Misogyny and ‘Manosphere’ Spreading To Playgrounds ‘and Is a Terror Threat’, Author Says

Article here. Excerpt:

'Perhaps the most chilling aspect of her research, Bates says, was discovering that this online hatred of women was filtering down to children, with boys who have not long entered their teenage years denouncing feminism in school playgrounds across Britain.

Before COVID, Bates would visit around two schools a week in her work to teach children about gender equality. Previously, she says even pupils who were initially skeptical about sexism would engage in debate but over the last two years, there has been a shift. Suddenly boys were showing up to her sessions parroting the same myths and misconceptions she recognized from the many hours spent trawling online women-hating forums, using an undercover alter-ego, Alex. Some were as young as 12.

"Those conversations are often challenging and awkward and funny and tricky, talking about sexism, about sex, about porn, and about gender stereotypes," Bates says. "I think it's really important to encourage those conversations and to ask difficult questions, but what I started to notice was very different to that, it was a kind of indoctrination really," Bates says.

"I was meeting boys who were really hardened against their female peers, they were completely dehumanizing their female peers, they very much saw women as sex objects but they also really believed there was this feminist conspiracy at the heart of government that was killing and taking away the livelihoods of white men.

"It's a form of grooming. They would repeat the same quotes and the same completely false statistics that they had heard online. At schools across the country, suddenly boys were coming up with the statistic that '90% of rape allegations are false'. And at that point, there wasn't any room for discussion."'