The New Age of Sexism

I almost wish I didn’t have to say Laura Bates has just written the most important book of our generation. Not having to say this would mean the issues she discusses and horrific realities she has researched may not be as threatening as they really are.

Anyone who has picked up a Bates book before will know there is no light reading to be done here, and those who haven’t, I urge you to. If you are a parent, a man, a policy-maker or you work in tech, this should be required reading.

While many of us will be aware of generative AI such as ChatGPT or might have seen laughable parody images of celebrities online, there are very real, very frightening things happening in the grossly unregulated tech world. The scale at which AI is already reinventing incel culture and misogyny is so much larger than we think.

Laura Bates needs to be thanked, by all of us, for what she puts herself through to research and write these books. Her 2020 publication, Men Who Hate Women, required spending hours upon hours in the incel corner of the internet, reading the vitriol of real men who do not believe women to be human, or do not believe they should be treated so.

For this book, Bates takes us to cyber brothels, to chat rooms with submissive AI girlfriends, to the real-life testimonies of women affected by image-based sexual abuse. We learn that 93% of deepfakes are fake pornographic depictions of people; 99% of these people are women. We learn that under the guise of addressing the ‘male loneliness epidemic’, purchases of sex robots are skyrocketing. Their main selling point? They are ‘women’ who cannot talk back.

If only there were an AI that could implant Bates’s findings seamlessly into our brains, because ignorance is not bliss; we need to know about everything this book reveals, and we need to do something about it.