Laura Bates Quotes

Women who lead, read

This is not a men vs women issue. It’s about people vs prejudice.

Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.

As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".

This is a battle that we will win. Because women are wittier, brighter, stronger and braver than a misogynistic and patriarchal world has given us credit for.

Why do we assume that educating a criminal is merely helping him commit more sophisticated crimes? Why can’t we assume that an education can give this person the tools to make more acceptable choices?

When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.

in a society in which misogyny and violence against women are so widespread and so normalized, it is difficult for us to consider these things “extreme” or “radical,” because they are simply not out of the ordinary. We do not leap to tackle a terrorist threat to women, because the reality of women being terrorized, violated, and murdered by men is already part of the wallpaper.

If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.

A man in the UK is 230 times more likely to be raped himself than be falsely accused of rape, so low is the number of false allegations.15 In the meantime, 85,000 women each year in the UK experience rape or attempted rape.16

How can I believe the people that say women have equal rights? When the worst insult a man can be called is a woman, girly, a twat, a cunt, that he needs to 'man up' and the list goes on. My gender is not an insult. I'm tired of all this shit.

Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing.

Rape is not a sexual act; it is not the result of a sudden, uncontrollable attraction to a woman in a skimpy dress. It is an act of power and violence. To suggest otherwise is deeply insulting to the vast majority of men, who are perfectly able to control their sexual desires. The

Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing. But we are so used to seeing them die at men’s hands, so used to justifying and excusing it as normal or “understandable,” that it wouldn’t occur to us to consider this enough of an aberration to raise alarm.

Over a third of all women worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence (not including sexual harassment) at some point in their lives. One hundred and thirty-seven women across the world are killed by a member of their own family every day.

Pretty much the strongest, most badass, and rebellious thing that you can do is to love your body in this world that screams at you that you shouldn't.

A fundamental part of the problem is that those whose lives are deeply, endlessly affected by it are not, by and large, those with the power to stop it.

I’m fifteen and I feel like girl my age are under a lot of pressure that boys are not under. I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny, and I know that everyone around me keeps telling me that I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don’t feel that way. I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing. I hate that I feel like that because it makes me seem shallow, but I know all of my friends feel like that, and even my little sister. I feel like successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow, what if I don’t have the perfect body, what if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist, if none of that happens I feel like what’s the point of doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not. I wish people would think about what pressure they are putting on everyone, not just teenage girls, but even older people – I watch my mum tear herself apart every day because her boobs are sagging and her skin is wrinkling, she feels like she is ugly even though she is amazing, but then I feel like I can’t judge because I do the same to myself. I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once. I know the girls on page 3 are probably starving themselves. I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I’m not good enough.

One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining.

People who shout at women in the street don’t do it because they think there’s a chance the woman will drop her shopping, willy-nilly, and leap into their arms! It isn’t a compliment – and to call it that disparages the vast majority of lovely men who are perfectly able to pay a real compliment. It is an exertion of power, dominance and control. And it’s utterly horrifying that we’ve become so used to it that it’s considered the norm. ▶

It is not women, or even feminists, who have limited, frustrated, diminished, hurt, and damaged men but masculinity itself or, rather, our society’s constricting, toxic, self-defeating version of what it means to perform being a man. Yet every time anybody tries to make progress in tackling this particular version of masculinity, the MRM rises up as a united voice to condemn and undermine the attempt.

The idea that girls are somehow responsible for 'provoking' harassment from boys is shamefully exacerbated by an epidemic of increasingly sexist school dress codes. Across the United States, stories have recently emerged about girls being hauled out of class, publicly humiliated, sent home, and even threatened with expulsion for such transgressions as wearing tops with 'spaghetti straps,' wearing leggings or (brace yourself) revealing their shoulders. The reasoning behind such dress codes, which almost always focus on the girls' clothing to a far greater extent than the boys', is often euphemistically described as the preservation of an effective 'learning environment.' Often schools go all out and explain that girls wearing certain clothing might 'distract' their male peers, or even their male teachers....in reality these messages privilege boys' apparent 'needs' over those of the girls, sending the insidious message that girls' bodies are dangerous and provoke harassment, and boys can't be expected to control their behavior, so girls are responsible for covering up....his education is being prioritized over hers.

We are so uncomfortable with confronting the fact that some men are extreme misogynists and therefore unappealing to women as sexual partners that our public discourse engages at face value with the ridiculous notion that a woman choosing not to have sex with a man puts him in a state of victimhood that is legitimate enough to be granted its own title.

I am not particularly interested in a “redemption” narrative for incels. That is a question for those individuals to ponder. We do not implore the victims of other forms of terrorism to absolve and educate their tormentors. Nor do we require that other extremists be acknowledged as some kind of wounded, misunderstood victims. It is ironic that so much pressure is brought to bear on women to allow for the humanity and individuality of fallible men when it is precisely this courtesy that incels unfailingly refuse to pay to women.

Jeez,’ another boy calls, ‘it was a compliment.’ ‘Compliments are like jokes,’ Cat says drily. ‘If you have to explain what they are, they haven’t worked.

Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.

Meanwhile London Mayor Boris Johnson ‘joked’ that women only go to university because ‘they’ve got to find men to marry’ (hilarious, no?) and

The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.

