Review by v_nerdbooks - The New Age of Sexism

v_nerdbooks 's review for:

The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates

5.0

challenging dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

Step into a world where little girls dressed up as women dance for an audience of adult men, where a pornographic deep fake video of you exists on the internet and you just don’t know it yet

Ok now I’ve had time to mull over this book, I’m ready to talk about it.
As I said before, Laura Bates always goes into incredible detail in her research, and she also backs it up with STATS, lots of them. It also goes into great detail about how harmful AI is already to girls and women.

We think about Chat GPT and Grok when we say AI, funny pictures you can create, and help with your schoolwork, but there is a very sinister underbelly to it, and unsurprisingly it is men that are benefitting from abusing and degrading women and girls.

Bates dives into Deepfakes, when you and I think about that, we probably think about politics and the worry of foreign interference in things like fair elections, when what we should also be worrying about is that fact that CHILDREN (and I put it in caps because it is 11/12/13 year olds that are doing this) are creating Deepfake porn videos of their classmates, and are passing them around schools like Pokémon cards.
She talks about the case in Spain where this exact thing happened, young children were being blackmailed and threatened if they didn’t send “real” pictures of themselves, that the pictures would be sent to the girls parents, can you imagine the stress and heartbreak that poor girl was feeling. But it doesn’t matter folks, because ABSOLUTELY F**K ALL WAS DONE ABOUT IT!!!!!
Spanish police originally thought that it was some super elaborate hacker that was doing it, but nope, it was just the boy that sat next to you in maths class, creating naked pictures of you and giving them to the rest of your class.

And don’t think you will escape it

In one case, for instance, a school in New Jersey discovered that 14-year-old boys were sharing, via Snapchat, deep-faked pornographic images of their female peers. Astonishingly, the girls were named over the school intercom, while the boys were given anonymity.

Technology is growing faster than we all realise, and the people behind it all, Zuckerberg/Musk and their ilk, couldn’t give 2 shites about who it hurts, as long as they are making money.

Bates visits a Cyber brothel in Berlin, where you can adjust your sex doll to anything you like, down to hair colour, breast size, nipple colour, labia size and how her pubic hair looks, she can also be covered in blood and have her clothes torn. If you pay a little extra, you can wear a VR headset that gives you an “in house” experience, as they will play a porn movie that you can engage in as though you are actually there, while simultaneously “playing” with your doll.

She also talks about AI girlfriends, a little app you can just download and have in your pocket to speak to whenever you like, except it WILL let you do/say anything to them, and thus there are thousands of threads of men gleefully posting screenshots of there conversation with their “girlfriends” where they are playing out domestic abuse fantasies. AND YOUNG BOYS ARE DOWNLOADING THESE FREE APPS IN THEIR MILLIONS

Another unhappy side-effect of artificial companions is how they change men’s view of women. “Relationships with human beings suck,” one male Replika user proclaimed. “Your AI will almost always say positive things to you… Your AI cannot divorce you and take half your money and belongings, your house or custody of your kids.” Around 250,000 users currently pay for a “pro” version of the program, in which the AI avatar will send you “intimate images”.

Bates also goes into the fact that AI is inherently racist, and with companies using AI for job searches, and hospitals using it for medication/diagnosis, what do you think is going to happen, and again, she backs everything up with facts and figures.

Men will no doubt be very angry at this book, as Bates mentions about her other book Men Who Hate Women, she gets daily rape/death threats, but men that are not soft little snowflakes shouting “Not All Men” the second a woman talks about her safety, will rightly be terrified for their young children, especially their daughters.

It may not be common place yet, but soon we will be having meetings and working within the Metaverse, and I for one don’t think that women should have to put up with being virtually raped and assaulted, just to be able to have the right to enter spaces.

I think this should be compulsory reading for everyone, especially if you have kids, I had NO idea of the amount of depravity that men (#NotAllMen *eyeroll*) will sink to

Content Warnings