Stepford students have scarcely been out of the media since they earned their soubriquet in this magazine three years ago. If you are offended (and tick the right demographic boxes), university is the place for you. But the social justice warriors are the last people anyone should want fighting their corner. Their legacy – even more than their threat to free speech in itself – will be the spectacular hindrance they have been to the causes they have taken up.
The majority of students now avoid controversies for fear of saying the wrong thing, or being ‘too privileged’ to weigh in. Dissent from the Stepfords can only really be gauged in the privacy of the ballot box: five universities have voted ‘the wrong way’ on disaffiliating from the NUS, while Cambridge students defied the student union to put a stop to the abolition of class lists. Otherwise, sticking your head above the parapet isn’t worth it, which can leave important student issues neglected.
Moderate voices are not welcome, as I discovered last year. A lengthy post was posted in my college Facebook group about the failure of a referendum proposal to hold a women-only gym hour. The post expressed ‘disgust’ and ‘horror’ at the ‘acceptance of victim blaming’. Naively, I liked a comment beneath it which appealed for the debate to be friendly. This seditious act earned me the label of ‘tone policer’; I was no longer allowed to claim I supported gender equality, despite – as I protested – sitting on a gender equality committee.
So the stage remains clear for the Stepford students. The challenges the next generation are making to conventional wisdom always attract media attention, often quite healthily. But these activists’ efforts have played out like a farce. This is clearest when it comes to the raging debate on gender, now usually dismissed as a snowflake student obsession.
However, as last month’s BBC Two documentary ‘No More Boys and Girls’ deftly showed (despite its rather silly title), there are troubling questions about the behaviour we expect from young men and women, and how these expectations shape the way we see ourselves from an early age. Why is suicide – the biggest killer of men under 50 – three times more common in men than women? Why are 89 per cent of those with eating disorders female? And rigidities of gender are even starker when it comes to transgender people: according to the charity Stonewall, 84 per cent of transgender teenagers have self-harmed and 45 per cent have attempted suicide. Hard though it is to discern behind cumbersome gender pronoun introductions and patronising workshops, the Stepford students have a point.
But the angry backlash they provoke by obsessing over policing the language of others is exactly what zealots in student unions up and down the country want. It’s an ego-trip. And that would be all very well if only they bore the consequences. Why some commentators get so very upset by transgender people getting on with their lives is a question for another day. But for the social justice warriors to feed this ‘transgender takeover’ narrative with crackpot attacks on free speech is hugely irresponsible.
Last November, a student submitted an anonymous piece to Varsity, Cambridge university’s student newspaper, reflecting on being sexually assaulted by her ex-boyfriend, and why she came to forgive him. Surely those behind the consent campaigns would welcome a survivor speaking out? Apparently not. We received complaints that she should be no-platformed because she had made the wrong decision.
Yet it only takes an individual being offended for the Stepfords to come to the defence of an entire group. If a gay person takes offence, it is incontrovertibly homophobia; if a black person takes offence, there is no possible defence against racism, and so on. This standard is applied from the most tenuous structural oppression to the most banal micro-aggression. I would love to know how many in Japan celebrated the victory against holding a ‘Tokyo to Kyoto’ themed May Ball. Or how many Jamaicans felt solidarity with the Cambridge students crusading against the inauthenticity of one of their heavily-subsidised college meals. But it doesn’t matter to paternalistic students: they’re happy to campaign on anything, to the point of offence becoming a triviality.
Just occasionally, reason cuts through. An excellent blog post by a student at my university explained how small, silly things such as jokes which emphasise her Indian heritage and sending up bhangra dance moves while out clubbing had done little to make her feel comfortable in an 80 per cent white student body. Her request for sensitivity was more effective than any polemic on micro-aggressions. Similarly, although the consent workshop I attended struggled to get beyond the blindingly obvious, the spontaneous discussion on experiences of borderline harassment on nights out which followed was nuanced and thought-provoking.
It’s a reminder – when it’s all too tempting to tune out, laugh, or despair – that behind each new Stepford controversy lies a cause they are failing.
Theo Demolder is an undergraduate politics student at Cambridge University
Comments