Laura Bates, activist: "The 'manosphere' has infiltrated the heads of adolescents we consider normal"

Laura Bates photographed in London on February 23. Ione Saizar

Laura Bates (Oxford, 36 years old) asks EL PAÍS not to reveal the name of the London neighborhood where she lives.

She has been receiving thousands of death or rape threats for more than a decade from many individuals who are part of the

, that world of the Internet where groups of resentful men —the so-called incel, or involuntary celibates;

or those who train adolescents on how to seduce or rape women— feed a hatred that she, she assures, has ended up reaching many adolescents and not so adolescents that we could consider normal.

More information

Nine examples of everyday machismo that should be eradicated

On the back terrace of a pub, isolated from the noise of the street, the author of

(Captain Swing) tells how she decided, camouflaged under a male pseudonym, to investigate a terrifying world, but not as marginal as some would like to think.

And how, above all, these groups manage to transfer their message of hate to the daily debate.

ASK.

Who are the men who hate women?

ANSWER.

It is a large and diverse group.

But one of the mistakes we make when talking about them is simplifying the problem.

In the communities in which I was able to infiltrate I saw a great variety.

Vulnerable teenagers who slip into them for advice on how to talk to girls;

or recently divorced people who come across them after digging online about their personal experiences and end up bitter about these peculiar forms of radicalism.

We have seen how some of the people who have been exposed for belonging to these communities turned out to be an American politician or an affable father who coached his sons' soccer team.

Q.

Aren't they a marginal redoubt?

A.

There are too many to think that they are just a bunch of weirdos on the internet.

Q.

Do they influence, as you say, the public debate indirectly?

A.

These forums can have tens of thousands of members, but the important thing is to pay attention to the number of visits.

Some of these websites riddled with insults receive up to two and a half million monthly readings.

And they manage to place their message in the attitude and public consciousness.

There are two ways to measure its effectiveness.

One is to check the number of men who sign up to them and consume their content, but another is to see how many men have absorbed their ideas without necessarily knowing where they came from.

That's what's worrying.

In Spain, one in five men between the ages of 15 and 29 believe that gender violence is an ideological invention.

In the United States, 27% of men say they would never have a work meeting alone with a woman anymore, due to so-called false accusations.

“In the US, one in four would not have a one-on-one business meeting with a woman for fear of 'false accusations'

Q. You became known with the Daily Sexism project, which you translated into a book.

But that machismo did not seem to reveal this terrifying other.

A. If you are a feminist activist you know these men, they will have already tried to contact you.

From the second week that I started that project, in 2012, I received around two hundred death or rape threats every day.

And, with its ups and downs, it's something that hasn't gone away since.

It was not a surprise to me.

But what made me want to investigate was realizing that they had infiltrated the heads of teenagers we consider normal.

Q. And you came to the conclusion that it was necessary to bring them to light.

R. At first I also believed that talking about them was giving them publicity.

But when you hear them repeat conspiracy theories and myths they've gleaned from those internet spaces, like women lie about rape, or good men losing their jobs because of gender politics, you understand that the great danger is not to talk about it.

Q. Many people of good faith, however, believe that we have made progress in the fight against machismo.

R. The idea that we have progressed is quite questionable.

newspaper

, based on data provided by the Home Office] of the rapes reported to the police in the United Kingdom end with a formal charge.

It is not hysterical to say that rape has somehow been decriminalized in this country.

But it is true that a public perception [of the advancement of women] has been created, fed by a conventional media that likes to instill fear with feminism.

We have witnessed debates in relevant media about whether feminism has gone too far and whether men are not really the real victims.

That is why people become more vulnerable to these conspiracy theories.

“The idea that we have progressed in equality is quite questionable”

Q. Point out the role played by some of them.

R. The traditional media have entered into crisis.

They need readers, an audience, they go looking for news with many punctures.

So instead of inviting someone to discuss the issues women face today and how to address them, many prefer to bring out a man by claiming that women use sexual favors to gain promotion.

Of course, there are brilliant media outlets that try very hard to explain the problem, but in general, when the media tries to clean up or soften these controversies, what they achieve is that the adolescent assumes more naturally that someone on YouTube tells them that the wage gap it is a myth.

Q. This phenomenon has also been used by some politicians.

A. It is a symbiotic relationship.

We have already seen men in these forums celebrating the words of President Trump, lamenting how hard it was to be a young man in the US. In Spain, parties like VOX rely on this virulent anti-feminist ideology, on these sentiments.

They also talk about

, a term that we can read on the front pages of some British tabloids.

Q. You raise the need to combat this threat as if it were a crime of terrorism.

A. If a group is being trained and radicalized via the internet to hate a particular demographic — women, in this case — and encouraged to commit acts of physical or sexual violence in real life, I think it fits the bill. international definition of terrorism.

Subscribe here

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber