This is a truly eye-opening book about the epidemic or sexism running riot across the globe and in out institutions, families and societies.

Unfortunately I no longer wish to review this book as the first few chapters did not reel me in. Thank you for the opportunity.

I had to stop reading this halfway through as the sheer volume and weight of sad, crippling stories threatened to overwhelm me. Powerful and certainly important, much of this is made up of references from Laura's many articles and interviews.

A collection of feminist essays/ articles/ columns. Engaging and thought-provoking.

This afternoon, I went for a walk. There’s some trees by my house with a path that runs through them to the main road. The road is paved but the trees are quite thick and its quite dark. I automatically went to high alert, put my phone away and put my keys in my balled up fist, just in case.

As I walked around my local area, three separate van drivers beeped their horns at me. The first time was a man laughing at me. The second time was three men making jeering noises. The third was a man staring intently.

On my way back to my house, I walked past a carpet shop. Three men were outside loading the van. They all stopped what they were doing to stare at me. One of them made a comment (I’m not sure what he said); the others laughed.

This was all in the space of an hour. It is absolutely typical of what happens to me every time I leave the house.

I know a lot of people don’t think that street harassment is a serious issue. I’m continually told that a wolf whistle or someone beeping their horn at me is a compliment. I’m told that men telling me to “cheer up love” are just being friendly. I’m told that men grabbing my bum, slapping me on the arse or just having a quick grope on a night out is “just a joke” or that its OK because the person doing it was drunk. If I complain, I’m told to lighten up, to stop being a feminazi, to understand that it was done as a bit of a laugh.

Frankly, I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of being expected to play along. I’m tired of being intimidated. I’m tired of people making excuses to shift the blame to me – I’m wearing makeup, I’m wearing a skirt, men can’t help themselves. I’m tired of policing my own behaviour – I can’t walk through those trees, I can’t go into a pub on my own, I can’t talk to a man without it seeming like I was flirting, like I was leading him on, so what did I expect when he pinned me against the wall and tried to ram his tongue down my throat?

Until fairly recently, I’d felt completely powerless to stop men from treating me like this (I know it’s not all men, but a woman has never harassed or sexually assaulted me – despite being friends with lots of gay and bisexual women and often going to gay clubs when I was a student). The problem is partly that harassment of women is so commonplace that an isolated incident is never going to seem that serious. But that’s the thing – it’s never just one isolated incident. Its the repeated comments, the constant judgement, the myriad ways in which society tells us, over and over, that women are to blame for their treatment by men.

So thank god for Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism project. By asking people (not just women) to tell her about their experiences with low level harassment, sexism and intimidation she’s managed to shine a light on what many of us have struggled to put into words – how persistent, low level sexism not only affects every single woman I know (and a decent proportion of men) but how the frequency and scale of the issue forms a foundation for sexism to pervade every echelon of our society.

Misogynation is a collection of Bates’ Guardian articles that were based on the thousands of personal testimonials received by the Everyday Sexism Project website. Bates has taken some of the main themes (street harassment, stereotyping, being patronised, gender pay etc.) and investigated further, pulling in some extrodinary facts and figures to back up her claims. Despite the seriousness of her work, she’s made the book really lighthearted, with plenty of tongue-in-cheek comments and ironic metaphors. I thought that this worked really well to get the message across whilst remaining engaging and accessible.

I’m not sure how Bates/her editor/the publishers decided on the order of the essays but I did feel that they were a bit all over the place. It would have been nice to see them grouped by topic (although I did find there was quite a lot of repetition) – perhaps the book would have worked better if the essays had been amalgamated or summarised by topic into individual chapters? Although this would have involved actually writing a book and not just re-publishing articles that have already been put into print (something that always feels to me like a bit of a cop out).

I did like the fact that because the essays were short you could dip in and out of the book – it’s an easy one to read if you’ve got another book on the go. I found that despite how hilarious it was, the facts and figures (along with some of the comments which showed the general attitude to what she was writing) could quickly get depressing so it’s great that you can read it in tiny chunks without losing your way. Some of the best parts were the clapbacks to sexist behaviour that people had sent in on twitter – one girl loudly narrated how a man was trying to feel her up on the tube, one girl, when asked if she was on her period replied that if she had to bleed every time she found someone annoying she’d be anaemic by now, and my favourite -a woman who was loudly harassed by builders from a rooftop who, after asking them to stop and receiving a barrage of nasty threats simply took their ladder away.

I also loved the element of hive mind support – there were many examples of other people offering practical solutions to problems that others had written in about. I personally felt far less alone in my experiences and more supported in speaking out against misogyny.

Overall, I thought that Misogynation was a good, empowering read that really opens your eyes to all of the low level, unreported behaviour which goes on every day. The fact that every story is real and is backed up by hundreds of others all saying the same thing really adds weight to all of Bates’ arguments. The content of the book could have been better defined but I loved the humour, ingenuity and resilience shown by the contributors. I thought it was a great way to showcase an issue that’s so often brushed off or minimised by society.

