Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes

Contains some violent scenes, and strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting from the start.

So Nadine Dorries. Alone in a hotel, no repercussions...

I'll abuse you so badly

your gynaecologist will think you've been in a fucking car crash.

My views on anything

are actually irrelevant to the size or shape of my vagina.

From abuse hurled at women appearing on Question Time

to bomb threats sent to campaigners

agitating for more female heroes on banknotes,

from the sexually explicit portrayal

of women in pop videos to rape jokes...

-Anyway, that night she got raped.

-LAUGHTER

..is there a new culture abroad in which men, and it is mainly men,

seem to think they have the freedom

and the right to speak about, write about,

and portray women in a derogatory, even abusive way?

And is this culture now infecting and polluting

the lives of school girls?

If you come home to your mother

and say there were rape jokes at school,

a girl was being slut shamed today, somebody was being touched up,

-would she not be horrified?

-I probably wouldn't tell my mum.

It's just so normal, why would I tell her?

Do you want a copy of The Female Eunuch?

The most prominent feminist of her generation didn't see it coming.

Things have got a lot worse for women since I wrote The Female Eunuch.

Who thought once you had social media

they would become this terrible grab bag of loathing of women?

We need a new analysis.

So have these sentiments always been lurking?

Has technology just given them a new, louder voice

or has something changed men's attitudes to women for the worse?

I think there is definitely

a new kind of misogyny developing right now

and it comes out of a deep sense of resentment

at growing female power.

Some people disagree and think women should just calm down

and stop taking this so seriously.

After all, we live in a culture

that can be coarse and vicious to everyone.

This isn't something which is peculiar to women,

this is something which is peculiar to the internet.

I think you have to, to use the sexist term, man up a bit.

So is that what this is about,

it's our problem and genuinely women just have to "man up"?

Or is there something new in the air,

a visceral misogyny, a kind of dangerous nastiness?

And if there is, could it have far-reaching consequences?

Women have so many opportunities today

that some say feminism has done its job.

My mother's life was so different to mine.

I don't think she could comprehend

the freedom I enjoy as a BBC journalist and presenter.

Like many, I've benefited from the hard-fought changes

that have made women equal in the eyes of the law.

But has achieving real respect for women in society

been such a smooth process?

Or are we seeing the latest and most virulent of a series of backlashes?

# All so we can have a good time, yeah!

# I'm in here busy looking for the next top model...#

And right now in our sexually explicit culture,

are age-old hostilities finding very contemporary forms?

From pop videos...

..to advertising...

..to TV shows.

Even though you are getting old and you're up the duff,

I would still smash your back doors in.

LAUGHTER

And spunk on your tits. LAUGHTER

Is what we're seeing sexism, misogyny or liberation?

Sexism is prejudice or discrimination.

Misogyny is something altogether darker.

Misogyny is personalised, sexualised and often violent.

It is, of course, nothing new,

but I wonder if it's found a new lease of life.

In our "anything goes" culture,

has it become OK to be sexually offensive to women?

And in the process, has it become harder to recognise misogyny,

or even as a society to agree when it occurs?

I'm going to Stirling University to investigate an incident

that really raises questions about what behaviour towards women

and language about them is considered socially acceptable

and whether there is any consensus about it at all.

WHISTLE

It's one of the most extreme cases of a string of episodes

at British Universities in which what's been dismissed as harmless laddism by some

is to others deeply problematic.

What was particularly notable about what happened at Stirling with one of the university's sports teams

was the time and the place of the incident.

A performance on a bus at 9:30 at night, so it was a public space.

I want to watch it and apparently it's pretty raucous,

so as I'm in a public space, I'll put my headphones on.

The students are singing an updated version of an old drinking song

and this one is far more explicit

and sexually aggressive than the original.

LAUGHTER AND CHEERING

-GIRL:

-Do you know...

I can just make out some women on the bus asking, "Why is that funny,"

and commenting that it's scary.

But the team was just getting warmed up.

The hockey team's enthusiastic chanting

has provoked masses of comments online

and on the streets of Stirling too, dividing opinion.

"Only university sports teams

"would appreciate this banter, both male and female."

"This is very misogynistic.

"I found the joke about miscarriage particularly sickening."

It was funny, it was witty. You've got to admit that, it was witty.

It's kind of shocking it would happen in a public place,

but I suppose it's reasonable if it's somewhere that the public don't get exposed to it.

This has got everything from

this is just hilarious and ironic to it's misogynistic, it's violent towards women.

It's extraordinary how one single incident

can be read in so many different ways.

I got together some students to find out how the same words

could be just harmless, laddish banter to some like Euan and Katie,

and so offensive to others like Maria and Miriam,

who were on the bus that night.

When you heard those lyrics, what was your reaction? You were there.

If you actually think about what it means, you know,

how the whole song is about this woman

going to the store asking for various everyday items

and that one time when she does ask for sex, you know, "Who cares?"

You know, "You're not as valuable.

"Your thoughts and desires are not as valuable as mine.

"I'll just give you what I want to give you and you have to take it."

And what did you think when you saw it?

