In 2024, I thought a lot about

In 2024, I thought a lot about Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates and what it told me about the young men and boys that I teach.

I bought this book in 2020, initially as a birthday present for a friend. But, after reading the introduction, I decided it might be too extreme, too triggering and too weird a gift. So, there it sat, gathering dust, until I picked it up this summer. 

You probably know the story by now: journalist Laura Bates set up the Everyday Sexism website to give women a platform to share examples of sexism that they were encountering in daily life. The online hate Bates received in response led her to explore misogyny that manifests in online spaces – from murderous incels to MRAs (men’s rights activists), pickup artists (men trained in seduction techniques to manipulate women) and MGTOW (‘men going their own way’ who believe society has been corrupted by feminism). She went undercover on men-only forums and message boards (the ‘manosphere’) and documented what she found out about many misogynistic subsects that embrace toxic masculinity and reject equal rights for women.

The result is a truly shocking read. And it chimed with some of the concerns I have had, as a high school teacher, regarding sexist attitudes in the boys in my classes.

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A few years ago, I really thought we were getting somewhere. I gave assemblies on gender and sexuality, and felt that students were opening up to ideas about equality and starting to challenge patriarchal values and gender binaries in class discussions. The non-sexist male students were feeling able to speak up and be allies.

But the pendulum seems to have swung back the other way, very quickly. Misogynist thinking had not gone away – it had just gone underground. 

One day in the spring of 2022, a year seven boy approached me on the playground and said, “Andrew Tate says women are the property of men – do you agree, sir?”

I had to look up who this person was. During a Media Studies lesson a few months later, the topic of Tate came up again. He was still relatively unknown amongst my colleagues and adult friends, but the Twitter spat between him and Greta Thunberg had garnered attention and it was apparent that every student in the class knew who he was. Two boys high-fived each other at the mention of his name, and called out, “Top G!” before collapsing in hysterics. I asked them to explain what they knew about him, and what they thought about his ideas, but they refused to engage properly and insisted on guffawing at each other. No matter how much I tried to channel the discussion, the pack mentality of these 16-year-old young men drowned me out.

Fast forward to earlier this year, just as I started reading Men Who Hate Women. My colleagues and I started noticing our male students using expressions such as ‘alpha’, ‘simp’, ‘sigma’ and ‘lone wolf’ – the same words that Bates had described four years earlier as being part of the language incels use about themselves and other misogynists. “What the sigma?” became the graffiti of choice doodled on desks. ‘Feminazi’ was widespread. “Feminism is cancer” was spotted in one boy’s exercise book. Some of the boys saying and writing this stuff were only 12 years old.

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These expressions have been common at school this year. But with their wider use, I wondered if their meanings had been diluted.

I asked my year 9 form group what I should make of it all, and one boy said, “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all just brain rot.” He went on to explain that these words and phrases were taken from memes and no one of their generation took them seriously.

In a lightbulb moment for me, Laura Bates concludes her book by suggesting that ideas which start with violent sociopathic incels on extremist subreddits, eventually filter their way through into the mainstream via social media accounts which place surrealist memes like ‘skibidi toilet’ and pointy Spider Men next to ‘lone wolf’ and ‘feminism is cancer’ memes. This process reduces troubling extremist ideas to meaningless banter – and like all banter, those involved in it assume it is harmless and victimless. And for many of them maybe that will be true. Teenagers, after all, have short attention spans, and what is trending today, may well be forgotten tomorrow.

But the fear is that some will be empowered and enabled by such casual extremism, and seduced by the ideology behind the words.

This week, knowing I had to finish this essay, I optimistically asked the “Top G” boys – now a couple of years older and studying A levels – whether Andrew Tate was still popular with their peer group. “Nah!” said one of them, “it’s all about Diddy, now!” 

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