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silveradeptYou’re all inspirations for things, finding just the right time and juxtaposition to make me say, “Hey, I should Write About Those Things.” And perhaps I’m feeling inspired in the Three Weeks For Dreamwidth project to put out a little bit more content that’s not totally cribbing links from everywhere.
Zo, as we get older, we start coming to grips with a lot of things. The sorts of things that we wouldn’t admit to our parents, to our friends, or even to ourselves as we were growing up. For many of us, it takes the form of “Hey, I’m not a person who only likes heterosexual penetrative sex in a lifelong marriage relationship” For others, it can mean confronting the things in our past that are trauma triggers and trying to come to grips with them. Sometimes both, and sometimes both in the same context.
Anyway, the point of this is not actually about the coming-of-age process, but the concept of safe spaces, places where it’s okay to talk about these kind of things in a non-judgmental manner, usually with people who have experienced the same thing or have the same inclination as you do. As a general curiosity, I wonder how many of us need and take advantage of safe spaces to work out those issues with our lives, and how many of us are the creators of safe spaces for others to guide them along their journey as well.
In the pre-Internet days, safe spaces were, almost by definition, physical places. If you weren’t a member of the group that used that space, you probably never heard of its existence. If you were someone who needed the use of that space, you were almost dependent on someone who did know of the place passing on that information to you, and that place being close enough to you that you could reasonably get there.
Now, of course, one can find something that resembles a safe space on-line without thinking too hard. There are some trust issues involved, as with any other space - you have to trust that the person who own/moderates the space is not going to sell you out, the people who are also there with you are not going to sell you out, and the people in charge of every server you hit along the way from origin to destination aren’t going to sell you our, blackmail you, or otherwise threaten to reveal your private information to the world at large. Obviously, the more celebrity you have, the more precautions you have to take. We’ll loop back to privacy and anonymity later in a different context.
Because of the availability and ubiquity of on-line places and access, be they role-playing dungeons, survivor forums, societies where people of a like mind come together to cuss out their favorite targets, or Post Secrets, I wonder whether the physical safe spaces are dying out. We talk about school as supposedly being a safe space for young people to explore their ideas, develop their selves, and learn about the world around them in a relatively consequence-free environment, assuming they put in the effort of trying to learn. As anyone who has been in required schooling and/or has children in required schooling, this is not the case, at least until university education. (For several reasons, such as the ability to select courses you like, the simple weeder effect that university must be paid for, and that university life is the first time many newly-minted adults are able to act and explore without the disadvantage of having parents always nearby to spy and report on them.) Required schooling pits students against each other in several battles of varying degrees of meaninglessness whose intensity varies inversely with the size of the school itself. Which, while suboptimal, could be made bearable assuming there were somewhere or someone that could function as a pressure release valve. A DMZ, at the very least, if not a truly safe space.
However, we haven’t applied the difficulty multiplier yet, which is the staff and administration of the school. A supportive staff can make things more bearable, and apathetic staff raises the difficulty, and an actively hostile staff Turns It Up To Eleven and possibly adds on Dante Must Die. Administration can almost always be counted on to be apathetic-to-hostile for a minor-major difficulty boost. It’s the nature of their beast, really - minimizing their impact is the best we can do. You can see where being different in any way can become hellisly hard in school - the students that think you’re weird, or an abomination, or an *insert bad word here*, multipled by a staff that doesn’t care, or worse, a staff person that also thinks you’re those things and will actively look the other way, and further multiplied by administration, which doesn’t like problems at all and would really prefer that you simply conform and hide what’s different about you. Clearly, there is the need for un-stigmatized safe space in school. This means mental health professionals and people who can help students work through their identity issues to successful resolutions. This also means the school library carrying material that will help curious students find straight talk and information about their issues from many perspectives (and possibly a shielded reading nook to browse them in), as well as a nonjudgmental librarian to help them find that information however discreetly the students need it to be. That could be as simple as making mention during one’s library tour. “By the way, here are the sections on social issues. Human maturation and sexuality is over here, religions of the world are over here, subcultures, here. Come and see me, too - we can have private, non-judging conversations about your information needs.” The problem with all of these is that degreed school librarians aren’t considered core in a lot of places, and mental health professionals are a luxury, so students don’t have even the DMZ.
