katieplant 's review for:

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates

2.0

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While reading the first chapter of this one I thought it might be a 5 star read, it presented a nuanced, sympathetic, and thorough analysis of how vulnerable teenage boys become radicalized into alt-right extremism through increasingly violently misogynistic online spaces. As I kept reading however my impressions of this book quickly changed. This book lacks any meaningful discussions of intersectionality, or how white supremacy and neo-nazism are inherently linked to, and proliferated in, misogynistic online spaces like incel forums. This leaves most of the analysis in the book feeling very shallow and incomplete. Also, the comparisons between misogynistic extremism and isis terrorism are at best distasteful and at worst outright harmful. The author often (whether intentionally or not) positions misogyny as worse or more important than other issues, particularly Islamophobia. She brings up Islamophobic responses to isis terrorism, but offers no critique of such responses. Rather she uses these extreme responses (including an unfounded and unjust arrest of a young Muslim teenager in his high school for being interested in engineering and building alarm clocks) as a means to highlight the lack of response to violent misogyny. Intentional or not, this comes across as an approval of Islamophobia in policing systems. The author also puts WAYYYYYY too much faith in policing and carceral systems as a response to violent extremism with no investigation into how these systems perpetuate and uphold systems of oppression and violence that cause such extremism. Overall this one had a lot of potential, but any discussion about race or terrorism was extremely clunky, surface level, and at times downright harmful.