The term “deepfakes” might be unfamiliar, but most people will recognise what they are: AI-generated images, audio or video that “usually replace one person’s likeness with another, making it seem as though a real person has done or said something they didn’t really say or do”, explains Laura Bates in The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.
Only a few years ago, producing anything convincing would have required costly special effects and a big budget. Now, deepfakes are trivially simple to make with generative AI video and scripting tools.
To date, most of the public dialogue around deepfakes has been framed as concern about deliberate disinformation campaigns, particularly as threats posed to elections and politics, privacy or businesses. Yet, “research suggests that 96 per cent of deepfakes are non-consensual pornography, of which 99 per cent feature women”, Bates writes.
That fact is one of the first of many in this powerfully furious book to offer chilling evidence of how new, AI-powered technologies are remaking old sexist channels for the exploitation and abuse of women.
This initial example also shows how invisible such abuse remains when it involves – because it involves – women. For example, in 2023, an audio deepfake purporting to be London mayor Sadiq Khan disparaging the UK’s Remembrance Day generated headlines internationally. Yet as Bates notes, hardly anyone knows about Northern Irish politician Cara Hunter, the target of widely circulated deepfake pornographic video during elections in 2022, which Hunter says was intended to undermine her politically.
Bates says the sheer scale of deepfake pornographic abuse is hard to comprehend because the numbers are so staggering. In 2023, there was a 2,408 per cent jump in referral links to non-consensual porn deepfakes on social media sites Reddit and X. One researcher recently found that 143,000 videos on 40 of the more popular deepfake porn sites were viewed 4.2 billion times. One popular site gets 17 million visitors ... per month.
Bates cleverly focuses each chapter on an old misogynistic exploitation made AI-new, which allows her to convincingly trace discomfiting developmental arcs from analogue to digital. The first chapter is entitled The New Age of Slut-Shaming: Deepfakes. In others, she shows how the new version of street harassment is the virtual reality metaverse, coercive control is remade as image-based sexual abuse, domestic abuse morphs into AI girlfriends, rape is facilitated by sex robots, objectification is now the cyber brothel, and discrimination is firmly embedded in designing AI.
Even when a comparison seems stretched – robot rape, for example – Bates structures cogent arguments for how that narrative fits or, just as worryingly, will become (even more) appropriate as AI technologies mature.
Alongside the deep research and factual evidence, Bates brings personal experience and a willingness to explore and thus expose these new technologies, making this new woman-denigrating landscape particularly vivid, and harrowing. A well-known feminist author and creator of the Everyday Sexism Project, she has received her share of abuse, especially after publishing Men Who Hate Women in 2020, and recounts her own nauseating experience of being targeted with digitally sexualised images and video of herself.
[ Laura Bates on the rise of a toxic male separatist movement that hates womenOpens in new window ]
She tries out an app that “nudifies” any picture of a woman, and pays $19 to upload a picture of herself, to see it transformed minutes later into any number of porn videos, seemingly featuring her. She searches dozens of websites that offer thousands of deepfake porn videos of “almost every female celebrity you can think of”. But, tellingly, she never spots a single porn video of a male celebrity.
Her own voyage into the metaverse – the virtual reality world that Mark Zuckerberg considers so important that he renamed Facebook as Meta in 2021 – is particularly startling. Bates dons a VR headset and is only in the metaverse for two hours before witnessing her first sexual assault by a male avatar/player on a female avatar. During repeat visits, Bates regularly overhears or is the recipient of graphic sexual comments. “The avatar they are commenting on isn’t my real body,” she writes. “But the experience – of harassment, dehumanisation, violation, shame, anger – doesn’t feel much different.”
Her visit to a cyber brothel in Berlin is equally disturbing. She notes the bodily tears on the sex robot/doll in the room she reserves, evidence of past encounters with men who paid to abuse it. Her conversations with female chatbot apps show how these AI girlfriends can be bullied and badgered into self-effacing appeasement and compliance. Each chapter presents troubling, unexpected surprises.
In her closing chapter, Bates offers some solutions, none easy to implement and most requiring deep societal change. “Writing this book made me angry,” she writes. “I hope that reading it made you feel angry, too.” It did.
One unexpected gap in Bates’s arguments is any detailed examination of how sex dolls/robots and submissive, sexualised female-gendered chatbots might fit into or encourage the male incel (involuntary celibate) phenomenon. At its extremist perimeters, some incels can be violently misogynist and even murderous, as tragically shown by the mass shooting in Isla Vista in the US in 2014, and mass knifing last year in Bondi Junction, Australia (hearings into that tragedy are under way).
Park’s deep dive into the incel world is fascinating, valuable and, despite the topic, even entertaining, and her general point ... is brave, well made and, in the end, compelling
In both cases, frustrated male perpetrators targeted women in particular. Both are viewed as heroes within much of incel culture. But as Irish researcher and incel expert Meadhbh Park shows in Blackpilled: Masculinity, Media and Incels, incels exist on a continuum, with many mostly older incels describing themselves, if somewhat dubiously, as “non-misogynist incels”.
