Once, I had an epiphany in yoga class. It was not spiritual. It was not transcendent. It had nothing to do with the downward dog. In fact, it happened when I was upright in the foyer and it, like me at the time, was pretty straightforward: Someone needs to tell this place it’s Stupid.
Someone did, as things turned out.
Yes. I am going to tell you a Powerful Personal Story of exactly the kind we insisted it was Stupid to tell in our third chapter on the negative Stupid of positive storytelling.
What was it I said? Something about how the Inspiring Journey of the TED talk and personal myth is now so necessary to the communication of a thought that all thoughts must become personal stories. Something about how the pleasure of crying and laughing along to a story is now accepted and demanded as the only effective means to receive an idea. Something about how the need to laugh, cry and identify with This One Video That Will Change Everything You Know About Disabled Kids Forever actually crushes the possibility of difficult thought. Anything that does not fit the parameters of a Teachable Moment is considered surplus and has no value and now the Oprahfication of wisdom is so complete that big ideas are cut down to shareable stories that can say nothing more than ‘the individual is so important’.
Things haven’t changed since we read that chapter. It is still the case that our new custom of demanding a personal story—and this need is reflected in the now common use of the word ‘narrative’ to describe even political campaigns—is producing Stupid. The well-written form of This American Life might convince us of its depth and universality, but it is actually feeding our long-held hunger for the low light of false enlightenment. And so My Powerful Story—which actually happens to be about a seriously ill friend who Beat the Odds and Changed Things For the Better—is just another form of narrated chicanery.
Well. Yes. In one sense, it kind of is a bit shit of me. I will reveal some Personal Details about my own adolescence and some Inspiring Stories You Won’t Believe about my friend at a yoga class. But I do so not only because they use the emotional shorthand of this Stupid storytelling age. I do so because our stories were, as it turned out, at odds with a world of teachable moments. And I do so to reveal the hypocrisy of the Safe Space that demands safe, edited and acceptable stories. Our stories were rejected. They were surplus and valueless in their lack of teachable moments.
I do not wish to claim these stories, or any stories, have intrinsic value. But I do want to show how a story, or an idea, that threatens the order of things is easily rejected. And I want to talk about how the safe story is also a sanitised one.
My friend Kylie has one of the most important-sounding diseases of which I’ve ever heard. As far as ailment names go, multifocal motor neuropathy, or MMN, is pretty serious. Not as serious as cancer, but pretty close—and even closer at the time of her diagnosis, which preceded by a year or two the wide availability of blood-based treatments on which MMN patients now depend.
Once, MMN was a near-guarantee of paralysis; its flares were treated with steroids and its progression was the business of fate, not of medicine. I saw how Kylie’s motor nerves had begun to deteriorate when we went to The Age Christmas party together: my glamorous, pint-sized friend was unable to wear her heels.
‘The foot-droop I can take,’ she said. ‘But going to a party in flats is too much.’
Kylie is now, as she long has been, a bright and stubborn journalist, and so her approach to the management of a potentially disabling illness was bright and stubborn. She was informed less by positive thinking and much, much more by evidence-based medicine. Kylie was moved by a need for outcomes and these she pursued with the bolshy expertise that serves good hacks who like good heels so well. That she did this while falling over, gripping on to hand rails and getting stuck while crossing our city’s tram lines lent real grace to her scholarship.
A year or so after Kylie’s diagnosis, she was given a treatment that restored her to strappy sandals within a month. It was one of those research miracles that makes you want to hug anyone in a white coat. But access to the treatment was quickly dropped in a bureaucratic toilet. The blood supply needed to produce the modifying drug had been cut off due to institutional Stupidity. She cried a bit and then she acted. Kylie became something of a lay immunologist; she campaigned in the media and lobbied government to open up the blood lines. And she didn’t stop until the supply for her own and other immune diseases were flowing.
But Kylie’s tenacity is hardly my point. Who am I, Deepak, and what is this, A Story of the Power of One? No. It’s a story, more or less, about Kylie’s bung foot and what happened to it at yoga class. (It’s also a reminder that you should give blood. Seriously. People are depending on that stuff.) But before we get to the yoga class, I need to assure you that Kylie is a very reasonable person. I do this to provide some mooring for a story which takes place in an ocean of woo; in a batty yoga class where I, in fact, am the star nutty mariner. Call me Ishmael. I made the booking for the Bikram class. Yes. It was me.