I work in a bar, I'm used to guys getting drunk and just being a bit silly,

but I didn't think it was as bad as everybody was making out at all.

-I think it's just... They're joking around.

-Yeah.

They're just singing a song, they've all joined in. They don't really mean it.

A night out is different to how you are during the day

or like in real life terms at university or at your work place.

Well, in that case it's quite interesting. Is there a subliminal attitude towards women

that men don't necessarily want to admit they have?

But this song isn't a one-off terrible song

that one group of bad individuals have sung,

this is...this is a common example of everyday occurrences

that really just highlight an underlying misogyny.

How come young people are so split

about whether offensive words have any meaning or not?

I was actually at Stirling University in the sexist early '70s.

And even then this wasn't my experience of higher education.

However problematic attitudes towards women could be,

my generation, maybe naively, thought we were leaving them behind.

And by the late '80s, while sexist and misogynistic views had hardly disappeared,

popular imagery of the sexes had changed.

For women it was power suits

and for men, well, there was the New Man,

from posters to adverting.

The men are here as we ask whether the appearance of the New Man

means an end to the battle of the sexes?

Just what happened?

Pull your top up. Let's have 'em out for the lads.

-CHEERING

-Look at them!

Britpop with the likes of Oasis and Blur

brought a new tone to popular culture

and soon there was a magazine to celebrate it.

MUSIC: "Loaded" by Primal Scream

In 1994, Loaded burst onto the scene

with a swagger, a beer can

and before long, a scantily-clad woman in tow.

So I wondered what Loaded's longest-serving editor,

Martin Daubney, now in his 40s,

made of the culture his magazine helped popularise?

What lad culture, when it emerged in the '90s,

I think it just kind of held a mirror to what was out there.

I think working class white males ostensibly, you know,

wanted to reject this kind of template they were being told they should live their lives.

You know, we should all be clean living, doing the hovering,

this kind of asexual creature that was being forced down our throats.

And Loaded was kind of a reaction to that, it was two fingers.

It was, "We don't want to be new men, we want to be old-fashioned, unreconstructed cavemen."

What was the kind of tone around Loaded at that time?

Was it, you know, that you were really smart guys

just being ironic about sexism or what?

I don't think Loaded ever set out to be sexist.

We celebrated women, we did, our readers loved women.

We had interviews with them and... You're smiling, you don't believe me.

No, I'm smiling, I love the idea that "we celebrated women".

We celebrated women but not necessarily to talk about

all the wonderful work they were doing or whatever,

it was more about their looks.

We did start to think of the women in the magazine

as, I guess, objects, sales devices, because they did sell magazines.

If you put a man on the cover of a men's magazine,

it was commercial suicide.

Whatever their intention, lads' mags arguably helped set in train

the idea that sexism, even misogyny,

could be rendered harmless with a knowing, ironic wink.

Making it harder today to distinguish between what's socially acceptable and what's not.

MUSIC: "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke

2013's biggest and most controversial hit was called, appropriately enough, Blurred Lines,

infamous for the topless models in its video

and lyrics described by a reviewer as "kind of rapey".

# I get these blurred lines

# I know you want it

# I know you want it... #

-Do you find it offensive?

-No, I think it's...

I mean, I understand why some people do, but it doesn't read that everybody should find it offensive.

You've no concern about the lyrics?

-Um.

-Split your ass and all this stuff?

I think people are on the whole intelligent enough

to ascertain the difference between a lyric in a song

and to actually go out into the real world and to split a girl's ass.

Even last year's Oscars caused a critical storm

with their focus on the breasts of the world's most successful actresses.

# We saw your boobs

# We saw your boobs

# In the movie that we saw, we saw your boobs. #

I think this is different because I don't think that was funny.

I think there was a collective sense there of people's toes curling.

And joke T-shirts pushed the boundaries of taste even further.

-OK, this is on eBay, but it's discontinued now.

-Yeah.

"I'm feeling rapey".

You know, if you make a joke about rape like this,

then I think you've got to be more hateful towards women.

It's not actually delivered in a humorous context, I don't think,

there's something more insidious.

-So is that misogyny, not laddism?

-Yes, that's misogyny.

It was never part of our mantra

to joke about rape or to encourage violence towards women.

Loaded tried to set a line,

but the trouble is not everybody wants to stay within the pen.

But is the legacy of laddism just how do you decide what's funny

or where to draw the line in a world of postmodern irony?

And I wonder if, in the confusion, it opened the floodgates to something darker.

Where better to explore the limits of humour than a comedy gig,

testing what audiences now want to hear on a good night out.

-One ticket, please.

-Yes, of course. That's

-£8. Thank you.

Cheers.

Is there any harm in having a laugh?

Comedy is all about pushing boundaries, even if it is at our expense.

And if women don't find it funny or even offensive,

is there any truth in the old accusation it's because women have had a sense of humour bypass?

Good evening! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. How are we?!

I wanted to put some comedy fans on the spot

at this popular club in Portsmouth.

What did they make of some of the material doing the rounds

with hugely successful comedians?

Jokes about women were once considered old-fashioned

by "hip" alternative stand-ups, not any more.

