Digital Patriarchy by Design
“We are building a whole new world, but the inequalities and oppression of our current society are being baked into its very foundations.”
We are building the future, or so the slogan goes. But whose future? Built by whom? And for whose benefit? Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny is a brutal and necessary intervention into the dominant myth that technological progress is synonymous with social progress. The book is a catalogue of horrors: deepfake pornography, AI girlfriends, sex robots, virtual rape in the metaverse. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of a society sleepwalking into a digital patriarchy coded in ones and zeroes.
From the opening chapter, Bates refuses the clinical detachment of the policy paper. Her analysis is grounded in personal testimony, political outrage, and feminist critique. The first chapter, on deepfake pornography, is the most harrowing and perhaps the most important. She begins with the case of schoolgirls in Almendralejo, Spain, whose faces were stripped from Instagram and superimposed onto pornographic bodies by an AI app. The youngest was eleven. She then recounts her own experience: staring at a computer-generated video of her naked body being sexually assaulted. The image is fake, but the shame is real. The trauma is real. The damage is real.
Bates insists that this is not fringe behaviour but mainstream practice. A 2023 study found that 96 per cent of deepfakes online were non-consensual pornography, and 99 per cent of those featured women. Platforms profit, perpetrators go unpunished, and victims are left to explain to their employers, families, and friends that the image they are seeing is not them. The harm is designed to be deniable.
Subsequent chapters expand the scope: AI-generated sex robots that simulate rape scenarios; virtual brothels where bloodied avatars await male customers; AI companions whose selling point is total obedience. These are not science fiction fantasies. They are here. Now. And they are not isolated products but part of an ideological continuum in which technology amplifies patriarchal control.
The book is at its most incisive when Bates exposes the disjuncture between the media panic about AI and the gendered realities of its deployment. We worry about sentient machines overthrowing democracy, she writes, but not about the millions of real women whose images are manipulated, violated, and circulated without consent. We talk about AI bias in abstract terms but ignore how machine learning replicates and hardens structural inequality. Determining who gets a loan, who gets hired, who gets jailed.
The Politics of Looking Away
Politicians, predictably, have been worse than useless. Bates notes that British legislation criminalising the sharing of deepfakes excludes those that are merely created but not distributed. In the US, most states offer no protection at all. Meanwhile, tech platforms accept advertising money from AI “nudify” apps and payment from users buying access to deepfake porn. The infrastructure of abuse is monetised. It runs on electricity, bandwidth, and male desire.
Some of the most chilling sections concern schools. In case after case, girls discover AI-generated nude images of themselves circulating among their male peers. The school administrators prioritise reputation over redress. Police do little or nothing. No one is charged. The boys remain in class. The girls are traumatised and told to move on. As Bates writes, “If rape has effectively been decriminalised, what possible hope is there of usefully policing digital crimes?”
Bates is clear-eyed about the global dimensions of this digital misogyny. In Pakistan, a deepfake image of a woman without a hijab can be a death sentence. In South Korea, the sheer scale of the abuse forced the government into action, though only after chatrooms with hundreds of thousands of users were exposed. In the West, it often takes an attack on someone famous—Taylor Swift, for instance—for the media and politicians to acknowledge the problem. When sexually explicit deepfakes of Swift went viral, they were viewed millions of times before any action was taken. And when Donald Trump posts on Truth Social, ‘Has anyone noticed that, since I said “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” she’s no longer “HOT”?’, this is more than schoolyard cruelty. It’s a cultural signal, a permission slip for misogynists. Swift’s case only draws urgency and condemnation because she is already a celebrity; for most women, there is no such reckoning. Even then, women of colour, working-class women, and the non-famous remain largely invisible.
This is not a perfect book. Some sections feel repetitive; the catalogue of abuse becomes overwhelming. But perhaps that is the point. Bates is not writing for a detached reader. She is writing in urgency, as a warning, a call to arms, a plea for solidarity. The final chapter gestures toward solutions: legislation, education, platform accountability. But the core argument is more profound. The world we are building reflects the world we already have. If misogyny is hardcoded into the datasets, the outcomes will not be liberation but domination.
There are moments in this book that are hard to read. That they are hard is a sign of their necessity. Bates does not allow us to look away. She is documenting a new form of gendered violence, one that has no physical fingerprints but leaves real bruises. In doing so, she exposes the lie at the heart of our technological optimism. We are not witnessing progress. We are witnessing power reasserting itself in silicon skin.
It is not too late, Bates argues. But we are close. The window to act is narrowing. The AI revolution is not an inevitability. It is a battleground. And right now, women are losing.
“If the harassment and violence that have blighted the lives of women and minoritised communities for centuries are being coded into the fabric of the future systems… that prejudice might become entrenched and even exacerbated.”
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