There was a time I found shelter in ‘holistic’ (read: unscientific and flattering) ‘healing’ (read: rip-off bollocks with a whale-call soundtrack). There was a period I spent a lot of time in ‘spaces’ described as ‘safe’. In fact, if you care to check my youthful oeuvre, you might even find me using the term ‘Western medicine’. And you could, if you looked hard, find me publicly defending the right to a ‘safe space’ for women at Sydney University. I badgered the union for allocation of a Women’s Room that, I can tell you with absolute and embarrassed certainty, was frequented by no more than a dozen women. All of whom were my friends. Three of whom I had sex with. In the ‘safe space’.
Once, I sought ‘safe spaces’.
Is it any wonder Bernard Keane used to anonymously troll me on a nasty blog calling me (although he denies this) ‘The most intellectually empty cunt to emerge from Canberra since Margaret Reid’?
He had a point. I recently looked at an old book I had written which contained a dreadful chapter recommending cranberry juice for the treatment of bladder infection. Like many people who frequented the ‘safe space’ of alternative medicine, where queries about scientific method are forbidden because UNSAFE, I believed that fruit drink could save you from renal failure. This canard was so widespread that the US National Institute of Health reviewed all studies on the effectiveness of cranberry juice as a prophylactic to urinary tract infection in women and found that it tasted very nice with vodka. A 2012 meta-analysis found that cranberry products ‘cannot currently be recommended for the prevention of UTIs’.
The safe space of my naturopath’s suite, where faith and acceptance were privileged over science and deduction, was not only Stupid but unsafe.
Safe space. If it is not a safe space, then it should have a ‘trigger warning’.
About ten years ago, I began seeing the term ‘trigger warning’ at the beginning of news stories. At first glance, this just looked like a new version of the old courtesy that gave you warning of carnage in case you were a ‘sensitive viewer’. There is no problem with this old technique at all; in some cases, it is just plain evil not to offer your audience the chance to look away. Take, for example, the case of suicide. In Australia, the matter of suicide has been studied with some care and it has been found that the description of a suicide—its method, its perceived ‘causes’, its location—causes a spike in suicides in the weeks following its report. The thing called ‘suicide contagion’ is real and measurable and the public discussion of suicide should be appended, if not preceded by, a warning that this discussion might be troubling and here is the number you call if you’d like to get help.
That kind of ‘trigger warning’ is good sense. There are other cautionary notes we see in the electronic culture that also seem utilitarian. Pictures of war or detailed descriptions of pain should, if they need to be made at all, continue to have their extreme violence heralded. There are some stories so brutal that we can assume their public telling may not be in the best interests of some of the people subject to their unfolding. This is a simple practical measure. Your children might be watching the news with you when Chelsea Manning’s video of atrocity in Iraq airs. You deserve the chance to change the channel or get them out of the room. Our most vulnerable citizens are surely entitled to the chance to avoid the extreme. But now some of our most powerful citizens are demanding a safe space as well.
In 2014, student politicians at the University of California passed a resolution to institute mandatory trigger warnings on class material. It was reported that a student who had previously been a victim of sexual assault felt threatened by the screening of a video that referenced this crime. The student felt that the stress triggered by this viewing not only compounded her distress but impeded her ability to learn.
In 2013, staff at Oberlin College, Ohio, were advised that potentially ‘triggering’ material should be removed from the syllabus. Again, it was held that depictions of injustice, especially those which could potentially remind students of the ‘racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression’ to which they may have previously been subject, was an impediment to learning.
These may be sincere attempts to protect the right of the socially maligned to learn. They could also turn out to be an inadvertent attack on the possibility of learning. And, perversely, learning, in particular, about social injustice. You can’t understand conflict without having it described. To learn about the French Revolution without a potentially troubling account of the Terrors makes about as much good sense as learning French without access to its verbs.
Look. I am not an ultra-con nutbag who thinks everyone should just harden the fuck up. I don’t think your kids should have unfiltered access to violent things they don’t yet understand. I don’t think victims of sexual abuse should just ‘get over it’ and accept the prurient coverage of rape as news media entertainment to which they are so often subject without warning. I am ardently opposed to irresponsible discussion of suicide and I am in the regular habit of reporting guideline violations. Free speech must be a right, but its broad exercise is a serious responsibility. I will fucking tell your boss or the press council if you fuck up because I believe one of the best traditions of top-down journalism is the responsible recognition of one’s power. The mass-media worker should know by rote those things likely to trigger stress on a large scale. But the academic must never be subject to these sorts of constraints.
