For our second discussion group of 2025 we read the 2023 paperback edition of Fix the System Not the Women by Laura Bates, featuring an additional chapter.
We agreed that Bates’ style of writing was very engaging throughout the book and that Bates is a great collector of data / evidence and statistics highlighting not just the systemic impacts of patriarchy and misogyny on women and girls, but also the individual impacts. For those who would like to get some overview of the main points that Bates covers in the book, this RSA interview with Laura Bates is a good starting point. David put together a quick summary / overview of the main points of the book, which you can find at the end of this page.
Due to limited time, Björn decided to listen to the audio version of the book, which was read by Bates herself. Similar to Oliver’s experience listening to the audio version of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht last time, Björn felt that something got lost when listening to testimonies of other women read out by Bates. Something else that was quite strange, was listening to Bates speak about the male violence she has been subjected to in her reading, rather than her regular speaking / presenting voice. It somehow seemed more distant, yet these violences were very much Bates’ real-life experiences, part of her “list” of sexist and misogynistic harassment and abuses she had endured at the hands of men and boys. David, who had listened to an audio preview of the book on YouTube, agreed that it somehow sounded jarring and some of the impact seems lost in audio books containing strong biographical elements.
William said that he felt astounded, learning how many things Bates had lived through and were part of her “list”. In particular shortly prior to starting the Everyday Sexism Project. The amount of testimonies that women and girls soon started leaving on the website, clearly laid bare the sheer volume of violence, abuse, sexism and misogyny men subject women to across the world. There are parts of the book, where Bates speaks of the precautions women and girls have to make or are expected to make in quite a sarcastic / darkly humorous kind of way. In these passages she very clearly highlights the ridiculousness of a society that expects women to engage in a never-ending list of activities to protect themselves from men, when the solution really lies in stopping the men from behaving in abusive, degrading, violent and misogynistic ways.
Jon wondered what audience these parts in particular, but also the whole book was aimed at. Although he felt unsure about his conclusion, he felt that it was more aimed at other women than at men. Perhaps it was the sense that Bates was repeatedly speaking about women’s shared experiences that women would be able to relate to on a deeper level. However, as a group we felt that it was important for us as men to get a glimpse and better understanding of the realities of being a woman in patriarchy through Bates’ own and other women’s testimonies. Any man who struggles to connect to how women experience the world, would be much more informed after reading this book.
David noted that in the RSA interview, Laura Bates spoke about women being held responsible and that the book in some way might support women in feeling less responsible or moving the responsibility to where it belongs, to the men.
We then started speaking about solutions to the problem of men’s violence against women and girls and spoke about the possibility of a curfew on men to stop them engaging in violent and abusive behaviours towards women and girls, a solution that Bates references in the book. We spoke about how feminists and women have spoken about this as a solution for quite some time. The 1983 film ‘Give us a Smile’ by the Leeds Animation Workshop for instance chronicles everyday sexism women experience and features a curfew on men. The fiction book After Dark by Jayne Cowie is a more recent example of this.
Jon noted that halfway through reading the book he had fallen into the trap of thinking that Bates was raising all the issues, but was not giving a solution and in a way how he had fallen into the trap of expecting Bates as a women to give us men the solution. We reflected on this further and highlighted that if there was an easy solution, this would have probably been implemented a long time ago and that any solution to male violence towards women and girls and male violence in general are likely to be lengthy and multi-faceted.
From there on we started talking about what it is that we can do to engage other men who hold sexist / misogynistic views and act upon them through discrimination, coercion, abuse and assault? Jon reflected that it is often difficult to convince those in power (i.e. men) to give this up and wondered whether one way of convincing men would be to show them the benefits of a society without sexism and misogyny. Jon was particularly thinking about Robert Jensen, who in his Ted Talk speaks about how feminism allows you to have deeper and more meaningful relationships with the women in your life (and generally) if you embrace feminism. The difficulty however, on recognised, might be about how could you convince people to take a more difficult path when their life is so easy? Following on from that, Björn reflected that some of these men may not have a pain point, i.e. their life is good the way that it is. They get what they want, when they want it, in whatever way suits them.
