She wrote the definitive book on online misogyny – which led to the police installing a panic alarm in her home. Bates explains how the ‘manosphere’ radicalises boys, how the media feeds the problem – and why she is still hopeful
“I think this is the biggest generation gap we’ve seen,” says Laura Bates. “It hasn’t happened before, and it might not ever happen again.” Five minutes into a conversation that lasts nearly two hours, Bates is crisply reminding me of one of the key things that define this bit of the 21st century. We have met to talk about misogyny, the online gathering grounds known as the manosphere, and Andrew Tate, the Big Brother contestant turned influencer responsible for webcam pornography businesses and a great splurge of misogynistic rhetoric. But the conversation also keeps returning to the huge gap between the younger generations, Z and alpha, who have never known anything other than the chaotic, sense-distorting, internet-defined reality of the 21st century; and the parents, politicians and journalists who are still running to keep up.
Older people, she says, tend to be resident in a world where YouTube is reducible to “movie trailers and cat videos” and social media largely means Facebook. Bates is 36, and from the cohort that cut its teeth on MSN Messenger and Myspace, and became immersed in the online world, but was spared the kind of adolescence that would soon be completely dominated by phones, platforms for constant communication, online porn and internet videos. Today’s teenagers, by contrast, know nothing else.