There’s a time and a place for serious discussion of abuse and conflict. It is not on your television at 6 p.m. It is in your universities. Electronic media is indiscriminate in its reach and so must be discriminating in its framing of material. Anyone could be watching. An academic lecture, on the other hand, addresses a very particular audience who are there to develop their own powers of discrimination. In other words, university itself functions as a ‘trigger warning’. The study of humanities in particular is an elaborate attempt to frame all the pain of the world. I couldn’t get out of bed for a week when I first learned about the systematised rape deployed as a weapon in the Balkan wars. It was Very Triggering. But all stories about conflict are triggering and unsafe. You could call a first-year module in international relations Trigger Studies, I suppose. But the pain of learning about the world, I think, is inferred by all decent students.
I once expected trigger warnings and frequented safe spaces: places where the price of admission is to agree. Well, agreement and twenty-five dollars for fashionable yoga. Plus an extra dollar for losers who did not have their own yoga mats.
‘This is a safe space,’ said the young, belligerently calm white woman whose inner glow was offset with a bright artificial tan the colour of chicken tikka. ‘Welcome. This is a safe space.’ And we signed the form indemnifying the safe space in case it killed us.
I hadn’t heard the term used since the early nineties. But here it was again in a new century. And it has subsequently re-emerged in contexts for which it was never intended. Yoga classes. Speaking events. I even saw it used in the window of a beauty salon once.
You know the place; one of Enya’s bastards continues a wilful tradition of pan-pipes. There’s a Buddha next to an oil-burner next to a display of take-home ‘botanicals’ as used in the ‘Goddess Array’ facial which promises to balance your oily T-zone and chakras as never before. There are almost some ornamental references to Bali, here. And Japan. Definitely India. There is a treatment named in the honour of Deepak. Probably. I don’t know. I didn’t go in.
I remember thinking I’d prefer a guarantee of hygiene and tepid wax temperature over one for safe spiritual space any day. I had my labia groomed elsewhere. But, I’d learned my lesson by then and have become perhaps only the second or third most intellectually empty cunt to emerge from Canberra since Margaret Reid. I went to a literary afternoon in 2013 where one of the writers said she felt confident reading out her awful work because organisers had assured her it was a safe space. In 2011, I was asked not to attend a homosexual arts festival on the grounds that it was a safe space. (To be fair, I had written an editorial asserting that a festival promoting homosexuals in the arts was about as desperately needed as a festival promoting white privately educated men in politics.) If art feels the need to call itself safe, it should not also be entitled to call itself art.
Art is not safe. Thinking thoughts of consequence is not safe. And neither, as it turned out, was the yoga class. We had an unsafe afternoon.
There is, of course, sometimes a civic need for safe spaces. I should make a point about what I recall as the etymology of the term because it didn’t always mean ‘an assembly of dills committed to say nothing even mildly provocative lest it disrupt the circle jerk’. These days, the term is used to advertise readings of awful feminist poetry and end-of-year performances for remedial circus arts graduates. Back in the eighties, a ‘safe space’ quite specifically meant refuge for kids turfed out of their family homes due to queer orientation or a women’s refuge.
Leisure-progressives, including myself and my girlfriends at Sydney University, stole ‘safe space’ away from homeless people and used it as a way to describe ‘a room full of people who will uncritically applaud reeking word turds’. Leisure-progressivism has the habit of co-opting a sense of terror; it needs to in order to justify itself. For the endurance of, say, a poem by Maya Angelou, fear of something worse than the poem itself is necessary. I mean: Maya. This woman was the go-to laureate for all sorts of progressivism-tinged major events from Clinton’s inauguration to Oprah’s last show. Goodness, the occasional verse she wrote for Oprah was especially awful. She may as well have just said ‘Everyone gets a car! Everyone gets a car!’ in that gravitas-enriched stateswoman voice. I know why the caged bird sings too, Maya. It was trying to drown out the sound of your vile retching, like:
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
—Maya Angelou, ‘Phenomenal Woman’
Hideous. Not quite so hideous, of course, as the inner mystery of the Sydney University Safe Space for Women. The mystery was that I abused my student privilege to found a personal on-campus fuckpad. But still. Maya was pretty bad. Yes, I know that Angelou worked in poetry’s oral tradition and we can’t expect the James Earl Jones of doggerel to look as good on the page as she did showered in the credulous ejaculate of liberal gratitude. But, bugger me, someone has to say it: Maya Angelou was a wonderful activist but a genuinely terrible poet and someone should have broken her pencils. Of course, I cannot say this because she is dead and THAT MIGHT BE TRIGGERING FOR YOU.
