Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S2 Ep16: Bookshelfie: Laura Bates

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

In this episode Zing Tsjeng is joined by Laura Bates - a writer and the founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-expanding collection of more than 100,000 testimonies of gender inequality, which has been described as “one of the biggest social media success stories on the internet”. Laura’s first book Everyday Sexism was published in 2014. Her latest book, Men Who Hate Women is out on September 3rd. Laura works with schools, universities and politicians to tackle gender inequality and has won multiple awards and accolades for her work. Laura's book choices are: The Last Slice of Rainbow by Joan Aiken  Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman  The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman How To Be Both by Ali Smith Circe by Madeleine Miller Every fortnight, join Zing Tsjeng, editor at VICE, and inspirational guests, including Dolly Alderton, Stanley Tucci, Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis as they celebrate the best fiction written by women. They'll discuss the diverse back-catalogue of Women’s Prize-winning books spanning a generation, explore the life-changing books that sit on other women’s bookshelves and talk about what the future holds for women writing today. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and this series will also take you behind the scenes throughout 2020 as we explore the history of the Prize in its 25th year and gain unique access to the shortlisted authors and the 2020 Prize winner. Sit back and enjoy. This podcast is produced by Bird Lime Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices, and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh, your host for Season 2 of the Women's Prize podcast, coming to you every fortnight throughout 2020. You've joined me for a bookshelfy episode in which we ask an inspiring woman to share the story of her life through five brilliant books by women. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Bookshelfy. We are still practicing social distancing, so this episode is being recorded remotely. Joining me today is Laura Bates, a writer and the founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-expanding collection of over 100,000 testimonies of gender inequality, which has been described as one of the biggest social media success stories on the internet. Laura's first book, Everyday Sexism, was published in 2014,

and her latest book, Men Who Hate Women, is out on September 3rd. Laura works of schools, universities and politicians to tackle gender inequality and has won multiple awards and accolades for her work. Welcome, Laura. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, thanks for coming on the podcast and, you know, sharing your amazing selection of books, of which I am a really big fan. I really like your choices.

And there's also a couple that I've just never heard of, so I'm really excited to hear more about them. Oh, fantastic. Were you always a big reader? I was particularly as a child. I read absolutely voraciously throughout my childhood. I had some teachers when I was really little who really encouraged me to explore books

and kind of would bring in books that they thought that I would like and the impact that that's had on my life has been absolutely massive. But I think after having done an English literature degree, I had a period where I stopped reading for a while, which I think is quite common. I know a lot of people who say the same thing that you kind of almost get overload and I had a kind of break from reading

and then came back to it. So I had a, yeah, but apart from that, I've always read voraciously throughout my life. I know that, you know, before starting everyday sexism, you were working as an actress and a nanny. So you must have been reading plays as well. Yeah, absolutely everything. and seeing a lot of theatre as well.

I love the strangeness of how plays are so different scene performed versus read. It's such an interesting art form because it's kind of both a book and not a book. It's literature and not literature. But also just any kind of scripts as well, many of them, sadly, extremely sexist, which was part of what led me from that career to sort of jump into what I'm doing now. You would just get these character breakdowns. My boyfriend at the time was an actor as well, and he would get these long detailed breakdowns

about descriptions of the character that would be all these flowery descriptions of their motivation and their past and what had happened to them. And I genuinely had real-life character breakdowns that were as short as 32D full stop. Really? Genuinely, that was a real life.

That was the only thing that mattered about that character and the woman playing her. Well, they would be just these incredible convoluted, um, inconsistent descriptors of women. You know, I had one, again, a real example. She's a vixen, but she's virginal. Um, or, or, um, she's naive but fuckable. Or just these incredible kind of things that would make you wonder

whether the people writing these female characters had ever actually met a woman in real life. And were they scripts that were written by men or, you know, were women also putting in these horrendous displays of character descriptions? I think women certainly weren't immune, but it was kind of reflective of the broader industry, which was certainly very male-dominated. And it was definitely my kind of the experiences I look back on that stand out the most in kind of horrifying casting situations,

certainly involved male casting directors. There was one man who put me in another actress in a room together and made us mine playing tennis. but on each hit of the ball challenged us each to make increasingly sort of hysterical orgasm noises. That was a real genuine interview audition situation I was put in as part of my job. Or there was another man I remember really vividly who had me in for an audition. And the moment before I went into the room, put his hand on my shoulder and said, we've decided to sex it up a bit and now you're taking your top off.

What? It wasn't, you know, could you think about this? we'd like to discuss this privately, would you feel comfortable? It was completely just assumed. And the thing that really got me was it wasn't some kind of sweeping epic drama, you know, some beautiful romantic novel that would require such a love scene. It was an IKEA wardrobe advert. That was what they needed a topless woman for at the time.

