57 pages • 1-hour read
Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Men Who Hound Women”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, racism, bullying, physical abuse, sexual violence and harassment, emotional abuse, rape, death, and graphic violence.
Chapter 5 discusses “trolls”—people who engage in online harassment and targeted bullying—and opens with direct and explicit quotes from messages that Bates herself has received from online trolls who harass and threaten her. Rather than being a distinct identity like the groups discussed thus far, “trolling” is a tactic that is utilized by different parts of the manosphere, although it is not exclusive to it. Though trolling is not limited to men, studies have shown that men are more likely to engage in online trolling than women, and trolling behavior tends to be misogynistic in nature.
The term “trolling” came about in the 1980s or 1990s and has become a blanket term for many different forms of online harassment; it can include a range of actions from posting something intentionally inflammatory and invoking defensive responses to sending rape and death threats. “Troll,” Bates notes, is a euphemism that fails to convey the seriousness of this form of online harassment and the potential damage it can cause—it can cause psychological harm as well as dangerous real-life consequences.
Bates discusses Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign in 2014 and 2015 in which many of the tactics still in use by trolls today were developed. To target two women in the video game industry, independent developer Zoe Quinn and blogger Anita Sarkeesian, the abusers cloaked their harassment under the guise of an ideological “movement” over ethics in video games, thus justifying their harassment as “a form of moral self-defense” (160). Bates points out that this tactic is continually used by the manosphere and alt-right. Another tactic also emerged from Gamergate: “Brigading,” a form of mass coordinated harassment in which specific women are designated as targets and trolls then inundate them with an overwhelming volume of abuse in an attempt to threaten them into silence. Trolls also create “sock puppet” accounts (false online identities) in large numbers to give the appearance of widespread support for a certain cause. The scale of the harassment and threats during Gamergate forced Quinn and Sarkeesian to flee their homes.
Bates cites numerous examples of how trolls can act en masse to abuse women. Unfortunately, this abuse is often successful in its attempts to silence women in online spaces, effectively damaging or even ending their careers. She cites statistics detailing the scale of the issue, arguing that this has both a profound psychological impact and unfairly alienates women from online spaces. This issue is compounded for women of color and LGBTQ women, who face an even greater volume of harassment. Bates argues that this is a direct threat to women’s free speech. This harm extends offline as well, sometimes escalating to real-life harassment, physical harm, and murder.
Bates criticizes social media companies for allowing misogyny to thrive on their platforms under the banner of “free speech.” She notes that private companies like Facebook and Twitter (now X) already have rules regarding conduct, but sexism is not taken seriously as a form of hate speech. She also lambasts their lopsided efforts to protect women from abuse, with “ideal” victims (particularly high profile, white, privileged women) receiving an outpouring of sympathy and support while women of color, LGTBQ women, or women with disabilities receive far less attention. She also critiques the way that journalism and media exacerbate and facilitate this kind of harassment by picking up stories that are most likely to be inflammatory and attract trolls and attention.
Finally, Bates connects this online harassment to real-life acts of violence, such as the Christchurch Mosque shooting in New Zealand, which the attacker live streamed for online attention. She explores how this was an “extremely online” (187) attack; the shooter’s manifesto mixed his violent extremist beliefs with obscure internet memes and “shitposting,” another form of trolling. The attack was labeled as Islamophobic and white supremacist, but any references to the misogynistic nature of the shooter’s manifesto were met with criticism. Failing to acknowledge the sexism inherent in these attackers’ crimes, Bates argues, is to misunderstand the issue and to ignore the interconnectedness of these different forms of prejudice.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Men Who Hurt Women”
Chapter 6 focuses on how men inflict rampant physical and sexual abuse on women and how this has been normalized worldwide. Bates criticizes media portrayals of these crimes. She asserts that though people tend to consider manosphere communities separate from real-life men who stalk, harass, abuse, or murder women, these issues are in fact interwoven. The manosphere, Bates argues, is both a symptom of rampant misogynistic extremism and violence against women and “a furious backlash against attempts to reduce it” (196). Manosphere communities use tactics like harassment to outright violence to achieve the ultimate end goal of a white, heteronormative, patriarchal utopia.
Similarly, men who domestically abuse women do so in an attempt to establish male power and control over women. Bates likens domestic abuse to terrorism on an individual level, as both are attempts to exert power and control through fear and violence. She says that similarly, a significant number of mass murderers and terrorists have a history of domestic abuse, though this correlation has received little mainstream attention.