-Same sense of humour?

-We'll find out in a minute.

THEY LAUGH

-This is going to end in divorce.

-Yeah, maybe?

Thanks for shouting out like a crazy bitch, that's brilliant.

LAUGHTER

I'll abuse you so badly your gynaecologist will think

you've been in a fucking car crash.

-You don't think he's very funny.

-I don't, but I thought that was funny.

I reckon your pussy's seen more action than fucking Helmand.

LAUGHTER I don't find him funny, but I don't find it offensive necessarily.

I don't think they have to go two and two together.

If he was taking the mickey out of someone

for colour, creed, whatever it was, that would not be acceptable.

I play practical jokes on her constantly though.

I got her so good a few weeks ago.

I replaced her pepper spray with silly string.

LAUGHTER

Anyway, that night she got raped.

And she called me the next day going, "You son of a bitch!"

-Funny? Not funny?

-No, not at all.

-Not one bit.

-Cringy.

-No.

-Oh!

Black sense of humour maybe.

-In the real world it's not all right but in abstract maybe.

-All humour is about misfortune,

so there's always somebody at the butt of the joke.

LAUGHTER

Please welcome to the stage the fantastic Brendon Burns!

Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, Brendon Burns,

specifically explores the nature of offence in his work.

And no group gets a free pass.

Hello! CHEERING

Feminists are fucking awesome!

It's true. They pick up their own cheques and they apologise when they're wrong.

LAUGHTER

Oh, you didn't know that was in the fucking deal, did ya?

You can see pretty young girls going, "Wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!"

I'm sorry, that is the cornerstone of feminism,

independence and accountability.

Everything else is just bum-sticker fucking bullshit!

Look, you're shaking your head. You're going, "No, surely feminism is having my cake and eating it?"

No! Germaine Greer hates you!

LAUGHTER

I was curious to know what he thought about women being comedy's victim.

Why are you under the impression that women are a sacred cow?

I think it's...it is about equality.

I think once you're fair game, then that's when you're truly equal.

-Fair game for what though?

-Humour, a figure of fun.

I think once you exclude any section of society from having a sense of humour about themselves,

you exclude them full stop. That's exclusion.

That's a fucking cock-sucker's laugh you've got there, madam.

LAUGHTER

See, she's not denying it!

HE HACKLES

That's a laugh born of choking on a stiff one. Is that not...?

Have you noticed, madam, when you laugh in pubs every guy in the room turns into a meerkat? Just...

LAUGHTER I bet you see heads going back and everything.

I wondered whether he thought being in a gig

gave stand-ups special dispensation.

Once you're in that space you can say anything

and it wouldn't be stuff that for example a comedian, not just you, would say outside?

Yeah, I think so. There's a bit of like...a secret handshake.

-Hmm.

-You know?

And everyone wants to be let off the hook, going, "Oh, I'm laughing ironically,

"I'm laughing at the perpetrator, I'm laughing at this or..."

And the bottom line is you're laughing cos you're surprised. That's all there is to it.

-LAUGHTER

-But why do jokes about women get such a laugh?

What about jokes where I'm the butt of the joke?

Either everything's funny or nothing's funny.

I always love coming here, it's always great to see you.

Thanks for coming out. My name's Brendon Burns. Good night!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

In this brave new world though where nothing is off limits,

laughing at sexual assault has become commonplace,

with 2012 being dubbed the year of the rape joke at the Edinburgh Festival.

But it's not just humour in clubs that's taken a darker turn.

Or comedians who justify saying the unsayable by arguing that "that's comedy".

So-called trolls, journalists and even politicians

have all made controversial remarks that beg the question,

are their comments sexist, misogynistic or just a bit of a laugh?

I think all the girls said, "No, none of us clean behind the fridge."

And I made a joke, "Oh, well, you're all sluts."

And everybody laughed, including all the women.

BOTH: # Get your tits out for the lads!

# Get your tits out for the lads. # LAUGHTER

Is football full of sportsmen

who enjoy a little bit of lads' mag humour? Yes, it is.

Could some women and men be right to have reservations

about this sort of comedy even in its mildest forms,

whatever the stated intention of the joke teller?

-Calm down, dear. Calm down.

-LAUGHTER

"It was meant as a joke and I thought would be taken as a joke."

To try to find out whether a joke is really just a joke,

psychologist Dr Thomas Ford

has been exploring the consequences of sexist humour on behaviour.

At his university, he got together mixed groups of men,

some with neutral attitudes to women, the yellow ones,

some with hostile, sexist attitudes to women, the blue ones.

We wondered what might happen if a group of guys like this

are sitting around in a pub and they were to encounter some sexist humour,

perhaps through a comedian on the TV, or perhaps through some banter

or sexist jokes amongst some of the guys.

Jokes such as, why did the woman cross the road?

"Who cares? What the hell is she doing out of the kitchen?"

LAUGHTER

He wanted to know whether jokes like these changed the normal boundaries of acceptable behaviour,

boundaries indicated by this white line.

For example, in the case of mild sexual harassment in an office.