Oh, my God. I can't, I can't, that really just boggles the mind. I mean, it's actually incredible to think that there could be a job interview situation in which you would be called on to fake an orgasm or take your clothes off. Yeah, it's an industry that still has many challenges, I think. It would be fair to say. Well, parking, acting in the industry aside for a second. I wanted to talk about book one, your first choice for the Women's Prize podcast,

which is one of the books that I've not heard of before. It's The Last Slice of Rainbow by Joan Aiken. Yes. What was this book about? It's a beautiful book. It's a book of stories for children. And Joan Aiken is better known for her novels, I think, things like the wolves of Willoughby Chase or the Whispering Mountain, which I also loved. But she had these beautiful books of short stories for slightly younger children. And there was one called A Necklace of Rainsrops, which I think is also more famous.

But this collection, the last light of rainbow, it's quite strange. It's quite dark and kind of gothic and really grotesque in places. And I think that's why, out of all... the books I read as a child, this one just really stays with me. And there are feelings of reading it that come back to me now. And I remember the stories. I remember exactly how they made me feel as a child. And it's a kind of mixture of excitement and horror and fascination. I think the reason for that is because she wrote in this really different way. She had this belief, I think, that children shouldn't be patronised.

And she didn't believe that children couldn't deal with huge, complex, naughty ideas. So this particular collection, for example, there's one story which always gripped me perhaps more than any other. And it's about a girl who's, she does something wrong. And she's cursed to having every hair on her head come to life and scream at her, but nobody else can hear them. And they scream insults and they undermine her. criticize her and everything she does, they second guess her and they goad her. And she has to

practice this incredible self-restraint to try and live her life with these voices screaming at her. And at the time, I was just fascinated by this story. And looking back, I wonder if there's a metaphor in there for mental health, but also for a life as girls and as women, full of the kind of screaming voices of the world around us. telling us about our own inadequacies, about the perceived imperfections of our bodies. There's so much in that story. I'm looking back. It's just, but it was so kind of horrifying and it transfixed me.

Even just listening to that story, it's such a deep metaphor for as well, you know, how those kind of screaming voices are external, but then eventually you just internalize them and they just become a part of you. Oh, God, yeah, absolutely. It's, yeah. And there are other stories as well. There's one about a boy who has to carry butterflies in his mouth. He's trying to rescue them from drowning.

And just the way that she describes, her description, I think, is just outstanding. There's a story where she talks about a boy's heart in his chest like a lark in a biscuit tin. That's very typical of her description, I think, something that's completely comprehensible as a child. You can immediately imagine the lark in the biscuit tin, but it's also just beautifully evocative and just so effective. So, yeah, her writing left a really big impression on me, I think. And how old were you when you read the book? I think I was probably very young. Perhaps, I don't know, maybe eight or nine.

It was definitely one of the early books on our bookshelves. And it obviously just had a huge impact on me because I remembered it to this day. And as soon as I knew I was coming on to talk to you and I was thinking, what really kind of evocative books from my childhood do I remember this one, immediately jumped out. although I couldn't remember what it was called actually and I spent hours trawling the internet typing boy, butterflies, mouse,

girls screaming hair and discovered that there are delightful, huge communities of people online specifically designed to help you remember the name of childhood books that you've forgotten. It's actually an incredible experience. I really recommend it for anyone who has sort of had a sort of half-remembered childhood book

that they'd like to find. There's actually lots of brilliant communities out there dedicated to share these sorts of recollections. That's amazing. It really reminds me of, you know, you can sometimes grow up remembering such a clear memory of reading a book or watching a film. And then when you grow up, you're like, did I even watch that or read that?

Did I just make that up as a child? Yeah, that's so true. Or you have a really clear recollection of something. And when you go back to it, it was completely different. And you think, what was I thinking? How did I misinterpret that? It sounds like you were a very imaginative child as well. Yes, I think I'd probably.

probably was. So the second book that you picked was Nots and Crosses by Mallory Blackman. Yes, and I just adored Mallory Blackman. I read everything that she wrote. So this was when I was older. As a teenager, Mallory Blackman was my favorite author. And I just, all of her books, Thief and Pickhart Boy and Hacker, she wrote so brilliantly and her stories were so gripping and powerful.

I would go to the library and then I'd go straight home and I wouldn't stop. I'd have to just read into the night with a torch underneath my covers until I'd finish them. But Nauts and Crosses, I think, made a really lasting impression on me because I think it was one of the first books I read that really effectively used fiction to examine, you know, a kind of social justice to examine a real life inequality. And it's such a powerful way. And it's something that's really stayed with me. And especially later on when I felt that that was.

was something that I might try and do myself when I started working with everyday sexism, and it led me into schools because so many of the thousands and thousands of stories that we received were from young people. And I started to realize that actually, for many of them, they weren't necessarily reading nonfiction books. They didn't necessarily know what the word feminism meant. But I remembered from my own adolescent this experience of this learning and exploration through fiction, and I wanted to see if it was possible to kind of replicate that. So for people who haven't read Knots and Crosses, would you mind giving a kind of brief synopsis of what it talks about?

Yeah, so it's very much a book about race and about power and about inequality, but the way that the story deals with it is to imagine a world in which there is an enormous racial inequality as in our world, but in which in this particular scenario, everything has been flipped. So there is a kind of ruling elite, if you like, of the crosses who are black and a kind of unequal society of downtrodden white people called Nauts. And I noticed that you're kind of doing a similar thing with your YAA book, The Burning, where you talk about, you know, revenge porn and 17th century witch hunts. It's almost like you're flipping the kind of realities and like crossing timelines

in the same way that Nots and Crosses does. Well, perhaps. I definitely wanted to try and use stories to explore inequality. I think the thing that Mallory Blackman does so brilliantly is that she doesn't tell you what to think. She doesn't sit down and say, right, you know, we're going to talk about racism. She makes it possible for the reader to come to those realizations about injustice themselves. And that was definitely something I aspired to. Certainly don't think I achieve anything like her masterpiece.

but that was certainly the idea to try and find a way to help readers to explore their own experiences because I knew that revenge porn was so incredibly common. But the narrative surrounding it at so many of the schools that I visited was just so flawed because the girl who is often the victim of coercion and harassment and abuse, as soon as these photographs are shared, becomes the villain of the piece. She becomes the slug or the slag or the whore. the boys in question almost always emerge unscathed or lorded as kind of players and lads and studs. And so many girls I've seen have ended up actually leaving school altogether,

massive implications for their education. Because of the way this story is told, because of this narrative, which is so powerful that the woman is the one who has done a terrible thing, who's committed a crime. And I wanted to find a way to straighten that narrative out, to tell that story differently, because the prevailing narrative, I think, is just so messed up. And when you started everyday sexism in 2012, did you expect to get this much of a response from, you know, people in school? No, I really thought, naively, I think, well, I didn't expect to get as much of a response as we got full stop.

I thought that maybe 50 people would share their stories and we'd be able to point to that and say, look, you know, this really is a problem. And in reality, we heard from hundreds of thousands of people. but I certainly anticipated, I think, hearing from adult women in workplaces and relationships. And the reality was that a huge proportion of the stories we received are from girls as young as eight or nine, who were being shouted at in the street by men, you know, so sexually aggressively that they perhaps didn't even understand what was being said to them, or girls who were 14 and 15 who were being sexually assaulted at school and being told boys will be boys, or, you know, it's your fault for wearing a short skirt.

It really opened my eyes to the scale of the problem. And I think I hadn't anticipated just how young it started and how bad it was for girls. It must have been almost quite overwhelming to receive this many responses. It was, especially at the beginning, because it was so unexpected. And to read these stories which are, of course, so powerful, but also so horrifying. And I think for me there was then a real sense. of a burden of responsibility with that.

So many of these stories had never been told before. I heard from a woman, for example, who wrote me a typewritten letter. She was in her 80s, and she wrote a typewritten letter that said, it began with something like, there are too many examples to count, but here are some highlights arranged by decade.

And there was this sense of what do I do now, suddenly, unexpectedly, I have these very precious stories that people have trusted me with, and I felt very strongly that I wanted to find a way to try and use them in a way that honored the people who had been courageous enough to share them, but also that tried to give them a real purpose. We could try and use them in a way that would prevent other people

from going through the same thing, then that would provide some kind of catharsis. So I started taking the stories and splitting them off into specific sections, So I took the stories that had come from girls into schools to talk to young people about healthy relationships and consent. And I took the stories that we'd received from specific sectors into workplaces that were where it was relevant. So I'd take the stories from women in law into legal firms and talk about the specifics of the problem there. Or we used one of the best things we did, I think, was to use about 2,000 of the stories that had come just from women on public transport. to the British Transport Police,

who were looking specifically at sexual offences on the transport network. They knew that 95% of sexual offences went unreported. So they had the power to stop it, but they didn't really have the details of what the problem was. And we had all the details,

and none of the power to stop it. So to put those two things together was very satisfying. And these women's stories then, in their own words, were explicitly used as part of the retraining for about 2,000 British Transport Police officers. and it had a really big effect.

It raised the reporting of sexual offences and the detection of offenders by almost a third. So I think that is such a testament to the power of stories and the power that they can have to make change. That's amazing. So were you always kind of welcome in these places of work or these schools? You know, what kind of response would you receive from people?

