Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - Men Who Hate Women

I tend to struggle with books that were written by journalists, because I find that their storytelling skills are lacking when it comes to creating a whole book. Even though Laura Bates is not a journalist, Men Who Hate Women falls foul of similar traps that I've seen previously in non fiction books of this type.

Most of the chapters feel unnecessarily padded out, often with repetition of previous points made that don't serve to create a cohesive narrative thread. Even in more successful chapters like 'Men Who Don't Know They Hate Women', half way through it veers off into a tangent about the 2016 election.

I understand that the topic at hand is very broad, complex and wide reaching, but the lack of focus makes it frustrating to read beyond the frustrating subject matter. With better and tighter editing I think this could have been a great book, but it ends up feeling like an unfocussed and cluttered collection of ideas and case studies with some paraphrased 4Chan posts sprinkled in.

I probably would have preferred it if the book just centred on what Laura Bates heard during her school visits and talks, rather than the need to try and summarise what she read on manosphere forums.

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bookishbrenbren's review against another edition

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dark informative medium-paced

4.0

I thought this book was really great but it would've benefitted from a heavier-handed editor crossing out repetitive or superfluous information.

It starts very strong with informative and compelling chapters on the incel community, pick-up artists (PUA), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and MRAs, which (even for someone who felt fairly well-informed before going into the book) were all by turns very shocking and very elucidating. I thought the author's argument of how and why this online extremism is causing offline harm was strongest in these early chapters and I found myself marking the most number of pages in this section.
The subsequent chapters, on trolls and domestic violence provided diminishing returns to their inclusion and could've been shortened - or rather, the domestic violence chapter could serve as a primer to the book, more of an introduction if anything, as knowledge of the misogynist foundations of our society is sort of necessary background information.
The following chapters, "Men Who Exploit Other Men" and "Men Who Are Afraid of Women", which cover, respectively, the ways the most powerful and recognizable misogynists - the 'face' of misogyny, if you will - benefit from the support of online misogynists (and how online misogynists are empowered by their public representation) and the strong misogynist backlash against the #MeToo movement and the sudden popular interest in false rape allegations. Again, I thought these chapters were out of place after 6 chapters of sketching how the extremist misogynist online community looks and acts. There were pages explaining how Donald Trump and Piers Morgan benefit from misogyny... like... did the author and editor assume their readers not only exist in the year 2020, and then not only bought THIS book (not likely by accident, given the title), but somehow also made it through the first 200 pages of this book without understanding what these men and their slavering followers have done to bring misogyny mainstream? Or did they think that these readers would be the folks who need convincing that the backlash to MeToo was misogynist in nature? To me, it seemed silly. If readers didn't know this information beforehand, it seems unlikely their worldviews would have allowed them to get through the first chapters of this book. Needless to say, I felt very bored by these chapters and what started out as a very exciting 5-star read for me became mired in "yeah yeah yeah"s.

Then the final two chapters, on young men and the ways they are captured by the online extremist community and men who are working against the very outdated societal standards of masculinity, were a return to extremely informative and extremely compelling writing, and I was very glad I didn't give the book up sooner. Thus, I am torn. If I could edit about 60 pages out of this book, I think it would be a 5-star read. But as it stands now, it's only 'good'.

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