When exposed to sexist humour, the blue sexist guys

uniquely perceived the instance of sexual harassment as acceptable.

-Only with humour?

-That's right.

-Not with sexist statements?

-That's right.

But sexist humour uniquely makes light of sexism,

it uniquely invites us to treat it as a joke,

as not serious in the immediate context.

And so, in a sense, we have a new...norm.

A new standard of appropriate conduct.

And so now everything within the blue circle

represents socially acceptable ways of responding.

And in further experiments,

Tom found that after hearing sexist humour,

men with hostile attitudes to women

were more likely to discriminate against women's groups financially,

for example, by cutting their budget.

And they were more likely to accept sexism at a societal level,

such as the underrepresentation of women in Parliament...

or the unequal division of domestic chores like cooking.

Men who are not sexist who are exposed to sexist humour,

-it makes no difference to them cos fundamentally they have their own belief system.

-Exactly.

But men who are sexist get a kick out of sexist humour and feel empowered by sexist humour.

Yes, I would agree with that. And they feel empowered by sexist humour and they feel liberated.

Our blue guys who have sexism,

they generally go around life suppressing the sexism

that they carry with them.

What sexist humour does, it frees the sexist man to express his sexism without fears of reprisals.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

What Tom is saying is you may not be sexist at all,

but if you laugh at sexist jokes either just to be sociable

or in what you think is an ironic way, men and women,

what you are actually doing is validating people in the room

who are sexist or misogynistic.

And hearing gales of laughter

simply encourages them to behave in a sexist or misogynistic way.

If laddism and humour have been vehicles for normalising misogynistic language,

some people have argued the place that's allowed it to run rampant is the internet.

It's an issue that's hit the headlines in the last year

after the wave of online abuse directed at women in the public eye.

Not least guests on the BBC's own flagship programme Question Time.

Every week as the rig goes up,

the world of social media gets ready to pass judgment on the panel.

I'd been monitoring the response to every woman

to appear on the programme in the first three months of the year.

There are reams of tweets and social media coming in.

You know, second by second people are commenting not only on the subject, but also on the panellists.

It's amazing just how much people when they're watching the programme

want to react to it.

And for women on the panel the background noise in unmistakable.

It's personal and it's sexual.

And a big welcome to you watching at home.

"Ruth Davidson can suck my fucking noggin.

"Motormouth dumb bitch.

"Don't suck so much cock, big mouth."

The worst example of this new trend

is what happened to Professor Mary Beard

after her appearance on the programme last January.

On one popular discussion site,

a picture of female genitals was superimposed on her face.

And the comments were just as sexually derogatory...

..ran one.

While another speculated on the capaciousness of her vagina.

For Professor Beard, this language has consequences, both personal and political.

You do have to steel yourself a little bit,

because it's quite affecting when you get this stuff.

But most of all, it's just infuriating.

My views on anything are actually irrelevant

to the size or shape of my vagina. I'm sorry.

I've decided I'm going to face the music, but there must be loads of women who think,

"That's just not what I want. I don't want that kind of rubbish."

And it's vile, it really is vile.

You think, "Why would anybody really bother to do this

unless they were terribly determined."

So I think it's very bad for women's participation

in the public sphere, honestly.

As Mary Beard says, there's a danger

that some women could be driven from public life.

Now, it's an open question whether any woman can be in the public eye

without exposing herself to the possibility of graphic, sexualised abuse.

Whether it's Ruby Tandoh,

one of the finalists in The Great British Bake Off,

being called a whore.

Gymnast and Olympic medallist Beth Tweddle

being dubbed a slag and a slut.

Or Caroline Criado-Perez being bombarded

with threats of rape and murder

after her campaign to get a woman on the back of a British banknote.

The threats have been so explicit and so graphic

they've stuck with me in my head and have really put me...in fear.

The abuse Caroline received was one of the stories

we covered on Newsnight last year that struck me the most.

And it's the key case that's resulted in a criminal conviction,

with Isabella Sorley and John Nimmo

being jailed for their part in the verbal onslaught.

-Why did you send those messages?

-I can't say nowt else.

It is illegal to make threats to rape or murder,

but when the sentences were announced,

there was a distinct strand to the reaction on Twitter.

Should language be treated differently online?

Is it somehow less real?

I spoke to columnist and provocateur Rod Liddle,

who's dished out some pretty strong language in his Spectator blog

and who's no stranger to a bit of internet abuse himself.

It's distressing if...if you allow it to distress you, I suppose.

And it's distressing to all of us in a very real sense, Kirsty, you know?

It's distressing to me when I read stuff telling me they hope I die of cancer.

Some people say that what's on the internet can be completely disregarded.

You know, if somebody's on the internet saying, "I know where you live and I'm going to rape you."

You should just disregard it.

But, actually, for people getting that you can understand how disturbing it was.

Of course and it's prosecutable.

But I think a lot of the rest of the stuff which goes on though, you can just write it off.

Just ignore it. Someone said that I look like a drug-addled middle-aged lesbian.

-You know, someone else said...

-That's quite insulting to lesbians.

-Very insulting to lesbians.

