An Excerpt from The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny
An excerpt from The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates, published by Sourcebooks and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Innovation & Creativity category.
Gender equality is something that has been a constant battle. With the advent of ever more high-tech equipment at our fingertips, there is a new wave of technologies that threaten this notion. With misogyny baked into their design, these technologies are dragging women back to the dark ages.
Laura Bates, feminist, activist, and creator of the Everyday Sexism project, casts a visionary eye toward the future of AI and how new technologies can and will create new challenges for women. From deepfakes to sex robots, Bates uncovers the ways our evolving digital landscapes are enabling new forms of sexism, and what we can do to fight back.
The New Age of Sexism takes readers deep into the heart of this strange new world. This is not a book about the future. This is happening right now, and it could become part of our daily lives much sooner than we realize.
The New Age of Sexism has been longlisted in the Innovation & Creativity category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is from the book's Introduction.
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There is a consensus within the tech community that even if all AI development stopped today, we would still make huge advances by building applications on top of the existing foundations. We aren’t waiting for a developmental milestone that may or may not happen: the tech is already here. The question is, what are we going to build with it?
Already, algorithms 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 minoritized 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.
Already, women are being sexually assaulted on a regular basis in the metaverse.
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 color to personality, only lacking the ability to say no.
Already, you can visit an establishment in Berlin where an artificially animated woman will be presented to you, covered in blood and with her clothes torn if you so desire, for you to treat her however you please using virtual reality.
“Move fast and break things” was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s motto back in the company’s early days. As the power—and indeed danger—of his platform came into focus, he later changed the motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” The messaging might have changed, but the underlying attitudes haven’t.
These technologies are evolving and multiplying—not yearly, not monthly, but daily. However, technology itself is not the problem here. In fact, many of these emerging tools possess the potential to have a transformative positive effect on our society. What matters is how we shape and use them.
There are significant parallels here with the advent of social media.
Before social media, the content of the internet was largely created by publishers and companies. Then social media exploded into our lives, and suddenly everyone could be a creator, with both hugely beneficial and gravely harmful results. Similarly, until the recent explosion in open-source AI, applications were mainly being built by a handful of wealthy companies, but now anyone can create their own model, bot, or app. While this opens up hugely exciting possibilities, we don’t yet have sufficient safeguards in place to prevent the harm that will come alongside them.
We’ve arrived at a critical moment. We are building a whole new world, but the inequalities and oppression of our current society are being baked into its very foundations. And if the harassment and violence that have blighted the lives of women and minoritized communities for centuries are being coded into the fabric of the future systems, environments, and programs that will form the basis of all our lives over the coming decades, unraveling those forms of prejudice is going to become a million times harder. Worse, that prejudice might become entrenched and even exacerbated, dragging the most vulnerable in our society backward as we supposedly hurtle forward into a glittering new world.
Despite the risks to already-vulnerable communities, public and governmental concern about the potential threat from emerging technologies tends to focus almost exclusively on fears of evil robots taking over the world, job losses, and the erosion of democracy. This is clear, for example, in the case of deepfakes—digitally manipulated images and videos giving the false appearance of a person doing or saying something they didn’t actually do. Intimate image abuse of women makes up around 96 percent of all deepfakes, yet a Europol report on “law enforcement and the challenge of deepfakes” mentions the word women just once and contains only a couple of brief paragraphs on deepfake pornography in its twenty-two pages.1 We should be less concerned about what a malevolent AI of the future might do and more concerned with what some malevolent humans are doing right now with existing technology.
In the course of my work as founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, which has collected over a quarter of a million testimonies of gender inequality, harassment, discrimination, and abuse, I see again and again how frequently the harms suffered by women and girls are ignored, dismissed, underestimated, and brushed under the carpet, particularly when they are perceived by those in positions of power as an inconvenient obstacle to “progress,” accelerated business development, or the accumulation of wealth.
In my workshops in schools, meeting thousands of young people each year, and my work with frontline sexual violence charities like Rape Crisis, I see how women’s and girls’ lives can be silently devastated by abuse that is happening on an epidemic scale while simultaneously going almost completely ignored by wider society.
My book Men Who Hate Women warned of a rising tide of extremism that nobody was talking about—a virulent misogyny that threatened deadly consequences. A few years later, Jake Davison, a man immersed in incel hatred online, carried out the worst mass shooting the UK had seen in over a decade.2 There is a similar urgency here.
Only now we are talking about a whole new age of misogyny. Emerging technologies are on course to infiltrate practically every aspect of our daily lives. And the impact on women’s lives will be inestimable.
I have experienced and witnessed the misogynistic weaponization of technology firsthand, from feeling utterly powerless when men have used publicly available photographs of me to create sickening sexualized images to watching helplessly as women have been assaulted in front of me in the metaverse.
We do not have the luxury of time to wait and see how things will pan out or trust that any “glitches” will eventually be fixed. Relatively speaking, these technologies are in their infancy, but now is the time we must act. The pervasiveness of emerging technology and the speed and scale of digital transformation mean that such issues may become impossible to fix if they are left unaddressed. We have a fleeting moment of opportunity to define whether they will create a world that is full of new possibilities, accessible to everybody, or a world in which existing inequalities are inextricably embedded—a dazzling future that drags women and minoritized groups backward.
We are standing on the edge of a precipice. This book is a call to arms to take action now, before it is too late.
Excerpted from The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates, published by Sourcebooks. Copyright © 2025 by Laura Bates. All rights reserved.
About the Author
LAURA BATES is an activist, writer, speaker, and journalist. She is the founder of the Everyday Sexism project and the author of Men Who Hate Women.
