The Next Frontier of Misogyny Is Already Here

We are standing on the edge of a precipice. While many people around the world have only recently become aware of the deeply concerning tide of misogynistic extremism suffusing online communities and websites globally (in part thanks to the powerful Netflix drama Adolescence), the reality is that the problem has been growing for some time, and the worst is yet to come.

We are not talking about a few lonely men in dark corners of the internet. In my 2023 book Men Who Hate Women, I charted how extreme misogyny had become so mainstream that the forums where men incite murder and rape, or encourage each other to carry out massacres of women and girls, have tens of thousands of members, with millions of visits per month. Again and again, men act in the real world after being radicalized into hatred by these online communities, and women and girls lose their lives. But we do not call it terrorism.

Teenage boys, who are not inherently misogynistic, do not have to go looking for this content: it comes to them. When boys aged 16 to 18 set up a new TikTok account, research has shown, it takes on average less than half an hour before the first piece of extreme misogynistic content is promoted into its feed. Indeed, reports have shown teachers and parents noting a disturbing rise in sexist language at home and in the classroom.

The sheer reach and therefore normalization of this hatred of women is staggering. On TikTok alone, videos of Andrew Tate, who has talked about gripping women by the neck and threatening them with machetes, as well as suggested they are responsible for their own rapes, have been viewed over 11 billion times. More than the number of people on the planet.

But this is old news. If you are shocked, you haven’t been paying attention. 

What we must pay attention to now is what’s coming next. Advances in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics and metaverses are about to transform our world at a scale and speed we struggle to grasp, because it has never before happened in human history. The rate of global investment in AI is skyrocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race.If these companies succeed, everything from our classrooms to our workplaces, our sexual partners to our finance and justice systems, are going to exist in a way that is substantially different from the world as we currently experience it. 

And if you think that social media has transformed our world: our politics, our media, our social lives, our professional networks, the impact will be a drop in the ocean compared to the tidal wave that is coming next. Imagine the kind of bias, discrimination, harassment and abuse that has become the wallpaper of social networks being baked into the foundations of every aspect of our society. Existing forms of inequality are not just re-embedded but strengthened and intensified and inextricably intertwined with almost every mechanism of our society you can imagine.

For many people, the idea of that world seems distant and obscure. They think of these concepts as science fiction – future technologies that do not really concern us yet. 

But the reality is that we are now living in the early stages of that new world. In researching my new book, The New Age of Sexism, I uncovered case after case where new technologies have been rolled out to public use, despite having been proven to regurgitate and intensify problems like racist and misogynistic bias.

Already, AI tools used to determine credit offers, healthcare access and court sentencing are in place across the world and have been proven to discriminate actively against women and minority communities. 

Already, many thousands of women have had intimate images and videos of themselves captured and shared across websites with millions of monthly views; they just might not know it yet. 

Already, schoolgirls are being driven out of the classroom by deepfake pornography created for free at the click of a button by their young male peers. Last year the nonprofit Thorn uncovered that 1 in 10 minors know someone who’s had a fake nude AI image created.Already, men are using generative AI to create ‘ideal’ companions – the women of their dreams, customized to every last detail, from breast size to eye colour to personality, only lacking the ability to say no. 

Already, women and girls’ lives are devastatingly impacted by the sheer spread and scale of misogyny across social media. Data from different regions points to a universal problem. A UN Women 2021 study in the Arab States region found that 60 percent of female internet users had been exposed to online violence. A 2020 study of five countries in sub-Saharan Africa found that 28 percent of women had experienced the same. Research suggests that women are twenty-seven times more likely than men to be harassed online and that Black women are 84 percent more likely to receive abuse than white women.

Now extrapolate that to a vastly wider range of applications and experiences, far beyond social media platforms. If women and marginalized communities have already learned, from their frequent mistreatment on social media, to self-censor, to withdraw, to mask, to disguise their real names and to mute their voices, all these coping mechanisms and restrictive norms will follow them when they step into new technological environments. Their experience will be interfaced by an entirely different perception of virtual worlds than the one many men have. And their contributions to those worlds will be limited and suppressed by the survival mechanisms already apparent in women’s online behaviour. Nearly nine in ten women say they restrict their online activity in some way as a result of online violence, with one in three saying they think twice before posting any content online and half saying the internet is not a safe place to share thoughts.

This is already apparent in our use and uptake of new technologies. For example, 71 per cent of men aged 18–24 utilize artificial intelligence (AI) weekly, while only 59 per cent of women within the corresponding age range do the same.

But this isn’t a tech problem, not really. It’s a misogyny problem. It’s a racism problem. It’s a societal problem, exacerbated by politicians who are prepared to support a handful of tech billionaires by actively blocking ethical, common-sense regulatory efforts in a headlong rush for profits and global domination.

And unless we act now, the most vulnerable will, as always, pay the highest price.