Men Who Hate Women author Laura Bates: ‘Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine how bad the backlash would be’

Last year, Laura Bates got on a horse, picked up a sword and learnt to fight as if her life depended on it. The writer, activist and leading light of feminism’s fourth wave was in Warwickshire taking lessons in mounted combat – along with sword fighting, she also learned to joust – as part of her research for her latest book The Sisters of Sword and Shadow. A work of feminist fiction set in the time of King Arthur, the book features a young heroine who is tutored in the ways of medieval knighthood.

“For someone who had never been on a horse in her life, it was an incredible feeling,” Bates recalls. “There was the feeling of empowerment that came from taking on a new skill, but also from the lessons I learnt as a woman about how to use your smaller stature to your advantage when fighting a man.” Owing to her decade-long campaign to end misogyny and sexism through the Everyday Sexism Project and beyond, Bates is grimly accustomed to fielding threats of violence from men – so much so that, following the publication of her 2020 book, Men Who Hate Women, an eye-opening exposé of organised online misogyny, the police installed a panic alarm in her house. Small wonder that Bates relished the chance “to feel physically powerful and to get all my pent-up anger and frustration out. I’d really recommend it.”

Today, 37-year-old Bates has a chest infection and has risen from her sick bed to talk to me over Zoom. When I offer to reschedule, she waves a hand dismissively and insists she will be fine. It is this indefatigable spirit that has helped carry her through 10 years of campaigning, both through her books – along with Men Who Hate Women, she is the author of 2014’s Everyday Sexism, 2018’s Misogynation and 2022’s Fix The System, Not The Women – and her work visiting schools and advising major organisations including the United Nations, the Council of Europe and a British parliamentary committee on how best to tackle gender discrimination.

First, though, there’s The Sisters of Sword and Shadow to discuss. An Arthurian adventure written for young adults, it follows the fortunes of teenager Cass, whose sister is about to get married and who is destined for her own arranged marriage. Cass is already mourning her impending loss of freedom and a life spent in domestic servitude when she meets a mysterious armour-clad woman on horseback. The woman introduces her to a sisterhood where women are trained to be knights, riding, fighting and jousting in a bid to protect their community from violent men.

Bates’s interest in Arthurian legend goes back to her days studying Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur as part of her degree in English Literature at Cambridge. “It’s such a rich universe filled with these characters who run the gamut of weakness, valour, moral fortitude and chivalry, but it’s all about the men,” she says. “It just feels like a world that is bursting with possibility for women. I love the idea of revisiting that world without the restrictions of women having to be either love interests or witches.”

For Bates, delving into her imagination and creating a medieval fantasy world has provided a delightful reprieve from the rigours of her non-fiction writing, which has variously required her to dig deep into organised misogyny, institutionalised sexism and female abuse. Nonetheless, she regards her forays into fiction (which also includes 2019’s The Burning, about a teenage girl whose boyfriend posts an intimate picture of her online) as an extension of her activism.

“It’s a different way to connect people to the same ideas,” she explains. “There are only so many young people you are going to reach with non-fiction. As a teenager, I wasn’t involved in feminism, or political movements, so all those ideas about social justice and challenging the status quo for me came from fiction. So I thought, ‘Hang on, there’s another way to connect to these girls who are going through so much and help them feel less alone.’ I want to challenge ideas about who they are and the limitations the world is putting on them.”

This desire to connect with other women, and to provide a safe space in which to talk about their experiences, is what led her to found the Everyday Sexism Project. Launched in 2012, it began as a website devoted to logging sexist abuse. Bates was starting out in a career as an actor at the time and “was turning up to auditions and being told to take my top off, or being sent casting breakdowns that had breast size as the entire description of a character”.

She was already near the end of her tether when, that week, she was followed home by a man who “wouldn’t take no for an answer”, and, a few days later, was sexually assaulted on a bus by another man. “I said what was happening out loud and nobody challenged him, and I felt so isolated and ashamed,” she recalls. And so she went online and asked for women to upload their stories of the microaggressions, the harassment and abusive behaviour that she termed “everyday sexism”.

Bates imagined she might collect around 50 stories: “It would just be something to point to next time I had one of those arguments with someone in denial about the problem to show that it really does exist.” In the event, more than 200,000 testimonials flooded in, turning it into the largest dataset of its kind and detailing everything from harassment in the workplace to groping on public transport to catcallers and kerb-crawlers.

Bates thought she was beyond being shocked about male behaviour, but that was before she read the entries from girls as young as 11 about the harassment and abuse they experienced walking to and from school. She was also taken aback by the extent of the victim-blaming. “The number of women who had been told [harassment] was their own fault, that they had behaved in a way that asked for it, or worn the wrong thing, or been out too late or in the wrong place. And they had internalised all of that.”

In 2014, Bates collated the entries into her first book, Everyday Sexism, putting them in a broader social, political and cultural context. If Caitlin Moran’s book How To Be a Woman was a fun-filled manual for female survival in the 21st century, Bates’s book was its more politicised sister, baldly laying out the facts of societal misogyny. To understand its impact, you only need observe how the phrase “everyday sexism” is now embedded in the vernacular when talking about gender inequality.

Bates says she is proud of all she has achieved and hails the “privilege and huge responsibility of being trusted with women’s stories”. Even so, she wasn’t prepared for how her activism would impact her on a personal level, to the extent that, when talking to interviewers, she is mindful not to divulge anything that might hint at where she lives, or about her personal relationships. “I just never dreamed of being in a situation where I can’t say anything about where I am and where, on a bad day, 200 men send me emails about how they want to disembowel me. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine how bad the backlash would be.”

It is 10 years since she wrote that first book, and still the threats keep coming. When I ask how she copes, she lets out a deep sigh and replies: “I think it impacts you a huge amount no matter how much you fight against it. You think about it every time the doorbell rings, you think about it every time you go outside and someone comes a bit too close. Every time you do an event that has been posted publicly, meaning people know where you’ll be in advance, you think about that picture of a gun someone has sent you and told you they’ll use and so then you’re scanning the crowd looking for someone with a hand in their pocket. When someone says, ‘I’m going to follow you and I’m going to murder and rape you and put it on the internet,’ it’s really, really hard not to let your mind play tricks on you.”

For Bates, the pushback against her campaigning has only got louder and more ferocious in the age of social media (she came off Twitter long ago, but she is still active on Instagram). Meanwhile, the rise of career misogynists such as Andrew Tate have emboldened these voices. Yet, while Bates is under no illusion about the task that lies ahead, she is cautiously hopeful for a better future based on her many conversations with young people “who are so fired up and so brave and passionate and politicised and fighting in so many creative ways”. While she sees boys picking up extremist ideas and becoming radicalised online, she sees just as many talking about and standing against those viewpoints and advocating for girls “in a way that just wasn’t the case a decade ago. There’s a lot to be worried about but there is a lot to feel encouraged about.”

When I tell Bates that, after a decade of activism, no one would blame her for scaling things back for a quieter life, she smiles and shakes her head. “While it is difficult and scary, you have to remember there are women around the world who are literally putting their lives on the line. I’m in a position of incredible privilege to still be able to use my voice and not be facing that kind of terror. More than anything, it’s not about me. It’s always been about raising our voices together and not letting that hatred silence us and shut us down. I’m quite bloody-minded so, having come this far, I’m not going to stop now.”

‘Sisters of Sword and Shadow’ by Laura Bates is published by Simon and Schuster on 9 November