Posted on 03/22/2015 7:08:24 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.
So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”
Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
One would think that attitude would get pretty boring and they’d find some other way to get through life. Obviously it has a certain amount of psychological payoff: you’re not a “victim,” you’re so damaged that you require coddling from the entire world at all times.
I suppose most of them get tired of the game eventually, or we’d notice people having freakouts about rape or racism or patriarchy all the time in real life ... and I’ve never seen one, not even in Walmart.
You probably know that women now outnumber men in colleges and universities. It seems to me that most of the stories I've read about college students feeling "unsafe" concerns upset female students.
Remember the upset female faculty member of Harvard when fellow lib Lawrence Summers gave a commencement speech a few years ago at Harvard? When he uttered the factual words that males and females might have different brain structures, the female prof was so upset she had to leave.
In my experience females are far more likely than males to be upset by certain kinds of speech. Certainly, there are probably many male students who join the chorus and whine about "unsafe" places. But I can't help notice the correlation between increasing numbers of females on college campi and the growing evil spread of suppression of free speech.
But if you suggest they not get together in large co-ed groups and get drunk - that they might later wish they hadn’t - you’re trampling on their inalienable right to act like absolute idiots.
True, but we wouldn’t know about it if we didn’t read FR. We wouldn’t know these loons exist.
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies
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Even more disturbing.
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