Every time Laura Bates goes home, she calls her mum up, and gets her to stay on the phone while she checks all the windows to make sure that no-one’s broken in since she left that morning. ‘We moved house recently, and there are more access points to this place – so I associate that with a threat. But it’s difficult, because I’m really trying not to be scared of the new house,’ she says.
You’ll probably have heard of Laura, but if not you’ll almost certainly have heard about her website Everyday Sexism – a platform that aims to highlight all the small incidences of sexism that most women face on a daily basis.
You might know that since the site launched two years ago it’s had 60,000 entries, prompting some serious soul-searching about the way sexism continues to permeate our everyday lives in a regular newspaper column, a TED Talk and now a book – Everyday Sexism, out today. But you probably don’t know that, since the site launched two years ago, the website’s founder Laura has faced a barrage of abuse from trolls almost daily.
‘Within a month of starting the project I was getting 200 messages everyday of really, really bad abuse,’ she tells The Debrief. ‘Really graphic descriptions of domestic violence and rape – and very specific death threats and rape threats.’
Laura believes it’s an organised group of trolls, who plan co-ordinated campaigns against her. ‘They’re very clever about it. They’ll co-ordinate it so there are hundreds of them coming in for a couple of days and then they’ll stop for a few hours and you kind of have this huge sense of relief, and then they’ll start coming back slowly saying, “Oh, hi again, did you think we’d forgotten you?”’
The abuse has often been terrifyingly personal – for instance, recently targeting Laura’s wedding this summer. ‘They made specific threats about the wedding [and] my fiancé; they’ve hacked into Facebook and got pictures of my engagement ring. I never thought for a second that this would creep into that aspect of my life. I’ve had to put something on my wedding invitations asking guests not to put anything on social media and to keep it private. That’s been really horrible, because it should be such a joyful happy time.’
The abuse is all the more galling when you remember the well-documented reason why Laura started the site in the first place – and what it’s since achieved. After she got cat-called, groped and harassed several times in one week, she realised how normalised that sort of behaviour had become, and asked other women to share their experiences in an attempt to paint a bigger picture.
The subsequent success of the site – both in terms of the volume of responses and the level of awareness it has raised around ‘everyday sexism’ has been immense. Even Laura was shocked. ‘I thought we’d just get entries from adult women talking about their lives, but stories flooded in from girls as young as nine or ten. In particular there was loads of stuff around the street harassment they were getting when they were wearing their school uniforms. Not just wolf whistles, but you know horrific stuff, abusive and aggressive stuff.’
Seeing the response grow is what spurs Laura on – despite the vitriol. ‘There are days when it gets really bad and I get really scared,’ she says, admitting that occasionally her fiancé will take over moderating the site for a few days. ‘But there’s never been a time when I wished I hadn’t done it – because there’s also never a day where I don’t get an email from a young girl saying that she didn’t think could stand up and fight this and now she’s seen all these other women and realises that she can. There’s always something so positive coming out of it.’
At the moment, tackling misogyny at university level is high on Laura’s agenda. She gave the keynote speech at this year’s NUS conference on banishing lad culture on campus and has written extensively on the subject. But are girls at uni really faced with more sexism now – or are we all just reading about it more? ‘What I do think is different [for women at uni now] is the use of “banter” – this idea of being a lad. That’s definitely something new, it wasn’t there when I was at university and I only graduated in 2010,’ she says.
The problem, as Laura sees it, is that by turning every sexist comment into a joke, it robs young women (and men) of the opportunity to protest. ‘There’s this inbuilt defence of “you don’t have a sense of humour, it’s only a joke”. And yet, when you look at what they’re saying, it’s violent abuse and it all comes under this strange banner of irony that makes it so hard to fight against.’
But how do you fight it when overt sexism has become an acceptable part of every young woman’s daily experience? According to Laura, it’s by sticking together – an ethos at the very heart of Everyday Sexism. ‘So much of this boils down to bullying. When you say someone doesn’t have a sense of humour you’re isolating them. What you’re really saying is that everyone else is in on the joke and you’re on the outside of it. But if enough people in the middle stand up and say, “Actually, I don’t think it’s funny,” then actually, the power falls away.’
Speaking of power, considering that what Laura does is innately political, it’s perhaps surprising that she’s not yet been signed up to run for Parliament. ‘It’s not that I’m anti-politics; it’s just that I think that feminism is universal. It has to be about everybody and by getting into politics you automatically alienate people who aren’t on your party’s side, as it were. I think this is too important to risk losing half the country’s support, it should be something that absolutely crosses party lines.’
Besides, perhaps online engagement is where the real power and influence now lies, rather than the political framework? ‘It’s not necessarily that there’s more power in it, but I think that young people in particular feel that’s where they’re able to actually make their voices heard. I think there’s this huge sense of disillusionment with politicians and I think a lot of young people of my generation feel that no matter how much they do raise their voices and go on marches, and do anything they can do get their message to politicians, it’s ignored.’
Laura argues that’s why sites like Everyday Sexism – and the other vocal digital campaigns around ending Page 3 and FGM – are even more important. Hence the book release. ‘We’d hit over 50,000 entries and we got to the point where no-one had time to go to the website and read all of them, so I felt like it was important to try and sum up the themes that have come out of it,’ she explains.
Next for Laura are the international Everyday Sexism pages – with sites launching in Serbia, Japan, China, Sweden, Columbia and Mexico (by no means an exhaustive list), the web platform is quickly becoming a global brand. Not that she’s turning her attention away from the UK completely. ‘We’re launching a really big campaign soon specifically aimed at domestic violence in the teen and young age group.’
She admits that she’s only switched her Twitter off once since the website launched, on a brief (internet free) trip to the Arctic Circle. Now the book’s out, does she even get a holiday? ‘Well, I will get to go on my honeymoon, so I’m looking forward to that. The place we’re going to is in the middle of nowhere. It does have WiFi, but I think we might have to make a rule that we switch it off as soon as we get there.’
Everyday Sexism (Simon & Schuster) is out today
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @rebecca_hol
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.