It's been extraordinarily varied. I was on my way to give a talk at a big city firm once and a man saw me looking at the map on my phone trying to work out which building I needed and said oh I'm walking that way where it asked me where I was going and offered to show me the way and we were having a really lovely chat until he asked me what I was going in to talk about and I mentioned it was about you know quality and diversity he actually crossed the street to get away from me and shouted oh for Christ's sake we've got to have some fun it's fair to say that there can be resistance certainly i've spoken in schools where the boys have

been told in advance that i'm coming in and they've organized themselves in advance so that when i walk out onto the assembly hall stage all the hundreds of boys started wolf whistling in unison i went to one school where they'd had a sexting case and the head teacher and the senior leadership team had chosen to deal with it by suspending the the girl's the victim punishing her. And they'd then explicitly forbidden the teachers from talking to the pupils about the case at all. They very much wanted to sweep it under the carpet.

You know, don't let parents think that we have a problem, reputational damage above pupil, well-being, is how I would characterize it anyway. And there was a group of young female feminist teachers at the school who just were absolutely horrified by this and desperately wanted to give the students an opportunity to talk about what was going on. So they smuggled me into the school.

They put down this talk. They had these talks for year groups on certain days of the week. And they said that this one was a driver's, driver's edge type talk. And then smuggled me in. So it's really mixed. And the responses are mixed as well. But I think having the conversation is the most important place to start. If we're not talking about it, then we can't get anywhere.

And yes, there's resistance. But actually, particularly with boys, A lot of the resistance, I think, comes from a place of misconception, you know, about what feminism is, about what it believes, about the idea that to talk about sexism, we must be blaming boys, that to talk about women's equality, we must be taking something away from men. And if you're prepared to be open and patient and just have those conversations with them, the nice thing is that there really is an answer to all of their questions and then often you can really move forward. I think also it's a really powerful testament to just being open and being willing to have the conversation. Do you think it's harder now to kind of open that dialogue and have people take it on good faith that you're engaging with them as opposed to trying to shout them down? Because I think that's what people say a lot about when you try and engage with people who have different opinions on social media, that it's a completely bad faith argument and you shouldn't be engaging with these people at all. Yes, I think it's getting harder because I think that we are. becoming more polarised as a society and I think that there's a lot of bad faith mischaracterisation

of the different sides of an argument going on very deliberately. In fact, in the last couple of years, I started to notice that in schools in particularly, the boys who had come perhaps, you know, mistrustfully but prepared to talk before were starting to arrive sort of pre-prepared at sessions and to the extent that they would come with notebooks sometimes with their arguments written down and they would be sort of almost glazed over and they really weren't prepared to listen because they came already believing that feminism is cancer, that women hate men, that the gender pay gap is a myth, that false rape accusations are more common than real reports of rape. And it was really strange and it made

it almost impossible to have a conversation because they were so radicalized is the word really. And actually, as I looked into it and I started talking to them and asking them, where they got these ideas, I started to realize that in schools across the country, you know, from inner city London to rural Scotland, boys were not only coming out with these same ideas, but they were using the same exact words and phrases or the same fake statistics to back them up. And I started to realize that there was something really sinister going on and looking into it further, realized that these boys are being very deliberately radicalized online by men from various, very extreme online communities, places like in cells, like pick-up artists,

like men's rights activists. And this is what I've spent the last two years researching for my new book for men who hate women, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was a form of radicalisation, this was a form of grooming that had made these boys utterly unreachable. They weren't prepared to listen. but it was almost completely under the radar. When we talk about grooming or about radicalisation, we're talking about other things. If you look at the prevent strategy, which is so overzealously focused on Islamic extremism

that we've seen a young boy questioned by police because he misspelled the word terrorist and wrote that he lived in a terrorist house by mistake. We are so overzealous about preventing young people from those forms, of radicalisation and extremism, but the prevent strategy guidelines don't mention gender at all. So this other kind of grooming was happening completely under the radar. I mean, it sounds like exhausting work as well, which is why I'm not surprised you are a big reader of fiction, just to have a break from all of this. Yes, definitely. I think fiction is absolutely escapism as well.

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Now that's our idea of living summer best. So the third book that you've picked is The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman. Yes, oh, I cannot recommend this book enough. And actually, talking of escapism, this book, although it deals with some very, very heavy issues, is beautifully escapist because it's written. The entire book is written in an in an in an, invented language all the way through every word to the extent that when you read the first page, you almost think, what am I reading? What is this? I can't read this book because I don't know

this language. And then it does this beautifully clever thing where you persevere and within perhaps the first 20 pages, you suddenly know the language and you're able to understand it and it becomes like poetry. It's difficult to describe without experiencing it yourself. It's set in a a kind of apocalyptic future world where a mysterious disease kills all adults when they reach the age of sort of anywhere between about 18 and 23. And so the world is ruled by kind of gangs of roaming young people. But the language that they've sort of created for themselves is just it's absolute poetry. It's just beautiful. It's so beautifully written. And because of the fact that you are sort of slightly deciphering it as you go along. It's extremely, the book just