Outside of school, the increased connectivity of everyone makes finding safety harder for students and others, too - witness media coverage of young women taking their own lives because of relentless teasing, houding, and even outright lies about them. Witness the speed of how one person’s inability to keep trust resulted in explicit pictures being sent around the student body and the thought of criminal charges being applied. Hell, witness the concept of the Internet Troll, whether signed or unsigned. On the Internet, we take refuge in our anonymity and privacy, whether to escape or to attack. This gives rise to things like the “sex journal”, privacy filters, and the careful segregation of public persona and pervert persona for most people. Despite the unambiguous fact that Everyone Is A Pervert in some way, that is.
Yet we persist in this segregation. For one thing, many of our perversions are currently considered illegal, even if between two or more consenting adults with full knowledge of what they’re stepping in to. You can thank the Moral Guardians, the gossips, and the social stimgatists for that. They disapprove of what you are saying, and they’re not shy about telling it to everyone they know, and everyone you know, and they want those people to think of the most depraved and squick-tastic acts they can describe every time they think of you. They want the law to think of you as an unfit parent, they want your boss to believe that continuing to keep you hired will drag their reputation through the mud and cost them business, and they want you to feel so ashamed of yourself that you either repress this part of you or you kill yourself and remove your perverted self from this world so you can get to burning in hell for eternity.
“If my boss found out about this, I’d be fired.” What part of your private life and fantasy, unless that part relates directly to your work, should result in your dismissal from a job? (Lest the Moral Guardians thunder down, I point out that this does mean persons with pedophilia and a fairly weak resistance to indulging in it should probably not hold jobs that work directly with children or young teenagers, and that politicians should probably not be caught in bed with anybody that might even appear to have the hint of impropriety. Which might include their wives *rimshot*. Put your brain to work, you pervert, and find something that you love that will also prevent the accumulation of bad juju.) If you build great houses and happen to be a swinger on the weekends, what part of swingerdom affects the quality of your house-building? If you’re a librarian and you’re furry, what part of furrydom affects your library skills? (Other than perhaps being able to be extra awesome at readers’ advisory around animal fiction and nonfiction, but that’s a benefit, yo.) If you’re a best-selling children’s author and you want to talk about your sex life with your name attached on a personal blog somewhere, why not?
The point is, we should be able to be frank and open about ourselves wherever we go. So we need safe spaces to talk about the things that are a part of us. And so we loop back once again to anonymity. Is anonymity good for us, even in the safe space? Or does segregating our lives out into public and perverted only make the problem worse and prevent good integration of ourselves, because we think of that segment as not being part of ourselves? If it were part of us, we’d be posting it under our regular identities. But if you and your furry self have different names, are you creating an Us/Them? If you go by a different name when you’re out swinging, are you saying that there’s you, the person, and you, the swinger, and the two of them should somehow stay separate? And if things come crashing down on you, are you going to be more likely to Deny Everything or stand outside the Closet, pop an eyebrow, and say, “So?”
Is our on-line anonymity and places creating true safe spaces where we can be ourselves, or are we just creating better and more connected ways of segregating parts of who we are and making sure they don’t cross? And where, oh where, have our physical safe spaces gone?
Zo, as we get older, we start coming to grips with a lot of things. The sorts of things that we wouldn’t admit to our parents, to our friends, or even to ourselves as we were growing up. For many of us, it takes the form of “Hey, I’m not a person who only likes heterosexual penetrative sex in a lifelong marriage relationship” For others, it can mean confronting the things in our past that are trauma triggers and trying to come to grips with them. Sometimes both, and sometimes both in the same context.
Anyway, the point of this is not actually about the coming-of-age process, but the concept of safe spaces, places where it’s okay to talk about these kind of things in a non-judgmental manner, usually with people who have experienced the same thing or have the same inclination as you do. As a general curiosity, I wonder how many of us need and take advantage of safe spaces to work out those issues with our lives, and how many of us are the creators of safe spaces for others to guide them along their journey as well.
In the pre-Internet days, safe spaces were, almost by definition, physical places. If you weren’t a member of the group that used that space, you probably never heard of its existence. If you were someone who needed the use of that space, you were almost dependent on someone who did know of the place passing on that information to you, and that place being close enough to you that you could reasonably get there.
Now, of course, one can find something that resembles a safe space on-line without thinking too hard. There are some trust issues involved, as with any other space - you have to trust that the person who own/moderates the space is not going to sell you out, the people who are also there with you are not going to sell you out, and the people in charge of every server you hit along the way from origin to destination aren’t going to sell you our, blackmail you, or otherwise threaten to reveal your private information to the world at large. Obviously, the more celebrity you have, the more precautions you have to take. We’ll loop back to privacy and anonymity later in a different context.