David reflected that in terms of organisations, like the police, a high-profile murder like the murder of Sarah Everard by Met Police officer Wayne Couzens might be a ‘good enough’ reason to look deeper at the organisational culture, rather than writing incidents off as ‘a few bad apples’, something Bates also spoke about in her book.
Jon noted that the 5 systems / institutions Bates spoke about in the book are all systems of dominance and submission, where a dynamic of men’s oppression and domination of women tends to prevail, due to the power men have structurally built up over time. This again is probably influenced by men’s higher physical strength. We discussed how this sort of goes back to how societies and communities originally formed and that there are a lot of issues with how this happened due to shifts between cooperation and competitiveness, where competition and power seems to have retained the upper hand. Anthropologically we can make sense of how the structures have arisen in this way, but the question is what we do now with that knowledge to create fairer and safer societies, particularly for women and children.
The discussion then shifted to Bates’ example in the book where a school decided that the girls should change the way they dress, because male teachers found their bare arms too distracting. Björn wondered what may have happened if male or female teachers had said that they found the boys’ arms or legs distracting in their short sleeves. It seemed that in the example in the book, the responsibility for not distracting the men, was firmly placed with the girls rather than the men who were sexualising their underage female students.
Jon also referenced the upskirting offences committed by boys in at a catholic High School in Liverpool, which resulted in the girls being told to wear shorts under their skirts. Again the responsibility was placed on the girls to make changes and the boys, whereas the boys faced no consequences for their criminal behaviour. A number of us reflected that we know know women who faced similar situations 15 or 20 years ago and how little progress there seems to have been with regards to accepting boys’ behaviour and putting responsibility on the girls.
We wondered whether the DfE (Department for Edcation) had any special guidance to help schools deal with boys’ behaviour in schools, rather than adopting the ‘boys will be boys’ perspective that lets them off the hook without any consequence.
We then widened the discussion to how we / society deals with men’s sexist and misogynistic behaviours in companies and organisations. We strongly felt that there should really be a whistleblower policy in place to support women in reporting unwanted and non-consensual behaviours from men, without them risking this becoming widely known. We felt that this is particularly important as we have come across a number of testimonies from survivors over the years who said that the reason they came forward was to prevent other women from being victimised. One recent example that sprang to mind was Evan Rachel Wood who spoke about the horrendous abuse she suffered at the hands of Brian Warner (Marilyn Manson) in the documentary Marilyn Manson: Unmasked.
We also briefly touched upon the fact that misogyny is not a ‘hate crime’ and how this speaks volumes about societal attitudes with regards to men’s violence against women and girls. We strongly felt that if this any other group of people was subject to the same torrent of abuse and violence as women and girls are, this abuse would be a hate crime. Not so in the case of women and girls however. We did not go deeper into the benefits and possible drawbacks of making misogyny a hate crime, but did note that it might add fuel to the fire of MRAs (men’s ‘rights activists’) and men and boys more widely who believe and claim that “feminism has gone too far”.
Jon noted that whilst the book was ‘unputdownable’ in a sense, he felt himself needing to put the book down on occasion to process what he was reading and also because a lot of it was simply so horrible. He spoke in particular about a testimony in the book about a woman who suffered a non-consensual sexual assault at the hands of her partner who enacted a pornographic scene onto her. This kind of abuse is the real-life result of men’s consumption of pornography and really difficult to ignore. We would hope that this and similar testimonies would have the power to convince some men to look at the systems, to look at their own behaviour and lead to positive change in their behaviour towards women and girls. You can find thousands of testimonies from women and girls across the globe at The Everyday Sexism Project website.
At this point in the discussion it felt like there were just so many things that needed to happen, that the discussion almost inevitably went to “what can we do”? One of the first things that sprang to our minds following our discussion about 14 year-old boys requesting nudes of girls or even sending their own without consent was how children come up with these ideas and how much the pornography industry is to blame for this.
