Society has slipped backwards in its treatment of women as the internet fuels a new wave of misogyny, a scientist claims.
Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at Oxford University, says the internet has allowed sexism to evolve into a new modern form.
Rather than becoming a thing of the past, Professor Cameron argues that figures such as Andrew Tate and Donald Trump have promoted new forms of misogyny.
TikTok and other online forums have created spaces where sexist ideas can freely be promoted, leading to a rise in verbal threats and abuse against women.
Professor Cameron says that sexism has now become part of ‘ordinary and unremarkable’ mainstream advertising, comedy, and news reporting.
Andrew Tate has been the beneficiary of algorithms that promote controversial and harmful content according to Professor Cameron
In her book, ‘Language, Sexism and Misogyny’, Professor Cameron argues that sexism has evolved into a form that reflects today’s conditions and digital culture.
Part of this change has been the rise of a new, particularly extreme version of masculinity which has been spread through extremely active online communities.
‘The internet has enabled the most extreme, obsessive and dangerous misogynists to find each other and interact intensively,’ Professor Cameron told MailOnline.
In the past, Professor Cameron says these individuals ‘might only have shared their views or their violent fantasies with a few trusted confidants in the pub or the locker room.’
‘This is the effect of what’s called the “manosphere”, a collection of forums hosting subcultures like incels, pick-up artists and male supremacists who are often also active in other kinds of extreme politics like white nationalism or neo-Nazism,’ she added.
Professor Cameron says that figures like Andrew Tate have been particularly influential in spreading this new extreme form of misogyny online.
Tate, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of human trafficking and creating a criminal gang to exploit women, has amassed millions of followers and is particularly popular among young men and boys.
Professor Cameron says that Tate has been the beneficiary of social media algorithms that promote controversial and harmful content.
Mainstream political figures like Donald Trump have brought a language of sexism into the mainstream according to Professor Cameron
‘He has billions of followers because he knows how to work the algorithms which decide what users of platforms like TikTok and YouTube will be invited to view,’ Professor Cameron says.
‘Tate’s influence is partly about the content he produces, if it had no appeal to anyone he wouldn’t be the phenomenon he is, but it’s also about the way technology scales things up.
‘A Victorian misogynist who communicated via church sermons or printed treatises might have reached quite a lot of people, but not billions across the globe.’
Recently, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was urged by MPs to tackle the radicalisation and ‘brain-washing’ of school children by Andrew Tate’s content.
However, she also claims that Tate is only part of a wider, normalised acceptance of sexism and misogynist language in everyday life.
Professor Cameron says that this new wave of sexism in society has led to women facing more abuse both on and offline.
‘Digital interactive media make it very easy to harass people anonymously with abusive and threatening messages,’ Professor Cameron told MailOnline.
Prominent women like Vice-president Kamala Harris have been the target of torrents of sexist and racist abuse online
‘We know that since the beginning of the digital era there has been a very large increase in online abuse targeting women specifically—especially women with a public profile’.
Influential public figures like vice-president Kamala Harris and eco-activist Greta Thunberg have been particularly exposed to a rise in sexist abuse, Professor Cameron says.
While Professor Cameron says that threats and harassment have always been a risk for women in public life, the ease of communicating over the internet has ‘vastly increased the scale of the problem.’
She adds that there is a mounting concern that ‘extremely graphic rape and death threats’ are making it harder for women to take part in politics and public life.
Meanwhile, online groups like the ‘Tradwife’ movement are actively advocating for a return to a time when women are not involved in public life at all.
Tradwives promote a style of living where the woman in a relationship is entirely subservient to their husband and makes maintaining a home and raising a family their primary concern.
Self-described Tradwife Estee Williams advocates for a lifestyle where women remain at home and out of the workforce, putting care of their husbands and children ahead of other goals
Professor Cameron also told MailOnline that AI tools like ChatGPT are amplifying sexism reflecting the biases of the data they are trained on.
Since Large Language Models require vast amounts of data sourced online, they incorporate the sexism that is coded into that data.
For example, Professor Cameron suggests that if most pictures of doctors online are of men, then AI will only generate images of male doctors.
‘A bias that already exists gets not just reproduced but exaggerated,’ says Professor Cameron.
However, Ms Cameron adds that ‘AIs don’t know that: they don’t know anything about the world, just the way it’s represented in the texts and images they can process.’
