The New Silencing: Women Versus the Manosphere (Part Two)

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Mia Sorenti (1:21)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorenti. In this episode, we return for part two of our recent live panel event, with Jess Phillips, Juliet Nicolson, and Joanna Scanlan. Together, they explore the changing landscape for women since May 2, from the rise of the Manosphere and violence against women and girls, to the pressures created by social media. The conversation was hosted by BBC News editor Katie Razzall.

If you haven't heard part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to catch up. And a brief content warning for this discussion, which contains some explicit language and discussions of sexual and domestic violence.

Now let's return to the conversation, live at Conway Hall in London.

Katie Razzall (2:10)

So much of this conversation is being had online at the moment. And I guess my question, not to you, Joanna, because I know you don't want to talk about tech, but are social media platforms, do you think, amplifying misogyny or are they actually actively reshaping attitudes to women?

Jess Phillips (2:26)

They're both things. It started with an amplification, but now it is, you know, look, there is an algorithm that will literally target you based on your age or gender, whatever it is. I mean, look, that's, I tell you, I tell you which bit of the patriarchy has definitely picked up on menopause, the one that pushes all the adverts at me.

Like, the, the, definitely, that there is, it is done on purpose. The algorithm, and it's not done on purpose for like misogyny's sake, as it were. It's done because it makes money. But it is definitely changing the way that people think. It isn't just that people think it and therefore it amplifies it. It is changing the way that people think because of what, what bubble they sit in. And I think it's King's College London have done quite a lot of research into this, where the divergence between young women and young men's attitudes towards things like feminism are getting so wildly apart. We're going to see it in the Maker Field by-election, where women's views on things are so wildly different to their male counterparts. And that is because women are being fed something different to what men are being fed. Online. Online, online. So their viewpoints are diverging. So we are, to go back to Erin Pizzi, we are, we are actually, we're being encouraged to be more different from each other and to have different and opposing views from each other. And if you, like the very best thing I can say about, like the example of where online is making attitude difference, is that if you were to interview a group of women from my generation and ask if you were ever strangled during sex, the answer would absolutely be no.

Of course not. Yeah, if there was a big American study done where they interviewed women under the age of 30 and over 60% of them had been strangled during sex.

Katie Razzall (4:33)

And I think it's complicated for the boys too, because I've had conversation with teenage boys who say, but I've seen online, there are girls putting up saying they like it and it all comes up with hearts and everything. And I was saying, well, are you sure that that's what they actually think?