When she was alive, I used to dream of breaking into a State occasion she threatened to ruin with her rot, hacking the teleprompter and replacing her nonsense about ‘summer puffs of wind’ or whatever with the words from the Mentos ad. Her voice was wonderful but her poetry no nobler than:
It doesn’t matter what comes, fresh goes better with life,
And Mentos is fresh and full of life.
Nothing gets to you, staying fresh staying cool,
With Mentos, fresh and full of life.
Fresh goes better, Mentos freshness, fresh goes better
With Mentos, fresh and full of life.
Are you triggered? Sorry. I should say that I acknowledge Angelou as a significant figure. I should also say that at one point in my life, I had actual need of a safe space. (As Maya certainly must have when enduring the Stupid of racism.) I was a Queer Teen and my mother wasn’t exactly Celebrating My Difference. We argued quite violently about my Lifestyle Choice, which I denied with my lips but affirmed with my haircut, so she sent me to a homophobic psychologist. The homophobic psychologist assured me that her offices were a safe space and so I conceded that I had Feelings for Ladies—one in particular who had a motorcycle and remains the only lezzer of my acquaintance who had good taste in music. The homophobic psychologist rang my mother and, reportedly, said, ‘I am so sorry about your daughter. She is a homosexual.’
If I had not been genetically burdened with an ego the size of a small moon, I may have become quite self-loathing at that point. My mother shrieked that I was sick. She raved about perversion and theorised that marijuana, a gentle father and Boy George were to blame. Being a smart-arse, I told her the delicious taste of vagina was to blame. Things didn’t go well after that. I sought asylum from her disgust; chiefly at an ultra-leftie community radio station, but a few times at a place set aside for kids just like me.
Years later, as I was writing the editorial about the safe space of the gay arts festival, I remembered my need for an actual gay safe space; a genuinely safe space free from duplicitous psychologists and angry mothers who urged their children to hate themselves. I felt like queer itself had turned its back on the most urgently needed safe spaces. I know there are kids hearing the same selfish, unsafe shit from their parents, and what they need, more often than not, is a place to go. I ran away from home for a brief spell; I have had the merest experience of homelessness but many other kids endure it for longer. And they need a safe space to run to. But this is no longer a preoccupation of a movement itself absorbed with re-creating the conditions of the Sydney University Women’s Safe Space.
A few years after I had written my first truly offensive editorial about the new, safe preoccupations of the queer movement, I had another piece published by an online newspaper. It was on a more general theme of These Social Justice People Are So Concerned With Making the Culture Nice and Safe They Don’t Look Out For Material Danger. It wasn’t especially good and I can’t remember for whom I wrote it and how much I was paid. But I copied and kept one of the comments from a young queer man:
Your argument reminded me of a queer student activist meeting where queer homelessness, youth poverty and housing shortages were raised. Neither the discussion, nor the plan decided upon, had anything to do with the material problem. Instead, the focus was entirely on ‘the heteronormative language used by real estate agents’, and the symbolic ‘critique’ we were going to use to ‘combat’ it. I sat there thinking, what the f*** does this have to do with anything? Why aren’t we asking how many queer youth are in financial difficulty, un/underemployed, struggling to find accommodation, or homeless? How does this compare to the rest of the population? How do we get resources to people who need them?
Instead, the focus was, ‘White picket fence language is discriminating against gays, let’s put up anti-heteronormative satirical posters around campus.’ When my mate suggested we at least depict the goals we were trying to achieve/who we were trying to help, the reply was, ‘We’re not really into that, we’re really into, just, like, critique.’
They decided in the end to stick a ‘male’ mannequin in a dress outside [real estate agent] Hocking Stuart.
He is much, much more promising as a human and a scholar than I ever was. I liked my space for activism safe at his age; almost certainly, I would have helped pick out the mannequin’s frock. Which is peculiar, really, given that I had an experience of homelessness just a few years before I segued into the pointless, safe work of cultural critique. I would like to be able to say that my insistence on a safe space for women at Sydney University sprang from my own rather vicious experiences at home, but by then, I had forgotten the terrible feeling and I quickly became mired in, rather than awed by, the privilege of actual safety. Life at a university good enough to make my mother proud of me again did not turn me into a good student. I was a bad student and a sloppy thinker who sought only the safety of agreement and the solace of sex in a room I’d disbursed my youthful energies defending when I could have been reading books about economics, which could have turned into action a bit more decent than the care of the self.