Because of the availability and ubiquity of on-line places and access, be they role-playing dungeons, survivor forums, societies where people of a like mind come together to cuss out their favorite targets, or Post Secrets, I wonder whether the physical safe spaces are dying out. We talk about school as supposedly being a safe space for young people to explore their ideas, develop their selves, and learn about the world around them in a relatively consequence-free environment, assuming they put in the effort of trying to learn. As anyone who has been in required schooling and/or has children in required schooling, this is not the case, at least until university education. (For several reasons, such as the ability to select courses you like, the simple weeder effect that university must be paid for, and that university life is the first time many newly-minted adults are able to act and explore without the disadvantage of having parents always nearby to spy and report on them.) Required schooling pits students against each other in several battles of varying degrees of meaninglessness whose intensity varies inversely with the size of the school itself. Which, while suboptimal, could be made bearable assuming there were somewhere or someone that could function as a pressure release valve. A DMZ, at the very least, if not a truly safe space.
However, we haven’t applied the difficulty multiplier yet, which is the staff and administration of the school. A supportive staff can make things more bearable, and apathetic staff raises the difficulty, and an actively hostile staff Turns It Up To Eleven and possibly adds on Dante Must Die. Administration can almost always be counted on to be apathetic-to-hostile for a minor-major difficulty boost. It’s the nature of their beast, really - minimizing their impact is the best we can do. You can see where being different in any way can become hellisly hard in school - the students that think you’re weird, or an abomination, or an *insert bad word here*, multipled by a staff that doesn’t care, or worse, a staff person that also thinks you’re those things and will actively look the other way, and further multiplied by administration, which doesn’t like problems at all and would really prefer that you simply conform and hide what’s different about you. Clearly, there is the need for un-stigmatized safe space in school. This means mental health professionals and people who can help students work through their identity issues to successful resolutions. This also means the school library carrying material that will help curious students find straight talk and information about their issues from many perspectives (and possibly a shielded reading nook to browse them in), as well as a nonjudgmental librarian to help them find that information however discreetly the students need it to be. That could be as simple as making mention during one’s library tour. “By the way, here are the sections on social issues. Human maturation and sexuality is over here, religions of the world are over here, subcultures, here. Come and see me, too - we can have private, non-judging conversations about your information needs.” The problem with all of these is that degreed school librarians aren’t considered core in a lot of places, and mental health professionals are a luxury, so students don’t have even the DMZ.
Outside of school, the increased connectivity of everyone makes finding safety harder for students and others, too - witness media coverage of young women taking their own lives because of relentless teasing, houding, and even outright lies about them. Witness the speed of how one person’s inability to keep trust resulted in explicit pictures being sent around the student body and the thought of criminal charges being applied. Hell, witness the concept of the Internet Troll, whether signed or unsigned. On the Internet, we take refuge in our anonymity and privacy, whether to escape or to attack. This gives rise to things like the “sex journal”, privacy filters, and the careful segregation of public persona and pervert persona for most people. Despite the unambiguous fact that Everyone Is A Pervert in some way, that is.
Yet we persist in this segregation. For one thing, many of our perversions are currently considered illegal, even if between two or more consenting adults with full knowledge of what they’re stepping in to. You can thank the Moral Guardians, the gossips, and the social stimgatists for that. They disapprove of what you are saying, and they’re not shy about telling it to everyone they know, and everyone you know, and they want those people to think of the most depraved and squick-tastic acts they can describe every time they think of you. They want the law to think of you as an unfit parent, they want your boss to believe that continuing to keep you hired will drag their reputation through the mud and cost them business, and they want you to feel so ashamed of yourself that you either repress this part of you or you kill yourself and remove your perverted self from this world so you can get to burning in hell for eternity.
“If my boss found out about this, I’d be fired.” What part of your private life and fantasy, unless that part relates directly to your work, should result in your dismissal from a job? (Lest the Moral Guardians thunder down, I point out that this does mean persons with pedophilia and a fairly weak resistance to indulging in it should probably not hold jobs that work directly with children or young teenagers, and that politicians should probably not be caught in bed with anybody that might even appear to have the hint of impropriety. Which might include their wives *rimshot*. Put your brain to work, you pervert, and find something that you love that will also prevent the accumulation of bad juju.) If you build great houses and happen to be a swinger on the weekends, what part of swingerdom affects the quality of your house-building? If you’re a librarian and you’re furry, what part of furrydom affects your library skills? (Other than perhaps being able to be extra awesome at readers’ advisory around animal fiction and nonfiction, but that’s a benefit, yo.) If you’re a best-selling children’s author and you want to talk about your sex life with your name attached on a personal blog somewhere, why not?