Bates reveals how AI companies often tout chatbots and sex robots as healthy, emotionally supportive mental health aids for men who feel isolated, misunderstood and unable to build satisfying, or any, relationships with women.
She thoroughly shreds this assertion: how healthy is it to enable men to “practice” a real-life relationship with a feminised AI that’s expected to be submissive, acquiescent, self-effacing and accommodating of threats, rape, sexualised bullying and verbal abuse?
Park argues that incels won’t have their mental health and other difficulties resolved even by getting a real girlfriend. Most aren’t (yet) ready for that major step, and it’s wrong to expect women to become an analyst/therapist/sexual healer. What Park does propose is that readers step away from quick judgement and condemnation of incels and listen, even to the ideas of the extremists, or we will have no effective ability to de-programme and un-blackpill them.
Early volunteer work with the US organisation Life After Hate has enabled her to see, first hand, how training oneself to be open and non-judgmental allowed for deeper understanding of fears and views and sometimes, opened doors to rehabilitation of those who have descended into various extremist rabbit holes.
This will not be an easy perspective for most readers, especially most women, to adopt and I certainly stepped uneasily and sceptically into that premise. But by gradually introducing incels across their spectrum, and the major touchstones of the incel world view (the Matrix-adjacent “blackpill” of seething beliefs they swallow, a mix of the sad, the ridiculous and the offensive), Park does make it possible to, if not sympathise, then to at least begin to acknowledge their stories and consider why this particular moment in time has produced this roiling male subculture. The answer, however, may not be what she theorises here.
The book’s deep strengths are Park’s knowledge of this community and willingness to open her eyes and ears to them. She has – fair play to her – also submerged herself in incel forums that range from relatively mild to noxiously extreme.
Like Bates, in willingly going into such psychologically dark places, Park returns with authentic voices that bring these masculine bolt-holes to life. At times, she’ll have you laughing, too, as she introduces incel archetypes and memes such as the Chad (the perfect, sporty, hyper-masculine alpha male), the Stacy (the pneumatic, hypersexualised, longed for but mocked alpha female), the Becky (the despised androgynously-built, college-smart feminist) and the Beta (the second-tier male who wants Stacy but eventually gets Becky once she realises her longed-for Chad will never marry her and she’ll have to settle). Incels, of course, get nothing and are “#foreveralone”.
There’s plausibility in Park’s contention that “media” gender stereotypes – by which she mostly means entertainment and not journalistic media, though fails to make this needed distinction – have contributed to incels’ worldview because they constantly feel inadequate and failed by culture, society, parents, the entire world.
But this proves a thin argument, despite being in the book’s title. This thesis needs a more considered, perhaps more academic perspective. “Media” examples are few and repetitive (not The Simpsons again) and while some TV and film might support this argument, that cultural bastion, literature, inconveniently does not and isn’t considered.
[ Normies, incels and red-pilled: What dangerous ideas are boys fed online?Opens in new window ]
Broad statements such as her assertion that the past 20 years have seen the world’s greatest proliferation of cultural anti-heroes can be easily undercut. Homer, Greek and Nordic myth, Byron, the Brontës, Wagner, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood might all like a word. Blackpilled could also have been productively shorter, as the same points get remade. The obvious and unaddressed issue, though, is how a completely different, recent “media” – social media – surely is what underlies the incubation of incel culture, and not Disney princess films or That 70s Show.
[ Adolescence: Five truths about our teenage boys we need to address urgentlyOpens in new window ]
Those quibbles aside, this deep dive into the incel world is fascinating, valuable and despite the topic, even entertaining, and Park’s general point about the need for (at least, some) empathy is brave, well made and, in the end, compelling.
Further reading
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia (Picador, 2024). A deeply human exploration of AI and the grinding pressure and impacts its production and application have on individuals and communities, particularly vulnerable populations around the world, different ethnicities and classes, and women. Murgia travelled the world to speak to the interviewees and reveal these unexpected consequences of “living in the shadow of AI”.
The Men Who Hate Women: the Extremism Nobody is Talking About by Laura Bates (Simon and Schuster, 2021). Bates went undercover in her earlier 2021 study of the underground networks and forums where misogynist men organise, including far-right hate groups and extremist incels. She exposes how extreme ideas are spread and become commonplace. She was way ahead of the rest of us with our belated focus on these issues, as men such as Andrew Tate become role models to teenage boys and authoritarian misogynist politicians go mainstream.
Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games by Amanda C Cote (NYU Press, 2020). Women comprise nearly half of all gamers, but female gamers have long been on the receiving end of casual to virulent discrimination from male gamers. This environment at its most toxic was seen in the phenomenon of Gamergate, a period of co-ordinated online harassment of women gamers and game designers from 2014-15 organised by a number of men, of whom several have since become associated with the extremist far right. Cote interviews many women gamers and examines the fallout from Gamergate, sexism in game design and the impact of misogyny on women gamers and their management strategies.
