Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates - The Research Process Behind The Book

Writing Men Who Hate Women required going undercover in communities of male supremacist extremists, both on and offline. Online, I had to first learn the vocabulary: these are communities with their own entire lexicon. They might spend all day writing about women, but they rarely use the word ‘woman’, replacing it with ‘foid’ (short for female humanoid, because they think of women as less than human). Or using terms like ‘roasties’ as a pejorative description of women whose genitalia they believe are deformed by having too much sex with the ‘wrong’ men. Terms like ‘gymcel’ or ‘rapecel’ describe different sectors of incel communities. Pickup artists might talk about the UFEA (universal female excuse archive) or FUGs (f*cking ugly girls), or ‘overcoming LMR’ (last-minute resistance, a reference to their theory that all women secretly want to be pushed into having sex, even if they change their mind.)
 
I infiltrated private groups, chatrooms, forums, websites, vlog networks and more, often having to undergo a vetting process by administrators before being granted entry: incels and other ‘manosphere’ groups are deeply paranoid, regularly accusing one another of being undercover law enforcement officers. The irony, of course, is that my research revealed almost no surveillance or even awareness of these groups by counter terrorism organisations or police forces.
 
Posing as a disillusioned young white man named Alex, I watched as other users both welcomed and abused him, simultaneously grooming him into their violent, misogynistic ideology and reminding him that his life was hopeless, and the world was inherently stacked against him as a white man. I saw how quickly young people can become desensitised to violent rhetoric when it is so normalised, with thousands of messages praising the ‘saints’ of the incel community like Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, for carrying out massacres of dozens of women. Again and again I watched as other men were encouraged and goaded to do the same. And I saw how tragically the trajectories of lonely, isolated men with genuine offline problems brought them crashing into the path of those waiting to radicalise and exploit them.
 
Periodically, I came across websites and discussions dedicated to violent fantasies specifically about my own rape and murder, with men competing to describe the most disgusting internal injuries they would like to cause me. I started replying to the men who send me graphic rape and death threats, enduring difficult and painful conversations with trolls like the man who had threatened to violate me with a piece of furniture. After I saw a real-life meet up of men’s rights activists advertised with a video featuring my face (alongside those of other feminists, some of them edited to sport red eyes and devils’ horns), I turned up, in a thick black coat with my hair pulled down around my face, my place reserved under a pseudonym. I kept to the fringes of the event, sitting in the back row and keeping my distance from the key players I knew would recognise me. I spoke to an affable, charming white man in his early thirties who chatted politely about his journey to the conference. Less than an hour later he was onstage, calling for women who support female victims of sexual violence to be prosecuted.
 
Immersing myself in the vitriolic bile of these communities made me realise just how extreme and shocking much of the online content is. It isn’t just a few ‘bad apples’. These are communities dedicated to destroying women, by any means possible. And as I went deeper, I started to realise the sheer scale of their networks. We aren’t just talking about a few angry men. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of them, across a vast eco system of different groups, movements, causes and communities, on and offline. And they’re not just a few monsters who never leave their basements. They are people you might walk past on the street or sit next to in the office. These communities are massive and deadly: I’ve linked them to the death or serious injury of over 100 people in the last 10 years alone. And we can’t stop them if people don’t even know they exist.
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