swallows you. It's brilliant escapism because you can't focus on anything else. It's extremely absorbing. And I know you read it for your role as a judge for the women's prize as well. I did, which I absolutely loved and was just one of the best experiences I've ever had. And this book was on my list. We apportioned the books out in the very first stage. So I got to champion it and wax lyrical about it and it ended up on the long list. It didn't make it to the short list, sadly, but I just, I absolutely love it

and can't recommend it enough. It's beautiful. Did you think that it kind of talked in a teenage dialect convincingly? I feel like you're probably the person that I've met who has probably met the most number of teenagers outside of teachers now.

Yes, but it isn't really a teenage dialect in the way that it's written. It's almost just another language. It's very, I suppose it is kind of, of course they are, they are teenagers, but that's not what strikes you about it. It's not in any way dumbed down or simplified. It's almost made, the language is made more beautiful. It's incredible feat. How on earth Sandra Newman, the writer, did it.

I can't imagine, I'd love to ask her whether she invented the language first and then wrote the book or whether the language kind of developed as she wrote the book. But yes, it's completely convincing, which is an incredibly difficult feat, I think, for an entirely invented language. But it doesn't jar. There's never a false note. I really like how a lot of your picks on this list are almost science fiction or fantasy,

which are both genres that I absolutely love. Yeah, that's true. It hadn't really occurred to me, actually. My first introduction to that genre was reading Slaught House 5. And I was perhaps, I suppose, 14. I think it was for GCSE and just absolutely falling in love with it. But I think I'm attracted to books within those genres that still, I think, have some kind of tethering to our own world as well.

Have you ever considered writing a sci-fi novel about sexism? You're making me think about it now. I mean, one of the best ones that I read for the Women's Prize podcast actually was the power. Yes, of course. which I think is sort of the gold standard of how you might approach a science fiction book in a feminist way. So Naomi Odomin just brilliantly, I guess does what sexism, what Notting Crossers does for racism and that she flips the power dynamic to show you just how ridiculous that a hierarchy even is. Absolutely, yes, and so skillfully as well.

Because I think something like that could also be done very badly. any of these any of these things I think where fiction takes on injustice story and and narrative have to come first otherwise the whole thing is a failure it can't be about hitting you over the head with it it can't be too obvious it can't be about telling you what to think because then what's the point would you be interested in writing more fiction yes absolutely in fact I'm I'm working on a my next YAA novel at the moment, which tries to answer the question of what on earth happens when you bring up a generation of teenage girls in an America where they quite clearly and uncategorically

can look around them and see that if you're accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, you can become the president. And if a woman comes forward and goes through the trauma of detailing her own abuse before the whole world, the person that she accuses will go on to become a judge on the Supreme Court, or if a boy is found guilty of raping a unconscious young woman, then we'll talk about his promising swimming career and give him great leniency. What on earth happens when you bring up a generation of young women in a world where you tell them that that is the response to anything that happens to them? And what if they decide to take matters into their own hands?

Interesting. So how far long is it? Because now I'm intrigued and I want to read it. it's quite close to the finishing the first draft. I think it will be published next year. So your fourth book that you've picked is How to Be Both by Ali Smith. Yes, which won the women's prize the year that I was judging, which I was absolutely delighted by.

And this book is just, I mean, how do you even describe this book? It does so, so much. In a single book, it bends time. It blends poetry and prose. it explores everything from grief to gender identity to human trafficking to historical legacy. I think it's just one of the most phenomenal books I've ever read. I also think that any time I see anyone try to describe this book, they make it sound a bit daunting. And for me, it's also accessible.

And I think that's really important. So for the people who might not know what this book is about, you know, is there kind of a brief synopsis you could offer? It's quite a challenging question about this one. It's a book that tells two stories. And the way that it was printed, the two stories are you don't know which story you'll get first. So half the book in some copies, half of the book comes first,

and then the second story comes second, and in other copies there the other way round. One story is a story of a teenage girl called George, living in Cambridge in the 1960s, and coping with the recent loss of her mother. And the other story is about an Italian Renaissance artist in the 1460s, dealing with issues that I don't want to give any spoilers, but it deals with issues about gender identity, particularly,

and kind of legacy and who gets to make art and who gets to decide what great art is. And yeah, the two stories, beautiful. complement each other and they inform each other and they change each other. So it's a kind of replication of the fresco painting method, but in literary form. But again, that makes it sound kind of technical and scary, which it isn't, I don't think. And when you were judging the women's prize, what was that experience like? Oh, it was incredible. I mean, it really was one of the best things I've ever been lucky enough to do, both because of the experience of the privilege of

reading so many wonderful, wonderful books by women, but also because of the experience of the judging, which was such a joy. And it was interestingly, it was the only thing I've ever judged where it was just all women in the room. And I have to say, it did absolutely transform the experience of a judging process, because it was so, it was generous, it was collaborative, um, People were prepared to change their minds. People changed one another's minds. It was very passionate, but it was also very safe. It was just absolutely brilliant.

