Laura Bates

We do not, as a rule, talk about male perpetrators of violence against women. We describe a woman as having been raped; we discuss the rates of women sexually assaulted or beaten. We do not speak in terms of men committing rape or being sexual assaulters and violent abusers. That is what makes it so easy to focus on women’s dress, behaviour and choices when we consider sexual violence. To warn women to take precautions to protect themselves and, implicitly or explicitly, blame those victims who do not.

While learning about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at A Level, some of her students complained, saying there ought to be ‘a Handmaid’s Tale for men’. (Atwood’s dystopian novel, set in an imagined totalitarian US in which women are completely subjugated, is famously inspired by real-world oppression. Atwood has stated: ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened.’)

Both worldviews rest heavily on the perception of women being without humanity, individuality or soul.

We are talking about an industry that exploits men’s worst fears, preys on their vulnerabilities and literally trains them in harassment, stalking and even sexual assault.

Men hurt women. It is a fact. It is an epidemic. It is a public health catastrophe. It is normal.

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

The manosphere is both a symptom of that inequality and a furious backlash against attempts to reduce it.

traditional ideas about marriage, the family and gender roles support male dominance

men, who hold these patriarchal stereotypes, tend to blame women and children for breaking expected dutiful, submissive behav

iors, thereby validating violence as a legitimate form of social control’.