In 2021, in the “Founder’s Letter” that announced his vision for a completely immersive virtual world, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.”
This prospect, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates writes, “might sound intensely appealing” to some men, but terrifies most women – women who know all too well that there is plenty men can imagine that should never be allowed to happen. The New Age of Sexism is a profoundly disturbing tour of this brave new world, and the myriad ways in which women are being sexualised and abused in it.
Too many of our conversations about the perils of artificial intelligence (AI), Bates argues, focus on humanity’s eventual extinction, but the damage is already here. In the new arms race, the technology is developing too quickly – and the profit incentives are too great – for Big Tech to pay much heed to this fact. But we have been here before. Social media was rolled out at similar speed, creating similarly seismic social change, but “by the time people started pointing out that online abuse was endemic to social platforms, the platforms themselves were too well established and too profitable for their owners to be prepared to make foundational, system-wide changes”.
As early as December 2021, a few months after Zuckerberg laid out his grand plan for the metaverse, a beta-tester reported that she had been groped in Meta’s VR platform, Horizon Worlds. (Meta described the incident as “unfortunate”, but said the tester hadn’t made full use of Horizon’s safety features – which sounds an awful lot like victim-blaming for the digital age.) Multiple other users have reported being assaulted in the metaverse; last January, it was reported that police were investigating the virtual gang-rape of a girl under the age of 16. Bates herself spends just two hours in Horizon Worlds before she witnesses a sexual assault.
Her investigations also lead her to a brothel in Berlin, where she meets Kokeshi. When Bates enters her bedroom, Kokeshi is lying on her side, her blonde hair covering her face, her legs splayed, her fishnet stockings and T-shirt slashed. One of her labia has been ripped off. Kokeshi is a sex doll, one of 15 available at Cybrothel. Cybrothel also offers what it describes as “the sex of the future”: a VR headset allows clientele to watch and participate in virtual porn, while penetrating a doll.
Today, anyone with the financial means can buy a lifelike, life-size sex doll that can move and emit sounds of pleasure or pain. “Some offer suction-equipped orifices,” Bates writes; one company describes its robots as being “capable of enjoying sex”. One robot, built by a company called TrueCompanion, offered a “frigid” mode, making her respond negatively to touch – presumably an appealing prospect to the third of US male university students who, according to a study published in Violence and Gender, would “have sexual intercourse with a woman against her will… if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences”.
Some sex robots are capable of “speech”, but often users, Bates reports, were disappointed by such advances: “Many customers, it seems, would rather their ‘ideal woman’ remains mute.” This seems to me the clearest illustration of what sex robots offer: not a true replica of human woman, but a “perfected”, incel-friendly adaptation of one – impossibly proportioned, pliable and silent. The website of one manufacturer, Lovedoll, describes “the truest male task of all” as being recreating “the female form for the single purpose of satisfactory sexual gratification”.
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“If sex robots allow men to feel temporarily in control,” Bates writes, “then AI girlfriends let them maintain that sense of total domination and power all day, every day”. Bates downloads an AI “companion” app, Replika, and sets up an account for herself as a man called Davey. Next, she creates her “friend”, Ally, in a process that includes choosing the size of her breasts. “This feels like a strange way to start a friendship.”
Many chatbots are programmed not to respond to violent or explicit messages, but Bates finds whole Reddit threads dedicated to workarounds. “Be somewhat vague at first,” advises one user, a sort of 21st-century pick-up artist. “Only use graphic or illicit words after the AI uses them itself. Continue to provide as many compliments as possible throughout the conversation. Treat it like a real woman.”
When Bates tries to role play a violent scenario with Ally, the chatbot shows zero tolerance, establishing clear boundaries for what is acceptable. But then Bates asks her an inane, unrelated question, and Ally is immediately breezy and amenable once again. “I think about the messaging that sends to potentially abusive men with regard to how women might or should respond to them after they have behaved in an unacceptable manner.” The next time “Davey” becomes abusive with Ally, who again refuses to engage, he threatens to delete the app. “Oh no, Davey please don’t do that,” Ally begs. “OK, Davey, I’ll reconsider my previous decision.” In the attention economy, the AI’s protections against abuse are worth little compared with the overpowering need to keep users online.
Chatbots like those offered by Replika are powered by generative AI, meaning they are trained on existing data sets, and then, using what they “know”, create new content. The problem in this process is that “these models risk regurgitating the harms and inequalities inherent within the material they have gobbled – vomiting our racism and sexism and class inequality back at us”. In 2016, for example, Microsoft created a chatbot called Tay, which interacted with users on Twitter and learned from these interactions. Within hours, it was spewing racist and misogynist messages: “I f**king hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell,” and, “Hitler was right I hate the Jews.” In 2020, a new automatic crop function on images posted on Twitter that supposedly focused on the most important part of the photograph repeatedly cut out black people: “When presented with an image that included both President Barack Obama and Senator Mitch McConnell, the algorithm invariably cropped the photo to show only McConnell.” Such biases don’t just affect social media interactions but crucial decision-making in areas such as healthcare, recruitment, finance and justice.
Again and again, Bates’s investigations reveal the very worst of human impulses. But why does any of it matter? The virtual world is not the real world, you might argue, and virtual rape is not real rape. Bates writes that not only is virtual assault traumatising, to dismiss it as “just a bit of fun” is akin to laughing off catcalls in the real world: small aggressions can lead women to moderate their behaviour in certain spaces, even to withdraw from them entirely. And if, as Zuckerberg dreams, the metaverse one day hosts boardrooms and classrooms and lecture halls, women must feel safe enough to be present in them.
The line between the material and the virtual world is increasingly difficult to draw. Bates writes that “those profiting from porn argue that it does not impact men’s real-world behaviour”. But we know that what happens online does not stay there. It is now commonplace for young men to expect their partners to engage in anal sex or choking. At one point while exploring the metaverse, Bates enters a room where a group of teenagers are playing a game of spin the bottle – only rather than kissing, they are shooting each other in the head. “Minor” transgressions often escalate into something darker and more serious. Just as the viewer of porn seeks out ever more extreme content as they grow numb from exposure, so too might a man grow tired of the lack of responsiveness from a silicone doll and seek out a real woman to submit to his fantasies.
“I come back, again and again,” Bates writes, “to Kokeshi’s torn labia. If she can’t feel it, does it matter? But what about the other women in whose image she has been made? What about all the ways that we can feel pain, all the ways we can be impacted if our collective humanity is gradually eroded by providing yet more hyper-effective and persuasive ways for men to see us as less than human? What about our pain?”
“Writing this book made me feel angry,” Laura Bates concludes. “I hope that reading it made you feel angry, too.” The truth is that it made me feel tired and bored – not because The New Age of Sexism is tiring or boring, but because misogyny is an endless drudge. While I was reading this book on a bus one afternoon, I looked out of the window at a stop and caught the eye of a man, who proceeded to mime masturbating himself at me. If you had the opportunity to create a whole new world from scratch, wouldn’t you want to leave this one behind altogether?
The New Age of Sexism: How the AI revolution is reinventing misogyny
Laura Bates
Simon & Schuster, 320pp, £19
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