Men Who Hate Women

From incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all

Laura Bates

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781471152276
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

***Laura Bates' new book Fix the System, Not the Women is out now in paperback*** ' A fascinating, mind-blowing and deeply intelligent book that should be recommended reading for every person on our planet' SCARLETT CURTIS 'Laura Bates puts out books that perfectly describe growing problems and possible solutions. She's a proper hero at the coal mouth' CAITLIN MORAN 'Brilliantly fierce and eye-opening' OBSERVER
________________________________________________________ The extremism nobody talks about
And how it affects us all Imagine a world in which a vast network of incels and other misogynists are able to operate, virtually undetected. These extremists commit deliberate terrorist acts against women. Vulnerable teenage boys are groomed and radicalised. You don't have to imagine that world. You already live in it. Perhaps you didn't know, because we don't like to talk about it. But it's time we start. In this urgent and groundbreaking book, Laura Bates, bestselling author and founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, goes undercover to expose vast misogynist networks and communities. It's a deep dive into the worldwide extremism nobody talks about. Interviews with former members of these groups and the people fighting against them gives unique insights on how this movement operates. Ideas are spread from the darkest corners of the internet – via trolls, media and celebrities – to schools, workplaces and the corridors of power, becoming a part of our collective consciousness. Uncensored, and sometimes both shocking and terrifying – this is the uncomfortable truth about the world we live in. And what we must do to change it.
_________________________________________________________ 'Passionate and forensic, Bates produces a powerful feminist clarion call. The world needs to take notice. Things must change' ANITA ANAND 'This is how change is made: by looking at uncomfortable things directly in the eye and not turning away. This book is a rallying cry to end suffering, for both women AND men' EMMA GANNON 'Laura Bates is showing us the path to both intimate and global survival' GLORIA STEINEM

1 MEN WHO HATE WOMEN

‘Since they deserve to [be] raped, I cannot concern myself with the pain rape causes them.’

Comment on an incel forum

Most people have never heard of incels. The average person who asks me what I’m working on as I write this book raises an eyebrow and asks ‘in-what?’ One person thinks they’re a type of battery. Someone else expresses their surprise that I’m interested in microbiology. The people incels walk past on the street don’t generally know that they even exist.

That’s why, when incels do occasionally crop up in news reports or conversations, they are so easily dismissed as a tiny fringe group of online weirdos. What you hear about them sounds so strange, so extreme, so hard to believe, so laughable even, that it is easy to shrug off. That’s a mistake.

The incel community is the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere. It is a community devoted to violent hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities, and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes. A community in whose name over 100 people, mostly women, have been murdered or injured in the past ten years. And it’s a community you have probably never even heard of.

A year before I started writing this book, it wasn’t a community Alex had ever heard of either. Alex was a disillusioned young white man in his early twenties. He wasn’t a hardened misogynist, just a bored guy surfing the internet. A bored guy with a vague awareness of people talking a lot about sexual harassment and the gender pay gap on the news, and an uneasy sense that maybe that wasn’t great for him. Alex was twenty-four and had never had a girlfriend. He didn’t have a lot of money and he felt frustrated and lonely. It didn’t seem fair that people were complaining about women’s needs when his lot in life, as a supposedly ‘privileged’ white guy, didn’t seem so splendid. Alex didn’t feel privileged at all, so it annoyed him when people said that he was. He spent nights browsing YouTube and bodybuilding sites, looking for tips on how to improve his looks. He discussed tactics in online forums dedicated to video games. He’d never come across the incel community until I did. But that’s not surprising really, because I made him up, although there are countless real people like Alex online.

Under this identity, I came across an incel conversation one day on a generic message board. The idea of other men who felt similarly empty and frustrated appealed to Alex. He liked the idea of being one of many, instead of the odd one out. He felt relieved to have the chance to discuss the feelings he sensed were unacceptable to voice anywhere else. So he visited some of the communities that were mentioned in the conversation he had stumbled across.

