Laura Bates
Leading a new, fourth wave of feminism, Laura Bates gave women a voice to speak out against sexism when she launched the Everyday Sexism Project. Then she took on Facebook – and won. Meet a modern-day superhero…
Photography by Anko
Sexism doesn’t exist any more. We’ve solved it. That was what Laura Bates was told in 2012. Fortunately for us, she didn’t listen. Instead, she launched the Everyday Sexism Project. What began as an online community for women to share their stories – from verbal abuse on the street to sexual harassment at work – has turned into a worldwide movement and placed Bates at the centre of a new, fourth wave of feminism, together with the likes of Caroline Criado-Perez and Jessica Valenti.
“I never set out to be a voice of anything,” the 30-year-old insists. “And I do think it’s important to say that the reason the project has had such a huge impact isn’t about one person. It’s about 100,000 women sharing their stories, raising their voices, saying enough is enough. What makes this wave exciting is the number of different people doing such great work.”
One of the key characteristics of the fourth wave is the internet and, in particular, social media. It is both its best friend and worst enemy. On the one hand, it has the power to mobilise hundreds of thousands of women across the world, to create powerful movements in just days. But on the other, it gives carte blanche to abusive behaviour, be it by hiding behind a Twitter handle or the ubiquitous term to justify any kind of hate dialogue: freedom of speech.
Bates continues to receive detailed
death threats, where the perpetrator
picks his favourite serial killer and describes what he’d like to do to her. “It’s hard not to be scared. It would only take one person to follow through, and there are thousands. But there’s a psychological toll too,” she explains.
Bates says she understands that Facebook and Twitter want to support freedom of speech. “But in many cases freedom of speech doesn’t apply. It doesn’t cover a threat to kill someone. That’s illegal online, as it is offline,” says Bates. “It’s about what those companies are choosing to allow on their platforms. Once it starts to affect their bottom line, that’s when we’ll see real action.”
Facebook is a case in point. In 2013, Bates and writer Soraya Chemaly, with some 60,000 messages of support, successfully campaigned for the social media giant to change its guidelines on gendered hate content – in just one week. Incredibly, Facebook had allowed groups such as “raping a pregnant bitch and telling your friends you had a threesome” to be created. “In their terms and conditions, they had rules against anti-semitic, homophobic and racist content, but nothing against gendered hate speech,” says Bates. To reiterate, this was 2013 not 1913…
This is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the guy on the street who gets offensive when you don’t appreciate his supposedly flattering comment about your breasts? Or the tiresome newspaper headlines: Cameron’s Cuties, Blair’s Babes, the Downing Street Catwalk?
“Oh, it’s so normalised, when it should be so shocking,” Bates despairs. “That has an impact on people’s perceptions of how well [female politicians] can do their jobs. The trouble with the low level things is when you try to point them out to people. Don’t make a fuss about media sexism, they say. Don’t get your knickers in a twist about a wolf whistle. They don’t get it. It’s all connected.”
The problem seems so big, how can we begin to fix it? Bates is now going for the grassroots. “It’s daunting. When I started, the first step was getting people to see the problem. Now it’s about challenging gender stereotypes before they become ingrained. What’s absolutely crucial is sex and relationship education, which is what I’m campaigning for,” she says of her campaign with the End Violence Against Women Coalition, called #SREnow. “There was a rape case in a school involving a 14-year-old boy and when the teacher asked him why he didn’t stop when the girl started crying, he said ‘girls are supposed to cry when they have sex’. Children are confused. If it’s your boyfriend, it can’t be rape. They see things in online forums they think they have to do, which is terrifying for girls and boys. If we were to give children information about what consent means, it would have a huge impact.”
Bates is working with other stakeholders, including teachers, parents and the website Mumsnet, to lobby the Department for Education for sex and relationship education to be made compulsory in all schools in England, primary and secondary, state and private. “They don’t want to expose children to ideas about sex,” Bates says, shaking her head. “What that completely fails to recognise is that they’re already exposed to it! It’s a fear of a public reaction, the idea that people will think you want to teach porn to five-year-olds. But it is happening at that age. We can either bury our heads in the sand or do something about it.”