I try not to get bent out of shape about it but formal safe spaces never made sense to me conceptually. Yes, everyone should have a space to feel safe and accepted but we’re doing piss poor as a society when your arbitrary membership in a marginalized group is the best shot to find that.

They’re a weak imitation of proper tight knit communities and 3rd spaces. They just happen to have some benefit because the membership self selects for similar life views. There’s nothing there that people weren’t getting at, say, a Victorian tea party, a laundry group or an AME church.

Neither side of the debate in this comment section is wrong but they’re talking about two sides of the same coin. Marginalized groups feel modern isolation much more acutely because they had fewer spaces to begin with. Cishet guys feel the isolation as well but can’t voice it in these discussions because “they’re accepted everywhere” and “power dynamics make it different”.

Those statements may be somewhat true but that offers no solution to the problem, not in the way that a safe space offers a simple constructive answer. It’s unfortunate because manosphere and fascist spaces capitalize on those vulnerable men with the same messaging and terminology.

These conversations shouldn’t be about defending one group’s right to create these spaces while delicately limiting that right for another group. They should be about why we fundamentally feel the need for these formal spaces at all…

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