Safe Space Policy

The New Age Censors: Banning Ideas By Labelling Them ‘Problematic’

Samuel Hooper19 Comments

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Declaring an idea or opinion to be “problematic” has become the activist Left’s tool of choice for shutting down debate and attacking free speech

I have a real issue with the recent hijacking and misappropriation of the word “problematic” by new generation feminists, trigger warning-toting student activists and the right-on Left in general. You could say that I find it…well, problematic.

Until recently, expressing a right-wing opinion or questioning the inexorable rise of identity culture might have seen you branded by the activist Left as being offensive, racist, sexist or oppressive in some other way. The criticism may well have been a shrill overreaction to a perfectly reasonable and valid point, but at least you knew where you stood and of what you were accused. Today, you are far more likely to be noted and quietly logged by the New Age Censors as being “problematic” – someone possessing opinions which do not properly conform to the current orthodoxy.

Take the insult that is university-sponsored sexual consent classes for fully grown adults, in which lecture theatres full of browbeaten good guys (the few potential future rapists never attend, of course) are made to feel like they are a potential threat to society, and that sexual relations between autonomous individuals should be stripped of their intimacy through the adoption of affirmative consent checkpoints at every stage of the relationship.

Frank Furedi writes in Spiked:

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Sexual Consent Classes Are Demeaning, Infantilising And Pointless

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

Sexual Consent Class - George Lawlor - This Is Not What A Rapist Looks Like

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Student union-supported “Sexual Consent Classes” are pointless, infantilising, highly offensive to men and a distraction from the core purpose of academia and university life

When you reach the age of eighteen, you become an adult. You can drink, smoke, serve on a jury or fight for your country in the Armed Forces. You are no longer a child.

It should not be necessary to state something so mind-numbingly obvious in modern Britain, but that is exactly where we now find ourselves, somehow forgetting that at a certain point – the age of eighteen, in this case – it comes time for people to put away childish things and take their first solo steps in the world, unsupported by parents, schools or institutions.

This regression is not happening by chance. There are certain groups of people – student union activists and the virtue signalling Left in general – who are determined to roll back the whole idea of adulthood, to infantilise almost the entire population and create a nation of wobbly-lipped current or future victims who must be coddled and protected at all times by the self-appointed Defenders of the Vulnerable.

We see it with the increasing demands for professors to slap “Trigger Warnings” on texts that some may find offensive or distressing. We see it in the deadly serious attempts to ban clapping in favour of jazz hands at student meetings. And we see it with the insidious growth of so-called “safe spaces” or free speech black spots, spreading over campuses like a cancer. It is no longer a strange new phenomenon.

But one of the most troubling manifestations of this regression to childhood is the new fad for universities (in collaboration with – or at the gunpoint of – student unions) to run mandatory “sexual consent classes” for students, organised on the assumption that young men are wild and dangerous creatures who need to be tamed and taught how to behave properly in polite society before being unleashed on campuses.

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