This took me AGES to figure out for myself, but in my mind, "safe" doesn't mean "danger/conflict never comes here." "Safe" means "if danger/conflict comes, we'll be ready." Often, people say one when they mean the other, when in fact they're often mutually exclusive.
"Never danger/conflict" safe spaces make me nervous, because I associate that stifling of all danger/conflict with making it go underground, and thus making it harder to track and predict, which I associate with MORE danger. I felt more at ease on a feminist cage fight blog than I did in most "nicer" places online, not because the feminist cage fight was free of trolling or conflict (far from it!) but because however flawed it was, there was a WAY to deal with it, rather than just trying to suppress it wholesale.
I grew up in a neighborhood that FLIPPED ITS WIG when a murder victim was found in the park. Which yeah, that's kinda scary, but I hated HOW they flipped. They went into all these backflips to explain that the guy wasn't murdered in OUR neighborhood, he was murdered ELSEWHERE and his corpse DUMPED in our neighborhood, so don't worry guys, our neighborhood was STILL SAFE. (When no, it wasn't. The danger was just all seething below the surface, out of view.)
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"Never danger/conflict" safe spaces make me nervous, because I associate that stifling of all danger/conflict with making it go underground, and thus making it harder to track and predict, which I associate with MORE danger. I felt more at ease on a feminist cage fight blog than I did in most "nicer" places online, not because the feminist cage fight was free of trolling or conflict (far from it!) but because however flawed it was, there was a WAY to deal with it, rather than just trying to suppress it wholesale.
I grew up in a neighborhood that FLIPPED ITS WIG when a murder victim was found in the park. Which yeah, that's kinda scary, but I hated HOW they flipped. They went into all these backflips to explain that the guy wasn't murdered in OUR neighborhood, he was murdered ELSEWHERE and his corpse DUMPED in our neighborhood, so don't worry guys, our neighborhood was STILL SAFE. (When no, it wasn't. The danger was just all seething below the surface, out of view.)