Bates notes that while the actions of many mass killers fall under the legal definitions of terrorism, they are seldom labeled as such; this is doubly true if the attacker is white. Media outlets tend to euphemize their actions and their indoctrination into extremist communities and beliefs, painting them as victims or citing mental health concerns. This is generally untrue for attackers from other demographics, like Islamic extremists, who are portrayed as unambiguous terrorists. This, Bates argues, indicates that society does not take misogynistic extremism seriously; it is desensitized to violence against women and is unaware of the true extent of the online male supremacy movements. She criticizes how the mainstream media sanitizes men’s (particularly white men’s) crimes, especially against women, and how it humanizes male murderers. This helps to normalize and even condone domestic abuse and leads to victim blaming for the abused. Even when men are explicit in their misogyny through their past actions or the manifestos they leave behind, media outlets try to look elsewhere for the cause of their actions.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Bates continues her exploration of The Spread of Misogynistic Ideals Through Online Communities by examining the phenomenon of online trolling. In Chapter 6, Bates demonstrates how hate speech frequently spills out of isolated manosphere forums and chat rooms and makes its way to mainstream social media, where it takes the form of targeted abuse against women. Most often, the perpetrators face few to no consequences. Bates argues that this online aggression toward women is evidence of how misogynistic ideas are increasingly tolerated in broader society.
Bates continues to lean on both personal experience and highly publicized cases to bring attention to the rampant abuse of women online, providing concrete and explicit examples of women who were subjects of relentless harassment. By using her direct engagement with trolls as examples, she challenges the idea that trolling is just harmless online banter, instead arguing that it is a dangerous, pervasive threat that has real-world implications. She details how this type of harassment can escalate from online vitriol to physical threats and violence, ultimately damaging or ending the careers of women who become targets. Her examination of the Gamergate campaign, where a vast network of misogynistic trolls targeted women in the gaming industry, shows how it set a precedent for coordinated online abuse. Bates says that this phenomenon has become too common in misogynistic online spaces.
Building on the theme of The Link Between Online Hate Speech and Real-Life Violence, Bates explores how trolling intersects with real-life violence, including mass shootings and domestic abuse. She challenges the notion that harassment is a form of free speech, which is a common defense of online hate speech; instead, Bates argues that it is a weaponized form of misogyny and connects it to mass violence. As an example, she analyses the link between online misogynistic trolling to the Christchurch Mosque shooting in New Zealand. The shooter, who livestreamed his attack, was deeply embedded in online hate spaces where misogyny was rampant. Bates argues that by focusing only on the Islamophobic and white supremacist elements of his manifesto and ignoring its misogynistic undertones, the media misses the crucial link between violent misogyny and mass acts of violence. Bates sees this as a clear example of how internet hate speech can directly lead to violent acts in the real world.
Bates’ exploration of domestic violence in Chapter 6 builds on this connection between online misogyny and real-life violence. She draws a comparison between domestic abuse and terrorism, asserting that both are tactics of control—terrorism on a public scale and while domestic violence operates on a private scale. She frames domestic violence as a “quiet, unacknowledged, everyday terrorism” (199), emphasizing that it is normalized and pervasive as a means of patriarchal control.
Bates critiques the media’s reluctance to label acts of domestic violence or mass shootings—particularly those committed by white men—as terrorism. By sanitizing and downplaying these violent acts, they normalize abuse, leading to victim-blaming and a general dismissal of misogyny as a serious issue. Thus, Bates challenges the false separation misogynistic extremism, online harassment, and violence, insisting that they are deeply interwoven and mutually reinforcing. The manosphere, she argues, is both a symptom and a perpetuator of this culture of violence—it amplifies and normalizes toxic views on masculinity while simultaneously pushing back against efforts to curb violence against women.
These chapters also begin to hint at Strategies for Combatting Online and Offline Misogyny. Bates criticizes social media companies, news outlets, and government agencies for failing to take the threat of misogynist extremism seriously. She notes the harmful tendency to overlook misogynistic motives behind notorious mass killings and argues that this perpetuates the normalization of misogyny. Thus, Bates argues that this evasion actively perpetuates harm, and she pushes for the recognition of misogyny as a dangerous problem.
Unlock all 57 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs