Men Who Hate Women - Laura Bates [Not A Review]

I recently finished reading Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates, a book that is, in many ways, a sequel and natural progression to Bates’ previous publications. Having established beyond doubt in Everyday Sexism and Misogynation that sexism exists and is a huge systemic issue in western society, Laura uses this book as an opportunity to delve deeper into the debate and attempts to uncover the ever growing, insidious, underground political movement that is at the forefront of propelling viral sexism into the mainstream, now a political movement with its own ideology, hierarchy, and manifesto. The book is brilliant, and I have no trouble recommending it to everyone, but beyond that there isn’t much to say about it that it doesn’t say for itself. What I do want to talk about, however, is some things I have noticed since reading this book. 

I can’t pretend that any of this is new to me. From online incel groups to the terror attacks their members commit, to the doxing and swatting of their opposition, to the pick-up artists perpetrating a variation of the same misogyny. I’m aware of it all, and the existence of it isn’t really a shock to me. I suppose the only thing I still struggle to comprehend is just how severe it is. These groups may have their “headquarters” in a niche corner of the Internet, but their operations are increasingly carried out in the mainstream - they are not a bunch of creeps distinctly different from the average person, they ARE the average person in every other meaningful way which allows them to hide in plain sight. Misogyny is a scale, rather than category to which you either belong or don’t. Alarmingly, there seem to be more people ascending this scale than any other, and yet we are still bending over backwards to divert attention away from this and toward other extremist groups. 

With that being said then, I have two broad takeaways from this book that I want to highlight; the sheer number of contradictions in the incel ideology, and the fact that misogyny is a sliding scale that almost everybody falls onto at one point or another.

The contradictions are interesting to say the least: it is a common grievance in these groups that women are granted custody of children in divorce settlements disproportionately to men, and yet it is also a commonly held belief by many of the same people that it is the role of women to stay at home and look after the children - no wonder they’re winning all these imaginary custody battles then. The use of degrading slurs towards women they deem promiscuous, calling them sluts that they wouldn’t even want to go near, is also not uncommon, and yet their original gripe stems from the fact that women are denying men sex. And then we take some of the terrorists from these groups, like Anders Breivik: a white supremacist who chose to spread his message by killing predominantly white people. By their own admission some of the men Bates comes across hate women, sometimes even going as far as to avoid them completely in life, all because they didn’t like the fact that women avoided them. Racism and, in particular, Islamophobia are rife amongst these groups, and yet they make references to a desire to have “white sharia” - this is based on their warped belief that Muslim’s do not treat women with equality, and a desire to follow in their footsteps. In many ways they are no different to the Islamist extremists they refer to - they are two faces of the same coin as Bates puts it in her book. This point becomes alarming when you discover that these beliefs have made their way to mainstream Islamophobic politicians worldwide.

All these contradictions move me onto something I finally understood when I was a teenager, which is that feminism is really one of the only things that is helping men too. There are a few go-to issues that these people list in opposition to feminism, such as the high male suicide rate, and the statistics regarding custody battle cases as mentioned above. Both are real issues, but both again stem from the gendered stereotypes that feminism is trying to dismantle; the idea that men think while women feel, and that it is a man’s job to provide for his family while a woman's job is to look after the home and children, that men are to be macho providers. These are all stereotypes that have a hugely negative impact on men and women in equal measure. The pornography that depicts women as objects to be used and abused is the same pornography that tells men they must have certain unattainable characteristics and abilities, which can only set both parties up for disappointment. 

Just from those two examples, then, you can see where this is heading; these are not arguments you read on a fringe forum in a secluded corner of the dark web, these are arguments you hear at work, on the tube, in a university lecture hall, on television, at the dining table, in the group chat, in a tik tok comment section, and so on. These (once extreme) views have filtered down to the public consciousness and have become relatively commonplace, making the conveyor belt to extremism relatively smooth. I have seen with my own eyes the tactics pick up artists use on nights out; men pressuring women, using the tactics Bates highlights in her book, even physically grabbing women and throwing them over their shoulder in some cases. The idea that a woman saying “no” is just them playing hard to get, that women are happy for creepy attention from attractive men but cry harassment if he is unattractive, that women regularly make false rape claims, are positions that a lot of ordinary men are (in the very least) sympathetic to, but are also points read from the same hymn sheet as these extremist incel groups.

This scale is at its worst online, where you have a much greater ability of retaining anonymity and therefore candour, but features of it are apparent in the mainstream too. Mike Pence, former Vice President of the United States of America, famously admitted that he never dines alone with a woman, especially where alcohol is present. This is hardly different to the philosophy of the MGTOW (Men Go Their Own Way) group Bates highlights in her book. Only about a month ago Nick Fletcher, MP for Don Valley, chose to blame women for men committing crime. "In recent years we have seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, the Equalizer all replaced by women, and men are left with the Krays and Tommy Shelby. Is there any wonder we are seeing so many young men committing crime?". This is where it begins; “male criminality is the fault of too many female role models”, which can morph into “women want too much equality”, to “women want to overthrow men”, eventually ending in extreme levels of violence towards women as we see regularly in headlines. While the groups Bates talks about may be seen as extreme and distant, the likes of Pence and Fletcher are at the heart of policy making and shaping society, and that is a truly worrying concept.