We also briefly touched on some of the deficiencies of some of the systems. Again we spoke about schools and the fact that despite the fact that there is mandatory RSHE (Relationships, Sex and Health Education), young people themselves have said that this often does not meet their needs or reflects their realities. Testimonies of young men we have spoken to very much felt how we felt 20+ years ago at school, when sex education involved bananas and condoms. It simply wasn’t fit for purpose.
At the end of the discussion we thought about having a separate discussion about our inverted ‘lists’, i.e. a list of all the sexist or misogynistic things we have done, said and thought (and may still be doing). This might include instances where we have belittled, harassed, controlled, exploited or abused women directly or indirectly. Our personal lists about our behaviour would help us think about how we are and have been complicit parts of the systems that Bates spoke about. Looking at our lists and thinking about why we did what we did and what we would do different now, might pave the way in helping us think what we could say to young men now to help them see that there are other ways of being.
As you have probably noticed, the book provided us with a lot of material for discussion and we therefore strongly recommend that every man reads it. Nonetheless the book felt less incisive than Bates’ previous efforts. This was in part due to the fact that Bates’ criticism of pornography was completely disconnected from a wider criticism of the sex trade and the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Instead prostituted women only featured in the book, when referred to as “sex workers”, which made us curious about her specific views relating to ‘sex work’, pornography and sexual exploitation are.
Some of the punch that Bates’ facts and statistics carried was unfortunately lost by the seemingly interchangeable use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. For us as readers, this meant that it simply wasn’t clear who was being referred to. It felt worth reminding ourselves that this lack of clarity is very likely due to changes in data collection, rather than being a result of Bates’ writing. We have personally noticed more and more how little research actually captures sex-specific data and how widespread the conflation between sex and gender in academia and statistics has become.
Lastly, some of us felt it was regrettable that Bates seemed to single out radical feminists’ perspective with regards to the importance of sex, sex-based rights and single-sex spaces as ‘trans exclusionary’:
“that leads some to argue that transwomen should be excluded from feminism…but this is ludicrous, partly because no two women’s experiences can ever be identical”.
Not just because it feels like a misrepresentation of valid arguments, but also because it further muddled the clarity of the book’s title and arguments.
BOOK SUMMARY
The 5 Systems of Patriarchy:
All are linked and cant be tackled in isolation. We assume they are natural or inevitable but in fact they were all set up specifically to benefit privileged white men.
The 4 Tests to Identify Patriarchy:
How to make patriarchy more visible?
Stop talking about ‘bad apples’ (as happened in Sarah Everard case) and start talking about this as a systemic problem. For instance the high proportion of MPs (10%) under investigation for sexual harassment is systemic, not ‘bad apples’.
All women have a list (or could make a list) of events where men / boys have been sexist or misogynistic. However, women blaming themselves is an issue – minimising the incident, ignoring micro aggressions etc.
Double jeopardy – not knowing how to deal with incidents, not wanting to be a ‘troublemaker.’ The fact that there are often negative outcomes to making a complaint. But the perpetrator should be responsible, not the survivor.
At work, men can change the culture by supporting female colleagues. E.g. by volunteering proactively for low level tasks that are routinely given to women.
How schools can deal with it
Need to start early by:
Problem of boys and girls treated differently – boys encouraged to be risk takers, girls encouraged to be careful / watchful.
Need also be aware of intersectionality – where sexism and racism are linked. Activities relating to Black Lives Matter and International Women’s Day (IWD) can be tokenistic.
There may be a vicious circle. Schools may look away / pretend there is no issue because it is not being reported and due to conerns regarding the schools reputation / not wanting to involve police. These attitudes then may influence how reports are dealt with and discourage girls and young women to make reports.
Points about Wayne Couzens’s murder of Sarah Everard:
We agreed that Bates’ style of writing was very engaging throughout the book and that Bates is a great collector of data / evidence and statistics highlighting not just the systemic impacts of patriarchy and misogyny on women and girls, but also the individual impacts. For those who would like to get some overview of the main points that Bates covers in the book, this RSA interview with Laura Bates is a good starting point. David put together a quick summary / overview of the main points of the book, which you can find at the end of this page.