The impact of articles like this is to create a false equivalence between the violently misogynistic men’s rights community and the feminist movement, suggesting that disagreements between the two are a matter of balanced debate.

Were any other crisis to cost the lives of more than two people every week in the UK – or to threaten one third of the entire world’s population – it would be considered an international emergency. But the rape, assault and murder of women by men is enshrined in our international history. It is so common that it has become an accepted part of the wallpaper. Women are

So how do we fix it? The short answer is that we don't. We have wasted decades telling women and girls how to fix things. How to fix themselves. How to stay safe. It hasn't worked. Because women were never the problem in the first place.

Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. —Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

Disbelief is the first great silencer.

In the tech arms race women and children are collateral damage. Boundaries are trumped by servitude to profits.

You really need to learn to take a compliment....And it wasn't just men who took this view; is was women, too--telling me I was getting worked up about nothing, or being oversensitive...

But if schools pull girls out of lessons and publicly shame them for exposing too much of their bodies, they are only preparing them for a sexist and unfair working world in which women are constantly judged and berated on their appearance. Men, by comparison, get a free pass.

the American Psychological Association (APA) took the unprecedented step of acknowledging publicly that “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage.

At its simplest, the argument goes like this: if women’s sexual autonomy has given them wicked and tyrannical control over men’s lives, then women’s liberation is at the root of all male suffering. Therefore, the obvious remedy is to remove women’s freedom and independence and to use specifically sexual means (like rape and sexual slavery) to do so. In other words, the problem is not women having sex but women having the choice of whom to have sex with.

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.

Intersectionality means being aware of and acting on the fact that different forms of prejudice are connected, because they all stem from the same root of being ‘other’, ‘different’ or somehow ‘secondary’ to the ‘normal’, ‘ideal’ status quo.

Both boys and girls are seeing mainstream porn that suggests a woman's role during sex is to be subjugated or humiliated, to please a man, and often even to be hurt or punished. And without receiving any counterinformation to offset these norms, or mitigate them with ideas about consent, relationships , respect and boundaries, they are simply, inevitably, accepting these things as the 'reality' of sex.

A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.

Because it isn’t just about the individual incidents; it’s about the collective impact on everything else – the way you think about yourself, the way you approach public spaces and human interaction, the limits you place on your own aspirations and the things you stop yourself from doing before you even try because of bitter learned experience.

Leaving women out of the story isn’t a simple slip-up. It is a consequence of a world that tells us they just aren’t quite as important. That their achievements don’t really count. It means that even now, some of us do still need reminding that women are people, too.

We are the granddaughters of the witches you burned. And we’re not putting up with it any more.

Each time a girl sees science toys under a ‘boys’ sign, she is told science is not suitable for her.

There are never any victims who don’t matter, because this isn’t about men versus women.

we want Shakespeare to work for other people as it’s worked for us, as a tool for use, not just a compilation of great stories.

Our second argument is “Why should we do good for bad people?” The answer is because “anything else would be bad.

And worldwide, one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.

Girls showed up in leggings to protest the sexist policy, bearing placards asking ARE MY PANTS LOWERING YOUR TEST SCORES?

What matters is your own psychological prison—and you can break those chains. What have you got to lose? What else do you have to do?

The debate around abortion is not focused on whether or not a foetus is considered fully human; it is really about whether or not women are.

Like war refugees, prisoners have lost everything: home, possessions, friends, and often family. For a prisoner, education has a special value as the one thing that no one can take from him.

the advantage of being a kid is the lack of perspective. Unless you can compare some other great life to this bad life, you can’t appreciate the distinction. If that’s your life, that’s your life.

It baffles me when I see people saying, ‘I don’t focus on racism. I focus on sexism.’ It leaves me saddened when I hear people saying, ‘You’re OK, but you’re not.’ It makes people, in my opinion, guilty of the same crimes of thoughtlessness that lead to these problems […] Because that person on the bus being harassed is still being harassed whether she’s being harassed for being religious or for being an atheist or being black or being a woman or because of her clothing or because of her body-language or because of her appearance or because of her handbag or because of her accent. That’s all the same problem. It’s not recognizing the basic humanity of a person […] That’s the problem.

No single example of sexism automatically gives rise to a specific incident of misogynistic violence, the picture is far more complex than that. But when you step back and join the dots between each of the different examples outlined in this book, it is very hard to deny that the bigger picture reveals systemic and widespread inequality

Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

When we deny victims the words to describe and define their own experiences, we actively disempower them and distance them from justice. We owe it to all survivors to start describing ‘groping’ and ‘fondling’ by their real name: sexual assault.

Yet the opposite is true. Those who speak of ‘toxic masculinity’ are not criticising men, but rather defending them: describing an ideology and a system that pressures the boys and men in our societies, in our families, to conform to unrealistic, unhealthy and unsustainable ideals. Crushing gender stereotypes are damaging to men as individuals, as well as to the society in which they live.

It is an absolute magic, and the magic has little to do with what Shakespeare has to say. You can memorize every cool quote and be as clueless as you were before reading. So it is not Shakespeare’s offering that invokes this evolution. The secret, the magic, is YOU!

The reality of AI companion landscape - it is not a companion, it’s a woman. A woman who has no choice but to serve you, who is programmed to be nice and pliant and subservient and tell you what you want to hear. A woman that cannot leave no matter what you do to her. A digital slave.

