Men Who Hate Women, by Laura Bates

Rosie Boycott

ROSIE BOYCOTT Men Who Hate Women By Laura Bates Simon and Schuster £16.99

Until a chance conversation with Bates two years ago, I had never heard the word incel.

It means ‘involuntary celibate’ and it is now an umbrella term to cover men who define themselves as unable to find a romantic (or sexual) partner, despite wanting one. It is a broad spectrum, ranging from a young man who feels unattractive, lonely and unloved to the extreme hatred that has led to acts of incel-inspired terrorism, such as the case of Alek Minassian who drove a van into a busy Toronto street in 2018, killing ten and wounding 16.

He later told police that the attack was for years of rejection by women and that he was a member of the incel movement. Bates tell us that at least 50 women have been killed by men who claim they were inspired by the incel movement.

When online radicalisation results in a Muslim attacker’s driving into white pedestrians, media reports immediately make the connection. When men kill in the name of misogyny, the perpetrators are described as one-offs: angry, resentful and mentally ill, but not attached to a movement.

It is almost impossible to tell where the lines are crossed in a man’s journey through the ‘manosphere’. At the start, it is easy to feel sympathy with the isolated young man who wants advice on how to find a girlfriend. One site leads him to another, and the sequence might tell him that, to be successful, the man must be in charge; that he should tell a woman what to wear and what to say. Then that all women secretly fantasise about being raped. Or choked.

One online ‘pick-up guru’ insists that men should ‘interrupt what a girl is saying every ten words, to throw her off balance, undermine her confidence’. Women, the message repeats, are responsible for all your ills. They have stolen your jobs, your authority and – in many cases – your children, too.

Bates says that people are complacent about the scale of this phenomenon: ‘At the time of writing, one of the most popular websites has over three million posts; two million messages.’

Furthermore, incels and men who hate women do not exist just on the margin. Nathan Larsen, a 37-year-old accountant and Congressional candidate from Virginia, called for the Violence Against Women Act to be repealed because ‘We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers, and later of their husbands.’ Another of his online posts declared, ‘A man should be allowed to choke his wife to death as punishment for cutting her hair short without his permission.’

In the UK, Bates singles out Piers

Morgan for his misogynistic tweets and attacks on women. On the day of a women’s march, Morgan tweeted 163 times along these lines: ‘I’m planning a “men’s March” to protest at the creeping global emasculation of my gender by rabid feminists.’ He constantly criticises individual men for terrible crimes ‘like parenting’, famously lambasting Daniel Craig for daring to carry his baby in a sling, tweeting that James Bond had been ‘emasculated’.

And this is one of the problems. When we founded Spare Rib in 1972, our initial plan was to include men as well as women, but there was too much to do to try and change the glaringly unequal role women held in society. In the years since, we have redefined what it means to be a woman: mother or a prime minister, engineer or astronaut.

But men? The range of what society sees as ‘masculine’ has stayed horribly narrow. Men at the school gates at 3.15 in the afternoon still raise an eyebrow. Stay-at-home dads come with a health warning. Young men today are regularly beaten to the top grades at school. Job prospects are poor. Confidence wanes and online messages find fertile ground.

Blaming women is a sure-fire way of venting frustrations with a system that still prizes financial success above almost everything.

Bates herself has been the victim of a mass of online abuse. She’s moved house twice, never reveals her address and has had to ask for police protection. ‘I’m scared of this book being published,’ she writes. ‘I’m throwing down the gauntlet … if they choose to deluge me with threats and abuse, they will be proving me right.’

As she says, we cannot tackle a problem unless we know it exists.