Due to limited time, Björn decided to listen to the audio version of the book, which was read by Bates herself. Similar to Oliver’s experience listening to the audio version of The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht last time, Björn felt that something got lost when listening to testimonies of other women read out by Bates. Something else that was quite strange, was listening to Bates speak about the male violence she has been subjected to in her reading, rather than her regular speaking / presenting voice. It somehow seemed more distant, yet these violences were very much Bates’ real-life experiences, part of her “list” of sexist and misogynistic harassment and abuses she had endured at the hands of men and boys. David, who had listened to an audio preview of the book on YouTube, agreed that it somehow sounded jarring and some of the impact seems lost in audio books containing strong biographical elements.
William said that he felt astounded, learning how many things Bates had lived through and were part of her “list”. In particular shortly prior to starting the Everyday Sexism Project. The amount of testimonies that women and girls soon started leaving on the website, clearly laid bare the sheer volume of violence, abuse, sexism and misogyny men subject women to across the world. There are parts of the book, where Bates speaks of the precautions women and girls have to make or are expected to make in quite a sarcastic / darkly humorous kind of way. In these passages she very clearly highlights the ridiculousness of a society that expects women to engage in a never-ending list of activities to protect themselves from men, when the solution really lies in stopping the men from behaving in abusive, degrading, violent and misogynistic ways.
Jon wondered what audience these parts in particular, but also the whole book was aimed at. Although he felt unsure about his conclusion, he felt that it was more aimed at other women than at men. Perhaps it was the sense that Bates was repeatedly speaking about women’s shared experiences that women would be able to relate to on a deeper level. However, as a group we felt that it was important for us as men to get a glimpse and better understanding of the realities of being a woman in patriarchy through Bates’ own and other women’s testimonies. Any man who struggles to connect to how women experience the world, would be much more informed after reading this book.
David noted that in the RSA interview, Laura Bates spoke about women being held responsible and that the book in some way might support women in feeling less responsible or moving the responsibility to where it belongs, to the men.
We then started speaking about solutions to the problem of men’s violence against women and girls and spoke about the possibility of a curfew on men to stop them engaging in violent and abusive behaviours towards women and girls, a solution that Bates references in the book. We spoke about how feminists and women have spoken about this as a solution for quite some time. The 1983 film ‘Give us a Smile’ by the Leeds Animation Workshop for instance chronicles everyday sexism women experience and features a curfew on men. The fiction book After Dark by Jayne Cowie is a more recent example of this.
Jon noted that halfway through reading the book he had fallen into the trap of thinking that Bates was raising all the issues, but was not giving a solution and in a way how he had fallen into the trap of expecting Bates as a women to give us men the solution. We reflected on this further and highlighted that if there was an easy solution, this would have probably been implemented a long time ago and that any solution to male violence towards women and girls and male violence in general are likely to be lengthy and multi-faceted.
From there on we started talking about what it is that we can do to engage other men who hold sexist / misogynistic views and act upon them through discrimination, coercion, abuse and assault? Jon reflected that it is often difficult to convince those in power (i.e. men) to give this up and wondered whether one way of convincing men would be to show them the benefits of a society without sexism and misogyny. Jon was particularly thinking about Robert Jensen, who in his Ted Talk speaks about how feminism allows you to have deeper and more meaningful relationships with the women in your life (and generally) if you embrace feminism. The difficulty however, on recognised, might be about how could you convince people to take a more difficult path when their life is so easy? Following on from that, Björn reflected that some of these men may not have a pain point, i.e. their life is good the way that it is. They get what they want, when they want it, in whatever way suits them.
David reflected that in terms of organisations, like the police, a high-profile murder like the murder of Sarah Everard by Met Police officer Wayne Couzens might be a ‘good enough’ reason to look deeper at the organisational culture, rather than writing incidents off as ‘a few bad apples’, something Bates also spoke about in her book.