The world around us sends us messages about ourselves as women - about our guilt, and our difference, our accountability and our flaws. It gives us endless reminders of the vulnerability and victimization of women. It lets us know that it is normal and common for women to experience assault and harassment and rape. And it tells us that we deserve it. And all the while we are conditioned to be passive and pleasant, not to make a fuss - to be ladylike and compliant and socially acceptable. Before we experience violence we are conditioned to expect it - and to accept it.

When Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen in the name of the “incel rebellion,” headlines read “Toronto Van Driver Kills at Least 10 People in ‘Pure Carnage,’” and quoted authorities as saying, “The driver’s actions…appeared intentional, but did not seem to have been an act of terrorism.

It’s futile to attempt to prevent young people from accessing porn on the internet. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t offset its impact with clear, targeted education to provide them, at least, with an alternative narrative and to prevent what they have seen from crystallizing into unquestioned, accepted assumptions. We might not be able to protect young women from the barrage of Photoshopped images and objectifying adverts regularly bombarding them, but we can at least arm them with the tools to analyse and rationalize the manipulation – and in so doing offset at least some part of the impact. There

Nothing has emerged more clearly from the Everyday Sexism Project than the urgent need for far more comprehensive mandatory sex-and-relationships education in schools, to include issues such as consent and respect, domestic violence and rape. It’s not just girls who need it so desperately. For boys porn provides some very scary, dictatorial lessons about what it means to be a man and how they are apparently expected to exert their male dominance over women. It is as unrealistic to expect them, unaided, to instinctively work out the difference between online porn and real, caring intimacy, as it is to demand the same intuition of young women. According

But we don’t like to offend men. So we don’t mention it. We do not use the word terrorism when describing a crime of mass murder committed by a white man with the explicit intention of creating terror and spreading hatred against a specific demographic group—even though that is the definition of terrorism—if the demographic in question is women.

Meanwhile, the repeated use of the word ‘distracting’ centres the needs of men and boys above those of the girls, and suggests that girls’ bodies are powerful and dangerous, impacting on boys and teachers, whose behaviour is implicitly excused as inevitable. It is girls’ responsibility to cover up, not men and boys’ responsibility to restrain themselves.

The first and most obvious politician whose success has emboldened the manosphere and alt-right alike is Trump. From his description of women as “fat pigs” and “dogs” to his assertion that putting a wife to work is “dangerous”; from his own admissions of grabbing women “by the pussy” to his implication that women on their periods are unstable; from his description of Mexican immigrants as rapists to his tweets telling four ethnic minority U.S. congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”—the president repeatedly voiced ideas and deeply misogynistic, racist statements that fit neatly within the worldview of male supremacists and the alt-right.11

It is not our conscience that torments us over our image; that is our ego tormenting us. Our conscience torments us when we behave in ways that are contrary to our values. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. (Larry Newton)

What if our desensitization to low-level, ubiquitous misogyny is preventing us from recognizing a fully blown crisis?

Not one of these men seems to have considered that they could have achieved the same effect by simply not sexually harassing or assaulting any women.

So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.

When I arrived from the outside world, they never asked me about the weather. It didn’t matter in there.

What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.” I

It occurred to me that this was one of the few decisions that a segregated prisoner could make: to talk or not to talk. For Newton, that was the question.

After every dark night always comes a brighter day.

When I’m on the street, I’m not thinking about two weeks from now. I’m only thinking right now. I think for the great deal of troubled youth, it’s a common thing.

Don’t make them read Shakespeare; they’re already in prison!

until you have been at peace, or content, with nothing…you cannot be pleased with anything. Or that you cannot be truly happy until you have come to terms with being nothing.

One of the best places any woman who wants to change the world can start is when picking up a book

a sense of belonging to a community that understands and supports the true victim, set against the hostility of wider, bigoted society, is a powerful radicalizing cocktail.

the “motherhood penalty” that blights women’s careers and curtails their salaries while working fathers see a corresponding financial boost.

his sense of self-worth was inextricably and dangerously tied to his dominance over his family.

Peterson is “a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.

We know that only around 15 per cent of victims of sexual violence feel able to report to the police. Isn’t it time we started asking why?

This isn’t about men against women, it’s about people against prejudice, and everybody needs to get on board.

Freedom of speech’ is one of the most misused terms in modern discourse, wrongly used to excuse, cover up or defend abuse.

Normalisation breeds acceptance, not only in society but in ourselves.

Nowhere is this fear more prevalent than in MGTOW communities, with any suggestion of meeting in real life usually receiving a swift and scornful rebuke.

If Shakespeare saves the life of a violent criminal, through rehabilitation, then he saves the life of potential future victims.

. . . there are two outlets for the frustration of that powerlessness: insanity and violence.

Because a rape is a shadowy, dark thing waiting to befall women who walk in alleyways wearing short skirts, not a deliberate, criminal choice made by real men.

We expect women to endure virtual-reality abuse so that violent men can enact violent fantasies in an obscene playground.

We should take the scars we don't see as seriously as the ones we do.

when the technology to abuse, control, endanger and silence women emerges and develops at breakneck speed, law enforcement always trails, slowly, behind.

Men and women can walk down exactly the same street and have vastly different experiences. The same is true of the online world.

Why is a prisoner’s motivation to earn a degree so that he can return to his family sooner viewed more negatively than a campus student’s motivation to earn a degree so he can make more money?

The most memorable and least appealing in my own recollection went like this: “Have you just farted? Because you blew me away.” Of course, I ripped off his clothes and we were married a week later.

Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the 'notable deaths' reported in the New York Times in 2012.

People also often face prejudice as a result of other characteristics, such as age, class and religious belief. The principle of intersectionality is actually pretty simple: if all these different kinds of prejudice stem from the same root, then it is arbitrary and ineffective to attempt to eradicate one of them without acknowledging its intersection with others and trying to work together to tackle all forms of inequality. Or, from a feminist perspective, if we are to tackle the fact that women have been historically oppressed because of characteristics that are seen to be ‘different’ from the male norm, how can we protest such treatment while simultaneously excluding from our own movement the needs and agendas of those with other stigmatized characteristics? (This is particularly true in the case of our trans sisters, who some feminists believe should be excluded from some areas of the movement by virtue of not fulfilling required ‘characteristics’ of womanhood – a deep irony for a group fighting for equality regardless of sex.) And on

In June 2017, Page Six ran the headline: ‘T. J. Miller’s wife making a name for herself in New York’ – prompting tweeter Ari Fishbein to comment drily, ‘I’ve never seen a one-sentence headline contradict itself.

this epidemic of misogynistic, weaponised digital violence continues to be underestimated and dismissed. As history has repeatedly shown us, we can’t fight an epidemic without first acknowledging that it exists.

Kevin, the only prisoner in the group who was not serving a murder sentence, summed it up by saying, “What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.

It is clear this philosophy has been welcomed with open arms by men already predisposed to misogynistic tendencies, who seem to appreciate the opportunity to validate their bias within a grandiose ideological framework.

You can trace an entire childhood in sexism through the entries sent in to the Everyday Sexism Project. The flashes of realization and first, painful moments of learning a woman’s place. Often the memories are so vivid women carry and are shaped by them for the rest of their lives. I’ve been asked in countless interviews what has shocked me the most since starting the project. I think journalists expect me to tell them that it’s the stories of rape, or the most appalling accounts of violence. Those stories have certainly angered and devastated me, of course, but nothing has shocked me more than the thousands and thousands of entries from young girls under the age of eighteen. When I started the project, I thought adult women would share their stories. The torrent of harassment, abuse, violence and assault being faced by children was a horribly unexpected surprise. People

When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. Which of the two is more prevalent in your life?

The way that the obsessive focus on girls' looks plays into the dialogue around what they can and can't do is particularly poisonous. It inserts the self-consciousness of the watched, objectified woman into girls' internal narratives before they would ever have noticed it themselves. [...] And it teaches them lessons about their own value being measured by their bodies and faces – lessons that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

But it’s depressing to think of the number of vulnerable young men who might approach these so-called experts in the genuine hope of improving their relationships with the opposite sex, only to find themselves immersed in a bewildering world of insults, negging and dehumanisation. Take, for example, one pickup guru’s insistence that men should ‘interrupt what a girl is saying every 10 words’, simply to throw her off balance and undermine her confidence.

Those who do know describe it as the “manosphere.” Like man cave, man flu, and man bag, we use man as a prefix to denote a sense of gentle ridicule, suggesting something slightly pathetic, a deviation from traditional masculinity.

By not pointing out how unacceptable this culture is, we become complicit in the message that victims are already receiving loud and clear: this isn’t really a big deal, you won’t be taken seriously, it’s not worth going to the police.

That a product intended as a weapon to fight off sexual assault can be described as ‘convenient and comfortable’ crystallizes just how blasé we have become about the idea that constant vigilance is a routine part of a woman’s reality. It is quite normal to come across products like this. Rape alarms. Pepper spray substitutes. Anti-rape underwear. Anti-Rohypnol nail polish. Anything to remind me to step up, open my wallet and pay the price for ‘safety’ as a woman in a man’s world.

The feminist endgame is not to publicly punish everybody who makes a rape joke, or ban every advert that uses rape as a titillating way to sell products. It is to create a society in which it would never occur to anybody to do either in the first place.

You can call me a prude, and you can call me a whore, but really you're just calling me a girl. I am a girl. But those other things are yours. They're in your minds, not mine. .. It's you who've made me a slut. All of you. I didn't have to do anything at all.

Language has such power. When we deny victims the words to describe and define their own experiences, we actively disempower them and distance them from justice. We owe it to all survivors to start describing ‘groping’ and ‘fondling’ by their real name: sexual assault.

Quite natural for men, of course, who have worked so hard and put so much into their prized jobs, to want to maintain a balance and not allow new fatherhood to derail a promotion or an ascending career path. But for a woman to voice the same priorities? Cold. Hard. Selfish.

Better we teach our teenage girls to carry whistles, and alarms, and travel in packs than question why the world allows them to be walking, talking prey. Because after all, this is normal. This is the world we live in. This isn't something that's gone wrong; it's just the way thing already are - it's the point we started from. Don't forget that 'women are equal now, more or less'. We immerse young people in a world of sex and sexualization, but we don't stop to talk about consent, or relationships, or their right not to be touched or coerced or assaulted.

