The New Age of Sexism: How the AI revolution is reinventing misogyny
Laura Bates, Simon & Schuster, 2026
If Laura Bates had lived thousands of years ago, she would be Cassandra, rending her garments and lamenting that no one took any notice of her prophesies. It’s six years since she published her devastating book Men Who Hate Women, about the dangerous rise of misogyny, and yet it took until 2023 for Police Scotland to take action to tackle the manosphere, and other UK forces still seem to be silent on the matter. Likewise, Louis Theroux’s documentary on the manosphere was broadcast earlier this year, and hailed as if it had something new to say on the matter.
This is why I don’t expect there to be a substantive response to The New Age of Sexism any time soon. Yet speed is of the essence if AI is not to become an eternally self-reinforcing cesspit of sexism.
Across seven harrowing chapters, Bates analyses the AI mechanisms and products that are cultivating growing divisions between the sexes, interrogates the motivations behind them, and sounds a clear warning of the consequences.
Her first chapter focuses on deepfakes and the technology that allows users to ‘undress’ images of women – including, or course, underage girls. Holly Willoughby’s stalker is not an isolated example of the way this technology feeds the obsessions of men intent on harming women.
Next Bates explores the mean streets of the metaverse, where VR and gaming create spaces in which women are at significant risk of abuse and assault, whose psychological impact are just as great as if the events had occurred in real life. And we are all too aware of the cases in which this behaviour has spilled over into real life, when abusers posing as teenagers have groomed young gamers and arranged to meet them in person for abuse and worse.
It is distressing to think that even a fraction of the immense potential of digital technology has been channelled into the creation of sex robots: life-size, speaking (if the user allows) dolls programmed to succumb to and even encourage men’s basest desires. They can do anything they want with them (some robots can be programmed to resist their owners’ advances, in effect enabling men to rape them). There are underage robots too, facilitating de facto rape…
For those who want endless variety rather than exclusive ownership, there are always cyber brothels, offering an array of robots, including nurses, secretaries and sexy schoolgirls. ‘You can now enjoy this erotic adventure … within the law and completely safely,’ promises the website.
Bates is clear that what is lazily termed ‘revenge porn’ should more accurately be termed ‘image-based sexual abuse’. It extends far beyond the celebrity world of Scarlett Johanssen and Jennifer Lawrence to thousands of women, for whom the non-consensual sharing of intimate images has created a living nightmare. The founder of one site for sharing such images describes himself as a ‘professional life ruiner’.
Next we come to the AI girlfriend, so much easier to contend with than the living, breathing, thinking kind. She will put up with any amount of coercive control, verbal abuse, virtual violence, etc. all while giving the male ego a boost. How could a young man ‘trained’ on this pernicious model ever hope to form a mutual, supportive, loving relationship?
Finally, Bates addresses the role of women in the AI industry: they are largely absent from design and influential positions in in tech companies – but over-represented in the ranks of overwhelmed moderators exposed to toxic material day in, day out, for exploitation wages. This means that every system affecting our everyday lives, such as banking, policing, employment and beyond, is developing a self-reinforcing bias.
In this context it is shameful the extent to which governments all over the world have driven us all into the embraces of the tech bros to the point where we are in effect held hostage by them. (And don’t get me started on the fact that HMG continues to use X as a way of disseminating information).
Bates is right to denounce Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of ‘Move fast and break things’. In what other industry could you have inadequately tested products released to the public and simply dismiss any resulting deaths, injuries or other harms as acceptable collateral damage? We owe a profound debt of gratitude to Bates for bravely venturing into the darkest recesses of AI on our behalf. Unlike Cassandra, though, she presents us with solutions, pressing for, among other things, regulation, the creation of safeguards, and greater involvement of feminist tech founders to shape new approaches. If this doesn’t happen ‘… all of us will pay the price for their [the tech bros’] greed and their myopic white male vision of what the future could and should look like.’