Online Spaces, Part 5: No Space Is Safe For Everyone
The term “safe space” has often meant places that are safe for people in the LGBT+ community. The world and the internet have expanded on the idea, and different web communities have their own notions of what it means to be in a safe space. The phrase still has a strong connotation of protecting a marginalized group, and we’re not sure how universal or exclusive that connotation is.
You can make a space to protect people from a particular kind of bigotry. Or from a kind of hostility or bullying. Or from being caught off-guard by content that can harm them. We like that people have been figuring out ways to protect each other online.
But different types of safety can contradict.
Say you have a safe space for people who need their triggers correctly labelled. That same space can be unsafe for people with disabilities or life situations that make trigger warnings tricky to create. People can have attention issues, or difficulty understanding a warning system, or difficulty making their body or the software do what they want. They may not be fully fluent with the language of a space, or even just the dialect.
Being bad at following a space’s rules is a little unsafe if you have to be on high alert in order to avoid making constant mistakes.
And it can be very unsafe if people respond to mistakes with insults, cruel assumptions, or suggestions of self-harm.
Now, say you have a place that’s safe for people who are processing trauma and anger. It might be unsafe for people who share traits in common with those who inflicted the trauma.
Or it could be unsafe for people who are processing the same trauma in a differentway.
The nature of a space depends on who it’s safe for, and what it’s safe from. It’s only safe if the occupants mostly agree on those two points.
Otherwise, you end up working at cross-purposes.
There’s tension when you try to expand your own type of safe space to encompass a larger community. Suddenly, a lot more people have to mostly agree about who’s supposed to be safe from what.
Sometimes you’ll find that your type of safety is too specific to work in a big space. It’s hard to predict all the needs of a varied community.
Now, some types of safety do a lot more good than harm even on a large scale. Making a big space safer can be a tense but needed transition.
We here at Averting The Flame Wars want everyone on the internet to be safe from things like public doxing and death threats. But not everyone would agree with that. And even we don’t know exactly how to enforce it.
It’s hard to build a consensus with a large group of people about which rules are worth the trade-offs involved. It’s a struggle between two things:
Freedoms: The safety of being able to talk and act thoughtlessly, to relax and be open about your passions, uncertainties, and experiences.
&
Restrictions: Rules and norms that give people some power over if and how they’re exposed an idea or situation.
These are both types of safety. In general, humans need some of both.
Keeping a space safe means hashing out how you’re going to balance these two needs in lots of different ways.
And it means deciding how you can enforce the restrictions you have. If one person breaks the rules, do others get to try to make them feel bad? If so, what methods are they allowed to use?
If you’re going to honor the needs of different humans, you need to change where the boundaries are from one space to another.
It helps a lot if you state the restrictions and freedoms of your spaces as clearly as possible, so the people who need to avoid it can do so. Some Facebook groups have guidelines for their members, and some blogs have guidelines for commenters.
In a more amorphously owned space like a tag, it’s going to be a lot more subjective. Still, if you feel like you know a safe space well, it can help to articulate what you think the rules are.
Likewise, if you sense that a space isn’t intended for you or has unwritten rules you don’t understand, one option is to ask. Ask the people you encounter about who they want the space to cater to.
If they seem receptive, ask if they’d be willing to explain what kind of behavior they expect from you. (Keep in mind that this can be a lot to ask. Most people don’t know how to articulate exactly what they expect from you. And some have bad experiences with being asked the question.)
You can’t preempt every harmful misunderstanding this way. Our ideas can minimize hurt, not prevent it completely.
Safe online spaces are important. And they can be pretty unsafe.
“Nobody will use your neopronouns in real life” how you gonna argue that with my siblings, mother, random strangers I met at the LGBTQ+ center, etc. who have all used my neopronouns or talked about using them at some point?
There are safe spaces in real life. Even if they are not accessible to everyone, even if there’s not enough of them, their existence is not impossible,itdoes and it can happen. With thousands of people who use or support neopronouns, we are bound to run into each other at some point.
In 1980, photographer Anita Corbin decided to turn her lens on the young women of UK subcultures. Over the next two years, rockabillies, mods, goths, rude girls, skinheads, rastas and more posed for Corbin and opened up about what it was like to be a young woman navigating an alt scene, and the importance of female friendships.
