If you’ve not heard of the ‘manosphere’, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The manosphere is a loosely linked number of online communities devoted to hating women. These include incels, pick-up artists, trolls, MGTOWs, and a legion of other types of extreme misogynists. If these sound like gibberish to you, I can recommend Laura Bates’s Men Who Hate Women, a fearless exposé of these online hate communities and the real-life harm they perpetuate.
Bates devotes a chapter to each community, detailing their particular ideas and philosophy, and showing how it has influenced its members to commit real and lasting harm. It’s a shocking book, partly for the content, and partly because these movements are not taken seriously. The stereotype is that online misogynists are basement-dwelling losers, but in reality they are often high-profile individuals in many different spheres of society, from business to politics to the culture industries, and use their platform to spread their hateful ideas as widely as possible. Pick-up artistry, for instance, is a billion-dollar global industry, whose adherents willingly spend hundreds to attend talks or seminars, in the hopes of learning how to better manipulate women into sex.
The label of ‘extremist’ is not usually given to the men in these communities, but Bates argues that it should be, and individuals that are motivated by them to mass murder should be called terrorists. She cites the example of Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old who killed six people and injured fourteen in 2014. Rodger was part of the online incel community (short for ‘involuntary celibate’), and posted a video online detailing his desire to punish women who rejected him, and sexually active men of whom he was jealous. At the time, reports emphasised his mental health as the reason behind the killings, and portrayed him as a ‘lone wolf’. Bates takes this viewpoint to task, rightly arguing that these kinds of groups are no different than any other that radicalises its members to violence, and should be treated with the same degree of severity.
I was aware of some of the communities going in, having seen them discussed beforehand on social media, but what I didn’t know was the scale of the problem. What stuck in my mind was how this kind of extremist logic has spread to schools. Bates often gives talks in secondary schools about sexism and gender inequality. She details how in recent years, teenage boys – who before were as jokey and disruptive as one might expect, but after a while did engage with discussion and were willing to listen – now ask concerning questions designed to discredit her. These young men believe wholeheartedly that feminism is a man-hating conspiracy, men experience more domestic violence than women, and women often lie about rape and sexual violence. This is by and large through exposure to extremist content on social media, which is often presented as harmless and normal (e.g. in YouTube videos or jokes on Instagram meme accounts). If the ideology of manosphere communities is being casually discussed by boys in schools, it’s a huge problem.
In the last chapter of the book, Bates points out some potential solutions to the spread of online misogyny, and highlights the men who are working against it themselves. But I got the sense that a whole separate book could have been written about it, and after the litany of extreme misogyny that came before, it didn’t serve to give me a lot of hope. To be clear, that’s not a flaw in the book, which was as thorough as it could have been, but a reaction to the reality of the effects these kind of communities have.
Men Who Hate Women is a vital book for our post-Trump world, where the standards of acceptability in mainstream discourse seem to have deteriorated beyond repair. It’s a guidebook to the world of online misogyny, and a rallying cry for anyone concerned about the state of women’s rights in the 21st century. I applaud Bates for her effort in exposing manosphere communities, and hope that this book can spark a change in how they’re regarded.
Review by Charlie Alcock
The label of ‘extremist’ is not usually given to the men in these communities, but Bates argues that it should be, and individuals that are motivated by them to mass murder should be called terrorists. She cites the example of Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old who killed six people and injured fourteen in 2014. Rodger was part of the online incel community (short for ‘involuntary celibate’), and posted a video online detailing his desire to punish women who rejected him, and sexually active men of whom he was jealous. At the time, reports emphasised his mental health as the reason behind the killings, and portrayed him as a ‘lone wolf’. Bates takes this viewpoint to task, rightly arguing that these kinds of groups are no different than any other that radicalises its members to violence, and should be treated with the same degree of severity.
I was aware of some of the communities going in, having seen them discussed beforehand on social media, but what I didn’t know was the scale of the problem. What stuck in my mind was how this kind of extremist logic has spread to schools. Bates often gives talks in secondary schools about sexism and gender inequality. She details how in recent years, teenage boys – who before were as jokey and disruptive as one might expect, but after a while did engage with discussion and were willing to listen – now ask concerning questions designed to discredit her. These young men believe wholeheartedly that feminism is a man-hating conspiracy, men experience more domestic violence than women, and women often lie about rape and sexual violence. This is by and large through exposure to extremist content on social media, which is often presented as harmless and normal (e.g. in YouTube videos or jokes on Instagram meme accounts). If the ideology of manosphere communities is being casually discussed by boys in schools, it’s a huge problem.
In the last chapter of the book, Bates points out some potential solutions to the spread of online misogyny, and highlights the men who are working against it themselves. But I got the sense that a whole separate book could have been written about it, and after the litany of extreme misogyny that came before, it didn’t serve to give me a lot of hope. To be clear, that’s not a flaw in the book, which was as thorough as it could have been, but a reaction to the reality of the effects these kind of communities have.
Men Who Hate Women is a vital book for our post-Trump world, where the standards of acceptability in mainstream discourse seem to have deteriorated beyond repair. It’s a guidebook to the world of online misogyny, and a rallying cry for anyone concerned about the state of women’s rights in the 21st century. I applaud Bates for her effort in exposing manosphere communities, and hope that this book can spark a change in how they’re regarded.
Review by Charlie Alcock
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