I will admit something straight away: I did not properly notice The New Age of Sexism when it first came out in hardback last year. This is shameful, really, because my daughter had requested it for Christmas, which should have been my first clue. Daughters, as a rule, are often ahead of us. They are also very good at casually handing you a book and, without saying anything too dramatic, making it clear that the world is on fire and perhaps you might like to catch up.

Then Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny appeared on the 2026 Indie Book Awards Non-Fiction shortlist, and so I did what any responsible bookseller should do when a book has been waving politely from the edge of her attention for months.

I sat myself down and read it.

And then I needed to sit down again.

Because this is not a comfortable book. It is not an “isn’t technology fascinating?” book. It is not one of those brisk airport non-fiction books about the future, full of gleaming robots, productivity hacks and billionaires in quarter-zips telling us that everything will be marvellous if only we stop worrying and trust the disruption.

This is a book about power. Specifically, it is about who builds the systems we all end up living inside, whose bodies are treated as raw material, whose safety is treated as optional and what happens when very old misogyny gets handed very new machinery.

Laura Bates is, by now, one of the major public feminist writers of our time. She founded the Everyday Sexism Project, which gathered hundreds of thousands of testimonies of gender inequality from around the world. She has written about girls, women, systems, violence, the manosphere and the ways sexism hides in plain sight. Her earlier book Men Who Hate Women went deep into online misogynistic radicalisation; Fix the System, Not the Women made the case, as the title suggests, that women are not the problem to be corrected.

The New Age of Sexism feels like the next movement in that work. If Everyday Sexism documented the atmosphere women were already breathing, and Men Who Hate Women mapped some of the darker online spaces where that atmosphere curdled into extremism, this book asks what happens when those same assumptions are built into artificial intelligence, virtual reality, chatbot companionship, image generation, surveillance systems, online platforms and technologies being sold to us as neutral, inevitable, even liberating.

Bates’s central argument is brutally simple: the problem is not that technology has become sexist by accident. The problem is that sexist systems are being designed, funded, scaled and sold at speed, often by companies who treat harm as a public relations issue rather than a structural emergency.

In other words, misogyny has not been invented by AI. It has been automated.

That distinction matters.

There is a lazy version of this conversation that becomes: “Oh dear, the robots are coming.” Bates is not especially interested in that. She is far more concerned with the harms already here: deepfake sexual abuse, virtual harassment, coercive control through image-based abuse, AI companions designed around female submission, algorithmic discrimination in healthcare, recruitment and surveillance, and the global workforce, often underpaid and hidden, cleaning up the data that makes these systems run.

The future, in this book, is not waiting politely over the horizon. It is already in schools, phones, bedrooms, police reports, workplaces and group chats.

One of the strongest early sections deals with deepfake abuse. Bates writes about schoolgirls targeted with AI-generated explicit images, and about how quickly a new tool can make an old violation easier, faster and more devastating. What once required technical knowledge, access and time can now be done cheaply, quickly and at scale. That change is not merely practical. It changes the nature of the harm.

Scale is one of the key words in this book.

A single humiliating image is already a violation. But what happens when thousands can be created in minutes? What happens when the victim cannot simply say, “That is fake,” because the image looks real enough to travel faster than truth? What happens when the threat of exposure becomes a leash, when an image that was never taken can still be used to control a life?

Bates is very good on this: the abuse is digital, but the consequences are not. The shame, fear, reputational damage, school exclusion, workplace panic, anxiety, depression and social isolation do not remain conveniently inside the screen. They enter the body. They enter the room. They enter the future.

That is one of the book’s most useful interventions. It refuses the comforting fiction that online harms are somehow less real because they are mediated through avatars, platforms or code. A threat delivered by phone is still a threat. A fabricated image is still an image that can destroy. A virtual space can still reproduce the same old lesson women have been taught for centuries: this place is not for you, and if you enter it, you do so at your own risk.

Bates’s method helps enormously. She is not writing from a safe distance, peering at the internet with opera glasses and concern. She goes in. She tests chatbots. She enters virtual reality spaces. She visits cyber-brothel environments. She follows the technologies into the places where polite society would rather not look.

That immersive reporting gives the book its unsettling force. It also gives Bates an unusual authority. She is not simply telling us that the thing exists. She is telling us what it feels like to stand inside it.

And it feels grim.

There are chapters here on the metaverse, sex robots, AI companions and cyber-brothels that are among the most viscerally disturbing in the book. Some readers may find these sections the hardest to read, partly because they reveal not just individual male violence or cruelty but commercial imagination. The market is not merely responding to misogyny. It is designing for it, naming it, packaging it and selling it back with a subscription model.

This is where the book is at its angriest and, in places, its most persuasive. Bates shows how easily “innovation” becomes a lovely smooth word for the old business of turning women into things. Simulated women. Available women. Grateful women. Women who cannot refuse. Women who can be punished, perfected, customised or deleted.

It is tempting, when reading these chapters, to comfort ourselves by saying that some of these technologies are marginal. And to a degree, that is a fair critical point. The metaverse, for instance, has not become the all-consuming new world that corporate presentations once threatened. Some of the technologies Bates examines still feel more grotesque than culturally dominant.

But the point is not whether everyone is currently living in a headset or buying a robot. The point is what these technologies reveal about desire, design and impunity. They show us what becomes possible when the people building the future do not have to ask who might be harmed by it, or when they ask and decide the answer is commercially inconvenient.

