Laura Bates, 38, should need no introduction to followers of this blog. She founded the Everyday Sexism Project (the Everyday Whining Project) in 2012. She won our Lying Feminist of the Month award twice in the space of a few months. She lied to Jeremy Vine on his BBC2 radio show (7.5 million listeners) in 2013, when we were both interviewed soon after we launched J4MB as a political party in 2013. She libelled a number of MRAs (including myself) in Men Who Hate Women, and made the laughable claim in that book that she turned up to a men’s issues conference in London.
She clearly has an anxiety disorder, and it’s become markedly worse over time. In today’s Times (£) there’s a long interview with her, Laura Bates: ‘I’ll get 200 rape and death threats on a bad day’. The male “journalist” is utterly uncritical of her throughout, treating her like an anxious child whose every utterance must be regarded as truthful, and the readers’ comments are virtually all supportive of her.
In her new book The New Age of Sexism, she claims to have presented herself as an avatar in cyberspace, where she is “groped and abused in virtual reality” (but not, of course, in reality – a foreign land to her?) Then this: “Posing as a man, she commands her smartphone to summon into semi-existence an 18-year-old AI girlfriend who is up for being sexually abused.” Semi-existence? What the hell is that? Non-existence with bells on?
It would be hard to create narratives more likely to make women (already prone to irrational levels of anxiety) believe that men are depraved and sadistic monsters, that men hate women and wish to harm them, when the age-old reality is that men are the great protectors of women and children, and their absence from the family leads to a range of problems. Also, something you’ll never find Bates admitting, something she’d probably find quite impossible to believe, women are more likely to be abused by a female partner than by a male partner.
Feminists are, of course, the only people who seek to exploit women’s anxiety for personal gain, most obviously seen in their rape and domestic abuse industries, through spreading lies about the issues. But I think Bates may be a curious exception, although she has spread lies about issues and has surely profited mightily from her book deals, personal appearances etc. She seems to genuinely believes her own rhetoric, and those who owe her a duty of care – such as her New York-based publisher Simon & Schuster – instead cynically exploit her.
I am convinced that Bates is, psychologically, a frightened girl trapped in a woman’s body. She’s a classic example of female “failure to launch” as an adult. I fear that she will come to a point where her sense of victimhood and hysteria become so overwhelming that she considers suicide (if she hasn’t already). She needs psychological help NOW and should have had it many years ago, for the sake of not only herself but also other women (and men).
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