Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Men Who Hate Women

Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates

19 reviews

jeggert10's review

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challenging dark hopeful informative medium-paced

4.25

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anniesher23's review against another edition

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dark informative sad tense medium-paced

4.0

This is incredibly well researched and written. The bottom line is I think that every parent or person who wants to have kids should read this. My takeaway was, my kids aren’t having access to the internet until they have formed their own opinions and learned media literacy. And I got really stressed out about all the parents who wouldn’t know to do that.

I can’t say I was really surprised by the information in this book. I feel like I see “manosphere” ideas in watered down forms just in my day to day interactions with men and in the media. I was a little disappointed that Bates didn’t address this or really acknowledge that there is a wide spectrum of woman-hating, and that the subtle forms need to be addressed too. Maybe that’s a different book, though. And Bates does consistently show how easy it is for men and boys to fall into the influence of the manosphere, how prevalent women-haters are, and how much influence they have over people and institutions of power.

The point I appreciated the most was Bates’s argument that the manosphere is incredibly shrewd, organized, and coordinated to attract the most members and exert the most influence it can. There is a huge amount of privilege that the manosphere and white supremacist movements get in being seen as the fringe lone wolves, and it’s not something we afford Islamist terror groups, for example, as Bates points out. She rightly argues how dangerous it is to ignore this when it comes to women-hating movements. This was the point I hadn’t thought about before, and I think it’s something we need to talk about more.

I can’t decide how I feel about how much compassion Bates has for men and boys being seduced by the manosphere. She constantly mentions how these people are struggling and we need to address that. She’s right and we do, and I get that her aim in this is to attack this problem at the source. That’s all fair, but women and gender non-conforming people struggle too, and we haven’t created these massively coordinated and destructive movements; we’re the victims of them. So when most of the compassion in this book is going to the perpetrators, it gets annoying.

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