Another amazing read from Laura Bates. If you know me, I will have tried to push a Laura Bates book on you at some point and so you won't be surprised to hear that I loved this one just as much as the others. I read this on ebook and then re-read it on audiobook because this audiobook is read by the author and so was even more wonderful than reading it on my Kindle.

This is a collection of columns written by the author including some discussion pieces, some advice pieces and some top ten lists. the top ten lists were humours even given the subject that they were concerning. Laura Bates knows how to write about what should be fundamental human rights and them not being granted to specific groups of women or all women and make it engaging and entertaining. I don't know how she does it but I am in awe of her and will read everything that she writes.

In this book, Laura Bates highlights some groups of women that are sometimes passed over in other collections of feminist essays or notes on misogyny and she also highlights programmes that are out there to help women and support the fight against Everyday Sexism that I didn't know about. I love the fact that these are highlighted for me. This collection gets a little more political than her previous books and i applaud her fro including this in her writing, it is a brave thing in our current climate!

Because this is a collection of essays, this is something I will be coming back to and re-reading section of that I find relevant as things come up in my life. I have done this with both of her previous novels and so I will be adding a physical copy to my Kindle copy and my audiobook of this one. If you are interested in reading about gender equality and the fact that everyday sexism still exists...everyday then you need to add this book to your collection and I suggest that you do that now.

"It is vital to resist those who mock and criticize us for tackling 'minor' manifestations of prejudice because these are the things that normalize and ingrain the treatment of women as second-class citizens, opening the door for everything else, from workplace discrimination to sexual violence."

Brought to you by Laura Bates, the founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, Misogynation is a collection of various articles Bates has written over the years since the ESP began. Covering topics such as catcalling, pay inequality, media sexism and sexual violence, the fundamental purpose seems to be to join the dots and demonstrate a pattern of entrenched, structural inequality.

"A 15-year-old girl wrote to us to say that 'I always feel like if I don't look a certain way, if boys don't think I'm "sexy" or "hot", then I've failed and it doesn't even matter if I am a doctor or a writer, I'll still feel like nothing...'"

For me, the existence of the Everyday Sexism Project will always give Bates an edge in popular feminist writing: she has the backing of tens of thousands of people who have contributed their own personal experiences of sexism, so her work is always going to be strongly rooted in lived experiences. The quotes she weaves in, especially those from young girls who are just waking up to a world that is treating them like second-class citizens always bring the reality home. That said, I would have liked to see a bibliography at the end of the book, as she references a number of different sources - but that could just be the preview copy I was reading. Each article is short, which makes it easily digestible, though in places I was left wishing for a bit more detail.

There are a few things that prevented me from giving it a higher rating. Firstly, because it is a collection of already-published essays, it doesn't add a lot of new things. There are mentions of more 'current' events such as #MeToo and Donald Trump, and the afterword looking at the ESP five years on is interesting, but otherwise it covers a lot of the same ground as her original book, Everyday Sexism. It also makes it quite repetitive in places and I wasn't always clear if she was following a particular order.

Occasionally I'm put off by her tone - where I admire her being bold and telling it like it is, she often slips into heavy sarcasm. I love me some sarcasm, but sometimes it got a bit wearing, and I know some who would be put off by that style.

Finally, while there were references to women of colour, LGBTQ+ women and disabled women in places, I would have liked to see it a lot more. In places it felt like an afterthought - i.e. this is a massive problem, and it affects trans women even more, end. I would have liked to see more intentional sections around the issues that these women face that maybe aren't such an issue for others.

As you can imagine, this book should come with a trigger warning for multiple descriptions of physical and sexual violence. Some descriptions are quite graphic in the level of detail, but it depends what you're affected by. I personally didn't find them triggering because they are presented as fact in the context of a book that is very clearly saying they are unacceptable; as opposed to a more gratuitous scene of graphic violence in a work of fiction. However, if you are unable to read these kinds of references, there are a lot of them, so this is a book you might want to steer clear of.

If you assess this book for what it is: a collection of existing essays offering a snapshot of a range of issue affecting women today, then I rate this book highly. It is easy to read and I felt validated by the points she made, which is always a good thing to have as a defence against a world that constantly seems to be wondering if 'feminism has gone too far'. However, if you try to take it as more than that, for example comparing it to Everyday Sexism (against which it will invariably fall short), or expecting it to delve into the complexities of every issue covered, you'll be left wanting. See it as a reminder that we still have so much more to do.

"The feminist endgame is not to publicly punish everybody who makes a rape joke or ban every advert that uses rape as a titillating way to sell products. It is to create a society in which it would never occur to anybody to do either in the first place."

I have read a few feminist books and coupled with my own experiences and the stories I have heard, this book wasn't really anything new. For someone, particularly men, this would be an eye-opening read and very useful in understanding the world we live in from a female's perspective.

