We had an absolutely amazing weekend at the Men Challenging Sexism Conference in Glasgow a couple of weekends ago. This year we decided to have it much closer to the #FiLiA23 venue, which proved to be an absolutely brilliant decision as it allowed for women attending FiLiA to come across to the MACS conference and attend sessions and contribute to our discussions.
It also provided us with plenty opportunities to chat, network, drink and exchange ideas with feminists from across the country.
We were in Glasgow a couple of days before our event kicked off and witnessed the ‘protests’ against the FiLiA conference, led by Glasgow Trans Rally on Friday morning, after they failed to get FiLiA cancelled. The chants of “Fuck you”, led by Tom Harlow and aimed at the peaceful attendees of a women’s rights conference were completely out of order and only served to underline the misogyny and sexism behind the attempts to silence women speaking about their rights and the abuses they face. Despite being only a 3-minute walk from the FiLiA venue this year, our men’s conference was not targeted by any ‘protests’ by the way…
Saturday go off to a flying start with a couple of excellent presentations by Vaishnavi Sundar and Malcolm Clark.
Vaishnavi spoke to use about gender ideology, the situation of women in #India and shared about 10 minutes worth of amazing clips of her forthcoming documentary #BehindTheLookingGlass. As you may know we have been supporting Vaishnavi in her fundraising campaign for the film.
Following Vaishnavi’s talk, Malcolm Clark then took us on a journey through time and place, which aimed to address amongst others the question: “How did we get to #DylanMulvaney being awarded ‘Woman of the Year’ on the cover of gay magazine Attitude?”.
We are aiming to make the videos of both talks available on our new YouTube channel, so please keep an eye on it.
On Sunday we had a number of brilliant talks again. Evan and Björn gave a talk about the oppression, sexualisation, exploitation of women and (particularly female) non-human animals as well as the fragmentation of bodies.
This talk was followed by Christian Wilton-King’s talk about pornography and how to talk to young people about it and we ended the day with an really insightful and easy to understand talk by Michael Foran on equality law.
We ended both days with reflection sessions in which we discussed the many links between the various talks and what we can do to take this forward through petitions, actions and further events like the Men Challenging Sexism conference.
We are very aware that there will not be a #FiLiA in 2024, but we want to keep going and are hoping to have a 1-day conference next year as well as speaking at and attending other events over the next 12 months. We will keep you posted!
