Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates - Review

TW: Mentions of rape and domestic violence.

Men Who Hate Women is an examination of the manosphere and its many forms. It is immersively researched. Bates places herself distressingly close to and around online spaces that create, house, radicalise, and praise, men who hate women. 

She educates, dissects, analyses, and quotes the many figureheads and forums of the movement. 

Bates' dialogue is fierce and impassioned, yet rational, calculated, and scientific. Her book is an undebatable encyclopaedia of the web of male ideology online that spills out into real-life. Men who hate, prey on, avoid, blame, hound, hurt, and are afraid of women are all part of a web of misogyny that has become society’s ugly but palleted wallpaper.

Bates explores the many faces of the manosphere and their core ideologies that differ slightly but are the same; Incels, Pick Up Artists, Men Going Their Own Way, Men’s Rights Activists and trolls. These are all united in one thing: their hatred (taking many forms) of women. Strains of the manosphere are dissected to reveal their core beliefs as being almost identical despite some being more accepted by popular culture than others. She draws, for example, on the fundamental similarities between PUAs – who package, and market to popular consciousness ideas usually only seen in the darkest corners of the manosphere, and incels. Despite neither of them claiming the other, both have an open acceptance of rape and rape culture, see women as the stingy deciders of the sexual marketplace that exist to provide sexual pleasure to men, and see sex as the pinnacle of male achievement that women coldly and deliberately keep from them. Bates writes that both groups essentially think of women as slot machines for sex. “The difference is that incels regard the machines as rigged,” she writes, while PUAs believe there is an “exact secret combination of buttons to push and levers to pull, in order to trick the machine into paying out every time.”

Bates meticulously proves that the manosphere and its subcultures are not small communities of lonely, harmless men, but instead are a web of harmful and permeating ideologies that affect women in the workplace, online, in schools, and further. They are groups that, under definitions of terrorism and terrorist groups, hold the same influence and danger as some of the most well-known terrorist organisations, but they are groups that are ignored. Whether this be asking for advice on how to rape a woman and get away with it, fantasising about and encouraging rape domestic violence, and murder, discussing the ideal woman for a sex slave, to praising mass murderers such as Elliott Rodger who went on a women killing spree because of his sexual failings (not to mention his deep involvement in incel communities), the manosphere and its pillars are unimaginably dangerous and powerful.

She engages in dialogue surrounding the types of men in these groups. Whilst these are men who are deeply lonely, scared, exploited by other men, insecure, and riddled with self-loathing, they are also dangerous predators who impose the same fate on other men and a worse, more dangerous and violent fate on women. She notices the paradox at play in these communities. Men recruit and radicalise other men by blaming women for the problems they create themselves. Within these groups, Bates notices, there is a hierarchy, economic exploitation, and toxic masculinity imposed by the very men who are 'brothers' and are saving each other from the 'blue pill' of life before the community – the self-fulfilling prophecy. “These are men who hate men who hate women they just don’t know it yet.”

She talks about the grooming process of young boys and how chat-room humour-jargon and memes like ‘feminism is cancer’ and ‘triggered’ is an all-too-slippery pipeline towards misinformation, misogyny, and the alt-right.

In an almost meta-sense, reading the book shows how misogyny can and has become wallpaper – too commonplace to be taken seriously. At first, the unedited comments from forums and YouTube comments and articles made me gasp aloud and my mouth hang open in shock. By the end, I read them like I would read any other information. As Bates herself talks about becoming desensitised to these forums as ‘Alex’, I experienced the same thing second-hand. Such is misogyny in society and online, as well as the grooming and radicalisation process.

Bates talks at the end about the dangers of publishing such a book that she is all too aware of. But she describes it as an act of resistance, an act to show teachers, parents, women, and most importantly men, what we are up against.