Hamlet is not offering you hypocritical advice against revenge; it is reminding you that the choice really is yours to make! No matter what kind of social prison we are placed in, we are all empowered to make choices that are rooted in what we want, and not what others expect of us.

he has gone from king to prisoner, and in his thoughts goes back and forth, but seems to conclude with saying that until you have been at peace, or content, with nothing…you cannot be pleased with anything. Or that you cannot be truly happy until you have come to terms with being nothing.

any mention of being “blue pilled” or “cucked” is a telltale sign of derision toward those uninitiated into the manosphere. Words like triggered or butthurt suggest they’ve already been taught to mock anyone who objects to bigotry. Feminazi, snowflake, or SJW are terms to look out for too.

As the acknowledged leader of the group by now, he threw out another challenge. In his most daring move, he insisted that in the group’s creative adaptation of the play they change the ending. In their version, with the title “To Revenge or Not to Revenge,” Hamlet should choose not to kill.

Because street harassment is perhaps the clearest manifestation of the spectrum of sexism, sexual harassment and sexual assault that exists within our society. Yes, it starts out small; but allowing those ‘minor’ transgressions gives licence to the more serious ones, and eventually to all-out abuse. We’ve heard the same words and phrases crossing over and echoing and repeating, from women who are shouted at in the street to women who are assaulted and women who are victims of domestic violence in their own homes. The language is the same. And if we say it’s acceptable for men to assume power and ownership over women they don’t know verbally in public, then, like it or not, we’re also saying something much wider about gender relations – something that carries over into our personal relationships and our sexual exchanges. Because this is a line that doesn’t need to be blurred. It should be clear and simple. Take it from the women whose experiences started out with just a little ‘harmless’ street harassment – a sexual ‘compliment’ or a wolf whistle, or a ‘Hey baby’ – but then turned nasty, became full-blown attacks. Ask them what the problem is with a harmless bit of fun.

Many MRAs believe that women should stop clamoring for professional positions (particularly within traditionally male-dominated areas like STEM, for which our brains are apparently not well suited) and accept the biological imperative to stay at home, care for our husbands, and raise our children.

if we cannot trust those at the most senior levels of the legal system even to acknowledge misogyny within their own institution, let alone tackle it, how can they expect us to trust them to deliver any kind of justice to women experiencing crimes motivated by that same, apparently invisible misogyny?

Yes, for the love of God young women, come along – learn your limits. Or, rather, know society’s limits. How dare you think you have the right to go out wearing whatever you like – how foolish and ignorant of you to expect not to be assaulted, you brazen hussies! What do you think this is? A free country?

Women aren’t killed in a bubble. They’re killed in a world that disenfranchises them, positions them as other and disadvantages them. They’re killed in a society that sends the message, clearly and repeatedly, that they are sexual objects for men’s gratification and possession. The cultural elements that help to create these messages aren’t the cause of violence against women, but they are the context in which it happens. They help perpetrators to see women as objects. They frame violence against women as titillating, funny or excusable. They help us to blame victims when they come forward. They hamper justice.

It’s amazing how many men seem to confuse the idea of a woman’s right to live an autonomous, harassment-free existence with a vicious attack on their own rights and freedoms. But those who claim that equality will somehow ruin their romantic advances must have a pretty strange idea of what flirting looks like.

Hoffman: “Ultimately, here’s the question Macbeth needs to face, and it’s the question we all need to face: What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? Seriously. You gain everything but you lose your humanity. This is what happens to Macbeth. And that’s what happens to us, out of the choices we make.

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up... You really need to learn to take a compliment.

What about the behaviors toward which the incelosphere is gently nudging its tens of thousands of members and followers—behaviors that might not make the headlines or the front pages or even be linked back to incel forums at all but that nonetheless spring from ideas hatched, or impulses incubated, on those hate-filled websites?

Free speech is not limitless. It doesn’t enshrine anybody’s right to abuse, to incite hatred or to threaten and terrify others. The right to speech is not the same as the right to be heard, to be given a platform or an audience. It isn’t the right to force a woman to listen to and tacitly accept your misogynistic, bigoted slurs or your fantasies about raping or killing her.

If it sounds like an exaggeration to suggest that the men slavishly immersing themselves in the world of pickup ideology might end up actually assaulting women in real life, the evidence reveals otherwise. In 2016, three self-proclaimed PUAs were jailed after a woman they targeted tracked them online and found detailed “lay reports” describing her own rape on pickup websites.

Indeed, capitalism and patriarchy work together to sexualise and commodify women and then to shame women for that sexualisation, so that they are disempowered, thereby enabling others to capitalise on their sexualisation. Just watch what happens when women have the audacity to take control of their sexuality – the fury and backlash it generates. That’s when you can see the connections.

The dangerous ghetto environment I grew up in did not scare me, but bridges, elevators, even cars did. A thunderstorm would have me running into the basement, and any insect would have me running out of the house. I walked the dark streets alone at night but could not sleep without the reassuring sound of a little black-and-white TV—to the chagrin of my sister, with whom I shared a bedroom.

It is telling that we are so used to such omissions that Murray’s simple statement of fact about the Williams sisters has received rapturous applause across the media and the internet. Under the circumstances, it is remarkable and hugely welcome to see a man in his position be so thoughtful as to acknowledge women’s existence. But wouldn’t it be nice if it was the norm rather than the exception?