Jon noted that the 5 systems / institutions Bates spoke about in the book are all systems of dominance and submission, where a dynamic of men’s oppression and domination of women tends to prevail, due to the power men have structurally built up over time. This again is probably influenced by men’s higher physical strength. We discussed how this sort of goes back to how societies and communities originally formed and that there are a lot of issues with how this happened due to shifts between cooperation and competitiveness, where competition and power seems to have retained the upper hand. Anthropologically we can make sense of how the structures have arisen in this way, but the question is what we do now with that knowledge to create fairer and safer societies, particularly for women and children.
The discussion then shifted to Bates’ example in the book where a school decided that the girls should change the way they dress, because male teachers found their bare arms too distracting. Björn wondered what may have happened if male or female teachers had said that they found the boys’ arms or legs distracting in their short sleeves. It seemed that in the example in the book, the responsibility for not distracting the men, was firmly placed with the girls rather than the men who were sexualising their underage female students.
Jon also referenced the upskirting offences committed by boys in at a catholic High School in Liverpool, which resulted in the girls being told to wear shorts under their skirts. Again the responsibility was placed on the girls to make changes and the boys, whereas the boys faced no consequences for their criminal behaviour. A number of us reflected that we know know women who faced similar situations 15 or 20 years ago and how little progress there seems to have been with regards to accepting boys’ behaviour and putting responsibility on the girls.
We wondered whether the DfE (Department for Edcation) had any special guidance to help schools deal with boys’ behaviour in schools, rather than adopting the ‘boys will be boys’ perspective that lets them off the hook without any consequence.
We then widened the discussion to how we / society deals with men’s sexist and misogynistic behaviours in companies and organisations. We strongly felt that there should really be a whistleblower policy in place to support women in reporting unwanted and non-consensual behaviours from men, without them risking this becoming widely known. We felt that this is particularly important as we have come across a number of testimonies from survivors over the years who said that the reason they came forward was to prevent other women from being victimised. One recent example that sprang to mind was Evan Rachel Wood who spoke about the horrendous abuse she suffered at the hands of Brian Warner (Marilyn Manson) in the documentary Marilyn Manson: Unmasked.
We also briefly touched upon the fact that misogyny is not a ‘hate crime’ and how this speaks volumes about societal attitudes with regards to men’s violence against women and girls. We strongly felt that if this any other group of people was subject to the same torrent of abuse and violence as women and girls are, this abuse would be a hate crime. Not so in the case of women and girls however. We did not go deeper into the benefits and possible drawbacks of making misogyny a hate crime, but did note that it might add fuel to the fire of MRAs (men’s ‘rights activists’) and men and boys more widely who believe and claim that “feminism has gone too far”.
Jon noted that whilst the book was ‘unputdownable’ in a sense, he felt himself needing to put the book down on occasion to process what he was reading and also because a lot of it was simply so horrible. He spoke in particular about a testimony in the book about a woman who suffered a non-consensual sexual assault at the hands of her partner who enacted a pornographic scene onto her. This kind of abuse is the real-life result of men’s consumption of pornography and really difficult to ignore. We would hope that this and similar testimonies would have the power to convince some men to look at the systems, to look at their own behaviour and lead to positive change in their behaviour towards women and girls. You can find thousands of testimonies from women and girls across the globe at The Everyday Sexism Project website.
At this point in the discussion it felt like there were just so many things that needed to happen, that the discussion almost inevitably went to “what can we do”? One of the first things that sprang to our minds following our discussion about 14 year-old boys requesting nudes of girls or even sending their own without consent was how children come up with these ideas and how much the pornography industry is to blame for this.
We also briefly touched on some of the deficiencies of some of the systems. Again we spoke about schools and the fact that despite the fact that there is mandatory RSHE (Relationships, Sex and Health Education), young people themselves have said that this often does not meet their needs or reflects their realities. Testimonies of young men we have spoken to very much felt how we felt 20+ years ago at school, when sex education involved bananas and condoms. It simply wasn’t fit for purpose.
At the end of the discussion we thought about having a separate discussion about our inverted ‘lists’, i.e. a list of all the sexist or misogynistic things we have done, said and thought (and may still be doing). This might include instances where we have belittled, harassed, controlled, exploited or abused women directly or indirectly. Our personal lists about our behaviour would help us think about how we are and have been complicit parts of the systems that Bates spoke about. Looking at our lists and thinking about why we did what we did and what we would do different now, might pave the way in helping us think what we could say to young men now to help them see that there are other ways of being.
