees as the key story: “They’ve provided him with coverage that they never would have provided to a different kind of extremist. The depths in which they’ve gone into his ideology, the replication of his quotes in massive detail in mainstream news platforms … I’ve been asked by journalists to come on TV and do a kind of origin story of Andrew Tate, looking at him as a sort of mystical figure. And mainstream media platforms have put elements of his ideology to me as if they’re facts, and presented them as valid things for debate.”
Can she give me an example? “‘Isn’t it true that he raises really important issues that are affecting men, like the fact that men have fewer economic and career chances than women?’ That simply isn’t true: it’s just not a question that a serious journalist should be asking you. Other forms of conspiracy theories and extremist, prejudiced beliefs just wouldn’t be given that kind of airtime. I just think that because it’s misogyny, there’s a real acceptability, giving him this almost kind of star treatment.”
In that sense, Tate’s arrival in the news is yet another reminder of how much has to change. Tate’s accounts may have been removed by Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, but these internet giants continue to carry huge amounts of the misogyny he represents. As for Prevent, the government’s anti-terrorism programme, even after Keyham (and, for that matter, the 2018 Toronto attack in which a self-described incel killed 11 people), it still puts violent misogyny in its “mixed, unclear or unstable” category; a recent official review of Prevent concluded that incel culture should not be a counter-terrorism matter.
And what of schools? Bates has been visiting education settings for eight years, talking about sexism and misogyny in most of its manifestations, and seems to now feel a guarded kind of optimism.
“The schools where I’m really seeing a shift in the atmosphere – and you can really see that if you go back several years in a row – are the ones who are doing the most to tackle things at as many different entry points as they can,” she says. “It’s not just a one-off assembly led by a female teacher. It’s schools where male senior leaders and male teachers are heavily involved in the process, making it clear that it matters to them. And it’s not just siloed into PSHE [personal, social, health and economic education] – it’s being brought into the politics curriculum, into English literature, into drama, into history.”
There is, however, a downside. “You can’t divorce this sort of theoretical stuff from what’s happening day to day in terms of sexual harassment and school dress codes,” she says. “The thing I think is wild about the Andrew Tate conversation is that we’ve just had an Ofsted report that found that 79% of girls said sexual assault was common in their friendship group. But we’re having this separate conversation about online misogyny. Very rarely does anybody ask me about those two things in the same conversation, which is mad. Because they’re so clearly connected.”
What children and young people can and can’t wear to school, she says, threatens to become one of the most insidious, overlooked examples of how seemingly innocuous things open up a path that leads to much more sinister stuff.
“Dress codes are a good example of where cultural norms feed into manosphere extremism,” she says. “We’re seeing schools where girls are being sent out of lessons, or sent home, because of skirt length, because of their shoulders or collarbones or bra strap showing. And in some cases the rhetoric that’s being used around that is about distracting boys or about making male teachers uncomfortable.
“When that happens, although it might not be deliberate, schools are sending the message to kids that, at adolescent or prepubescent age, girls’ bodies are powerful and dangerous in a way that boys’ bodies aren’t; that girls are responsible for covering themselves up to avoid harassment rather than boys being taught to respect women. It just plays into every possible cultural trope that we’ve seen very much in the wake of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa’s murders recently: ‘Women should be avoiding this. Women need to learn to do the right things.’”
In among such backwards steps, she also sees other signs of hope. “It’s true that there is a worrying minority of boys who are really being radicalised into these hardened, misogynistic, extremist ideas,” she says. “But it’s also true that there are boys standing up against this stuff in a way that I’ve never seen before. And their generation is also a generation of girls who are politicised and aware of feminism and advocating and starting campaigns in a way that definitely wasn’t the case 10 or 15 years ago. Almost every school I visit now has got a feminist society or gender equality society. So it’s a mixed picture.”
There is one set of people we haven’t talked about so far. If you’re a parent – particularly of a teenage boy – and you’re increasingly concerned about these great oceans of women-hating material online and how they wash up into everyday life, what should you do?
“Don’t panic. Any parent asking: ‘What can I do?’ is already ahead of the curve; the biggest problem is parents who just aren’t really aware of this at all,” she says. “One of the biggest things is trying to cross that digital culture gap. So have a look at some of the men’s rights pages on Reddit. Sign up for some of the biggest comedy meme accounts on Instagram and see what they’re pumping out. Try typing something innocuous about women on YouTube and then pay attention to the five or six videos that the algorithm serves up to you next. Make a TikTok account, and get a sense of what that world actually is like.”
When it comes to talking, she says, “it has to be little and often; it’s more about opening up channels of communication that are supportive and non-judgmental than trying to shut things down. None of that is going to work in the face of really effective radicalisation, which is what’s happening here. It’s about giving them opportunities to ask questions and to feel that you’d like to talk stuff through.”
I have one last question: how is she right now? In Men Who Hate Women, she described endless death and rape threats, repeatedly moving home, and never sharing details of her family and friends. “I’m scared about this book coming out,” she wrote, and by the sound of it, those fears have been realised.
“Yeah, much more so since that book came out. It had a quite dramatic effect in terms of an uptick in the amount of threats that I was receiving – to the degree that the police put a panic alarm in my home, and various security measures that I’m not allowed to talk about publicly. So it really does affect your life and your family and the people that you love in very real ways. And there’s no getting around that.”
The Everyday Sexism project she set up in 2012 to catalogue and collect women’s experiences goes on. Last year saw the publication of her incisive polemic about deep-rooted, institutionalised prejudice, Fix the System Not the Women. She says she’s working on a novel, but there’s no sense of any real let-up in her activism. Is there a voice in her head that occasionally wants to stop, if only for the sake of her wellbeing and the prospect of a halfway calm and quiet life?
“Yeah, there definitely is. But there’s a whole number of reasons also for saying no to it.”
She talks about women around the world who are “putting their lives at immediate risk” as they fight the same problems, and teenage girls in this country who write to her every day describing life in the midst of what she talks and writes about. There is also an oblique mention of the people and forces that she and her allies are up against, and the faintest of smiles. “That’s the bloody-minded part of me,” she says. “I just don’t want to let them win.”
