The Everyday Sexism Project: An Interview with Laura Bates
Started as a website in 2012, The Everyday Sexism projects aims to catalogue instances of sexism experienced on a day-to-day basis. The premise was simple - by sharing everyday stories of gender inequality, the project showed the world that sexism does exist, it is faced by women daily and that it is a valid problem to discuss. Often viewed as the start of fourth-wave feminism, the website has received countless submissions from all over the world and led to the release of best-selling books that explore the connections between these everyday experiences of discrimination and prejudice. We recently had the pleasure of interviewing the project’s founder, Laura Bates, to discuss her thoughts on intersectionality, gendered violence, and the role that privilege and power plays in harassment.
We often hear people dismiss things like street harassment and the more ‘everyday’ type of experiences that you document through the Everyday Sexism Project as being issues that are not worth focusing on when much worse forms of gendered violence are still happening. To you, what is the connection between these more ‘minor’ forms of harassment and gender-based violence more generally? Why do you think it is important to tackle both forms of harm concurrently?
I believe that all forms of gender inequality and gendered violence are connected. The Everyday Sexism Project has received hundreds of thousands of testimonies ranging from street harassment to workplace discrimination to sexual violence. They are part of a spectrum of inequality and power, and allowing the so-called 'minor' instances to flourish enables and normalises those at the other end of the spectrum.
To us, street harassment is never simply about sexism. It can often reflect much broader forms of societal discrimination and, for those whose identities are formed at the intersection of multiple marginalised or vulnerable communities, street harassment can be a deeply upsetting experience on multiple levels. Do you see this type of intersectionality reflected in your own work? Do you think that the feminist movements and campaigns that tend to get more attention in the mainstream are properly addressing this issue?
This is absolutely reflected in the testimonies we've received: they reveal how sexism intersects with racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, Islamophobia, ableism and other forms of prejudice, and how important it is to recognise that they are not separate problems but interconnected. A woman doesn't tell us she experiences sexism on one day and ableism on another, for example - rather that these experiences are combined and intensified by the intersection (like the disabled woman who wrote that she was told to do a pole dance around her walking stick). We still have a long way to go in fully addressing these intersections within the feminist movement and it isn't helped by a mainstream media far more likely to amplify the campaigns of already privileged people, but I'm hopeful things are beginning to shift and I'm encouraged by the number of young people I meet, in schools in particular, who make intersectionality a founding tenet of their activism.
It can often be hard to put in words exactly what it is about an incident that can leave people feeling uneasy, particularly when it comes to more interpersonal, subjective interactions. Out of your work, what has come out as the key things that tip these interactions from being a normal one into a situation of harassment? What have you found to be the best way of conveying to someone who may have not experienced this before exactly why these experiences are unsettling to so many people?
The feeling of the recipient is more important than the intention of the harasser. The sense of being unsafe is a key tipping point. Often this has to do with privilege and power. A man who has never felt unsafe in public space might find it hard to understand the weight of context and history that impacts how a woman responds to his unwanted advances. This is very much an intersectional issue too - with questions of who is made to feel safe, to feel they belong, to feel that public space belongs to them, or that their bodies are considered public property. Women of colour and trans women, for example, are disproportionately likely to be made to feel unsafe in public space.
Through the Everyday Sexism Project, you are privy to a lot of very personal and often harrowing stories of discrimination and harassment. These can range from stories of assault to the ‘smaller’ stories of everyday discrimination that are heartbreaking in their normalness. How do you deal with the emotional toll of being entrusted with so many people’s most personal stories day after day?
I find it very useful to have close connections and communication with other feminists and activists. And for me, the best way to offset the pain of carrying these stories is to do all I can to ensure that they have a real impact in creating real-world change. So, in anonymised form, we use stories from women on public transport to train transport police to better tackle sexual violence, or stories from young people to work with schools on healthy relationships and consent.
As a result of your work, you have unfortunately been the target of a lot of online hate and trolling. Lately this kind of backlash has become central to how we talk about online activism or even simply being a woman navigating online spaces. While these experiences are undoubtedly deeply troubling, what we have found to be most frustrating in our own work is the people that try to dismiss our stories and experiences through intellectual nit-picking or arguments that try to frame our perspectives as over-reactions or things are simply ‘not that bad’. How do you deal with this type of response to your work?
I try to recognise that these reactions are not usually genuine doubts but rather an attempt at resisting change: denying a problem exists is one of the first ways people will try to push back against efforts to tackle it. The collective voice of the project is very cathartic in these instances: it is much harder to dismiss one person as 'lying' or 'overreacting' or 'misinterpreting' when a hundred thousand others have had the same experience.
After having done this work for 8 years now – do you feel like things are getting better? Have you seen the conversation around issues of gender equality and sexism evolve in the past 8 years and where do you think we’ll be 8 years from now?
We've certainly seen some progress: from legislative gains to an increasing awareness and acceptance of the existence of the problem. But there is a danger that by starting a public conversation, people assume the issue has been resolved, when really the conversation is the very first step in the process. I'd like to hope that we'll soon start to move away from blaming individual women for their own abuse, and instead towards a systemic approach to solving what is very much a systemic problem.
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Laura Bates is a feminist writer and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. She regularly writes for a number of publications, including the Guardian and New York Times, along with being the author of Everyday Sexism, the Sunday Times bestseller Girl Up, and Misogynation. Over the years, Laura has worked closely with politicians, businesses, schools, police forces and organisations from the Council of Europe to the United Nations to tackle gender inequality. She was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in the Queen's Birthday Honours list 2015 and has been named a woman of the year by Cosmopolitan, Red Magazine and The Sunday Times Magazine.
