Laura Bates
Bio:
Laura Bates is a New York Times bestselling author of 10 books. She’s an educator, activist, and journalist and has spent the past decade researching misogyny and its intersection with new and emerging technologies as well as working directly with tens of thousands of young people in schools, training teachers, and helping governments and education systems grapple with supporting young people to tackle sexism. Her book Men Who Hate Women was the first to bring the issue of the manosphere and extreme online misogyny to public attention, and her new book, The New Age of Sexism, lifts the lid on the extensive but underreported gendered implications of AI. She has been named one of CNN’s 10 Visionary Women, awarded the Women’s Media Center Digital Media award, and described by Gloria Steinem as “showing us the path to both intimate and global survival.” She is an honorary fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and has received a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality.
WMC Live
WMC Live #487: Not Knowing When We've Lost or Won. (Original Airdate 11/16/2025)
Robin analyzes off-year elections, and welcomes back Laura Bates, who discusses AI as well as her just-out book, The New Age Of Sexism.
WMC News & Features
AI and the New Age of Misogyny
Laura Bates, author of The New Age of Sexism, says: “We are building a whole new world, but the inequalities and oppression of our current society are being baked into its very foundations.”
WMC Live
WMC Live #411: Suffer the Little Children. (Original Airdate 5/28/2023)
Robin takes on the headlines themselves, including the latest Catholic Church shockers. Special Guest: Laura Bates, author and founder of Everyday Sexism, on the results of this remarkable campaign.
WMC Women Under Siege
The impact of nurturing male violence
The portrayal of sexualized violence as an instinctive and inherent feature of masculinity leads has a potentially devastating impact on our society.
WMC Women Under Siege
Shutting us down: How online misogyny prevents women from fully participating in democracy
There are two major barriers to women’s full participation in the democratic process in the UK at the moment—the first relates to their taking part in the vital and shaping process of grassroots activism, and the second to their participation in more traditional political careers.
WMC Live
July 20, 2013 | Katrina vanden Heuvel, Laura Bates, Nada Bakos |
Politics,
Race/Ethnicity,
Robin Morgan
WMC Live #48: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Katie Goodman, Laura Bates, Nada Bakos. (Original Airdate 7/20/2013)
Robin on the Zimmerman verdict and a double standard for violence against black women; an ex-CIA agent combats trafficking; an online activist fights daily sexism; comic Katie Goodman sings funny; Katrina vanden Heuvel on headlines and punditry.
WMC Women Under Siege
Women’s bodies: Cause of ‘epidemics and disasters’?
Her name is Amina. She is a teenage girl. A man in her country, Tunisia, thinks stones should be thrown at her until she dies because she posted a photo of herself on a website. Because she is a woman. Because she had the audacity to make a comment about her own body, and to photograph her body, and to use it to share her ideas with others.
WMC Women Under Siege
When will I 'earn' my right to safety?
Delhi. Ohio. Nepal. Around the world, women are suffering sexual assaults so heinous that they are making the headlines on an almost daily basis. And yet, almost inconceivably, governments, members of the judiciary, and authority figures around the world continue to advocate that the solution lies with women—that their behavior is to blame and that their behavior has the power somehow, magically, to prevent rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
Beneath the law: When the system inherently favors the rapist
Back in April, I wrote for WMC’s Women Under Siege about the legal gender imbalance female victims of sexualized violence face around the world. But a disturbing recent investigation by the independent Indian weekly newsmagazine Tehelka suggests that the miscarriage of justice in some cases of rape and sexual assault might be linked to prejudice on the part of those delivering justice, rather than bias within the law itself.
WMC Women Under Siege
What’s in a name? The rhetoric of rape
Campaigners in Egypt have recently drawn attention to the increasingly widespread sexual harassment, assault, and rape suffered by women in public spaces. The severity of the situation there well documented and longstanding, with women suffering “violations of their human rights” in the form of intrusive virginity tests, “assault and torture,” and even “being dragged naked on the ground,” according to a 2011 press release from the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights.
WMC Women Under Siege
A crime upon a crime: Rape, victim-blaming, and stigma
In Sudan, where tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes by fighting and destruction, where the lives of refugees have already been devastated by the loss of their homes and families, women bear a second, enduring pain. Because for many Darfuri women, the “crime” of falling victim to rapists and sexual attackers renders them valueless, “dishonored,” and rejected.
WMC Women Under Siege
Ideas into action? A view from inside the UK's new initiative to stop rape in war
You may have heard that the UK recently launched a new initiative aimed at preventing sexualized violence in conflict. We’ve been fortunate enough to be part of the early stages of this ambitious new project, which has invited participation from NGOs and experts around the world.
WMC News & Features
Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Hypocrisy
This week, Seventeen magazine promised to publish un-photoshopped images of real girls, finally responding to 14-year-old SPARK activist Julia Bluhm's campaign. Such pressure must continue argues author Laura Bates.
WMC Women Under Siege
What are the solutions to wartime rape?
Part of Women Under Siege’s mission is to try to understand and share findings on the complexities of wartime rape in its varied forms in order to develop targeted solutions that would work effectively in different situations. We need to get a better grasp on what’s happening so we can stop it, and to stop it we need to think creatively and strategically. Here are some ideas on how to end or prevent sexualized violence in the context of various conflict situations.
WMC Women Under Siege
What do we mean by rape in war?
For many of us, the phrase “wartime rape” evokes blurry, broad ideas of military assault, battles, and weapons. Just like the common misconceptions that surround rape in places like the U.S. or the UK (such as the idea that rape is a crime committed by a shadowy stranger in a dark alley, when, according to UK charity Rape Crisis, “only 9 percent of rapes are committed by ‘strangers’”) it is easy to make incorrect assumptions about the causes and manifestations of wartime rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
It's not a revolution for those left behind
“Who should I blame for this? Mubarak for destroying my country’s education so those men have no respect for women and have become just animals … our useless police who are incapable of defending us…our religious leaders who claim that they want what’s best but they don’t go to these young men and teach them what’s right…. Who? … I am sorry for the women of Egypt… . I am angry but I am not broken.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Why is stopping gender violence a 'women's issue'?
The Violence Against Women Act is causing contention as it comes to Congress for the third time for reauthorization. Democrats want to extend the act, first approved in 1994, to provide protection to Native American women, victims in same-sex relationships, and undocumented immigrants—some of the country’s most vulnerable populations. But Republicans have accused Democrats of deliberately including these “controversial” issues in an attempt to lure them into blocking the bill.
WMC Women Under Siege
Defining justice when the law is unjust: How gender imbalance affects women around the world
Justice is supposed to confer equality, impartiality, protection for victims, and punishment for perpetrators. Yet as recently as the 1970s, spousal rape was not considered a criminal offense in some U.S. states.
Recent Articles
WMC Women Under Siege
In Rural Tamil Nadu, Child Marriage Was Already Rampant. Then Came the Pandemic.
WMC Unspinning
Zulu