It was kind of like being involved in the most amazing book club, but sort of on steroids because you're reading hundreds of books instead of just one a month. When you started everyday sexism, would you have guessed that this would be kind of where your career would take you, where the project would lead you to you? No, I never could have dreamed. that any of this would have happened and I've been so incredibly lucky and actually really truly none of these things would have happened to me without the support of other women so much of my

career in the way it's developed has been because other women have seen what I was doing and have reached out and supported me you know my my incredible agent abbey Bergstrom who at the time was at Simon Schuster as an editor who reached out to me and said have you thought about writing a book about this. And it never had crossed my mind and probably never would have done if she hadn't. And women who really championed me and the books and the project in such generous ways. And it's been really life-changing, of course. Like that group of feminist teachers who smuggled you as a driving instructor. Exactly. Or the group of women who just reached out to me when they first saw that the project was

receiving a slew of abuse online, which of course is sadly very predictable and said, we've been here before. We will walk you through this. You're not on your own. I think that's just incredible and just makes such a difference. Do you think that it's kind of changed from then? Do you think women get less abuse or more abuse online? I certainly don't think it's lessened. I think that I like to hope that this is a teething problem. The internet is still relatively in its infancy. And at the moment, what we're seeing, of course, is a symptom of a wider issue in our society.

It's not really an internet issue at all. But certainly, and that will be much harder to crack, its roots in our society, but certainly in terms of how it manifests itself on the internet, at the moment, there is just lawlessness. There's a lot going on which is illegal. It's already illegal. to threaten to rape or kill somebody online just as it will be in real life.

But unfortunately, that is what many men are doing with impunity at the moment on a daily basis. And, you know, it is far, far worse if you're a woman of color. If you're a trans woman online, then you're receiving this so much, so much amplified. And you get the intersectional nature of that abuse. And you're also far less likely to see any kind of support for it. So I think at the moment, our ways of dealing with it are deeply flawed. and particularly social media companies completely unsatisfactory and their handling of it.

They like to pay lip service to the problem. They like to kind of suggest that this is so huge and, you know, how could anybody really tackle it? They don't really take action until a journalist gets in touch saying we're writing a story about abuse against Taylor Swift or X insert the name of another usually very privileged young white woman. And then they go, oh, no, no, no, in this case, and they want to give a good quote to the press.

So they take action and protect that one particular privileged white woman. But because the systemic nature of the problem doesn't get tackled, it means that the way that they're dealing with it kind of just helps to further marginalise people whose voices are already missing from the conversation. I think it's a real problem. And what do you think needs to be done about the situation? Like in an ideal world, if, you know, Twitter and Facebook and, you know, every single media company, social media company in the world handed over the reins to you,

What's the first thing you would do? The first thing I would do would be to hire thousands and thousands of human moderators and to train them using and paying civil society groups, particularly for marginalised communities and those most likely to face online abuse, to train them to recognise and deal with online abuse on the platforms. And the idea that that's not something that's possible is completely absurd. These companies, some of them are making more money than the income of a small country. You know, they say, you know, they say, oh, but it's really.

difficult because algorithms are flawed and we're trying to algorithmically deal with this. Well, yeah, so hire 10,000 human moderators and do it properly. You've got the money. But instead, it's just the individual women who end up being these kind of canaries in the coal mines. And you've got someone like Leslie Jones and the horrific racist and misogynistic abuse that she faced. And it took her going through what I imagine must have been an utterly traumatic and perhaps life-changing experience that I I think a few of us can imagine what that must have felt like to have thousands and thousands of men sending her pictures of horrific racist memes, pictures of her own face covered in their semen. You know, that's what it took for Twitter to take action against specific hate figures who'd been using the platform for years to incite that kind of pile on. It's the wrong way around.