People have said they'd like to see me stabbed, killed, beheaded.

It's every day. Get a grip!

Why would it be worse for a woman than for a man?

Why would it? Unless there is something inherently different between us

which makes you guys less able to put up with this. I don't think there is a difference.

I don't think...that this is a gender problem,

I think it's a political and class problem.

I think it's the middle-class left

who cannot abide having their world views challenged,

transgressed, sometimes in rather brutal language.

There is a special issue with women and feeling vulnerable,

I will grant you that,

but if there's one thing to learn from what you're saying they must not take the internet seriously.

But can we dismiss the internet as somehow divorced from real life?

DUCKS QUACK

I went to see linguist Dr Claire Hardaker,

who studies online abuse,

to see whether she thought the internet and the mainstream media

are completely separate or intertwined.

Well, effectively what we have here is sort of a,

if you like, a bit of a map of how you can have a behaviour

that can occurs in one domain and can spread to another.

So if we take, for instance, an article by AA Gill,

he was critiquing a programme by Mary Beard.

And what he actually starts talking about a great deal is her teeth,

her hair. The outfit is an embarrassment.

So effectively we start off with this idea of appearance,

of being an object.

And as we move on, we start to see this turning into things like

very implicit suggestions of sex.

So for instance, Clarkson, "You wouldn't want to."

Not the Mary Beard in this case, it's Hilary Clinton.

Exactly. And it's this really implicit sort of,

"Would you sleep with this? Would you have sex with it?"

And where does this take us to?

OK, so what we find is from the media, we effectively get

this movement across into the online behaviour of public figures.

For example, there was a spat among three broadsheet journalists

in which James Delingpole tweeted that Toby Young had,

"Given Suzanne Moore such a seeing-to

"she'll be walking bow-legged for months."

If you think about the language of that, such as "seeing-to,"

that she'll be walking bow... It's quite aggressive.

We're talking about quite a violent type of action or behaviour.

And then we come on to the just the general tweets.

So these are the ordinary people.

Effectively by this point the ideas and tropes that began in the media

have now become really loud, really amplified, quite extreme.

So for instance we have things... rape,

"I'd do a lot worse things than rape you."

-And then when it hits this...

-Mm-hmm.

-..what happens next?

So it doesn't actually stop here.

What we find is a really interesting feedback loop that takes us

back up to the media.

What Claire's saying is the ideas that started in the media,

that were massively amplified online,

reappear louder than ever back in the mainstream press,

in articles by journalists, such as Rod Liddle.

If we take, for instance, Rod Liddle's article

about Professor Beard, Mary Beard.

He's interestingly, essentially trying to argue that the attacks

that she's receiving are not misogynistic.

So, effectively, Rod Liddle, what he is doing is he's saying is

it's not really misogyny, it's just people criticising you.

-It's your fault.

-So he's minimising.

He's minimising and he's excusing and justifying.

So you could think of this actually as a big loop.

It starts up in the media with these very implicit ideas.

It goes onto the internet where it's hugely amplified,

it's taken to its extreme,

and then it feeds back around again to the media

who pick up on these ideas, who feed it, who make it bigger,

and so on it goes in an endless cycle.

If Claire Hardaker is right, what happens online counts.

It's exacerbating already problematic attitudes

to women offline.

I wanted to know if Rod was at all concerned by the potential impact

of his journalism.

You can't just say something and expect people to understand it.

You actually have a responsibility

to make sure you're saying things in context.

No, I don't, actually.

I think I think we've got to be radical about this.

I think as soon as we feel ourselves,

we feel this self-censorship coming on...

"Oh, my God, if I write this will people take it the wrong way?"

It's incredibly damaging and limiting to freedom of speech.

That's no way for a journalist to behave.

That is no... We may as well be an insurance loss adjuster.

Free speech, of course,

has been one of the founding principles of the internet.

Is it a coincidence that the apparent rise in misogyny

has happened in parallel with the rise of the online world?

Or is there is something about the internet itself,

beyond its relationship with the media, that has encouraged

language that's hostile to women?

Nice to see you!

Laurie Penny is a blogger and journalist

who practically grew up online.

I'm interested in knowing whether or not you think that the internet

is simply giving, as it were, a different kind of voice

to sexism or misogyny, or do you think there's something new at work?

I think there's definitely a new kind of misogyny developing

right now. The internet has not created the new misogyny,

I think the internet has facilitated a new misogyny

and it has allowed people to speak about sexism

and exchange sexist ideas in a new and angry way.

Do you think this atmosphere grows out of the fact that originally,

way back when, the internet was more a male space?

Back in the old days of 1980s, 1990s, in the early days

of the internet people were very much, very utopian about the internet

as a space where you could be anybody you wanted to be,

but it turned out quickly after that that if anybody

came into those spaces and said, "Oh, yeah, I am a woman,

"I am a person of colour, I'm gay,

"I'm a lesbian," then they started to get attacked for those things.

So the internet was a space which was neutral only if you pretended to be

a white, straight man.

The idea that it's not our space, it's really men's space

that women just inhabit is extremely pervasive.

