There has been a lot of discussion about the rapid rise and fall of MenSoc. The feminist side of this has now been extensively covered in the Huffington post; I was not given a chance to contribute to an article that seemed to largely centre on a group that I created. I would like to give my perspective on what happened but I am going to first open with an apology: MenSoc was not set up with the intention to hurt people, and for that I again apologise.
MenSoc was set up by my friends and I to parody YUSU’s decision to refuse ratification for FemSoc but also to criticise FemSoc’s continued overreaction and aggressive censorship of dissenters. It seems that people are now convinced that I set up the group because I hate women, and I am beyond trying to convince people who don’t know me otherwise.
The page quickly got out of hand and I took the decision to rescind admin status because there were hundreds of comments and posts on the page and I was being pressured into censoring them; certainly there were people making comments using language that was less than desirable. I encouraged people to use Facebook’s built in reporting/blocking functions as I considered them sufficient. Looking back I shouldn’t have shunned this responsibility and I can now see that I should have dealt with the abusive language. It seems now that the comments of a very small number of posters are being used to characterise a group that contained over 500 people. As various people have noted through comments on other articles many of the discussions proceeded in good faith and without recourse to insult.
The Huffington Post mentions ‘personal attacks’ on Alex Wilson (the founder of FemSoc), but when this is examined Alex herself says she was accused of four things: having ‘extreme views’, saying ‘questionable things’, being a ‘bad role model’ and ‘running her page like a dictatorship’. Another member then contributed to say ‘people involved said such hateful things to Alex in particular’. It seems something of a stretch to consider these comments as ‘hateful’. In fact what was said about Alex on the MenSoc page seem to be in line with comments made by the campus media which have been critical of both the feminist campaign and YUSU’s decisions – an article published by the Yorker accused the feminist ‘clique’ of having a ‘hopelessly narrow-minded view of the world’.
By contrast a picture of me was posted on Twitter with the intentionally ambiguous statement ‘it has not been proved that men and women have the same intelligence’ and quickly attracted such comments as ‘FUCKING KILL HIM’ and ‘Seriously burn them all’, which remain unchallenged by the person who originally posted the picture. The Huffington post also quoted Gillian Love as saying ‘no remorse from them, the shits.’ As Bob Hughes noted ‘sinking to personal attacks and discriminatory language is simply unacceptable on all sides’ and it seems that FemSoc members are also willing to engage in this activity.
The group was immediately outed as a hoax and deleted when a fake email was uploaded without my knowledge, Darren Acaster has subsequently admitted to this and apologised for the damage he unwittingly caused. I intended to use this group to draw attention to the injustice behind the failure to ratify FemSoc, whilst also highlighting a tendency of FemSoc to over-censor their debates and aggressively shout down those who disagreed. In hindsight this idea was flawed, and poorly implemented, however I think it’s important to recognise that not every criticism of Feminism is inherently sexist. I have now appeared on a front page splash on the Huffington Post, mine is the only name mentioned in the entire article, as if I was personally responsible for the entire thing, when in fact there were people both far more prolific and far more insulting posting on the page. I have been vilified as a misogynist; I think ignorant fool would be a far more fitting description. I regret the that fact that a group I started has made a mockery of what should have been a constructive debate about feminism by needlessly intruding on the matter, drawn attention away from important issues and reduced people on all sides to pointless mudslinging.
Credit to Vision for publishing this, people should always be given the right to reply and I think it’s terrible that the Huffington Post did not give you that right in their article. All the best Sholto.
Good article Sholto, I hope this all blows over soon. Its nice to see some balance restored here, the FemSoc quite frankly are buying into the whole crazy feminist cliche with their obviously biased article in HuffPost and other media endevours.
Finally! the truth is outed! I happen to know Sholto and he is not a misogynist nor a hateful person. The attacks against him on femsoc members’ twitter page showed an inherent lack of maturity despite the members representing a soc that ACTUALLY seeks people to take them seriously. Having seen both facebook debates, a few twitter feeds and online articles concerning this, feminism lost more respect out of the 2 parties I feel…
Probably the most sensible thing written on this whole preposterous thing. Well done to both the author and Vision.
The part of this article that people should pay close attention to is the Alex Wilson bit. I saw the original facebook page and how she can describe the comments as hateful I don’t know. They were genuine grievances directed at her for the way she ran her society. There was nothing personal whatsoever. She is playing the victim now to make others seem like bullies. I don’t really know what she expects to be honest? Are people not allowed to criticise feminists anymore without being described as misogynist or sexist?
“Not every criticism of feminism is sexist” – whoops.