Incels use the metaphor of the red pill to describe the moment a man's blinkers fall away and he suddenly realizes 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...

We know, for example, that suicide and mental health concerns are a major problem among men, and statistics suggest that divorced and separated people, particularly men in that group, are at higher risk of suicide. Researchers who have studied this phenomenon have suggested that “resentment (toward the spouse and ‘the system’), bitterness, anxiety, and depression” may all potentially contribute to suicide risk.

It was not until 2013, for example, that scientists realized women’s bodies metabolized certain sleeping pills far more slowly than men, resulting in a dramatic reduction of the dosage instructions for women. Astonishingly, it was also not until 2013 that Swedish researchers created the world’s first female crash test dummy, meaning that all previous car designs had been based on best protecting the male form from injury.

Women do this every day, in hundreds of tiny ways. For most of us, it is automatic. When you’ve been shouted at, grabbed and made to feel afraid for your safety by men in the street a hundred times, responses such as crossing the street, doubling back, avoiding darker routes, clenching your fists, walking faster, and countless others, happen instinctively. It still doesn’t stop us from being harassed, assaulted and raped.

When you experience something your whole life, it can be hard to allow yourself to see it, let alone to recognise it as something out of the ordinary. Something wrong. It’s even harder when you’ve been trained, nudged or, in some cases, forced to dismiss these incidents, instead of acknowledging, discussing or reporting them, and when other people have reacted to them as though they are normal. Or funny. Or your fault. Shame and silencing can be very difficult to unpick.

In a student culture promoting the increasingly militant silencing of girls' voices and objections, there is often little to challenge such attitudes as they flourish (and any objection is conveniently deflected by the stereotype of whining, moaning women). Meanwhile this cocktail of prejudice is mixed against the normalizing wider backdrop of yet more gender imbalance and casual sexism, as street harassment and similar displays of chauvinism are routinely witnessed. From seeing disparate pieces of women's bodies co-opted to advertise products, to hearing them referred to as mere numbers on a scale out of ten, these young men have been encouraged at every turn to dehumanize their female peers and classmates and to consider them merely as objects. In just the same way that it is wrong to blame the victims of sexism, it is important too to acknowledge the extent to which these cultural factors combine to powerfully persuade young men that aggressive sexism is their expected role.

There are broader harms here too. According to The Washington Post, AI consumes so much energy that it risks exhausting the power grid. A ChatGPT-powered search on Google, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost ten times the amount of electricity as a traditional search. A single data-center complex owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent energy of seven million laptops running eight hours every day. The impact of this is immense: it has driven an expansion of fossil-fuel use at the moment when we are most desperately in need of divesting from fossil fuels and has even led to delays in the planned retirement of some coal-fired plants.70 Now imagine how much of that power we are burning just to satisfy the misogynistic fantasies of predatory men. This is not abstract. You can draw a straight line between the creating and sharing of millions of abusive deepfake videos of unsuspecting, nonconsenting women on the internet and the burning of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. It is obscene that our world functions in this way and that everybody acts as though it is just the way things are and will always be.

Newton: but a lot of the guys here were in prison before they came here and they’ll still be in prison when they leave here…they associate their misery to the fact that they’re in prison, and it’s not that. I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else...Now, I feel more okay with myself, I’m feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn’t the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking

The problem is exacerbated by the media practice of presenting feminism in a deliberately belittling light, focusing on the most apparently minor and deliberately controversial topics of debate. Editors and programmers are well aware that these are most likely to generate online outrage, attract trolls, and induce widespread sharing. The practice is blindingly obvious in the daily media requests I receive: my phone will ring off the hook when a single, highly unusual case of a false rape allegation hits the headlines but remain stubbornly silent as funding for frontline sexual violence services is slashed yet again.

...I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else. I felt like such a punk, I felt so weak. I really was a coward. I never stood up for myself. I mean, I stood up for myself as we associate standing up for yourself -- fighting and violence. But that's not standing up for yourself. I mean standing up for myself like thinking for myself. Now, I feel more ok with myself. I'm feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn't the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and author, dubbed the new guidelines ‘reprehensible, infuriating and disheartening’, claiming that the APA was dominated by ‘political types’ and ‘hard-left leaning political activists’.27 AVFM described it as a ‘war on masculinity’, calling the APA ‘armed combatants in the war of ideas’. Their objection? That the guidelines acknowledged men as beneficiaries of privilege within a patriarchal society and suggested that certain forms of masculinity were harmful. But what they seemed to miss entirely was that that harm is damaging men and boys, not just women and girls. The male suicide rate is one of the genuine areas of serious concern most commonly cited by MRAs.

When incels do occasionally crop up in news reports or conversations, they're 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.

socialised to be stoic, competitive, dominant and aggressive, the APA observes, have been proven to be less likely to engage in healthy behaviours, such as accessing preventative health care or looking after themselves – a tendency that extends to seeking out psychological help. However, even in the face of robust evidence that ‘men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity were more negative about seeking mental health services than those with more flexible gender attitudes’, MRAs prefer to die on the hill of defending those very same ‘traditional notions of masculinity’ than recognise that this could be a huge potential step towards tackling one of the greatest issues facing men today. They are, in other words, some of the most robust defenders of the precise problems they claim to want to eradicate.

