Laura Bates

We do not, as a rule, talk about male perpetrators of violence against women. We describe a woman as having been raped; we discuss the rates of women sexually assaulted or beaten. We do not speak in terms of men committing rape or being sexual assaulters and violent abusers. That is what makes it so easy to focus on women’s dress, behaviour and choices when we consider sexual violence. To warn women to take precautions to protect themselves and, implicitly or explicitly, blame those victims who do not.

While learning about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at A Level, some of her students complained, saying there ought to be ‘a Handmaid’s Tale for men’. (Atwood’s dystopian novel, set in an imagined totalitarian US in which women are completely subjugated, is famously inspired by real-world oppression. Atwood has stated: ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened.’)

Both worldviews rest heavily on the perception of women being without humanity, individuality or soul.

We are talking about an industry that exploits men’s worst fears, preys on their vulnerabilities and literally trains them in harassment, stalking and even sexual assault.

she was intensely harassed online by gamers, who saw her commentary as an attack on the industry and an unwelcome attempt to sanitise or ‘feminise’ it

competing to outdo one another in the extremity and obscenity of the abuse

after police refused to carry out searches for firearms in advance of the event, because of Utah’s open-carry laws

it demands transparency of statistics while spreading false facts, and it portrays itself as the champion of downtrodden victims while espousing the creation of greater gains and protections for the group already most privileged in our society

So, when we tell women to simply switch off, or spend less time online, or stop visiting certain websites, what we are really saying is that they, not their harassers, should suffer the negative consequences of trolling

Advice that we shouldn’t ‘feed the trolls’ implies that the problem is simply inevitable: that men will always harass, abuse and degrade women, so we must inevitably take steps to protect women, rather than trying to tackle the problem at its root.