Finally somebody who can actually write a half decent article as well as not blowing this whole thing completely out of proportion. Criticism of Femsoc is not criticism of women, or even feminism, how hard is that to grasp?
I believe Sholto means that criticisms of feminists’ methods and actions are not inherently sexist. @derp – resorting to deliberately obtuse complaints is exactly the kind of unconstructive and aimless debate method made infamous by mensoc.
@Rowan,
I think you mean made infamous by FemSoc.
Interesting article, great that we can hear your side. One bit of advice though, “MenSoc was not set up with the intention to hurt people, and for that I again apologise” kinda sounds like you are apologising for NOT deliberately hurting people, and that it would have been better if you had set out TO hurt people…
I would also like to comment that, whilst a large number of trollish comments were posted on the group that were unneccessary, there was also a large amount of positive debate on the issues which men do suffer with in society, as well as an analysis of why society was not beneficial to either men or women, debate which I have not seen on the FemSoc group page. Whilst questions can be raised as to Sholto’s motives for setting up the group in the first place, I would at least give him credit for creating a forum whereby some could discuss issues that do matter and which have been overlooked by other groups.
Looking at this as a bit of an outsider, it makes me tremendously sad, and a little bit angry that our society, the intelligent and mature students of the University of York, can’t have a serious discussion about something that clearly affects a lot of us without seemingly becoming a bunch of impudent children.
Based on what I’ve read, at least some of the “personal attacks” suffered by Alex Wilson and others were nothing more than criticism of how she ran her society, and as a leader, or any kind of publicized figure for that matter; and as someone involved in such a highly charged issue there is going to be criticism, and for our society to involve we have to be receptive to negative comments and we have to learn from them.
Such is the nature of the Internet and complete anonymous freedom to speak your mind, that there will always be patently ridiculous comments, the likes of “DEATH TO WOMEN! MAN IS LORD” and these are quite clearly spam, but for any reasoned argument or sensible point (regardless of whether you agree), debate and discussion are the answers, never censorship.
You are very right Sam, but I am sure Alex Wilson would disagree with you. She is very intent on playing the victim here and complaining of the ‘abuse’ she suffered because of MenSoc even with no evidence to show for it aside from people criticising here opinions (such as, her: ‘men who want to be involved in feminism should only be allowed a passive role.’ rant, plus the banning of people from the facebook group which was happening long before the creation of MenSoc despite what she told HuffPost), whereas apparently Sholto gets to recieve death threats and his name in the national media, labelled a misogynist with no direct evidence to support it (the most HuffPost could do was to quote an ambiguous statement by him).
The very name of ‘Mens Rights Society’ was designed to provoke — it’s akin to setting up a white right’s society. We can all agree that men’s social pressures should be discussed but what makes Sholto that doing this directly with FemSoc would have been a bad idea? If he wanted a mature discussion and is amenable to feminism, why not go directly to the many campus demonstrations and discussions? The very fact that he wanted to create a hoax shows he doesn’t care one iota about the issue: just about provoking. There is no way in god’s earth that his criticisms were to support the existence of FemSoc on campus, Sholto can’t have his way of being both pro-feminist and using the hoax to criticise feminists on campus: which is it?
The ‘man is lord’ posts are ridiculous but their primary goal is to provoke a reaction from feminists, and to make them look ridiculous in the process. This has been an exercise in baiting a fair and uncontroviersial goal of women on campus to talk about their treatment in society. To even talk about the leadership of one person is to trivialise and not take seriously the important matters being discussed. The ‘man is lord’ posts have nothing to do with criticism of FemSoc leadership — which besides being no issue — the fact that he thought this is more important than a discussion of feminism suggests he doesn’t give a damn about gender debate.
This cliched bashing of feminism as militant and angry when actually there was no unreasonable behaviour before the Men’s Rights hoax.
It’s no good attacking campus feminists and then shouting about their reaction as unreasonable when they finally succumb to provocation.
The key thing here — Sholto made no post of support for feminism, at the same time posting inflammafory comments. In the context of this, Sholto clearly does not just care for women’s rights but dislikes them enough to trivialise and mock them. Even if you have taste in humour poor enough to think they’re a rip-roaring joke, they lazily incited a lot of campus misogyny among the boys. He made no attempts to combat or clarify the misgonistic fervour he stirred up. Seems to me that this article is trying to excuse a reactionary, lazy and poorly thought out prank. All of his actions show this.
It depresses me that there are enough fools on campus to believe that this shitty, childish, selfish and uncharitable joke passes for a political demonstration.
You have now been baptized into the World Of Feminism, Mr. David.