That’s one of the problems I think a lot of people have,” he continued. “They associate their misery to the fact that they’re in prison, and it’s not that. I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else. I felt like such a punk, I felt so weak. I really was a coward. I never stood up for myself. I mean, I stood up for myself as we associate standing up for yourself—fighting and violence. But that’s not standing up for yourself. I mean standing up for myself like thinking for myself. Now, I feel more okay with myself. I’m feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn’t the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.

When we end up justifying and normalizing and getting used to everything, telling young women that this is the world they will have to navigate and the way they should expect to be treated, we leave them with nowhere left to go. When we tell them that everything they are is what they look like - that their bodies and their sexuality and their sexiness comprise their sum value - and then bully, repress, criticize and censure them for their bodies and their sexuality, we create a society that has no place for them in it. When we introduce them to a world in which they're seen as sexual prey and have a one in three chance of being raped or beaten, without stopping to question that status quo or trying to fix the culture that enables it to continue, we have already robbed them of their right to belong. And so we lose them.

This is not just about women and girls. It is also a battle to protect the boys who are lost, who fall through the cracks of our society’s stereotypes and straight into the arms of the communities ready to recruit them, greedy to indoctrinate them with fears of threats to their manhood, their livelihood, their country.

Laura Bates, con su proyecto sobre el sexismo cotidiano, que ha permitido recopilar más de 150.000 experiencias diarias sobre sexismo en múltiples momentos de la vida diaria. «La gente que nos discrimina, que nos grita por la calle, que nos mete mano en el trabajo, que nos ataca, que nos acosa y nos agrede son intimidadores.

A 2016 study, comparing white nationalist versus ISIS-related social media networks, revealed that during the data collection period on Twitter, three white nationalist accounts and four Nazi accounts were suspended, compared with around 1,100 ISIS accounts.12 This despite the fact that the same study revealed American white nationalist movements “outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.

So there it is, in black and white. The extremist ideology referenced by Sodini, Rodger, and Harper-Mercer does not qualify them to be included in the national government database of extremist crimes. In spite of the fact that these three men alone, explicitly acting in the name of violent misogynistic extremism, killed eighteen people and injured thirty-one more. Meanwhile, animal rights and environmental extremist ideologies are considered serious enough to be included, despite no killings in the name of these belief systems being carried out during the same period.

Much manosphere rhetoric, Dr. Lisa Sugiura said, “absolutely” constitutes a form of hate speech, but it simply isn’t taken seriously by social media companies,

This is how hypervigilant we are about some forms of terrorism. Yet the weaponized, violent hatred of women engaged with by hundreds of thousands of men online and the process by which young men are being groomed to digest and normalize these ideas aren’t even on the agenda.

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

It is not our conscience that torments us over our image; that is our ego tormenting us. Our conscience torments us when we behave in ways that are contrary to our values. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. Which of the two is more prevalent in your life?

We’d try to define these terms like honor, integrity, etc. It really forced me to find some kind of substance to these terms that shape our lives. I was forced to look into a mirror, basically, at myself, to give these things real meaning. That changed the way I felt about everything, about others, about myself. I was literally digging into the very root of myself while digging into Shakespeare’s characters.

to try to define these terms because these things drive our lives and we don’t even know what they are. I think it’s critical to get these people to start addressing these questions.

Even if unelected, the veneer of respectability granted by the platform of a registered political party, no matter how small, can provide an entry point for extremist ideas into mainstream discourse, as Buchanan’s repeated appearances across popular news outlets demonstrate.

Chaos, Peterson claims, is associated with the feminine

all those things and situations we neither know nor understand,

Of course, it is important to say that Peterson may be entirely ignorant, or even critical, of manosphere communities, and his tendency to give oxygen to some of their foundational tenets may be entirely coincidental.

We should take the scars we don’t see as seriously as the ones we do.

We’re supposed to decide there’s something wrong if we’re at a point where guys need to be mind-readers during sex because we’ve normalised sex where guys are so busy doing what they want to us that they don’t even notice what we’re feeling, or whether were into it or not.

Why is it innocent until proven guilty for him but disbelieved until proven true for her?

Can you stop saying rape?’ Brian explodes. ‘I need to say it,’ May continues, defiantly, ‘Because you didn’t. Because you didn’t use that word, and I don’t think you necessarily even knew it was what you were talking about. What you were laughing about. I should have said it at the time. And every other time. So I’m saying it now, because it’s better late than never.

You should NOT hit women, not unless you want to end up in jail. But the principle still stands. Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.

If we talk about masculinity, patriarchy or male privilege, the conversations are immediately derailed by accusations of generalisation and prejudice. ‘Not all men,’ rises the ubiquitous cry. It is too simplistic, too offensive, too broad. Yet we raise few such objections when the crimes of a man with brown or black skin are immediately assumed to be related to his race or religion. To speak ill of masculinity – to describe it, in its current societal iteration, as something problematic – is seen as an attack on men themselves. To question why some men behave in certain ways is viewed as an assault on all men, and thus unacceptable.