When Alex first joined an incel forum, he didn’t know much about it, except that it was a community of men who were unhappy being single. Alex was, too. He posted a couple of pretty tame introductory messages, giving basic information about his age, single status and frustration with women. Within a day, he’d been indoctrinated into the ‘truth’. Told that the world was stacked against men like him. Advised that he might as well kill himself, that his life wasn’t worth living, that nothing would ever change. Extreme and pornographic images were used in response to his posts. Other users were quick to tell him that his whole existence had been a lie: society had tricked him into believing men were in control, when really they were at the bottom of the food chain. It was women who were privileged, who held all the cards and who were given all the advantages. Men were the true victims. Above all, he was told, over and over again, women are the devil.

Initially, Alex felt confused, then intrigued, then angry. How was it possible that this was the world he had been living in his whole life without even knowing? But then Alex looked at his own experiences and it started to make sense. It was appealing; until that point, he’d pictured himself as an underwhelming, very average man. But now he realised that he was a survivor. Part of a team of underdogs, fighting evil forces against the odds. Alex could be a wronged, avenging hero. This was a much more attractive version of himself than his previous reality.

After that, Alex didn’t say much. He was a lurker. Like millions of other people on online platforms, his account appeared dormant as he just watched, listened and absorbed. He saw a six-point thread titled ‘Why I support the legalisation of rape’. At first, he was bewildered and a little overwhelmed by the messages on the thread. But they were persuasive. They used facts and historical examples to back up their case. It was seductive: a world in which nothing was his fault, in which he was an aggrieved martyr, not the privileged loser he felt society painted him as. Most of all, it was a community. Yes, some of the posts were extreme, some of the replies were hostile and mean. But they treated him like a compatriot. Against the man-hating world they portrayed, he was their brother-in-arms. He was one of them, with a cause to believe in and an enemy to fight. Over time, it became easier and easier to see that women really were the enemy. When he had doubts, the messages he read reminded him that he had been deliberately blinded by the female-centric conspiracy designed to keep men docile and passive. He’d been tricked into allowing himself to be downtrodden and discriminated against. There were thousands of men who all believed the same thing. He quickly became a member of more and more forums, joining Facebook groups and private chatrooms, watching video after video on YouTube, and learning more and more. Every single day, he saw hundreds of messages like this: ‘I hate all women. They’re the scum of the earth. If you’re a woman and you happen to be reading this – I hate you fucking whore.’ Or this: ‘Women are disgusting vile parasites.’ The more he saw, the less extreme it seemed. Eventually, the ideas became normal. And I watched it all through his eyes, feeling physically sick.

In the mid-1990s, long before the advent of dating apps, Facebook or even MySpace, a young Canadian woman, known only as Alana, started a simple website.

Alana was in her mid-twenties and struggling to find love. Hurt by ‘lonely virgin’ jokes and convinced that she couldn’t be the only one feeling this way, she started a mailing list and began posting articles to the website she called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project.

Over time, the project grew into a small and generally supportive online community, where men and women shared their fears, frustrations and unhappiness.

Gradually, Alana started having more success with dating and drifted away from the community she had started, no longer wanting to focus on her former lack of romantic success.

Over twenty years later, the little project Alana called ‘invcels’ (a portmanteau of ‘involuntarily celibate’) has morphed into something completely unrecognisable. What started out as a small support group has mutated into a nightmarish world inhabited – or so a significant proportion of its content would suggest – by men who hate women. Alana would later tell a Guardian journalist: ‘It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war.’¹

Now known as ‘incels’, the community consists of a sprawling network of websites, blogs, forums, podcasts, YouTube channels and chatrooms. The growth of the movement has, in part, coincided with the widespread adoption of the internet, but it has also seen a marked expansion over the past five to ten years, alongside a similar increase in the popularity and visibility of a progressive feminist movement, particularly in Europe and North America. Almost cultish in its development of a vehemently misogynistic ideology, this hydra-like incel subculture has spawned a detailed, often delusional and violently anti-feminist worldview.