“I have chosen to focus on girls, not because the boys (where present) were any less stylish, but because girls in “subcultures” have been largely ignored or when referred to, only as male appendages.” -Anita Corbin, photographer, “Visible Girls”
In 1980, photographer Anita Corbin decided to turn her lens on the young women of UK subcultures. Over the next two years, rockabillies, mods, goths, rude girls, skinheads, rastas and more posed for Corbin and opened up about what it was like to be a young woman navigating an alt scene, and the importance of female friendships.
“I have chosen to focus on girls, not because the boys (where present) were any less stylish, but because girls in “subcultures” have been largely ignored or when referred to, only as male appendages.” -Anita Corbin, photographer, “Visible Girls”
Concrete, 100% effective way to tell if someone doesn’t belong in a LGBT+/queer space:
They openly and actively hate/ want to hurt the people in that space
Controversial opinion here, I know, but just because you’re in a safe LGBT+/Queer space doesn’t mean you have to disclose their identity to everyone there. And people are allowed to bring their partners, regardless of their orientation, to those same spaces.
Obviously there are certain spaces that are for specific people, but at the same time, y’all are so obsessed with micromanaging queer spaces. The only thing that should be a litmus for entry into those spaces is: “does this person want to hurt someone else in this space and I know that? Yes? Then they aren’t fucken welcome. Regardless of identity.”
I volunteered in ine of the biggest queer youth clubs as an educator / guide (there isnt a word in english for these stuff).
We had so many queer kids that brought cishet friends and some of them didnt come out later, some of them really were cishet and that is fine.
They did no harm to the queer atmosphere and when someone new joined for the first time we gave them a little tour of the club and invited them to a one on one talk with one of the volunteers.
Ive had many of these conversations with teens at the ages of 12-19 and everyone calmed down when we told them there is no criteria to being there that this is a safe space and after a short explanation and some questions where many of them just blurted out their stories.
The non queer identifying people came for years either because they just met some friends from different places along the country and it was their usual hangout or because they really needed a safe space with no judgment in their lives.
Cishet people also need safe spaces where there are no gendered expectations of them and they can play with makeup and dresses and just be calm and learn about safe sexuality and consent.
Why in the world would you kick people who need safe spaces and benefit from them out???
Queer people seeing cishet people in queer spaces not acting weird and for once seeing the atmosphere is queer and the cis person has to adapt does marvels to one’s sense of how real it feels, how you could bring this safe space outside and this culture to other friends.
Introduce some of the stuff you learned to your friends and family maybe to some willing coworker idk.
The point is that our way to smash the patriarchy, gender roles, rape culture and more shit is too bring it outside and allow allies to be there cus why the fuck not
Thanks for sharing! This really highlights a collection of reasons why it’s important to not create these arbitrary rules to who can and can’t come in.
Also?
When I was in college, I had a cishet friend who was Christian and quietly felt homosexuality was a sin. I never heard her say so out loud….
…..which is why it STUNNED me when last year, she admitted she felt that way in college. But, she said, spending time with me in what we called the LGBTQIA+ group, to support me through a time when I was on and off suicidal, she discovered that queer people were, well….people. Who just wanted to be allowed to live. That might sound like “wow, the bar was belowground and she was doing the limbo with Satan,” but you must understand: this was 2006 in a very tiny town. Our senator had just compared homosexuality to both bestiality and pedophilia and there was a concerted push going on to write “one man, one woman” into the Constitution. Allison’s position (“I feel a certain kind of way but I’m not going to say it aloud”) was actually KINDER than most of the people around me.
And just spending time in our spaces, being around queer people, she realized “hey, what I have been told my whole life is a lie. These people are just people. Telling terrible jokes, having cookouts, fighting for basic human dignity, arguing over whether or not face painting is an appropriate college activity. There is no difference between them and me.”
Without a welcome into queer spaces, Allison might still be part of a homophobic church. Instead she helped organize her town’s first Pride parade in 2019.
“The queer kids, whether they’re gay or straight, need to stick together.” — Tim Miller, gay performance artist
The amazing adorable gorgeous Bran has written a super sweet blog post about the importance of having a photographer that creates a safe space for photoshoots and features me!
Has it really come to this? That mental health and personal resilience, and notendorsing imaginary helplessness, “oppression,” and victimhood, particularly among the most privileged, most entitled people in the safest, freest, most prosperous countries in the world - and worst of all, actually saying, *gasp*, the truth - are now “Republican” qualities?
If hearing the truth triggers or offends you, the problem is you, not the truth.
