Uhhhhh…..
Charlie Kirk: alright guys we need a new idea on how to protest all this liberal nonsense like “caring” and “feelings”
guy with a diaper fetish: glad you asked!
What bothers me about all this nonsense, is that it is entirely part of the patriarchal attempts to erase or glorify certain aspects of history. Let me explain.
In the past, it was exceedingly common, indeed expected for men to have safe spaces. They were sometimes even called this. A man had a study at home, or an office. Even in the poorer houses, during the growth of the middle class, circa 1700′s, men had a library, or a study, or a dressing room. They had social clubs that did not allow women. They were allowed multiple locations that were entirely theirs to do with as they pleased, including abandoning their wives to whatever it was they were doing, ignoring the world, shooting billiards, drinking, smoking and so forth. Even before the creation of the middle class after the plague, there were male-only groups, meeting halls, schools, and pubs. Men had plenty of safe spaces reserved for themselves that were unrelated to work and entirely focused on leisure. At universities, which were male only for the longest time, there were also common rooms, study rooms, rooms for leisure activities, pubs, mess halls and so forth.
Men have always had their male-only spaces. They have kept women from them, they have used them to escape from “the strictures of family life” specifically. They used them to avoid the things that men found overtly objectionable. They have used them to write letters, or converse with other women who were not their wives, or experience companionship with other men. They have even made rules about what could and could not be discussed.
Great historical partnerships, arrangements, bargains, treaties and on and on were founded in these male-only safe spaces. Lloyd’s of London, one of the largest financial institutions of the world? Founded in Lloyd’s coffee shop – a typically male-oriented space full of cronies sitting around chatting about their insurances on ships and trade. Publishing? Founded in pubs and churchyards. Property? governed through public houses and in male clubs. Law? An entire group existed at Temple Bar and the Inns of court to allow male lawyers to have freedom from the regulations of the city, to the point that they often fought with the crown. These men had an entire culture entirely to themselves, with additional safe spaces within that were the foundations of many of the longer standing legal and trade organizations. The British East India trading company? You guessed it. Put together by blokes sitting at a pub on the North Bank.
Safe spaces for men have always existed, while women were either kept from them or eventually had safe female spaces delegated for them by men, usually a solarium or parlor, or drawing room specifically. They were allowed to take the air or promenade in the park, but that was all.
And that says nothing about racial organizations that provided safe spaces from the poor, the immigrant, the slave, from which, all of these groups were banned or forced to act as servants or slaves within these safe spaces, seeing the white males go about their safe leisure, with no regard that it is being facilitated by the oppressed.
To now see grown men in children’s clothes, acting as if the entire foundation of everything they hold dear and propagate as the heights of achievement wasn’t built in male safe spaces, by men escaping their families, or their jobs, or their obligations, or the people they didn’t see as “fit”, for a moment, is both appalling to me and uniquely ignorant. The history of male leisure and its critical impact on how the world works is being overwritten. This new history is a palimpsest that obliterates the intrinsic hierarchies at play in western culture.
These men are stupid bastards, and someone ought to give them a good walloping.
i just think it’s hilarious that they’re dressing up as babies in order to act like children
“waaaah it’s not fair that i get in trouble for being an asshole in public”
huh, usually you guys do this on the internet in your undies, but ok
yeah what these kinds of men are really freaking out about is other people trying to be safe from THEM. bullies will always scream about the injustice of their victims figuring out how to escape.
Tag: safe spaces
Entitlement, Safe Spaces, and “Sitting With Fear”
Forever ago, I ran across an article on privilege and the inability to “sit with fear” that has really stuck with me. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, trying to put something into words that has been bugging me and I think it’s starting to crystallize.
The idea is that we live in a society where privileged people rarely have to deal with being afraid or uncomfortable and so they learn to think they have a right to always feel that way and that right trumps other people’s needs. So we see “being around [x race/ethnicity/class] makes me feel unsafe; feeling this way harms me; I have a right to feel comfortable in my environment”
We see this expressed most strongly in the more privileged groups: white people unaccustomed to being a minority or being around minorities, straight men unaccustomed to feeling sexually or physically vulnerable or to receiving unwanted sexual attention from men, etc. These are people that primarily feel safe–people that have rarely hought twice about wearing what they want onto the streets, raising their voice in ways that might be perceived as threatening, or calling the cops for assistance and assuming the cops will be their allies.
This leads to the harmful conclusion that people have the right not just to BE safe, but to FEEL safe.
On the other hand, most members of less privileged groups have at least some, if not lots, of experience “sitting with fear.” We will be in environments where we do not feel comfortable or safe. We will experience vulnerability. Not all the time, not everywhere, but often enough. Some of these times we will actually be in danger, some we will just feel less than safe, but regardless, by the time we are adults we have extensive experience and a well developed toolkit for how to process fear.
Sometimes, when situations are genuinely and unnecessarily unsafe, we will work to change them. Other times, when our feelings of discomfort have to be balanced against the competing needs and feelings of other groups we will work to find compromises or build a variety of spaces. And when multiple needs really can’t be reconciled or when our feelings of vulnerability exist only as feelings not based in reality we know how to sit with our fear.
Here’s the interesting bit :
I see, increasingly, people buying into the privileged fallacy that a state where one never needs to know how to sit with fear is not only achievable but an entitlement.
I mean it’s not unidentifiable, to look at that sense of security and think “I want that. I deserve that.” I think it’s normal. Hell, I think people do deserve that. I just don’t think it’s achievable, not on some kind of black-and-white, universal scale. There will always be people who need different things, and even people who need things whose presence is potentially threatening to other people. (A neutral example: addictive painkillers.)
