Christina: I gave a lecture at Oberlin and Georgetown a year ago and they organized Safe
Spaces for students who were triggered by...it was a philosophy professor was going to reduce
PTSD because of what they objected to, is that I might have some ideas that invalidate
their experience.
Camille: They're institutionalizing neurosis.
It's what they're doing.
Christina: That's absolutely true.
Camille: It's absolute madness.
Christina: Have you heard the phrase, the fashion on campus now is called intersectional
feminism, and it's supposedly very progressive?
And it's going to take feminism to a place where it is taking account of women with multiply
marginalized identities, on and on.
But all of the women, the practitioners, seem to meet at the intersection of propaganda,
and neurosis, and rage, and they're bullying people.
They're using feminism now.
They're telling men, "Check your privilege."
Camille: Well, I think it's a good idea that feminism be critiqued by class issues.
Because what I have said all along is that what is being demanded is a bourgeois protection,
a white middle-class girl style, the perfect little girl emerging from her parents living
room wants the same kind of protections on the college campus.
So I've always felt there was a bourgeois element in this that was never sufficiently
critiqued.
And then what I see on the street are Latino women, African-American women who may be middle-class,
but have a working class background, as I did as an Italian from an immigrant family...who
were able to handle themselves on the street, able to speak back.
Don't mind having strong voices and strong gestures.
Christina: Well, intersectionality started with those women.
So it was a group of African-American women who were just setup with the Women's Movement,
attending only the needs of highly professional, upper middle-class women, but it has been
appropriated by mostly middle-class white women on the campus.
So Safe Space was actually a word that was used early in Black Feminism, as where black
women and Hispanic...places where they could just talk to each other and they weren't censored.
They could speak their minds.
But now it means a place where, for example young women at Brown University if there's
a debate that upsets them, they flee to a Safe Space where they...It was described in
The New York Times by Judith Shulevitz.
They had coloring books, crayons, tapes of frolicking puppies, bubbles and this is what
feminism has come to.
Camille: It's what education has come to.
Absolutely the definition down, they're therapeutic.
What can I say?
Therapeutic resorts is what education has turned into.
Christina: So they have feeling circles.
They have reflection journals, and it's this odd mix of therapy and anger because the word
for this style of activism, they call them Cry Bullies because they combine...they're
both victim and victimizer and they do to other people this new style of campus intersectionality.
They actually do to other people what they claim was done to them.
They treat people...they objectify and they stereotype, and they demonize and then they
try to get people punished.
Camille: Well, Christina, this is coming from the public schools.
It's coming from the public school education, which was devoid of knowledge of world history
and world geography.
It is nothing but naval gazing and the diversity training, and all kinds of instructions about
social interaction, when in fact, if the atrocities of history were revealed to young people,
they would be able to put their own little hurt feelings into perspective.
Christina: Into perspective.
They have no perspective.
Camille: No.
Christina: I think with these anti-bullying programs, they are learning that even the
slightest insult is a major event.
You must bring in the adults.
"It was terrible.
He called me a name," so they come to college thinking that if someone disagrees with them
or says something that's distressing, that it's a catastrophe.
Camille: I've called my feminism Amazon feminism.
I've called it Drag Queen feminism, Street Smart feminism because the drag queens of
old knew how to handle themselves on the street.
They could be a six-foot tall, African-American guy in a dress and he knew how to pull off
his high heels, and defend himself on the street, and what a tongue they had.
And now everything is about weakening students, not strengthening them.