New recruits find the incel community in a variety of ways. Some stumble across it while looking for answers to life problems or loneliness. Some segue into its path from other areas of the internet, like more general message boards or websites. Some are pushed towards it by algorithms, with video platforms such as YouTube recommending incel content, even though the user didn’t go looking for it. Some are sucked in through more sinister means, groomed by messages in private gaming chatrooms or on forums frequented by teenage boys. We’ll look at some of these routes in more detail later. But, however you find the incel community, your first initiation – in common with many other manosphere communities – is taking the ‘red pill’.

Borrowed from cult film The Matrix, this refers to the scene in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice between taking a blue pill, which will enable him to continue seeing the world around him the way he always has, or a red pill, which will suddenly shift his perspective, enabling him to see the ‘Matrix’ and, in so doing, realise that nothing in his world is as he had thought. It’s ironic that I feel a little bit like I have taken a red pill after writing this book. Once you know that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there despising women to the point that many of them believe we should all be exterminated, you can never un-know it.

Incels use the metaphor of the red pill to describe the moment a man’s blinkers fall away and he suddenly realises that he has been lied to his whole life. The world that he has been forced to believe works in his favour is actually hopelessly stacked against him. Everything, from our government to our wider society, is designed to promote women over men. The myth of male privilege, so the story goes, is perpetuated by a massive feminist conspiracy. Incels refer to this man-hating world as a ‘gynocracy’, a clever system designed to keep men (the true victims of oppression) in their subordinate place, without them even noticing.

The ‘red pill’ metaphor is a powerful and dramatic way of conveying an ideology, and it is immediately attractive to those with any kind of grudge or grievance. Lost your job? What could be more appealing than a whole new worldview in which it isn’t your fault: you’ve just been the victim of a power grab by women and minorities. Dumped or divorced? That lying bitch is part of a much bigger attack on you and other men like you. Angry that you don’t seem to be lucky in love? It’s not you, it’s her. Every single ‘her’, in fact.

Some of these are individual complaints, but many of them tap into wider forms of malaise that particularly affect men and boys. The burgeoning feminist movement is often seen as a threat. Our recent societal focus on equality is deliberately interpreted and framed by anti-feminists as a criticism of all men, and the communities explored in this book spread the idea that there is no acceptable way to be masculine any more. For many ‘good’ men and boys, this can create a sense of injustice and attack, prompting a defensive knee-jerk reaction. And, when you feel defensive, the first place you want to run to is somewhere you’ll be told it’s not your fault. The manosphere goes one step further: it subverts the narrative of the privileged and the victim altogether. It tells men that they are suffering, and it blames women.

Many men, of course, are suffering, and suffering deeply. The male suicide rate is around three times that of women; men are vastly less likely to receive support for mental health problems than women; and men, in particular, are hard hit by issues such as unemployment and workplace injuries, in a world that teaches them that it is their duty and role to be a provider and protector.

Here we see the crux of the manosphere itself – its complexity and its heartbreaking irony. As we will discover, this sprawling web of communities encompasses well-meaning groups that tackle genuine problems affecting men, not just groups deliberately and systemically promoting physical and sexual violence against women. Its adherents range from naive teenagers to advocates of rape, vulnerable recluses to violent misogynists, non-violent ideologues to grieving fathers, online harassers to offline stalkers, vocal propagandists to physical abusers. Clearly not every individual who has participated in this space is deserving of the same label or treatment; indeed, there may be a large cohort of these men and boys in desperate need of support. It is paradoxical, therefore, that the group at one end of the spectrum is responsible for the most acute harm done to the group at the other. Those most powerfully reinforcing rigid and patriarchal gender stereotypes are suffocating those who most need to escape them.

Superficial analyses of incel communities have sought to imply that class is the biggest factor driving new recruits to the cause: that this is about poor, white boys being left behind. Others have suggested that it is a specific response to shifting labour markets, as manual jobs become increasingly scarce, and women are employed in ever greater numbers in more powerful roles. But, in the time I have spent immersed in these conversations and message boards, it has become apparent that the socio-economic background of members is too diverse wholly to confirm any one of those theories. The membership of these groups spans from blue-collar workers, angry about immigrants ‘displacing’ them at work and in the bedroom, to highly privileged private school graduates, furious that their ‘rightful’ place at the top of the political food chain is being challenged.

