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.