Laura Bates

We do not, as a rule, talk about male perpetrators of violence against women. We describe a woman as having been raped; we discuss the rates of women sexually assaulted or beaten. We do not speak in terms of men committing rape or being sexual assaulters and violent abusers. That is what makes it so easy to focus on women’s dress, behaviour and choices when we consider sexual violence. To warn women to take precautions to protect themselves and, implicitly or explicitly, blame those victims who do not.

While learning about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at A Level, some of her students complained, saying there ought to be ‘a Handmaid’s Tale for men’. (Atwood’s dystopian novel, set in an imagined totalitarian US in which women are completely subjugated, is famously inspired by real-world oppression. Atwood has stated: ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened.’)

Both worldviews rest heavily on the perception of women being without humanity, individuality or soul.