Laura Bates

We do not, as a rule, talk about male perpetrators of violence against women. We describe a woman as having been raped; we discuss the rates of women sexually assaulted or beaten. We do not speak in terms of men committing rape or being sexual assaulters and violent abusers. That is what makes it so easy to focus on women’s dress, behaviour and choices when we consider sexual violence. To warn women to take precautions to protect themselves and, implicitly or explicitly, blame those victims who do not.

While learning about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at A Level, some of her students complained, saying there ought to be ‘a Handmaid’s Tale for men’. (Atwood’s dystopian novel, set in an imagined totalitarian US in which women are completely subjugated, is famously inspired by real-world oppression. Atwood has stated: ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened.’)

Both worldviews rest heavily on the perception of women being without humanity, individuality or soul.

We are talking about an industry that exploits men’s worst fears, preys on their vulnerabilities and literally trains them in harassment, stalking and even sexual assault.

in spite of the fact that a relatively small number of high-profile men have faced consequences at all, compared to the millions of women who have recounted their experiences of abuse without ever having seen justice; in spite of the fact that many high-profile men accused of sexual violence by dozens of women continue to walk free… still this idea of it being fake news has become an accepted and acceptable narrative.

The tactics and hallmarks of manosphere logic and argument, however, remain clearly visible. There is the use of ‘whataboutery’ to distract from valid argument. The undermining of real statistics using pseudo-science or just outright lies to suggest a different reality.

there is the notion that a single woman’s spurious accusation is enough to torpedo an innocent man’s livelihood. The reality, again, is very different. What we have seen over and over again, as the trajectories of high-profile men like Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh clearly demonstrate, is that even multiple accusers or dozens of correlating accusations are often not enough to derail powerful men’s careers.

though dramatic media reports about men’s ‘execution without trial’ have attempted to portray the loss of reputation or individual roles as equivalent to imprisonment or even death, the reality is that many of these men will go on to be quietly rehabilitated away from the public eye.

When it comes to criminal charges, the justice gap yawns even wider. Some men are facing short-term professional consequences. The vast majority have faced no long-term sentences or criminal justice.

What we do know – thanks to hard, statistical evidence – is that thousands of women experience workplace sexual harassment and assault, that their employers regularly fail to take any action over it, and that the vast majority (far from the spectre of conniving, manipulative accusers conjured up by the media) never report what has happened at all. Most are too scared, terrified that they won’t be believed, that they’ll be blacklisted or seen as a ‘troublemaker’, or that their careers may suffer as a result.