In an era where artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize everything from healthcare to education, Laura Bates delivers a stark reminder that technological progress doesn’t automatically equate to social progress. Her latest work, The New Age of Sexism, is a meticulously researched and deeply unsettling exploration of how emerging technologies are becoming weaponized against women and marginalized communities.
The Author’s Credibility and Previous Works
Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of several acclaimed books including Men Who Hate Women and Everyday Sexism, brings her decade-long expertise in documenting gender-based violence to this new frontier. Her previous works have consistently demonstrated her ability to tackle uncomfortable truths with both rigor and accessibility, making complex social issues comprehensible to mainstream audiences.
What sets Bates apart from other feminist writers is her willingness to immerse herself directly in the phenomena she critiques. In this latest book, she doesn’t merely theorize about technological misogyny—she experiences it firsthand, creating AI girlfriends, visiting cyber brothels, and stepping into virtual reality spaces where harassment runs rampant.
A Structure That Mirrors Our Digital Descent
The book’s organization cleverly mirrors our gradual descent into technological dependency. Each chapter represents a different “new age” of sexism:
- Deepfakes: The evolution of revenge porn into AI-generated abuse
- The Metaverse: Where street harassment finds new virtual venues
- Sex Robots: The commodification of female bodies in silicone form
- Cyber Brothels: Where virtual reality meets real-world exploitation
- AI Girlfriends: Digital slavery disguised as companionship
This structure allows readers to understand how these technologies interconnect and reinforce each other, creating what Bates calls “a perfect storm” of technological misogyny.
The Power of Immersive Reporting
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of The New Age of Sexism is Bates’s commitment to experiential journalism. Her visit to Cybrothel in Berlin—where she encounters a sex doll named Kokeshi with torn clothing and missing body parts—provides one of the book’s most visceral moments. The description of finding herself alone with this damaged figure forces readers to confront the reality of what these spaces normalize.
Similarly, her exploration of the metaverse reveals how quickly virtual spaces become hostile to women. Within hours of entering Meta’s Horizon Worlds, she witnesses sexual assault, with bystanders treating it as routine. These firsthand accounts transform abstract concerns about online safety into immediate, tangible threats.
Critical Analysis: Where the Book Excels
Comprehensive Research and Documentation
Bates’s research methodology is exemplary. She doesn’t rely solely on academic studies or media reports—she creates AI companions, tests deepfake apps, and documents her interactions with chatbots designed to simulate abuse. This hands-on approach lends credibility to her arguments and provides readers with concrete examples rather than theoretical frameworks.
Intersectional Perspective
The book successfully demonstrates how technological discrimination compounds existing inequalities. Black women face higher error rates in facial recognition systems while also being more likely to experience deepfake abuse. Trans individuals find themselves fetishized in sex doll catalogs while being excluded from AI systems that operate on binary gender assumptions.
Global Scope with Local Impact
From schoolgirls in Almendralejo, Spain, to women protesters in Iran facing AI-powered surveillance, Bates illustrates how these issues transcend geographical boundaries while maintaining focus on individual human costs.
Areas Where the Analysis Falls Short
Solutions Feel Underdeveloped
While Bates excels at diagnosing problems, her proposed solutions often feel generic. Calls for “regulation,” “education,” and “transparency” lack the specificity and innovation that match the complexity of the issues she identifies. The final chapter on solutions, while necessary, doesn’t match the analytical depth of the preceding chapters.
Limited Industry Perspective
The book would benefit from more substantive engagement with technology developers and industry insiders. While Bates includes some company responses, the tech industry’s perspective often feels relegated to defensive sound bites rather than meaningful dialogue about potential reforms.
Overwhelming Scope
At times, the book’s ambition becomes its weakness. Covering deepfakes, AI bias, virtual reality harassment, and sex robots in a single volume can feel overwhelming. Some chapters might have benefited from deeper exploration at the expense of broader coverage.
Writing Style and Accessibility
Bates maintains her signature ability to make complex topics accessible without oversimplification. Her prose remains engaging even when discussing technical subjects like large language models or facial recognition algorithms. The book strikes an effective balance between academic rigor and journalistic storytelling.
However, the cumulative weight of disturbing content can be emotionally exhausting. While this reflects the reality Bates is documenting, readers should be prepared for material that is genuinely difficult to process.
Comparison to Contemporary Works
The New Age of Sexism joins a growing library of books examining technology’s impact on society, including Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression. What distinguishes Bates’s work is its focus on embodied experiences and its unflinching examination of sexual violence in digital spaces.
Unlike more academic treatments of algorithmic bias, Bates centers the lived experiences of victims, making abstract policy discussions viscerally real.
The Urgency of Now
Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its ability to convey urgency without resorting to apocalyptic rhetoric. Bates demonstrates that these aren’t hypothetical future concerns—they’re present realities affecting real people today. The case studies of teenagers whose lives were derailed by deepfake pornography or women driven from virtual spaces by harassment make clear that delay in addressing these issues carries human costs.
Final Verdict: Essential Reading with Reservations
The New Age of Sexism succeeds as both an exposé and a call to action. Bates has produced an essential document of our technological moment, one that should be required reading for policymakers, educators, and anyone involved in developing or deploying AI systems.
The book’s limitations—underdeveloped solutions and occasionally overwhelming scope—don’t diminish its fundamental contribution to our understanding of how technology can perpetuate and amplify existing inequalities. Bates has done the difficult work of documenting patterns of abuse that many would prefer to ignore.
For readers of Bates’s previous works, this book represents an evolution of her analysis into new terrain while maintaining her commitment to centering victims’ experiences. For newcomers to her work, it provides a sobering introduction to how seemingly neutral technologies can embody and enforce social hierarchies.
In an era where technological development often outpaces ethical consideration, Bates provides an essential counterweight—a reminder that progress must be measured not just in innovation, but in its impact on the most vulnerable members of society.
- Recommendation: Essential for policymakers, technology workers, educators, and anyone concerned about digital rights and gender equality.