The point is, we should be able to be frank and open about ourselves wherever we go. So we need safe spaces to talk about the things that are a part of us. And so we loop back once again to anonymity. Is anonymity good for us, even in the safe space? Or does segregating our lives out into public and perverted only make the problem worse and prevent good integration of ourselves, because we think of that segment as not being part of ourselves? If it were part of us, we’d be posting it under our regular identities. But if you and your furry self have different names, are you creating an Us/Them? If you go by a different name when you’re out swinging, are you saying that there’s you, the person, and you, the swinger, and the two of them should somehow stay separate? And if things come crashing down on you, are you going to be more likely to Deny Everything or stand outside the Closet, pop an eyebrow, and say, “So?”
Is our on-line anonymity and places creating true safe spaces where we can be ourselves, or are we just creating better and more connected ways of segregating parts of who we are and making sure they don’t cross? And where, oh where, have our physical safe spaces gone?
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-09 09:44 pm (UTC)I am very skeptical of online "safe spaces" and only partly trust offline ones. I think that getting offline can lead to more real, helpful and productive conversations, too.
In general, telling people things face-to-face often pressures them to be more respectful, and that's often a good thing.
School is like spending all day with a group of the people you might randomly meet in an airport or on a bus. It's not a zone where people should be expected to be 100% authentic about anything, even if there are good ground rules in place.
If I know someone in a group really dislikes what I have to say, I'm not going to think of that as a safe space, even if they are being completely respectful about it.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 02:23 am (UTC)My main experience with a safe space is my female sexuality class, and we all signed a contract that we discussed together, outlining what safe space means and pledging to abide by it. Honestly, after that, anything else is going to come short. In our last couple of classes, we talked a little bit about how to keep or recreate the space of the class after the end of the semester. I suggested that we should work to create the kind of safe space we had in class with our friends and the people we know on an individual kind of basis.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 03:17 am (UTC)Sorry, I don't have the contract with me just now, so I don't remember some of the other specifics. The contract was honestly just a set of guidelines for how to behave and interact in class and create the foundation of a safe space, and as we shared things with each other and got to know and understand the class better, safe space evolved out of that. The contract alone wouldn't have done it, I don't think.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 09:05 am (UTC)If it were part of us, we’d be posting it under our regular identities.
I'd tend to disagree. It's the difference between multiplicity and rejection; some of us are more than our regular identities, but we happen to like it that way.
And if things come crashing down on you, are you going to be more likely to Deny Everything or stand outside the Closet, pop an eyebrow, and say, “So?”
The latter. If someone does find "dirt" on me, it's their fault for snooping and not mine for being discreetly weird.
And where, oh where, have our physical safe spaces gone?
Furry cons and outdoor raves come to mind, at least as places where it's implicitly OK to Be Weird and talk about Weird things.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 04:38 pm (UTC)I suppose it might be more like taking on a sacred name or something - it's something that's a part of you, but you don't reveal it to the outside world because then it loses it's power.
Conventions! You have a point, there. They certainly function as safe spaces. And they tend to happen once a year, which seems to be too few times a year to be as effective as they could be in establishing regular safe(r) spaces. Outdoor raves might be more frequent and more local, so they might serve against the problems of "can't find one" and "has to be nearby".
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 12:28 am (UTC)I think anonymity has positive and negative sides. The positive side is, you can say anything you want (depending on where you go) which is great if you need to vent or ask tough questions and get fairly impartial responses. The negative side is, no one truly knows you. I think a real "safe space" is one where the person (or people) with you knows you, accepts you, and encourages you. Maybe you can get to know people online; certainly one hears about people finding friends or love partners through the internet. But I think to really know someone you have to be able to talk with them face-to-face--voice tone conveys so much, as does body language and facial expression. I feel like you can't... get a view of a person's life if you only know them by their writing. I like to be able to see where people live, see how they move and how they speak, listen to them laugh, watch them think.
The internet doesn't feel like a true safe space to me. I want a place where people know me and like me.
On the other hand, I'm having a hard time finding that in the real world, too.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 03:12 am (UTC)I would love to have had parents that I could talk freely about things with, but they demonstrated very early on that they were not that kind of people...
no subject
Date: 2010-05-14 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-15 05:47 am (UTC)