Sexism with a silicone face

The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny

Laura Bates

Simon & Schuster, £20, pp320

Something new and disturbing is wriggling in the pan-cultural petri dish: a degrading in male-female relations masquerading as technological progress. This, at least, is the premise of Laura Bates’s new book, in which she scrutinises the increasingly sophisticated, often disquieting new tech (AI, virtual reality, robotics, the metaverse) that she claims is enabling “a new age of misogyny”. “We are standing on the edge of a precipice,” Bates warns.

Unnecessarily alarmist? I’m not so sure. In some ways, The New Age… is a continuum of the work Bates began with her first book, Everyday Sexism. Published in 2014, it sprang from her Everyday Sexism Project, a feminist initiative documenting sexism around the world. This is her fifth work of nonfiction since then and many chapters function as updates of entrenched abuses against women: The New Age of Slut-Shaming: Deepfakes; The New Age of Street Harassment: The Metaverse; The New Age of Coercive Control: Image-Based Sexual Abuse.

Throughout, there is a sense of something big, toxic, unstoppable. Something that even those of us who don’t consider ourselves tech-savvy will have noticed in the real world and the AI “badlands”: the ubiquity of deepfake nudes; the tsunami of online porn, now so normalised it barely merits a squeak of protest; the ever louder and angrier incel noise. Young women, in particular, are dealing with all this and more.

One recurrent theme is that women are no longer being “merely” harassed, they are also being erased – replaced by increasingly realistic pornographic tech-proxies. Among them, a new generation of sex robots that can be purchased online and delivered to your door. Some models have mechanically articulated necks to simulate orgasm. Others give oral sex with back and forth head motions that Bates likens to a “pecking chicken”. Although vocal interaction can be enabled with sex dolls, many men don’t want it. It wrecks the fantasy – they prefer them mute.

Another section deals with cyber-brothels offering robot sex workers, which operate globally from Amsterdam to Japan to Gateshead. Bates visits one incognito in Berlin (they sound as though they are run like no-contact Airbnbs), where she has pre-ordered a robot called Kokeshi: “A silicone shell being offered up as a warm, willing, breathing, talking, consenting sexual partner.” While Bates has asked for Kokeshi to be dressed in ripped clothes, she notices her labia has been torn off. “Perhaps bitten off?” writes the author, adding: “I feel sick.” Elsewhere, online, she finds sex dolls made to look as young as five, complete with child vulvas, clutching teddy bears.

It isn’t only in the cyber-brothel that this book gets immersive. Investigating deepfakes, Bates (herself a one-time target of sexualised images) pays a website to insert photos of herself into online porn, just to demonstrate the sheer ease of it. “Fake pornography is a new form of abuse,” she writes, “but its underlying power dynamics are very, very old.”

Exploring the metaverse, which she describes as a “virtual-reality social world” featuring shops, arenas, islands, gigs and clubs – and where those parts controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta are only accessible if you fork out around £250 for a virtual headset – Bates is threatened by a gun. She learns it is common for women to be virtually raped in the metaverse, abused and groped, and for child users of universes such as Roblox to be dragged into adult scenarios.

Bates wonders why society accommodates this parallel universe. Do we imagine it is of no consequence because it’s about robots and the virtual world, and “isn’t real”. Aren’t the attitudes to women real? Advocates posit that sex dolls fulfil a need, helping to discourage offences from rape to sex trafficking. But, as Bates points out, there has been an increase in male sex crime since the advent of Kokeshi and her AI friends.

Bates rightly reserves her main fire for the all-powerful tech bros, not just the ones manufacturing and profiting directly from the sex tech but also those such as Zuckerberg, Elon Musk (X), and Sundar Pichai (Google) in charge of the algorithms, datasets, systems and search engines delivering it. As she argues, just as with food and drug companies, there is a strong case for improved regulation, supervision, legislation and transparency – for the big beasts of AI to take responsibility along with their billions. Right now, abuses and denigrations of women appear to be at the bottom of big tech’s to-do list.

I finish The New Age… wondering, not for the first time, if there is any way to put this particular genie back into the bottle. Bates cannot, and does not, attempt to answer that question. But her book does succeed in exposing the intersection between AI and misogyny. Any report on tech is doomed to date eventually, but this title marks a moment and the message is clear: sexism hasn’t gone away, it’s simply being recoded.

Order The New Age of Sexism at observershop.co.uk to receive a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply

Laura Bates will be in conversation on The New Age of Sexism on Tuesday 20th May. Tickets are available here to join her in The Observer newsroom or online.