“If your personal beliefs deny what’s objectively true about the world, then they’re more accurately called personal delusions.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
–- Carl Sagan
“If you are emotionally attached to your tribe, religion or political leaning to the poi that truth and justice become secondary considerations, your education is useless. Your exposure is useless. If you cannot reason beyond petty sentiments, you are a liability to mankind.“
– Dr. Chuba Okadigbo
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
– George Orwell
If I don’t tiptoe around the delicate feelings of the traditionally religious, why would I tiptoe around yours? You’re not on the side you think you are.
“Faith triumphs over facts.”
– Church sign.
“I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.’
–Elder Boyd K. Packer, Mormon Elder.
Thank you for proving the point of the meme. And reinforcing why I regard myself as politically homeless.
And maybe take the opportunity to look at a world globe some time.
What if people are emotionally sensitive because they’re overtaxed?
We’re fed a lot more emotional information than we’re practically prepared to process well.
Oversensitivity might result. Like exhaustion from overstimulation.
In a way, you’re correct. Someone who is overweight, has poor fitness, etc will be “over-taxed” simply walking up a flight of stairs. The problem isn’t the stairs, it’s the physical fitness of the person.
The same is true of emotional resilience.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and describes the phenomenon.
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.
But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.
There is no resilience to challenge or to hearing things that are true that are uncomfortable. We have an entire culture of “micro-aggressions” and “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” built up around validating and reinforcing the fragility of people, particularly college-age. In a way their parents did not. Students are actively protesting against free speech, while their grandparents protested forit.
Which is to say that they don’t understand to point of freedom of speech at all.
We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.
Greg Lukianoff, co-author of the Coddling article and subsequent book, runs FIRE - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and he has described it like a switch that was suddenly turned on in the 2013-2014 timeframe where everything suddenly changed, where the nature of the cases and complaints they dealt with changed, and students were suddenly describing things they didn’t like in terms of “harm” or “danger” and demanding speech codes, safe spaces, and other protections from reality.
Christina Hoff Sommers talks about a lecture she gave where fainting-couch feminists fled to a “safe space” with bubbles and coloring books, rather than engaging with her in an intellectual discussion. This is completely new, bizarre behavior compared to the prior decades she’s spend lecturing and presenting.
Haidt and Lukianoff argue that these people been protected from danger - don’t go out into the world on your own, stranger danger!, etc - which makes it more difficult to build resilience (Seerut Chawla likens it to a muscle). Because in order to learn to walk, you have to fall over.
Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can remember riding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperoned by adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But “free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made Baby Boomer parents more protective than their own parents had been. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequently in the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up on milk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.
The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.
And that they’ve also been taught the “three great untruths”:
Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
Untruth of Us vs Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
These are three of the exact cognitive biases that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is intended to help you un-learn. Specifically because they’re unhealthy. But these are the modern-day “virtues.”
So, yes, they may well be “over-taxed” but not for the reasons you’re suggesting. And it can hardly be blamed on simply saying things that are true, much less an excuse for denying them or claiming they cause “harm” or “hurt.”
Instead it can be blamed on their emotional resilience, the weakness of their emotional “muscle.”
Think of resilience like a muscle. It’s *meant* to be used.
If instead of using & strengthening your muscles you were very carefully carried around all the time- they will atrophy.
The good news is: like your muscles, resilience can be developed.
The idea that we should change the world to accommodate those with low emotional stamina is like saying we should flatten out San Francisco in order to accommodate those whose walking muscles have atrophied. It’s unreasonable and unrealistic, and functions as little more than a plausible deniability excuse. It means it’s always the world’s fault, and never the responsibility of the individual. “It’s the world’s fault I can’t walk around San Francisco, not my fault for not exercising.”
Suggesting that we should protect people from ideas they find uncomfortable or offensive, especially true ones, is the same as suggesting that they remain mentally unhealthy and incapacitated. That they’re correct to feel that helpless and frightened.
The world is a safer place now, particularly in first world countries, than it has ever been. Violent crime is down, standard of living is up, poverty has never been lower. And yet, everything, even this meme, is a drama. And no, it’s not simply drama and “emotional information” being fed. It’s being created by the same people.
And, my point remains. None of my readers expect me to tiptoe around the fragile feelings of believers, to back away from telling them the truth just because they find it uncomfortable or offensive. They cheer me when I don’t.
Why would anyone expect the opposite when it comes to the fragile feelings of others in non-religious matters, simply because they find it uncomfortable or offensive to be told the truth?
Is it just the public spectacle of “the people I don’t like”?
Why would anyone want to read someone who was so lacking in integrity that they’d be that inconsistent and hypocritical? Don’t you already have CNN and Fox News for that?