As you have probably noticed, the book provided us with a lot of material for discussion and we therefore strongly recommend that every man reads it. Nonetheless the book felt less incisive than Bates’ previous efforts. This was in part due to the fact that Bates’ criticism of pornography was completely disconnected from a wider criticism of the sex trade and the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Instead prostituted women only featured in the book, when referred to as “sex workers”, which made us curious about her specific views relating to ‘sex work’, pornography and sexual exploitation are.
Some of the punch that Bates’ facts and statistics carried was unfortunately lost by the seemingly interchangeable use of the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. For us as readers, this meant that it simply wasn’t clear who was being referred to. It felt worth reminding ourselves that this lack of clarity is very likely due to changes in data collection, rather than being a result of Bates’ writing. We have personally noticed more and more how little research actually captures sex-specific data and how widespread the conflation between sex and gender in academia and statistics has become.
Lastly, some of us felt it was regrettable that Bates seemed to single out radical feminists’ perspective with regards to the importance of sex, sex-based rights and single-sex spaces as ‘trans exclusionary’:
“that leads some to argue that transwomen should be excluded from feminism…but this is ludicrous, partly because no two women’s experiences can ever be identical”.
Not just because it feels like a misrepresentation of valid arguments, but also because it further muddled the clarity of the book’s title and arguments.
BOOK SUMMARY
The 5 Systems of Patriarchy:
- School
- Police
- Politics
- Media
- Criminal justice
All are linked and cant be tackled in isolation. We assume they are natural or inevitable but in fact they were all set up specifically to benefit privileged white men.
The 4 Tests to Identify Patriarchy:
- Sex-based imbalance (female representation)
- Injustices faced by women (i.e. sexual harasment, lower pay etc)
- Anti-sexist policies that aren’t working
- External impacts (e.g. how police deal with rape cases)
How to make patriarchy more visible?
Stop talking about ‘bad apples’ (as happened in Sarah Everard case) and start talking about this as a systemic problem. For instance the high proportion of MPs (10%) under investigation for sexual harassment is systemic, not ‘bad apples’.
All women have a list (or could make a list) of events where men / boys have been sexist or misogynistic. However, women blaming themselves is an issue – minimising the incident, ignoring micro aggressions etc.
Double jeopardy – not knowing how to deal with incidents, not wanting to be a ‘troublemaker.’ The fact that there are often negative outcomes to making a complaint. But the perpetrator should be responsible, not the survivor.
At work, men can change the culture by supporting female colleagues. E.g. by volunteering proactively for low level tasks that are routinely given to women.
How schools can deal with it
Need to start early by:
- Talking about it including lessons in online media literacy, tackling gender stereotypes.
- Whole-school approach, not just tick box exercise
- Is harassment taken seriously? How are incidents reported?
- Diversity in choice of books read in the school and invited speakers etc.
Problem of boys and girls treated differently – boys encouraged to be risk takers, girls encouraged to be careful / watchful.
Need also be aware of intersectionality – where sexism and racism are linked. Activities relating to Black Lives Matter and International Women’s Day (IWD) can be tokenistic.
There may be a vicious circle. Schools may look away / pretend there is no issue because it is not being reported and due to conerns regarding the schools reputation / not wanting to involve police. These attitudes then may influence how reports are dealt with and discourage girls and young women to make reports.
Points about Wayne Couzens’s murder of Sarah Everard:
- Why have we heard / know her name and not those of the other victims of femicide?
- Police are not recognising the systemic issue(s) (the ‘bad apple’ argument).
- Focus on policing women in local areas (e.g. told not to go out at night, or advised to download an app for reporting threats) rather than the men.
- Blaming Sarah Everard for submitting to false arrest.
- Police shutting down a women’s vigil in memory of Sarah Everard.
- Reported by press as a ‘tragic incident’ that Sarah Everard didn’t deserve – as if other victims of femicide did.