I read Derrida instead. And he is certainly remarkable but dangerously safe for a selfish young mind. Postmodern critique provided even more padding to the ennui of the women’s safe space. Oh, it’s all just culture, I said and turned my spotty adolescent back on material danger for the safety of any literary criticism that wasn’t Harold Bloom.
This is not to say there should not be literary criticism. This is not for a minute to suggest that we should not be ‘critics after dinner’, as Marx famously promised we could be after a day of working in the fields. The thing is, though, I had deluded myself into believing that my feeble ‘deconstruction’ of literature written for a tutor unlikely to do anything but encourage my onanism was Making a Difference to the Real Political World. I’m telling you: you’re not going to change shit ‘unpacking’ a ‘text’. Which is fine. I just happened to believe that I was changing the world from my academic safe space. I saw danger where there was none.
It took all of my youth to acknowledge that I had long preferred safety over rigour. And I still hadn’t acknowledged the toxic nature of my love for ‘safety’ when Kylie and I arranged to meet for yoga.
I am not proud but I am obliged to tell you that this was a date for ‘hot’ yoga; a ninety-minute endurance test of copyright-protected bullshit enforced with a thermostat set to thirty-seven degrees by a wafer-thin bint whose $7000 student fee paid to the Bikram Academy of Yoga entitled her to talk in faux Hindi about the ‘known’ connection between the human immune response and chakras.
Look. I know. That two reasonable adults had spent money for the ‘wisdom’ of a dodgy franchise whose most notable contribution to the world was emissions from an over-worked heater is woeful. I had read on a HOLISTIC website that Kylie’s multifocal motor neuropathy is a condition that responds well to heat. Because yes: I was once the kind of person who decried Big Pharma and urged a return to holistic approaches. You know that shit. It believes there was a Golden Time when humanity Followed Its Instincts and that ‘herbs’ provide a system of treatment better than that offered to us by evidence-based medicine. The success of so-called holistic ‘medicine’ does not inhere in its chemistry but in the way it is able to flatter its patrons much more than science (SO TRIGGERING) can. Generally, a GP has neither the time nor the professional inclination to hold your forearm warmly as an aromatherapy humidifier upchucks ylang ylang into air thick with the irresistible question, ‘So how are YOU?’ The attachment to ‘wellness’ I had developed came from vanity and the urge to be ‘understood’ and safe.
The desire to be understood and truly known is, I’d guess, fairly widespread. I’m also going to say it is fairly unwholesome. It is a nasty craving that has driven me to do some pretty silly stuff at times, including:
1. Asking my partner if he really understands me
2. Telling a therapist my mother has never understood me (which is true but boring)
3. Choosing a career that is entirely based on my need to be heard and understood by people I have never met.
I had heard from an associate—who has since been lost to the cheap meth of personal development seminars and whose every utterance is riddled with phrases like ‘I have invented a possibility for myself’ or ‘I would like to enrol you in my possibility’—that the Bikram yoga instructors really understood. And the need to be safely understood drove me to yoga. Actually, Kylie drove me to yoga. Which was a little unnerving as I wasn’t entirely confident that her dodgy foot could work the brake. But she was, as I have told you, a practical lady and she had the car retrofitted.
The car accommodated her but the chicken tikka spray-tan lady didn’t. Kylie told her, as per the request on the Indemnify the Safe Space form, that she had a bung foot. And she said, ‘So don’t be surprised if I can’t do all the postures.’
‘Don’t be surprised if you can,’ said Red Rooster.
‘No,’ said Kylie, ‘I will definitely not be able to do tree pose. I can’t stand on one foot because of the nerve damage.’
‘We have had people get up from wheelchairs,’ the instructor said. ‘You need to believe. If you don’t believe in the power of Bikram, you will never recover in your pain body.’
By this stage, I was a scarlet so vivid as to make Miss Safe Orange Space seem pale. I asked Kylie if she wanted to fuck off and she said no, she’d give it a go. She’d been trying a meditation class here and a cupping therapy there, she said, to see if it helped with the anxiety her condition had produced. Some of the stuff was soothing. The massage in particular took her mind off limbs that sometimes felt dead. But a lot of it was pretty irritating and she was, by now, habituated to hearing wankers tell her that her nerve damage was ‘all in the mind’. Besides which, we had both heard that you could lose a kilogram or two in sweat and she was going out on a date that night.
There was no access lift; not that Kylie needed one, but I had asked when I’d made the booking just in case she was having a shitty day. We climbed up the stairs to the yoga room and I wondered briefly how the miraculous wheelchair recovery person had managed.
