Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, racism, sexual violence and harassment, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and death.

“Imagine a world in which millions of women are raped, beaten, mutilated, abused, or murdered every year because of the simple fact that they are women.”

Men Who Hate Women opens with descriptions of graphic violence to paint a picture of the severe and rampant violence faced by women worldwide. Bates uses a rhetorical question to make her readers reflect, and she sets the tone for her exploration of misogyny by highlighting the weight of the issue immediately. The graphic imagery here highlights the brutality of gender-based violence.

“The majority of men are good and kind and would never dream of committing such crimes. But that must not prevent us from recognizing those who do are not always acting in a vacuum.”

In this passage, Bates juxtaposes “good and kind” men with the acknowledgment of misogynistic behavior. This reflects her nuanced approach—she encourages her readers to understand the social systems that enable such behavior without alienating the entire male population. This balanced view underscores the complexity of misogyny’s roots and its widespread impact.

“[T]he only way [misogyny] can become so wildly, phenomenally successful , the only way it can be so cleverly camouflaged as to be almost undetectable, is if its arteries creep outward from that black heart of violent hate, wending their way through online pathways and webbing out across social media platforms, splitting and dividing into finer and finer capillaries, infiltrating chat rooms, reaching out through message boards, sniffing tentatively at the air and taking the leap out of the dank realms of the internet altogether, slithering offline, penetrating our pubs and bars and sliding around street corners, twirling delicately up the wooden legs of kitchen tables, peeping into corridors of power, burrowing into institutions and workplaces, fanning out tendrils across talk shows and newsrooms, taking deeper and deeper root until they’re part of the very fabric of our shared consciousness.”

Bates uses vivid imagery to describe the insidious spread of misogyny, likening it to a physical infection that quietly infiltrates all corners of society. The metaphor of “arteries creep[ing] outward” enhances the image of misogyny as a hidden, pervasive force that spreads unnoticed, subtly influencing both online spaces and offline institutions. This passage establishes the idea that the normalization of misogyny is a slow, deliberate process that eventually becomes a part of societal consciousness.