Yesterday we received a message on our site from a member of staff at a festival that will remain nameless. In case you haven’t seen it, the message reads as follows:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We have recently been informed through instagram of a number of slanderous posts, in an attempt to smear our organisation. These claims are baseless, as many of the senior roles in our company are occupied by women. Instead of playing the victim card, why dont you try to enact your own change? If the contents pertaining our company, are not immediately removed - we will be forced to take legal action and contact the correct legal authorities.

Best Wishes,

[Upset Festival]

[Upset Festival] left an email address that we tried to contact, but unfortunately the email bounced so we’ve decided to put our response here in the hope that they’ll see it. Upset Festival, if you’re reading this, please shoot us an email at [title of this blog]@protonmail.com and we’ll happily engage you in more private discussions.

To anyone thinking of sharing this, please don’t mention any festivals by name. Thanks!

Hi [Upset Festival],

We were very entertained by your message, and were thrilled to find that our message has made it all the way to one of the UK’s biggest festivals! We just had a couple of issues with the content of it, which we’ll try and go through in the order in which you brought them up.

As per our limited understanding of the law, in order for a statement to be slanderous, it can’t be true. We’ve counted, twice, the artists on your website, and have concluded that you have booked six women: Anna, Charlotte de Witte, Hannah Wants, La Fleur, Nina Kraviz, and Peggy Gou. The only other statements we made regarding your festival are that the total number of acts currently announced is 89, and that one of these acts is Scooter. If you can provide any evidence that any of these three statements are untrue, we will gladly retract them and issue a public statement of apology.

The bio of our Instagram page says that we’re “[r]aising awareness for promoters who are allergic to booking women and gender minorities”, and if we’re interpreting your message correctly, you say that this doesn’t apply to [Upset Festival] as many of the senior roles within your organisation are occupied by women. Unfortunately, we’re not campaigning for more events management roles to be filled by women, we’re campaining for more artist roles to be filled by women, a metric by which we believe your festival has failed dramatically. It is also worth noting that this seems to be a view held by Mixmag, a publication in which I have seen full-page [Upset Festival] advertisments being printed, so you may want to consult internally before threatening us with legal action.

The last thing we wanted to clarify was that you seemed to want us to, er, enact our own change. Respectfully, what do you think our Instagram page is trying to do?

We eagerly await your response.

Kind regards,

Women Allergy Club