Somewhere between the crashing waves and the warmth on my skin, a podcast episode rattled something in me.
I was walking the Sea Point Promenade, no schedule, no agenda, when The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White introduced a conversation that caught me off guard.
The episode was titled “The New Age of Sexism” with guests Laura Bates and Desiree Burch. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard women name the exhausting shapes misogyny takes. But something about this particular conversation—the honesty, the rage beneath the humour, the way familiar frustrations were laid out so plainly—stirred something deeper.
It wasn’t all new information. But it arrived differently.
Maybe because I was walking in the sun, held by a rare moment of peace. Or maybe because it’s hard to unhear something once it clicks in your body. Either way, it shook loose something I didn’t quite understand until I got home and sat with it.
When Technology Becomes the New Weapon
The conversation centred on Laura Bates’ new book “The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny.” Bates argues that new technologies aren’t just failing to solve age-old inequalities, they’re deepening them, creating entirely new forms of violence against women.
Part of the episode explored misogyny’s role in AI technologies, sex robots, deepfakes, and the toxic landscapes of the metaverse. These aren’t distant concerns or theoretical problems. They’re happening now, reshaping how women experience harm in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
What struck me was the historical parallel they drew to Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas”—her response to a man asking how she would prevent war. Woolf understood then what Bates is articulating now: that women’s liberation and humanity’s survival are inextricably linked.
The fact that their messaging feels so similar, separated by nearly a century, revealed something devastating. We haven’t come nearly as far as we’d hoped. The tools have evolved, but the underlying violence remains, now amplified, digitised, and scaled beyond anything Woolf could have imagined.
The Question That Changed Everything
But the moment that truly stopped me was when Bates was asked about building resilience for such heavy, soul-altering work. She had subjected herself to experiencing some of the horrors of being assaulted in the metaverse while researching her book—imagine the psychological toll of that dedication to truth-telling.
Her response was unlike anything I’d heard before:
“I don’t ever want to suggest that there is a way to build resilience that is enough to cope with men sending you deep fake videos of themselves choking you with their cock. Because actually I don’t want to live in a world where we normalise the idea that that’s inevitable and what we have to do is teach women and girls to find ways to cope with it.
And I think this sector is kind of not obviously completely unique but unusual insofar as the people doing this work are, you know, not all firefighters are trying to put out blazes in their own backyards, not all oncologists are themselves actively battling cancer. And the women that I meet working in this field are often setting up and then scrabbling desperately to keep the doors open and the lights on the services that they needed that weren’t available to them. So I think my answer is that there isn’t and I don’t think there is anything that equips you to not be affected by these things. […]”
From The Guilty Feminist: 439. The New Age of Sexism with Laura Bates and Desiree Burch, 09 Jun 2025
This response shattered something in me that I didn’t even know needed breaking.
The Lie I’d Been Carrying
I realised, walking back to my car from the promenade, that I had completely bought into the narrative that there should be ways to cope with misogyny. That if we just developed the right tools, the right mindset, the right resilience practices, we could somehow armour ourselves against the violence of a world that devalues women.
I’d internalised the belief that it was our responsibility to find ways to remain unaffected by systems designed to harm us. That self-care, boundary-setting, therapy, and meditation could somehow shield us from the crushing weight of institutional oppression.
But Bates named something I’d never allowed myself to think: We shouldn’t have to learn how to cope with something that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
The women working to address these issues aren’t building resilience against abstract problems—they’re putting out fires in their own backyards, treating their own wounds while simultaneously trying to prevent others from being hurt in the same ways. The personal is always political when you’re fighting for your own humanity.
The Boot Gets an Upgrade
We’re no longer just contending with the obvious, physical weight of the boot that’s been pressed to women’s necks for generations.
That crushing force is being upgraded.
Now it’s pixels. Now it’s code. Now it can be replicated infinitely, distributed globally, and embedded into the very infrastructure of our digital lives.
It lives in algorithms that erase us, in deepfake porn that violates us, in virtual spaces where consent is optional and harm is ‘just simulated’ but still devastatingly real. It lives in AI systems trained on biased data, in hiring algorithms that discriminate, in recommendation engines that funnel women toward harassment.
We are stepping into a future where violence against women isn’t just physical—it’s digital, scalable, downloadable, and disturbingly unregulated. The patriarchal gaze has gone high-tech, and it’s being marketed as progress.
And once again, we’re being asked to adjust, to evolve, to carry it. In silence.
The Refusal
But what if we don’t?
What if, instead of developing better coping mechanisms, we refuse to normalise the unnormalisable?
What if we recognise that there is no amount of self-care that can protect us from algorithmic bias, no meditation practice that can shield us from deepfake harassment, no boundary-setting technique that can stop AI from perpetuating centuries of misogyny at digital speed?
Women have never been silent about their oppression — they’ve been ignored and victim-blamed.
So maybe the real question isn’t when we’ll start demanding change, but when the world will finally stop pretending it hasn’t already been asked.
This isn’t about giving up hope or abandoning the tools that help us survive. It’s about refusing to mistake survival tactics for solutions.
It’s about naming the truth that Bates spoke so clearly: some things are designed to harm us, and our job isn’t to learn how to carry that harm gracefully. Our job is to refuse to accept it as inevitable.
The boot may have gone digital, but our refusal can go viral too.
