Discovering Miso-gine-soc

This week Felix discovered the existence of “GineSoc”, the alter-ego of the Imperial Men’s Hockey XI 2’s team. After discovering a certificate of “Gine” last week on a table outside the FiveSixEight (a bar located on Union premises), we carried out further research. Our investigations revealed the existence of an “@ginesoc” twitter feed (now removed), containing an explicit avatar image and a mixture of tweets to pornographic actresses as well as tweets about hockey matches. Included in the twitter feed were an invitation for a porn actress to visit Imperial College Union on a Wednesday night if she “ever want[ed] a good time in London” and a request for a shout out from Select UK Radio to “ginesoc hockey club, listening on the way back home from a big 4-2 win” Felix also found a closed Facebook group called “ICHC Men’s Ginesoc XI”, in which the group identified themselves as “The glorious men’s 2’s” and linked to a definition of “gine” which states that gine means “sexual relations with a girl”, which “comes from the word Vagina” and “is a harsh way of saying that someone wants to have sexual relations with a girl”.

Felix spoke to the ICHC asking them to explain why they felt it was acceptable to publish the material they they did on social media in a way that potentially excludes the female members of hockey. In response to these allegations a representative of the Men’s XI 2’s stated via email, “ICHC is one of the largest entirely mixed sports clubs at Imperial and we pride ourselves in being one of most friendly and inclusive societies” Felix also spoke to the Union, who released the following statement: “The Union were made aware on Thursday 6 March of allegations that the IC Hockey Mens 2nd Team were associated with the facebook page and twitter account in question. A formal investigation into these allegations has been launched under the provisions contained in the Union’s Bye Laws. While this investigation is taking place a suspension of activities has been issued to the team in question.

The Union takes allegations of this nature very seriously; we will be acting quickly to establish facts and explanations related to these allegations.” Looking at the evidence we have gathered, Felix believes that the squad is potentially in breach of BUCS Regulation 17 article 1, which states: “Every member institution and its clubs shall be responsible for ensuring that its players, officials and all persons purporting to be its representatives do not conduct themselves or print / have published any material which will bring the company into disrepute including social media platforms.” We also believe that the further scrutiny on the squad is due to Union Bye-Law E, which deals with “Bringing, or having the potential to bring, the Union into disrepute”, amongst other matters.

After we reported the allegations to both the Union and ICHC, the offending facebook group and twitter account were removed (although a text version of the twitter feed is still available in the google cache).

Have any further information? Please email us at felix@imperial.ac.uk.