It shouldn't be that victims are having to go through that in order for things to be done when these companies know, what the problem is and they do have the money and the power to fix it or certainly to make great strides if they wanted to. Are there any like, you know, bright sides of, you know, the work that you've done, you've clearly achieved so much a relatively young age? Well, I think for me the thing that completely makes it worthwhile and doable is the success stories or success stories isn't the right word really. The stories we receive from people that are very different in tone from what we were getting when in the project first started. there was a woman who said that she often went running

and she was used to being harassed and abused and then there was this day she went running and she had been reading the stories on the everyday sexism project from other women experiencing similar things and on this particular it was a November evening it was cold and dark and a man slowed down in his car and wound down the window and called her over and asked for directions and she went to help him and he leaned out of the window

and grabbed her breasts with both hands and really hurt her as well as terrifying her. And she said she felt all the usual emotions that she would feel in that situation, anger and shame and embarrassment and fear and the urge to run. But she also felt something she'd never felt before and it was the sense that thousands of other women

was standing alongside her and it gave her the strength just to stop for a moment and write down the car number plate and that the man was later charged with assault. Those kinds of stories, I think, make a difference, certainly. that's amazing. I mean, that's an incredible thing to, especially I feel like if you are the subject of abuse yourself, to know that you can just go back to everyday sex and think, well, the project that I've done has actually changed people's lives and gotten people convicted as well, rightfully. So,

that's got to feel pretty good. It definitely helps, certainly. So for your fifth book, you picked Madeline Miller's book, Circey. which is a book I also love. I actually just finished one of her previous books. What did you like about Circe? Well, actually, it's very relevant to what we've just been talking about because to me, Circe was real escapism. It was while I was writing this book,

Men Who Hate Women, where I was kind of willingly immersing myself in these online extremist communities, which was a really difficult thing to do and uncomfortable, that I was reading Circe. found it like a barn. I'd emerged from these days that I'd spent in sort of wading through hatred and bile online to Miller's writing, which is just absolutely, it's just beautiful and it's clear

and it's soothing. And I had loved her first book, The Song of Achilles. But what I just loved about Circe was the way that she took a character who really is a very marginal, minor player in classical mythology. And she gives her this sort of complex personality and this whole full life and agency and space. I think what I loved about it was that she gives Circe who is, she's a nymph, she's a witch. And she ends up being exiled from her home. And she spends a great deal of her life living alone on an island.

but sort of glorying and learning and understanding her innate power and harnessing it and becoming increasingly powerful. But she mingles the kind of grandiose elements of classical mythology like magic and power and monsters with some very kind of almost mundane realities of what it is to be a woman. So she has, she, for example, is a single mother. and she lives alone. And I liked how kind of uncompromising that portrayal was

and the fact that she doesn't always have to be likable either, Cersy, that she's difficult and proud and rebellious and very real, I suppose. And she was very brave and uncompromising at a time when I was trying to be brave and uncompromising myself and not feeling very brave. So it was one of those books, some books I think you could read at any time in your life, and you'd fall in love with them. But for me, it was one of those books that came along at just the right moment. I can imagine as well if you're going undercover in these in-cell forums and the manosphere,

it's almost like you need a book that's just told completely from this perspective of an amazing woman to kind of counter that. Definitely. And a witch at a time when you're being called a witch and much, much worse. Yes, definitely. It was almost like a talisman, I suppose. What was it like going underground in those kind of forums researching the book? It was really, really shocking.

And I really thought that I was unshockable. I mean, at this point, there are days when I get 100 death threats or rape threats, you know, and they're long and detailed. It's not just, I will kill you. It's here are the 17 different knives that I'll use to disembow you with and what order I'll use them in. And I didn't think that it could get much worse. But actually, I was completely and utterly taken aback by it,

partly by how utterly hateful they are, but also by how huge they are. I think that was the biggest shock for me. The biggest mistake we make when we talk about incels and these other members of these communities is to write them off as a tiny group of odd-bore losers, a fringe, you know, cave-dwelling men in their parents' basements. Because most people have never heard of them.

who have really think that there's just a handful of them. And what really shook me was that I was realizing that these communities are number in the hundreds of thousands. I mean, I've traced in-cell ideology directly to the murders or serious injury of over a hundred people in the last 10 years alone. These are men who are deliberately going offline and using guns or cars or knives to stab women, to mow them down, to shoot them. And yet we never use the word terrorism to describe them when that's exactly what it is and exactly what they're doing.

And I think the scariest, the weirdest thing for me about this research was that I would spend my days wading through these literally millions of threads and posts, these kind of group orgies of imagining days of retribution when women would be killed and raped, debates about whether women should be kept as sex slaves or whether they should be killed, debates about whether women should be thought of as human beings at all, about whether rape should be legalized or whether that would take the fun out of it for them.

And then I'd emerge offline to a world where, first of all, I had to adjust to normality, but also where no one else had ever heard of it. No one knew this stuff was going on outside of my feminist activist internet bubble, where, of course, people have been sounding the alarm about in cells for years. The average person I know just in my daily life has never even heard of them. And that was really hard, I think, to realize that, you know, people have heard of the Toronte Van Attack, but they have no idea that Alec Manassian who carried out that attack was deliberately murdering and massacring women because of an extremist ideology, an extremist misogynistic ideology.

