Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Men Who Hate Women

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates

22 reviews

nugenmak000's review against another edition

I plan to pick up this book later when I'm in a stringer mental headspace. This book is dark and covers the different layers of the manosphere and their groups. It covered misogyny and crimes against women/general hate of women. It also mentioned manifestos of crazed misogynistic murderers like Elliot Rogers. This book is overall very heavy and difficult to read.

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titan_reads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense slow-paced

5.0

Very informative, but dark. A great place to start reading about misogyny and sexism, though it does quickly introduce some of the worst of the worst which can be quite shocking. The author mentioned real violent and abusive acts that have been committed against women and also shared posts that contain unfiltered threats to commit these acts throughout the book.

I felt it was a good mix of showing the daily struggles women face just existing but also being empathetic towards the real problems men face. The last few chapters made me want to encourage the people in my life to take a more active role in the lives of the vulnerable people around them.

I did have trouble reading this book not because of the writing but because I recognized so much of what was depicted in my own personal experiences with people online and in-person. I read something more upbeat alongside it and took breaks when I needed them. If you're in the right headspace it is worth the read.

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th18's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring medium-paced

5.0

Amazing book and incredibly eye opening. Hard to read sometimes because of the emotions I felt but I think this is a book that everyone should read atleast once, especially men. Highlighting these issues hat we as women and half of the population face is extremely difficult but I feel that Laura did an amazing job. I've definitely been motivated to spread this information to others and do my best to educate men around me in order to prevent as much as possible their becoming of incels. I cannot stress enough how educational this book has been. Will definitely reread.

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bookishbrenbren's review

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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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