The Repercussions of Misogyny in Society

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Laura, the title of your book is really quite worrying and actually frightening. I mean, it’s called “Men Who Hate Women.” There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it, no qualifiers. What made you write that book and what is the nut graph, so to speak, in what you are trying to impart?

LAURA BATES, FOUNDER, EVERYDAY SEXISM PROJECT: Well, I suppose it’s important that the book is called “Men Who Hate Women” and not “Men Hate Women.” So, we are talking about a very specific small group of men. Of course, this isn’t about all men. I started writing the book because I was aware of extremist communities of what you might call male supremacists online as a feminist writer and researcher. But for me, I started to recognize the impact they were having on young people on my school visits. As part of my work, I talk to young people in schools across the country around the world. And over the last couple of years, I started to notice that I was coming into contact with more and more teenage boys who had been radicalized online with very hate-fueled ideas about women, really extreme misogyny, who had been taught to believe, for example, that there is an epidemic of false rape accusations raging, that there is a feminist conspiracy at the heart of government designed to topple white men from their jobs. And I realized that by any other name, we would call this grooming or radicalization, if it were another group propagating hatred amongst young people, but very few people know about these groups, even though they actually take their ideology offline and commit real life atrocities in the name of this extremist misogyny.

AMANPOUR: You know what, all I have to do is swap ISIS for what you’re talking about and I think you’re talking about grooming, radicalizing, you know, young men or vulnerable youth, for some kind of war against the demographic. And in a way, that’s what you’re saying. I just want to read something that you say in the book. 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, the man is just disturbed, deranged, a lone wolf. Are you basically saying the authorities should be looking into this in a serious a manner they do in terms of terrorist recruitment?

BATES: Absolutely, because it meets every international definition to be described as such. I’m talking here about massacres like Elliot Rodgers, Santa Barbara massacre, where six people were killed and 14 injured, or Alek Minassian, the Toronto van attacker who drove a speeding rental van into crowds, killing 10 people and injuring 16, the majority of them women. These are attacks that have been explicitly carried out, their attackers have made very clear in the name of an extremist hatred of women, but we don’t consider them terrorism, although we would for another form of attack carried out for similar motives.