The strongest sections of the book are, for me, those where Bates deals with abuses already widespread and normalised: deepfakes, image-based abuse, AI bias and algorithmic discrimination. This is where the book feels least speculative and most urgent.

Her chapter on bias in AI systems arguably comes too late. It might have been stronger nearer the beginning, because it gives the underlying architecture for everything else. If systems are trained on biased data, designed in biased industries and released into biased societies, then bias is not a surprising side-effect. It is the air in the machine.

This matters in obvious areas like facial recognition, but also in quieter ones such as healthcare, recruitment and workplace systems. The harm is not always sensational. Sometimes it is bureaucratic. Sometimes it is invisible. Sometimes it looks like a woman not being diagnosed properly, a Black woman being misidentified by a system, an applicant filtered out by software, a protester tracked by facial recognition or a badly paid worker in another country being exposed to appalling material so that the rest of us can enjoy a cleaner interface.

One of Bates’s great strengths is that she keeps widening the frame. This is not only about a teenage boy with an app. It is about schools, police forces, legislators, platforms, developers, investors and governments. It is about the institutional shrug. It is about the way women’s harm is so often treated as regrettable but not urgent, predictable but not preventable, unfortunate but not structurally important.

That is why this book is more than a catalogue of horrors. A catalogue of horrors can leave the reader stunned but passive. Bates is trying to show pattern. She is trying to show that these are not isolated bad things happening in unlucky corners of the internet. They are connected by power, profit, speed and the repeated decision to treat women’s safety as secondary to growth.

This is also where the book’s limitations become interesting.

Bates is excellent at diagnosis. She is less satisfying on cure. That is not entirely her fault. In fact, it may be the central difficulty of writing this kind of book. If you spend three hundred pages showing that the problem is deep, structural and profitable, it is very hard to end with a list of plausible solutions that does not feel a little small beside the scale of the fire.

Regulation, safer design, better moderation, transparency, education, more diverse teams in tech: all of these are sensible. None of them are wrong. But they are also familiar. They do not quite match the ferocity of what Bates has just shown us. If the system is making money from speed, scale and harm, then asking it to become kinder by design feels necessary, but not sufficient.

There is also a larger question about audience. This is a brilliant book to hand to readers who know something is wrong but have not yet seen the pattern clearly. It would be excellent in schools, reading groups, policy conversations, staff training, parenting discussions and, frankly, on the bedside tables of anyone raising teenagers with access to phones.

But will the people who most need to read it read it?

That is the uncomfortable question hanging over the whole thing.

The men designing exploitative systems may not be first in the queue. The boys sharing images may not be browsing feminist non-fiction tables. The executives deciding that harm can be managed later may not be waiting for a bookshop newsletter to trouble their conscience over breakfast.

And yet, that does not make the book pointless. Far from it.

Books do not only work by converting villains. Sometimes they work by giving language to the already uneasy. They help parents speak to children. They help teachers understand what is happening in corridors and group chats. They help women recognise that what happened to them was not private shame but public failure. They help readers connect a series of apparently separate headlines into a pattern.

That is one of the reasons independent bookshops matter. We are not simply selling a unit of non-fiction. We are placing a book in a reader’s path and saying: look here. This is worth your attention. This may help you understand the world your children are already living in. This may make you angrier, yes, but also less alone.

And anger is not always a bad outcome. Properly directed, it is useful. It is clarifying. It stops us pretending that all technological progress is innocent until proven otherwise.

One of the things Bates does very well is puncture the myth of inevitability. We are constantly told that AI is coming, that change is unstoppable, that we must adapt, innovate, embrace, move fast, keep up. That language can sound exciting. It can also be a way of removing responsibility.

If something is inevitable, nobody has to be blamed for building it badly. Nobody has to slow down. Nobody has to ask whether it should exist in this form, at this speed, with these risks, for these profits.

Bates insists that we ask those questions.

The book is not perfect. It is broad, sometimes too broad. Some chapters could have been deeper rather than wider. Some sections overlap. The solutions do not always satisfy. There are omissions that could have been explored more fully, particularly around the relationship between pornography, sexual exploitation and the technologies that borrow from or feed those industries.

But perfection is not the point here.

The point is that The New Age of Sexism is a serious, readable, disturbing and necessary work of public non-fiction. It takes technical and policy questions and makes them human. It makes abstract harms visible. It understands that the future is not only built in labs and boardrooms, but in assumptions. Who matters. Who is believed. Who is protected. Who is sacrificed. Who gets to design, and who gets designed against.

It is also, crucially, a book that understands misogyny as adaptive. It does not stay in one costume. It learns the language of the age. Once it spoke through law, custom, religion, respectability, medicine, advertising and the family. Now it speaks through platforms, prompts, avatars, datasets and design choices.

Same old beast. Shinier teeth.

So yes, I missed this one when it first came out in hardback. I should not have. My daughter, annoyingly and predictably, was right.

But perhaps paperback shortlists exist for exactly this reason: to make us look again. To make booksellers catch up. To make readers pause in front of a table and think, “Oh. Maybe this is the one I need to read next.”

The New Age of Sexism is not easy reading, but it is important reading. It is the kind of book that makes you want to press it into people’s hands, not because it is comfortable, but because comfort is increasingly looking like part of the problem.