One of the early internet memes, or viral ideas, was...

Even today it's been estimated just 15-17% of Silicon Valley engineers

are women.

Does the architecture of the internet kind of favour men?

Well, geek culture as a whole is massively influential

over the culture, the various cultures of the internet,

and for a very long time geek culture, nerd culture,

was deeply misogynistic, deeply mistrustful of women,

and there is a very broad overlap between geek misogyny

and internet misogyny.

To understand geek mentality and the culture the internet grew out of,

I've come to Insomnia - the UK's biggest gaming festival.

Today gaming is a massive industry, arguably bigger than Hollywood,

and female participation is on the rise.

But just like the internet,

it was largely built by and once dominated by men.

I want to know whether its attitudes towards women can tell us something

about the online world,

and the way women tend to be represented in games

has got people talking.

Girls in games are very, very sexualised.

You get used to it at the end of the day, that's what just happens,

so you aren't really like, "Oh, my God, her boobs are out."

In fact, you're like, "OK, cool,

"that's what she's meant to be like."

But there's one game whose portrayal of women has stirred up

just about more controversy than any other.

Grand Theft Auto, created by the Scottish company Rockstar.

On the release of its latest incarnation,

set in a sleazy version of LA, some reviewers accused the game of

rampant misogyny.

It didn't stop it becoming the fastest-selling entertainment

product of all time.

I got some gamers to show me

one of its perennially controversial features.

How in your travels around the city you can sleep with prostitutes,

then decide whether to mug or kill them to get your money back.

He's spent the money,

but there's a chance for him to get the money back.

There is. You can mug people in Grand Theft Auto.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Is he...

And there's the money.

You can do the violence to anybody in the game.

I think people pick up on it more obviously because it is a woman.

But it, for me, it...

Not everybody's just going to go out

and just hit a woman in the back of the head thinking it's a good idea.

I wouldn't do that in the game. That doesn't interest me.

I'm playing the game for the story,

not for the fact that I can take a prostitute to a back alley,

have sex, then punch her in the back of the head to get my money back.

To me, that's not this game. I don't play this game for that.

It is for some people, you accept, for some people.

No, I don't think is.

I think people don't buy it for that particular part.

I think that Rockstar put that in because, you know,

for the shock value. Shock value sells.

But while these gamers can't see the appeal of sexualised violence,

others haven't found it so difficult.

Online there are pages and pages of "how to" videos,

in which players share their techniques for killing prostitutes.

GAMER: Come here, bitch. I want my money back!

Come here, you fucker!

50 bucks? I paid 100 bucks. Where's the rest of it?

It is striking that such a hugely popular game can have such

dismissive representations of women.

The million dollar question, though,

is how are real women treated when they game?

Many can be played online with other gamers from around the world,

using headsets and instant messaging to communicate.

I joined Nicola, who's been gaming since she was six.

When you talk to them,

what are the kind of responses people make to you?

The tendency is, they want to know about you as a girl,

and it's usually along the lines of, "Where are you from?"

"How old are you?"

But then you get the young adolescent guys who are just trying to be

abusive and they'll send really crude messages,

insinuating what they'd like to do with me, essentially.

Nicola recorded some of her gaming at home to show me

what she faces when she plays.

Yeah, I'm a girl.

Why would I need to do that to justify I'm a girl?

I've had situations where if I'm persistently doing well,

beating someone, it's like, "I'm going to find you.

"I'm going to come and find you and rape you."

And when you say, "Hey, I don't like this,

"this is really inappropriate," does it make any difference?

Well, that's the problem. I mean, you feel kind of intimidated by it

and your response just aggravates it,

so what I've learnt to do is just laugh it off.

I'm thick skinned, I've got used to it now,

And it's gone from getting...

Your first game within two minutes you're being abusive,

to I can play now for a week and I'll go a whole week without any abuse,

provided I don't play at night.

-It's not exactly freedom, is it?

-No.

The situation may be improving,

but there's one particular case that shows just how far hostility

to women in gaming can go.

Anita Sarkeesian launched a crowd-funding appeal to finance

a short film she wanted to make looking at how women are portrayed

in video games.

Welcome to our multipart video series exploring the roles

and representations of women in video games.

In response, she was inundated with rape threats,

sexualised and violent images, her website crashed...

A computer game that invited you to hit her created.

I wanted to know whether Anita's experience could reveal

something fundamental about the dynamics of online abuse.

Well, so what was interesting is that, or also disturbing,

is that they refer to this behaviour as a game.

Like, they even have theme music and little videos about it.

I feel like while it is disturbing to think of the abuse

and assault of a woman as a game, it does help to sort of

understand how this kind of cyber-mobs operate, right.

They were showing off their abusive behaviour to one another.

And so you kind of have this, like, macho posturing happening,

where they're earning the praise and approval of their peers.

And this is not just anonymous either, right,

we're actually seeing the faces of some of the people.

On Facebook you can see people's names and places of work.

Like, this isn't just about anonymity.

How would you characterise what has happened to you

and what is still happening to you?

Well, this is really misogyny on a grand scale, right,

like this is the hatred of women, the exclusion of women,

of maintaining this boys' club.

And boys' club means no girls allowed, to keep us out

and keep us not participating in these spaces,

and not having a voice in these spaces.

And what the harassment does is, it creates an environment that is

too toxic and hostile for women to endure.

And sometimes it works and that's what's really sad about it.

Maybe geek culture can offer us a key to understanding

the way that misogyny seems to become embedded in the very DNA

of the internet.

Technology companies appear to work in a way that protects

the perhaps embattled males of the species

at the expense of females, gay people, minorities.

And this really matters because the internet isn't just a force

in our lives. Increasingly, it is shaping our lives.

But I'm not convinced that the internet creates misogyny.

After all, it predates the online world.

So why do some men have such deep feelings of anger

and contempt for women?

It's a question feminists have been asking for some time.

In 1970, in a book that became the rallying cry for a generation

of feminists, Germaine Greer wrote a hugely controversial statement.

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them."

Well, the thing about that statement in the book,

it doesn't imply that men loathe women and this is somehow a secret,

but that there is an element of hatred and rejection

in men's relationships to women,

which women are unfortunately unaware of at their peril.

I wanted to know what she made of misogyny today,

and what could be provoking it.

This is what's known as the Hutch.

And these...

these are my titles.

They're not all of them.

"Brilliantly written, quirky and sensible.

"Full of bile and insight."

Bile, that's the stuff you need. Give us more bile.

But, I mean, who would have thought 45 years on...

Or maybe you would have thought 45 years on.

No, I wouldn't have thought 45 minutes on.

I never thought once you had social media there would become this

terrible grab bag of loathing of women.

Have things changed for women in terms of the way that men

feel about them in the last 45 years?

One way of answering that would be to say that men are now more aware

of women because women keep pushing themselves in.

Nowadays women expect to share men's lives.

They want to do the same work, they want to play the same games,

they want to have the same social life,

and I think it's driving men nuts.

And the result would seem to me to be that men are even more less tolerant

of women than they were before.

Now, if men have always needed women to be in a subservient,

filial, ancillary position.

When they stand up and call attention to themselves,

it produces reactions which are difficult to manage, I think.

Germaine Greer is not the only one who thinks female success

is giving men an identity crisis.

I was editor of Loaded for eight long years...

Many, like Martin Daubney, are beginning to ask serious

questions about what it is to be a man today, particularly a young man.

Where is the anger coming from in young men?

There's a lot of confusion, and I think the confusion in terms of

what is my destiny, you know, what's my job, what's my role,

is very confusing for young men and I think it's causing anger.

And I think young men are angry that there's no jobs for them,

there's no traditional gender role, they see women going by them

in the fast lane.

Generations of defined gender models have just been thrown to the wind

and I think men are frightened by that.

So the outlet for their anger is attitudes against women

because they feel that women

are actually taking their rightful place.

No, they feel that they're losing their balls.

I think it comes down to the basics.

They're kind of no longer a man.

So in terms of culture, though,

where do men find ways to be masculine?

Or do men need still to be masculine?

Well, I mean, the pervasive force now,

-the real opinion shaper is the internet.

-Mm.

Quite simply, you know, young men are, you know, consuming,

you know, not just porn, but also extreme content,

violent content, decapitations, gross-out content.

Young men always like to gross each other out,

but now the currency is much more extreme.

And feeding into that, of course, is the more violent sexual content

which is now absolutely ubiquitous.

You know, if that's what you're seeing over and over again

is there an insidious message that this is how you must behave

in real life towards real women?

Porn is available in a quantity and of an explicit quality

unknown to previous generations.

And some people are arguing we're conducting a grand experiment

with malleable teenage brains.

Oakgrove School in Milton Keynes is alive to the challenges

facing young people today, if they view this material at the

very age when they're forming their ideas about the opposite sex.

Can you answer this question for me?

Where do YP - young people - learn about sex?

Can I join this table?

-So was porn the first one on there?

-Yeah.

I joined one of their sex education classes, run by the charity Brook,

to find out what boys and girls do think about each other,

and what some of the pre-conceptions are

that the school wants to challenge.

There's sometimes bad stuff on it as well, like on porn.

Like sometimes you see things like a step-dad with daughter.

Porn, like, makes it look unequal. Men being more dominant than women,

where it should be equal.

Do you feel pressures from porn as well,

the way that sex is portrayed in porn would affect the way that guys

-want to have sex with you?

-Yeah.

I feel like guys get, I don't know, like attention...

-They get more focused on...

-Yeah.

Because of porn and because it's stereotypical that they watch porn

-and that...

-They expect girls to behave a certain way.

Yeah, and they expect sex to be a certain way

and that they should be the focus of it...

Like they're the more dominant one

when it comes to sex and relationships.

And according to this group of young people,

girls' active sexual desires are actually punished.

If a girl loves sex.

She wants sex, talks about sex... Yeah?

She would be classed as a slut.

What about if there was a guy that was really into sex?

-Yeah?

-He's just a boy.

-Just being a boy?

He would get ratings for it, if he had sex a lot.

If the message that some boys are taking away from porn

is that to be a man is to pursue their own sexual desires,

and that girls who are sexually active are simply sluts,

could what girls want

be in danger of going unnoticed?

Yas, Lili and Georgia are so concerned about their

generation's understanding of sexual consent they have launched their

own campaign for it to be taught as part of the National Curriculum.

They're worried that a culture which routinely reduces women to

sex objects and everyday language which makes light of

sexual harassment and assault,

is leading to confusion about what sexual consent actually is.

And that that's having an impact on young people's behaviour.

For me, I feel that more needs to be said about

respecting personal boundaries.

So I was at a party a few weeks ago and a lot of the boys

were being very touchy-feely with the girls

or basically groping them when the girls didn't want to be touched,

and I was speaking to my friend after and she said,

"You know, I wish they'd teach us in lessons,

"you can't treat a girl like she's a toy."

What did the girls say to the boys?

Did they not feel confident enough to say, stop that now?

Yeah, I don't think girls are even told they can say that.

I think girls feel like they have to put up with it.

It's definitely, like, feeling like you can't speak up against it.

What about jokes?

I mean, rape jokes, what kind of jokes go round your school?

Yeah, I used to,

I used to count up how many I would hear a day

in secondary school at one point,

and I would hear at least three every day

just walking down the corridors.

If there was one thing that kind of summed up the way you see

the problem as it affects you guys, your age, what would it be?

Well, the terrifyingly iconic case is always the one in America,

in a small town called Steubenville, which is where a group of boys

raped a 16-year-old girl and livetweeted and took photographs

of the attack, and I think that really sums up what we want

to change, which is this notion that rape culture is just to be accepted.

What happened in Steubenville was so shocking,

some have even dubbed it rape culture's Abu Ghraib moment.

At a high school party, a girl who was semi-conscious

was carried around, digitally penetrated and masturbated over

by two star football players.

As it happened, other partygoers commented online.

The two footballers were convicted of rape.

But despite all the evidence,

many blamed the victim for her own assault.

One tweet ran...

But do you think that the Steubenville case is something

for America, or is the atmosphere the same here?

It's definitely an international problem.

We have exactly the same social networks as America,

we have just as little legislation about it.

The exact same attacks happen here as in America.

I think it could absolutely happen here,

and to be honest, it probably has, but we just haven't heard about it.

I'm actually shocked and pretty distressed by what Georgia,

Lili and Yas have to say and what they have to deal with.

But maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise.

If we treat women as sex objects and trivialise sexual assault,

are we in danger of colluding in, or at least allowing to exist,

a culture which rape isn't seen for what it is?

And this doesn't just affect a few high-profile women,

it's playing out in the lives of ordinary young people.

There seems to me to be a terrible irony here.

What many of the feminists of the 1970s fought for

was a better understanding of sexual violence

and for women's own sexual liberation.

But in the culture wars that have followed, while women have

made gains in many spheres, the latest reactionary response

has tried to push us back, in this area at least, to where we started.

I wondered what that early pioneer Germaine Greer made of it.

Liberation hasn't happened. People like to think that it has.

What happened... Even sexual liberation didn't happen.

What happened was that commercial pornography was liberated,

fantasy was liberated, but people weren't liberated.

Now, though, have we reached a tipping point?

Just as social media has given oxygen to misogynistic views,

and the internet acted as a vehicle for their distribution,

could technology become the means for women's own fight back?

The potential for ideas like anti-sexism to go viral

is a really, really interesting way of fighting back,

because misogyny and sexism are essentially reactionary.

The internet is not by its nature reactionary, the internet changes.

Online, you can find a wealth of young feminist activism.

There's a thank you note to internet trolls by Isabel Fay

and the Clever Pie team.

# I'm really sure

# That if I met you

# You probably wouldn't rape me like promised that you would

# We are like that... #

Australian students have done a witty riposte to

Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.

# You think that you're so slick

# Let me emasculate ya

# Because your precious dick

# Can't beat my vibrator

# We're feeling the frustration

# From all the exploitation

# Prepare for your castration

# So we can fuck this man's world... #

And The Everyday Sexism Project helped score a major victory

last year - harnessing the power of online activism with

the #fbrape campaign.

It forced Facebook to change its rules and prohibit violent,

misogynistic content on its site.

What is heartening is that women are standing up to misogyny.

The barrage of abuse experienced by prominent women like Mary Beard

has shocked people into action.

The challenge we face as a society

is deciding exactly what form that action should take.

If we think about sexism and misogyny as air pollution,

we're all breathing it in, right,

regardless of how much we're contributing

to that air pollution, we all have a responsibility to fix it.

If you think that by getting rid of men's mags

and getting rid of Page Three, that that's going to change anything,

I really do think you're living in fantasy land.

You know, we need to educate young men to behave differently,

not lecture at them.

Young women and men deserve to grow up in a society where

there's a culture of mutual respect.

That's what I want for my daughter and my son.

I think we're at a moment where, if misogynistic views are tolerated

and gain a solid footing,

there'll be destructive consequences for the next generation.

And that's no laughing matter for any of us.