‘This is a safe space.’
‘This is a place where you’ll be understood.’
Like understanding ever changed the fucking world or produced a good idea. The proletariat doesn’t start a revolution by asking the bourgeoisie to understand it. Understanding is a placebo. Unless, of course, it is undertaken rigorously. Say, at university. Which is very difficult if you are worried about being ‘triggered’.
We went to the class.
Kylie had been a jogger for years and was strong. She did downward dog perfectly; she did a very creditable warrior. I didn’t as I am shit at yoga and was really in it for the heat-induced inch-loss. But the teacher didn’t correct my crap asanas despite the fact they were the most ungainly in the room.
Instead, she picked out Kylie.
‘Kylie, Kylie,’ she said to Kylie. ‘Feel your Hindi-Word-I-Didn’t-Recognise-And-Am-Therefore-Unable-To-Reproduce-In-Text so you can achieve your Something-I-Am-Pretty-Sure-That-Nasty-Orange-Bitch-Made-Up.
‘Do your Mystical Whatsit so you can get in touch with your Chumbawamba and release your Spicy Fruit Roll.’
And then it was time for the tree pose, which might very well Enhance the Root Chakra as claimed but, given that it demands that all one’s weight be carried by a single foot, is pretty much impossible if that foot has sustained significant nerve injury.
‘You need to believe, Kylie.’
We need to get the fuck out of here, Kylie.
The safe space has become a fixture of some contemporary social justice movements. In the safe space, all participants agree not to critique a certain set of principles. It’s a bit like bringing peanut butter to kindergarten. It will result in your expulsion.
A few years ago, I was asked to do a funny piece at a feminist fundraiser. I wrote a short comic poem on the topic of penis and my new enthusiasm for it entitled ‘She’s Back on Solids’. But it turned out to be a fundraiser and a safe space.
I picked up a copy of the rules and they requested that anything likely to ‘trigger’ negative responses be signalled with a ‘trigger warning’; that is, if one was planning to mention the topic of sexual abuse in particular, one should give ample time for those Viewers Who Might Find This Disturbing to leave the room. It also requested no ‘Feminism 101’ speak, which meant that all participants agreed that the basic principles of feminism be understood.
Now, I can see how it might be profitable to discussion to observe both of these rules. Essentially, one is creating the means for a more advanced exploration of a topic without menace or inconvenience. But I also saw, in what turned out to be an okay evening, how these rules begin to take on the appearance of natural justice and how one very quickly can become enamoured of their enforcement. At university, I adapted quickly to seeing a reflection of my own views; any crack in the looking glass was a transgression. It hardly needs saying that the experience of exchange without opposition is seductive. And habit-forming.
Creating a temporary zone for particular thought has its intellectual uses, but our tendency to take the temporary and make it permanent is one of our species’ least laudable and most dependable traits. God, we are good at explaining our worst and most Stupid habits away as ‘natural’. The formalised safe space sees any resistance as the work of a ‘troll’ and action outside narrow margins as ‘hostility’ and, as it has made its rules explicit, I guess it is entitled to do so. But it troubles me that these ground rules, intended to privilege the normally marginalised, reproduce the framework they seek to defy.
This is what happens in the naturopath’s office. It happens in an increasingly niche electronic world where birds of a feather tend to tweet, ‘like’ and ‘share’ together. Once, I suppose, it happened in church, but there was not then the pretence of empowerment by participants; just the promise of heaven. In church, one consented to rules set by a Higher Authority or one was excommunicated. The authority of Understanding Each Other is far more duplicitous because it claims to be consensual. And one never knows when one has broken the rules until the naturopath has told you that your irises are blotchy or your book club strikes you off because you called literary fiction ‘just another genre’ or you are un-friended. You don’t know when you’ve broken rules often unwritten and always devised with ‘safety’ in mind.
‘Kylie. KYLIE,’ said the ginger tan to the falling tree. It was quite clear that the orange lady was concerned far less for Kylie’s safety than she was for the safety of The Space.
Kylie broke the rules by toppling over; the failure of her body was an affront to Bikram.
That Kylie was unafraid to topple is to her credit. The composed, yogic look on her face as she went down conveyed the stupidity of the safe space so invested in the protection of itself and not those within it. Being unafraid to make a misstep in one of these unsafe safe spaces takes a courage I couldn’t muster for years. Perhaps now, having abandoned the need for intellectual safety, I can get off my arse and build some genuinely safe space for people persecuted by a force more awful even than ‘triggering’ poetry.
HR