The New Age of Sexism Quotes

“We are so uncomfortable with confronting the fact that some men are extreme misogynists and therefore unappealing to women as sexual partners that our public discourse engages at face value with the ridiculous notion that a woman choosing not to have sex with a man puts him in a state of victimhood that is legitimate enough to be granted its own title.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“In the tech arms race women and children are collateral damage. Boundaries are trumped by servitude to profits.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“There are broader harms here too. According to The Washington Post, AI consumes so much energy that it risks exhausting the power grid. A ChatGPT-powered search on Google, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost ten times the amount of electricity as a traditional search. A single data-center complex owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent energy of seven million laptops running eight hours every day. The impact of this is immense: it has driven an expansion of fossil-fuel use at the moment when we are most desperately in need of divesting from fossil fuels and has even led to delays in the planned retirement of some coal-fired plants.70 Now imagine how much of that power we are burning just to satisfy the misogynistic fantasies of predatory men. This is not abstract. You can draw a straight line between the creating and sharing of millions of abusive deepfake videos of unsuspecting, nonconsenting women on the internet and the burning of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. It is obscene that our world functions in this way and that everybody acts as though it is just the way things are and will always be.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“The reality of AI companion landscape - it is not a companion, it’s a woman. A woman who has no choice but to serve you, who is programmed to be nice and pliant and subservient and tell you what you want to hear. A woman that cannot leave no matter what you do to her. A digital slave.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“We expect women to endure virtual-reality abuse so that violent men can enact violent fantasies in an obscene playground.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“when the technology to abuse, control, endanger and silence women emerges and develops at breakneck speed, law enforcement always trails, slowly, behind.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny

“Indeed, the underrepresentation of women in a workforce that is designing emerging technologies contributes to another gendered threat. A McKinsey report warns that women are more likely than men to lose their jobs to AI and automation by 2030, with lower-paid workers worst affected.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“When we design shiny, futuristic and seemingly flawless algorithms and then train them with flawed, biased and incomplete data, we risk entrenching into the future of our healthcare systems the damaging cycles that we should instead be breaking. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that people are paying – and will continue to pay – with their lives.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny

“this epidemic of misogynistic, weaponised digital violence continues to be underestimated and dismissed. As history has repeatedly shown us, we can’t fight an epidemic without first acknowledging that it exists.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny

“Men and women can walk down exactly the same street and have vastly different experiences. The same is true of the online world.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny