The futile search for “safe space”

By Caitlin Kelly

It’s a shriek of outrage/grievance/shock that happens when:

 

Someone says the wrong thing.

Someone touches you in a way that feels aggressive.

Someone disagrees with you.

 

 

 

Among  some younger and apparently ferociously ambitious women, I’m seeing a kind of mass fragility I — and my peers — find astonishing:

 

Every day, someone shrieks in fury that someone has been racist or sexist or mean to them — which they might well have, but not actually have intended as a personal attack.

Every day, someone says “You’re shaming me!” when all you’ve done is politely, if firmly, disagree with them or share an alternate view, which is now, for some, unforgivable.

Every day, though, I also hear pleas for advice, insights, mentoring.

Every day, the demand to march into HR and get them to fix it, right now.

Every day, the need to school others in how to speak and behave, including those who have the ability to hire — and fire — them.

Every day, a chorus of virtue signalling; dare to challenge or contradict the group, and you’ll be banned, shunned, blocked and bullied  — for your lack of sensitivity.

 

This, often arising from women who have already acquired the relative privilege of a college education and/or paid employment, has rendered me and other women at the top of our professional game, women who have spent years teaching and mentoring, both mystified and repelled.

Because women who have already spent decades in the working world didn’t harbor, or share in fury, the naive fantasy that life would be easy or that it even should be.

 

The world is full of very sharp edges!

 

Anyone you meet can challenge or even threaten you, economically, politically, emotionally or physically.

Yes, life is often much more difficult when you’re a person of color, transgender or LGQTBA and the daily fight for social justice is still a necessary one.

I’m speaking of something different, something that feels both more privileged and more unlikely because of that innate power.

Many older women are second or third-wave feminists, every bit as filled with righteous indignation as anyone today ranting and raving about how terrible everything is.

Yet we’re now being lectured to by finger-wagging neophytes on how to speak and behave.

We already know that moving ahead through a male-dominated world could be hard and it still is.

We already know that situations one expects to be civil can get weird, even frightening, and they still do.

We already know, no matter our skills, credentials or experience, we’ll probably have to listen to some absolutely appalling crap and we still do.

These depressingly shared experiences could create powerful inter-generational links, but that’s not what I and my peers are seeing; instead it becomes a dialogue of the deaf and one that older women like myself eventually just walk away from.

No one deserves to be mistreated, overlooked, underpaid and ignored.

We get it!

But older professionals never enjoyed the luxury of a “safe space”, nor would it even have occurred to us — while weathering three American recessions in 20 years — to expect or demand one.

My husband, of Hispanic origin, has heard shit, socially and professionally, I can barely believe. Yet we’re both still working and achieving our goals. If we’d stood up, (as we very much wished to each time someone was rude to us), and shouted “How dare you?!” — we’d possibly have lost a well-paid, hard-won job and probably damaged our careers.

The only safe space I know of is a locked room to which only you have the key.

Talk to people living in Syria or Myanmar or Mexico — where heads literally roll in the streets — about what a “safe space” looks like to them.

 

 

There’s a phrase from the Bible, (even though I’m no ardent Christian), that I find powerful and moving: “Put on the armor of light.”

 

Armor up.