Usually I absolutely love anything by Laura Bates, but this book fell flat for me because it's feels like a 'we haven't had a book from you in a couple of years' idea from the publisher. I enjoy Bates' journalism, and I did learn a lot e.g. about funding cuts to rape crisis centres and the problems women face in prison, but I found the book to be so repetitive. Taken individually, each article is great, but put together in an anthology like this, the message is the same and often Bates uses exactly the same phrasing to put her ideas across. I'm also not the kind of person that needs to read this - I don't need to be convinced by feminism, I don't need to have the facts about sexual violence repeated to me, and I know that catcalling is vile. My question is, how do you get the catcallers to read this? If this book really wants to make a change, it needs to get into the hands of those who don't already agree with its premise.

This book doesn't disappoint, if anything it makes the reader angry and aware of the many ways in which women are shortchanged in this capitalist society that we live in. A natural progression from Everyday sexism and Girl Up! this book should be on every feminist's reading list.

Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism is the latest essay collection from Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. These essays first appeared as columns in The Guardian, so like many collections compiled this way there is a lot of repetition; but repetition is kind of the point here. Women, trans and non-binary people deal with this stuff day in and day out; when we’re catcalled while walking to work, when we’re afraid of how men will react if we ‘don’t play nice’ to their unwanted advances, when we’re described as ‘snowflakes’ for daring to not laugh off sexist jokes as ‘banter’, when we’re constantly made to feel like we’re asking for too much, when we’re simply asking to be treated equally.

Who is this collection for? Short answer; everyone. Longer answer; there is something for everyone, whether you’re new to feminism or a seasoned activist, with a particular focus on men and their understanding of and unlearning of the sexism they perpetuate, oftentimes without even realising it. I want to buy a copy for every man I know and watch the conversations that unfold between them as they read it.

I've been following the #Everydaysexism project on Twitter for many years and have read Bates' other books with great enjoyment. This collection of her essays is no exception to this and I heartily recommend Misogynation to everyone. I very much like how Bates links sexism to racism, homophobia, disability discrimination and other campaigns without reducing the importance of any of these campaigns.
As will any essay collections there is some repetition and this is a book to dip in and out of rather than reading cover to cover. I will be recommending it to everyone.

This book is a collection of essays split into sections such as 'Handy Guides for Confused Dudes' and '#NotAllMen'. They're not in chronological order which is incredibly interesting because there's no sense of these problems getting better over time.

These essays are all clear, understandable, and very well written. You don't need to be a scholar to understand them. They're short and punchy too which gives them a bigger impact on the reader. Bates doesn't lose the point of her argument and she always gets straight to the point. Bates weaves some humour into these serious subjects but it doesn't detract from the message because it's mainly sarcastic and sly humour. I actually really like what the humour does to the tone of these essays because Bates doesn't suffer fools, she tells it as it is. There's also a lot of swearing in this book, with frequent appearances from the 'c-word' but it needs to be there. She's merely quoting what women, and men, experience on an everyday basis and there's no reason to shy away from the language that is used against us.

This collection made me think about how I’ve experienced sexism and sexual harassment and how young I was when it started. I've had a sexist A-Level Maths teacher ("Maths isn't a subject for girls"), I've been wolf-whistled by builders when I was just 12 years old and wearing school uniform, I often felt pressured into sexual acts by the boys I dated in high school. I've been groped, spat at, and called awful names. It's just something that you can never get away from and this book brought my rage back about these issues. 

I would definitely recommend reading no matter your age or gender. I think it'd be a great book to show to teenagers (no matter what gender they are) because they need to learn that this behaviour isn't okay and that we should stand up against it.

A great collection of essays by Laura Bates. I hadn't read most of these before but some of pieces seemed familiar from her previous book, Girl up. It was an interesting read and I learnt some facts that I were not aware of.

Latest collection of essays, from Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. The collection pulls together articles over a five year period from Bates' weekly Everyday Sexism published in the Guardian. I read a great many of these when they were published but the effect here is even more stark and frankly depressing when the power of the articles is combined. Yes, there is a level of repetition, but then again what the book is dealing with is a HELL of a LOT or repetition of behaviours and attitudes.

Like recent books about men from Grayson Perry and Robert Web I suspect the book is one that is most likely to be read by those women – and men – who are already more in tune with its idea's and arguments, than those who perhaps are more in need of its enlightenment, but that is to take nothing away from those arguments and points made.

Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project that invites women to tweet/message the things that have happened to them in their daily lives that are misogynistic and this book is a revolting revelation of just how pervasive (that even I as someone who considers themselves to be a feminist who has some idea of how bad it can be), misogyny is.

A collection of essays that are brutally written and backed up in every way, this book certainly opens your eyes to the dimensions of the culture we live in that allows for behaviour like this to be okay. Bates skewers arguments and points out the layers of misogyny in this book with clarity that though sometimes hard to read, makes you keep reading anyway.

It takes so much courage in today’s society to talk about Feminism as it’s often used as an insult or a term to fear, and Laura Bates delivers in this book everything you need to know about women in today’s society. I wish for men to read this book, I wish for my nan to read this book, I want anyone whose felt like they’ve gone through misogyny, to read this just to know they are not alone.

A fantastic collection of essays that are must reads for all women.