Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - Men Who Hate Women

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates

8 reviews

pianokeys's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

4.0

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elisacarlene's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful informative sad slow-paced

4.0

This book is a necessary read. It exposes a terrifying truth, that the world of ‘men who hate women’ is not as underground as people think and is, in fact, seeping (pouring?) into the mainstream. Bates unpacks the involvement of powerful people, including mainstream politicians, and explains the tools leaders of the manosphere use to legitimise their vitriol. I appreciated the fact she points out how this movement is actually bad for men, how the men involved in leading it often mistreat other men, and how many men who are sucked into these movements are themselves vulnerable. Having personally seen hints of some of the attitudes described in this book up close in real life, coming from (possibly vulnerable) men who seemingly live normal lives and cross our paths usually without most of us ever knowing their ideology, I wanted to understand it more and this book certainly helped.

However, I found it very difficult to get through, admittedly largely because of the subject matter, but also unfortunately because of the way it was written. It was quite repetitive and I think some information/examples could have been chosen more selectively and told more succinctly. Though I understand Bates probably just wanted to drive her points home and show as much evidence as possible, I believe this could have been executed better. I also feel the chapters, some of which were very long, were disorganised and could have been better structured, perhaps with subheadings and maybe some graphics showing the data visually, to aid the flow of reading and the digestion of such tough content. I’m only taking one star off for this because I still believe this is an essential book on a largely-ignored topic, not to mention the fact that at least Bates took the issue on, and not without great personal risk. It’s a shame it didn’t read better, because this is the type of book everyone should read and that I’d like to give to family and friends, but I think perhaps Bates is preaching to the converted, as apart from being unlikely to pick a book with this title up in the first place, someone who isn’t ‘converted’ probably wouldn’t have the patience to read a book written in this way.

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