What they do seem to have in common is a craving to belong. And this need is met in spades by a community that excels at conveying a tribal sense of cohesion. What better way to suck in new recruits and repel criticism than to borrow an origin story that immediately positions all acolytes as heroic, doomed visionaries, and all critics or disbelievers as either pitifully ignorant or part of the oppressive system itself? (The fact that the Matrix trilogy was created by two transgender women, or that its kick-ass female characters would revolt against the misogynistic ideology of any manosphere community, is an irony apparently entirely lost on incels.)

The foundational tenet of taking the red pill is at the root of almost all the major manosphere groups we will look at in this book, including pickup artists, so-called Men’s Rights Activists, and Men Going Their Own Way. But it is a departure point from which different communities take dramatically different routes. In the case of incels, their prime focus is a feverish obsession with sex, and anger at being ‘denied’ it. Yes, this is a community of tens of thousands of men who claim that the world (and, in particular, individual women) is withholding from them the vital human right of getting laid. Amazingly, in the thousands of conversations and endless hours spent discussing their sparse sex lives, alongside lengthy rants about how women are evil, subhuman vessels, it never seems to occur to these men that their hatred of women might be related to their lack of romantic success. In fact, even to suggest such a thing is a banning offence in many incel forums. Instead, incels see themselves as innocent and tragic victims, creating a vivid portrait of a bleak society irreversibly stacked against them.

Tim Squirrell, a researcher studying social interaction in online communities, says:

The first thing you notice when you look at an incel forum is a mix of hopelessness and anger. These people genuinely hate and pity themselves, but, simultaneously (and almost paradoxically), they feel this righteous anger and vindication that they see the world for how it really is, even if they’re at the bottom of the heap. That feeling of absolute certainty that they are correct is twinned with the fact that they’re correct about their own misery, and that’s a powerful and strange cocktail.

Visit any incel website and you are quickly indoctrinated into this worldview, pressed to accept that vapid, self-obsessed, greedy, promiscuous women are the enemy.

Women, so the story goes, are constantly hungry for sex, but they only choose to sleep with the most attractive cohort of men. Incels are obsessed with what they refer to as the 80:20 theory, which holds that the top 20 per cent of the most attractive men enjoys 80 per cent of the sex within our society. They lament that the ‘sexual marketplace’ is brutally hierarchical, with women completely in control. They believe that, when women are choosing sexual partners, looks far outweigh personality or any other attribute, and that any man born unlucky enough to be ugly, short, bald, non-white, spotty, or a host of other perceived imperfections, is cursed to a lifetime of unfair sexual frustration.

Young women are also accused of having huge amounts of sex with extremely attractive men, before later settling down with less attractive men, who they don’t really love, but ruthlessly exploit as a means of financial support. These men (sometimes referred to as ‘beta cucks’) are pitied, because they are forced to spend all their money on a woman whose virginity has already been taken, who is spent, used up and sexually worthless, even if she does deign occasionally to allow her husband to sleep with her. Incels dub this alleged female sexual strategy ‘alpha fucks, beta bucks’.

The self-ascribed physical shortcomings of incels are seen in such concrete terms that they have spawned a wealth of subcultures, including those dedicated to being ‘heightcels’ (unacceptably short), ‘gingercels’ (too redheaded), ‘baldcels’ (irreversibly bald), ‘skullcels’ (poor facial bone structure), or even ‘wristcels’ (with a wrist circumference of 6.5 inches o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Men Who Hate Women
• Chapter 2: Men Who Prey on Women
• Chapter 3: Men Who Avoid Women
• Chapter 4: Men Who Blame Women
• Chapter 5: Men Who Hound Women
• Chapter 6: Men Who Hurt Women
• Chapter 7: Men Who Exploit Other Men
• Chapter 8: Men Who Are Afraid of Women
• Chapter 9: Men Who Don’t Know That They Hate Women
• Chapter 10: Men Who Hate Men Who Hate Women
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Copyright