Laura Bates

Who she is

Laura Bates is an English writer and campaigner, born in 1986, who founded the Everyday Sexism Project in April 2012. ^[1] The project is a public archive where women record incidents of sexism they encounter in daily life; it had gathered 100,000 entries within three years and now operates branches in roughly 25 countries. ^[2] That archive made her one of Britain's most visible feminist voices: she received the British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in 2015 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. ^{[1] [6]}

She is on this site for one book. Men Who Hate Women, published by Simon & Schuster in 2020, is the most widely read journalistic account of the manosphere, and much of the mainstream vocabulary now used to discuss incels, pick-up artists and MGTOW reached general readers through it. ^[4]

The undercover investigation

Bates researched the book from the inside. She has described creating a fictional male persona, a young man she called "Alex," and using that identity to spend time in MGTOW, pick-up-artist and incel communities, watching how they talked to and recruited men like the one she was pretending to be. ^[5] Her own author page describes the result as an undercover investigation into the world of incels. ^[6]

Her account of what she found is concrete rather than abstract. In an extract published in The Irish Times, she reported that the main MGTOW website had nearly 33,000 members and over 790,000 forum replies, with associated video channels claiming more than 730,000 followers and 130 million views; she described the movement's internal "levels" of separation from women, up to adherents known as "ghosts" who withdraw from society altogether; and she traced how ideas born on those forums surface in ordinary workplaces, citing a 2019 study in which 27 per cent of American men said they avoided one-on-one meetings with female colleagues. ^[3] That last move is her signature argument: the manosphere is not a sealed container, and its assumptions leak into mainstream life.

What the work cost

Describing the threats around Bates's work requires no embellishment, because she has stated them plainly herself. In interviews she has said she receives rape threats and death threats, at times a few hundred messages a day, a pattern that long predates the book. ^[5] After Men Who Hate Women was published, she reported receiving deepfake pornographic images depicting her. ^[1] This page records those facts from her own published accounts and does not attribute them to any named individual or group.

Where she stands in the debate

Bates writes as a campaigner, and her framing is explicit in her subtitle: she treats organised online misogyny as extremism, and the book's reception in outlets such as The Guardian and NPR reflected that framing. ^[4] Readers should understand that this is one pole of a live debate documented across this site. Researchers such as William Costello argue from survey data that incel communities are better understood primarily as a mental-health population than a terror threat, while academics such as Debbie Ging and Lisa Sugiura sit closer to Bates in treating the manosphere as a misogynist radicalisation problem. Bates's contribution is not a dataset; it is first-hand documentation of what these communities say to the men inside them, gathered at personal risk and published under her own name.