I mean, it's so depressing to hear about stuff like this because you kind of think, you know, projects like everyday sexism, for instance, kind of shone the alarm and highlighted this kind of pervasive, everyday sexism and misogyny that, you know, nowadays is pretty much considered not acceptable, you know, catcalling, for instance,

or sexual harassment in the workplace. But to find out that there's this whole kind of fringe lunatic underground that is full of these kind of elaborate fantasies of murdering and, you know, enslaving women, that's just horrendous. I mean, do you think that You know, you mentioned it's not the kind of stereotype of the basement dwelling loser who lives with their parents.

You know, is your kind of understanding that the people who are engaging in this ideology, they're just regular guys? Absolutely. And we know that's the case because you can look at men who've been arrested for sending thousands of horrendous, hateful, abusive messages to women in the public eye, for example, and discover that they're, you know, a successful accountant who coaches his son's football team or, um, Actually, I also infiltrated some of these communities offline, and I went to one of the biggest men's rights meetups in the UK, sort of semi in disguise, and chatted to a really pleasant, very sharply dressed, white man in his mid-30s,

who kind of made small talk with me about where we'd come from that day and all of the rest of it. And minutes later, he was up on stage, baying for the blood of Alison Saunders, the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, for the sin of having supported female survivors of sexual violence and cheering along as someone on stage announced that feminists shouldn't be allowed to have children because it's child abuse for a feminist to have a son. So I absolutely think that these people who are members of these

communities are not the sort of monstrous aberrations we'd like to think. They are regular people that we all probably know and come into contact with. And more than that, actually, one of the most shocking things I found researching the book is that their ideas and their ideology have spread incredibly effectively into the mainstream. So even people who've never heard of these communities nonetheless might very well have absorbed some of the myths and misconceptions that they've very effectively spread. You know, the idea, for example, that Me Too is a witch hunt that's gone too far. The idea that white men are now under attack, the idea that men are losing their jobs left, right and centre because of this kind of twitch-fork mob.

The idea that false rape allegations are rife, all of these are very, very common notions. And they've sort of been smuggled out of these dark corners of the internet and given a veneer of respectability by more mainstream commentators and then picked up by the press, by national newspapers, looking for a juicy, controversial debate to get lots of clicks. And suddenly, before you know it, 27% of men in America say that they won't have one-to-one meetings with women, female colleagues on their own.

The old Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States, refuses to have a meal alone with a woman who's not his wife. And suddenly you think these ideas that we consider so niche and extreme actually are becoming incredibly common. Most people just don't know where they're coming from. Well, I think men who hate women is starting to sound like a must read because I've definitely noticed that pervasive spread of, I'd say extreme misogynist ideas.

ideology. And it's shocking as well that you say that it's boys as well who are absorbing this and kind of parroting it. Absolutely. And they're very clever. I mean, absolutely is grooming. You know, it's not about saying Du Bois come and look at these websites, sign up. It's much more subtle than that. First of all, they use very, very cleverly and effectively. They use vehicles like online memes, like viral YouTube videos, like jokes and photos and imagery. They actually describe it explicitly. is like putting cherry flavor in children's medicine. They are deliberately targeting boys using these kinds of jokes and memes, using the veil of banter.

But they're also going to where they know that boys are online. So, for example, one of the things that was weird when I first started researching this was how rife these posts were on bodybuilding websites, which at first glance don't seem to have anything to do with these extremist communities. But of course, they've realized that if you look at the biggest bodybuilding website in the UK, the teen section is far and away the most busy area of the site. And of course, if you're looking for a group of children or young people who are particularly going to be vulnerable to these very hyper-masculine ideas,

where better to look than boys who are already vulnerable because they're boys who are particularly for whatever reason concerned about creating a particular physique and performing being a man in that particular way. Gaming websites were another place where I found that this grooming was happening. happening. Ninety-seven percent of teenage boys in the States say that they do gaming. And so you've got these boys who are just there online in these spaces and absolutely being taken advantage of. I mean, it sounds like the scale the problem has yet to be exposed. So I'm very much looking forward to your book. Thank you. So one last question because you've shared

so generously with us. If you had to choose one book from your list as a favourite, which one would it be? Oh no, you can't ask me that. It's hard enough that you've asked for only five. I mean, that's cruel enough in itself. I know. This is the, this is the evil question that we ask people on the podcast. I guess so evil and it's so hard to compare because there's such different things, aren't they? I guess if you had to press a book into someone's hand right now for this exact moment in time, which one would it be? How to be both, I think. It's so wonderful. And it does so, so much. And I think it would probably do something different for anybody who read it. Well, I love how to be both. So I am very, very, very minded to agree with you.

Thank you so much, Laura, for sharing your books with us and sharing so much of your time with the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's been really lovely. I'm Zing Singh, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. You definitely want to click subscribe. Please rate and review this podcast. It's the easiest way to help spread the word about the female talent you've heard from today. And thanks very much for listening.

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