Review: 'The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny' by Laura Bates

As someone who works with medieval literature and also finds herself actively online in this, our twenty-first century, I am no stranger to misogyny in all forms, shapes, and sizes. It is shocking, really, how little we have truly advanced when it comes to base level misogynistic thinking, despite so many legal and cultural developments in the past half century. Despite all of this, Laura Bates' new book was something of a shock to me in some of its details, tracing how new technologies, especially around AI, are bringing these millenia-old ideas back onto our screens and into our lives. Content warnings for the book itself can be found in the tags. Thanks to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 19/08/2025
Publisher: SOURCEBOOKS

Misogyny is being hardwired into our future. Can we stop it?

We like to believe we're moving closer to equality, riding the wave of technological progress into a brighter, fairer future. But beneath the glossy surface of innovation lies a chilling truth: new technologies are not just failing to solve age-old inequalities—they're deepening them.

In The New Age of Sexism, acclaimed author and activist Laura Bates exposes how misogyny is being coded into the very fabric of our future. From the biases embedded in artificial intelligence to the alarming rise of sex robots and the toxic dynamics of the metaverse, Bates takes readers on a shocking journey into a world where technology is weaponized against women.

This isn't a dystopian warning about what might happen. It's a harrowing account of what's happening now and the dangers we face if we don't act. With clarity and urgency, Bates reveals how these advancements are dragging society backward, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and jeopardizing decades of progress in the fight for gender equality.

I have to state at the beginning of this review that the advent of AI has turned me into a Luddite. I'm one of those engineers, without actually being an engineer, who distrusts everything and anything technical that requires a little too much information and connection. Naturally, in my everyday life, I am still very online, and thus this mostly shows itself in reluctance to hop onboard the latest developments. I straight-up refuse to use AI for anything, let alone my actual work. Maybe it's my age, but I legitimately do not understand how, within a year or two, we went from "naah, real generative AI is far in the future and requires regulation" to "AI told me how to boil an egg, do my laundry, and fulfil my job requirements, it's also my best friend". (Yes, this is something of an exaggeration, but you know these people are out there.) I fully appreciate that AI, and algorithms in general, can be very useful; I too benefit from spell checks. However, it is the uncritical relinquishing of critical (thinking, reading, listening) skills which has amazed me, especially at the high cost, including to the climate. As such, I'm something of the perfect audience for The New Age of Sexism. Already a feminist, already angry, and suspicious of AI. And yet, I wasn't prepared for what Laura Bates had to say, how deeply screwed we already are in many respects. 

The New Age of Sexism is split into eight chapters. The first considers 'The Future of Slut Shaming', looking specifically at the impact deepfakes of intimate images have on the lives of (young) women. The examples she lists here, of school girls whose classmates have AI create nudes of them, is honestly disgusting and heartbreaking, but Bates also highlights how the conversation around deepfakes tends to centre on any potential political impact, while overlooking the already present impact on women generally. Chapter 2 looks at 'The Future of Street Harassment', largely within the context of the Metaverse or similar virtual online spaces. As I've never participated in any of this, it was completely new to me and I can't believe how unregulated these spaces truly are. Chapter 3 hit really hard, which explores 'The Future of Rape' by looking at sex robots. These have been around for a while, both in our cultural imagination and as a reality. Nonetheless, there is something at once pathetic and deeply threatening about how they are marketed and used. This is taken to a next level in the following chapter, 'The Future of Objectification', on cyber brothels. Bates describes her experience going to one undercover in Berlin and there is something horrifying to her descriptions of a lifeless doll that is somehow still lifelike, just lying there, mutilated. Chapter 5, 'The Future of Coercive Control', discusses how revenge porn, already a major issue a few years back, continues to be a bane to the existence of women, with hardly any actual legal help being available. Bates then tackles the presence of AI girlfriends in 'The Future of Domestic Abuse', exploring how oppressive and restrictive gender roles (for both women and men) are baked into, coded into, current AI systems. The same regressive stereotyping is explored in 'The Future of Discrimination', but with a focus on how racism is reproduced by these algorithms. The final chapter, 'The Future in our Hands', looks at possible solutions and, sadly, this felt like the saddest chapter to me, mainly because so much of our hope is vested in political and legal institutions taking all of this seriously and actually enacting regulations. The book also includes a list of resources, discussion questions, and extensive notes. 

I haven't yet read Laura Bates' Men Who Hate Women, but this was the book with which she landed on my radar. It's an exploration of the (online) extremist communities (of men), who absolutely loathe women and will make it everyone's problem. That book was marketed as a 'broad, unflinching account' (blurb on Goodreads) and the same applies to The New Age of Sexism. Bates has clearly done her research and it is especially in her recounting of her own experiences with some of the issues discussed and in the space she gives to the words of other women that the book really shines. I did have an issue or two with the book, however, which is that it is very broad in its scope and very limited in its solutions. Don't get me wrong, I think it is very important that these issues are all discussed and are all given space. A watering down can take place, however, when one horror follows another. It is probably best to read one chapter at a time, give it some space, and then continue, rather than have an absolutely horrible day by reading it in one go, like me. An element to this is the shock value of the book itself, which begins in the blurb calling this 'a shocking journey'. A while back I read Naomi Klein's Doppelganger and I had to take a break because it was making me incredibly anxious. I felt a similar impulse with The New Age of Sexism, especially with the repeated declarations that most, if not all, women are already subject to much of the harassment discussed. I appreciate the urgency with which Bates is writing, but I don't know if this is the right approach. And, despite that urgency, the book isn't quite as critical in its proposed solutions as I would like. For example, Bates is not critical of AI itself almost at all, nor calls for it being limited in its endless encroachment into our daily lives. Surely a next step would, or at least could be, to call for a pause on these developments? To call for a critical investigation into the billions of dollars/pounds/euros/etc. being poured into this? Is it really inevitable, that this is our future? Must we, in order to enact change, also kneel down at the altar of AI? I wish Bates had been more decisive here. 

I give this book...

4 Universes!

With all that said, I do think The New Age of Sexism is an important read for those concerned about where this push in new technologies is bringing us (back to). Just let it be the beginning of the journey, rather than the end.