But I see a lot of people who are hurting, in spaces that are practically designed to hurt them, trying to fix it by turning the broken rules around backwards to make a society designed so they’ll never feel hurt or unsafe or uncomfortable.
And I think that’s harmful.
I think that’s drinking the privileged kool-aid.
This post is, by the way, NOT an argument against safe spaces. Safe spaces are necessary and important parts of any community. What this is is an argument against the idea of universal safe spaces in a world with diverse, competing, sometimes irreconcilable needs. This is a reminder that not every space can serve every person, and that when it comes down to the line we need to be very aware of this fact, and also aware of the difference between entitlement to BE safe and to FEEL safe.
The privileged approach to safe spaces is thinking that your needs are either universal or the priority and that your feelings outweigh someone else’s needs. The privileged approach to safe spaces is “this thing hurt me, so it’s bad.“ It’s thinking “my feelings are unbiased and objective and the most important feelings to have.” The privileged approach to safe spaces is “my internal reality is the one true reality.”
We know different. And when we have to, we know how to deal. Let’s not give that up.
I don’t know all the reasons why I like dark things, and I don’t think I need to know them all, but… I was just looking at the blog of that person who said I “dehumanize and fetishize” gay men, and I saw that he was quite young (15) and his blog was all full of pastel colors and references to his mental illness and something dawned on me that I hadn’t thought about in a Tumblr context at all.
Part of my PTSD is about experiences I had in hospitals, and because of that one of my triggers is… not pastels, all by themselves, but like… have you ever stayed in a hospital as a kid? And everything is covered in soothing soft colors and all the nurses wear scrubs with like… cute animal drawings on them and everyone talks in a sing-song voice and reassures you things won’t hurt when they OBVIOUSLY will and you’d rather they tell the truth, accept that you have good reasons to be scared, and get it the hell overwith?
Yeah, I think I just figured out why those kids’ blogs give me a weird tingly feeling of creeping dread.
And I think I figured out, also, where my intense leeriness of “safe spaces” and trigger warnings comes from too–even though as a person with PTSD I’m supposed to want them.
It’s because in my experience, people who were trying to make me feel safe were LYING. They were lying because it was in their interest–in mine, too, but in theirs–for me to feel calm and soothed. For me not to feel despair, or anger, or blind screaming rage.
…Is it any wonder I like the stories where the people with the knives and the cruel smiles and the mind games are blatant about it? Or that I might want a few knives of my own, even though I have no desire to hurt anyone who isn’t going to get off on it?
I don’t want those kids to not need safety.
I want them to stop pretending safety looks the same for everyone.
Yes, this.
When people tell me “You’re safe,” I don’t think of Helpful Adult saving me from the monsters under the bed. I think of my teachers, saying the people who hurt me would never do such a thing, and I should stop lying because I was perfectly safe. I think of the people who used to hug me until my lungs wouldn’t fill and my ribs creaked, and got away without a whisper of a reprimand. Because they were pretty and soft, and I was cold and harsh.
That’s not safe, to me. That’s the most dangerous place in the world, because the people who live there will do anything- anything at all- if it means they don’t have to acknowledge how nasty their walled garden has really gotten. Because if I defend myself, they can’t pretend anymore. And they sure as hell won’t defend me.
THIS.
I have experienced a lot of passive-aggressive emotional abuse in my life and let me tell you – my abusers had a vested interest in keeping me calm.
Upset means resistance. Upset means that they have to face the damage they’ve caused. Upset means that you may finally realize that you should leave. Upset means that you might just get up and leave. So they soothe you. They make you doubt the validity of your feelings. They make you feel guilty for getting upset. They make you think that the issue was your fault in the first place. They make you feel like getting upset is pointless. They make you feel like you have wronged them and yourself by being unhappy.
You do not have to let yourself be soothed. You do not have to let them take the fight out of you. If you do not feel safe; you do not have to feel guilty for getting yourself out. You do not have to feel guilty for being upset when someone has wronged you. You do not have to feel guilty for seeking your own brand of safety.
This is the most poignant description of what it actually feels like to be helpless in an institution that I’ve ever read.
It’s a special kind of violence to be hurt and to be told that it’s kindness. It’s intensely intimate and perverted. Succumbing to it is… spiritually destructive in a way that I have a hard time putting to words. Just… in my safe space I’m always fighting because as long as I continue to struggle that very special form of violence can’t take hold of me and I’ll be okay.
Like… when I get triggered about some of these experiences I’ll even have fantasies about dying while resisting. I mean… I don’t want to go into details because super triggering but… just think about that for a moment.
“It’s a special kind of violence to be hurt and to be told that it’s kindness. It’s intensely intimate and perverted.”
My experiences are not exactly the same as yours, but this, yes.
This is why I have such intense reactions to unkind SJ, whether it’s “sit down, shut up, and listen” (gee, what might that resemble?) or “representation means heroes with no serious flaws.”
Because that particular “shh, shh, shh, if we pretend utopia is already here, it soon will be” lie has hurt me EVERY TIME I’ve heard it.
I’m learning now that the roots of a lot of my trauma was this exact “your life is perfect, you’re not allowed to feel anything other than happiness, you’re ungrateful,” yelling more if I cried, any inkling of talking back or standing up for myself was met with twice the punishment, etc
So while it’s understandable that those in a dark place seek softness and gentle color, and there’s nothing wrong with that, those of us forced into it seek the grime as a form of truth and expression that wasn’t allowed for us, or a fictional playground of violence and anger where we can actually scream our frustrations onto a canvas.
And telling people that they should ditch such exploration for holy goodness is just another form of telling us our anger shouldn’t exist
Boom.
i’ve just realized this is why i have such a negative reaction to ‘think of the children’ rhetoric. because my abuse was so often put in terms of ‘think of the other children, they’re more important than you’.
just moving along like everyone else 