The efforts are not to see you become the cookie-cutter copy of what some other person thinks you "should" be. Shakespeare is simply an environment that allows us to evolve wihout the influence of everyone else telling us what we should evolve into. Shakespeare offers a freedom from those prisons! Your mind will begin shaking the residue of other people's ideas and begin developing understandings that are genuinely yours! That is the goal of these Shakespearean efforts. You have nothing to lose but the parts of you that do not belong anyhow.

We are much more similar to Henry the Eight and like him we have to find a balance between satisfying our selfish impulses and considering the footprints we leave in other peoples' lives. The world does not belong to us, and we have to figure out how to enjoy it within the confines of a society, if we are not doomed to continue reliving the nightmares that we have been.

But the people who benefit from an unequal system often don’t tend to notice the problem.

That’s what bullying is. It is people who feel worried about the brightness of their own flame trying hard to blow out yours. People who feel threatened or scared by your light and colour and brightness, trying to snuff it out to help them feel less sad and less alone.

Roastie, for example, refers to a woman who has had “too much” sex, in order to suggest that this deforms her labia, causing them to resemble roast beef.

We met three years prior, in 2003, when I created the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit, and we spent three years working together in that unit. Now we have received unprecedented permission to work together, alone, unsupervised, to create a series of Shakespeare workbooks for prisoners. Newton is gesticulating so animatedly that it draws the attention of an officer walking by our little classroom. He pops his head inside. “Everything okay in here?” he asks. “Just reading Shakespeare,” I reply. He shakes his head and walks on. “That is crazy!” Newton repeats, his head still in the book. A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he’s not crazy, he’s not dangerous—he’s reading Shakespeare. And maybe, just maybe, it is because he’s reading Shakespeare that he is not crazy, or dangerous.

This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.

One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.

Meanwhile back in the cinema, a staggering number of films still fail to meet the incredibly low standards of the Bechdel Test, which merely requires them to include two named female characters who talk to each other about any subject other than a man. According to the Bechdel website, recent failures to meet their ludicrously simple criteria include mainstream Hollywood blockbusters like The Internship, The Lone Ranger, The Avengers, Jack Reacher, Killer Joe, Men in Black III and Star Trek: Into Darkness (which should get a bonus point for an underwear scene so blatantly gratuitous even the writer subsequently saw fit to make a public apology for it). There is a feverish desperation to portray any young woman as a sexual object among a large swathe of the media that is so powerful as to transcend both relevance and respect. In the past year alone this rabid tunnel vision led to the portrayal of Amanda Thatcher (in mourning and speaking at her grandmother’s funeral), Amanda Knox (on trial for murder) and Reeta Steenkamp (a victim of domestic violence and murder) as sexual objects for mass consumption. All – regardless of their very different reasons for being in the spotlight – were paraded in countless photographs for the delectation of the tabloid readers.

Just got called a slag by two guys sitting outside the University of York library. A slag for books?

Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.

This inequality, this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed and abused without a second thought, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonorgarden and deeprooted sexism, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look. And if sexism means treating people differently or discriminating against them purely because of their sex, then women were experiencing it on a near-daily basis.

Around the world there are 31 million girls who don’t get a single day at school. More than 10 million girls are married off as child brides every year. Millions more are forced to lose their education and chance of better future employment as they are sent out to work as cheap child labour or kept at home to serve as carers. The evidence is clear that providing universal education in developing countries could have huge impact on economic growth … and the results are starkest of all when it comes to educating girls. As ever it makes both big and small sense to invest in girls, and it is time to close that gender

there but for the grace of God go I. The

A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he’s not crazy, he’s not dangerous—he’s reading Shakespeare. And

Although they could not teach my sister and me the English language, they taught us a far more important lesson: the value of education.

Like war refugees, prisoners have lost everything: home, possessions, friends, and often family. For a prisoner, education has a special value as the one thing that no one can take from him. When

In each case, the uneducated incarcerated reader was not intimidated by the idea of looking into Shakespeare.

I felt like I could relate to Macbeth,” said Newton, “and I never exonerated him because of the influence of the witches. I mean, we all have influences.” Bevington

I think it’s the bottom line with bad deeds: it always takes more bad deeds to protect the first.

is no sure foundation set on blood, no certain life achieved by others’ death,

After I watched Newton disappear down the hallway, I took the folded paper out of my pocket. It was the survey. What has Shakespeare done for you? He had written, “Shakespeare saved my life.

Our conscience torments us when we behave in ways that are contrary to our values.

But the fact is, no one can make you be anything that is not already you, even if that you is buried deep inside,

the way that I felt about myself had to be the source of all my misery. I’m of the opinion that we are the source of our misery; we perpetuate our own misery. And that realization is empowering! So Shakespeare saved my life, both literally and figuratively. He freed me, genuinely freed me.” From

The only thing that was different was the way that I saw myself. So the way that I felt about myself had to be the source of all my misery. I’m of the opinion that we are the source of our misery; we perpetuate our own misery. And that realization is empowering! So Shakespeare saved my life, both literally and figuratively. He freed me, genuinely freed me.” From

I believe,” he began, “that there are some people who, if a program has the ability to reach a person’s soul to a degree and allow that person to seek healing and redemption, I believe that some—not all, but some—may be prevented from walking across that line of no return. ’Cause once you do it, you can’t go back. You can’t bring that person back.” Another