The OSFL debate is not about censorship, but about our right to express dissatisfaction about an event happening at our university.
The OSFL debate is not about censorship, but about our right to express dissatisfaction with an event happening at our university
Last week, students at Oxford University objected to a ‘debate’ hosted by a pro-life group entitled ‘This House Believes Britain’s Abortion Culture Hurts Us All.’
We’ve since been called Nazis and/or Stalinists, politically correct fascists, but most commonly, enemies of free speech.
This indicates a misunderstanding of what free speech actually entails. Some twitter users might be surprised to hear that actually, we understand that in a liberal society free speech is of course a fundamental right – but we also believe that this right can be dramatically misinterpreted.
If we accept the definition of freedom as the ability to perform an action without external constraint, then free speech is the ability to express opinions without government censorship. Free speech gives every individual the political right to speak without the state intervening.
We have a right to express our dissatisfaction about something happening in our university; Tim Stanley, Brendan O’Neill, and pro-life organizations have the right to express their dissatisfaction with the cancellation of their event.
It might be useful at this point to recap what actually happened, a narrative which has been drowned out by free-speech sensationalism. We organized a counter-event to voice our dissatisfaction with the framing of OSFL’s debate, and the exclusion of women’s voices from an issue about their bodies and choices.
We did not originally call for the event to be shut down by the college – we had intended to implement the no platform ourselves by popular protest. Ultimately, Christ Church decided to withdraw their platform and OSFL were forced to cancel the debate themselves when they could find no alternative venues to host their event.
No venue is obliged to host any debate, and the fact that no alternative venue was found does not constitute a violation of free speech.
We objected to the debate pre-supposing Britain’s ‘abortion culture’, a phrase that exposes the ‘objectivity’ of the debate to be pre-loaded with the anti-choice rhetoric of shame. It implies that abortion is a normalized and harmful social trend, creating associations with genuine social phenomena like ‘rape culture’.
This is a misleading implication which overwrites the experience of women, trans and non-binary people.
The right to be able to speak freely does not oblige anyone, especially not a private institution, to provide you with a platform – a means by which a person is able to talk, write, or otherwise communicate their opinions to an audience. Free speech is our right, but a platform is not.
One twitter user accused us of ‘intellectual cowardice’ for refusing to engage with the debate on OSFL’s terms, an attitude of entitlement which was incredibly common.
The right to say whatever you want, within the law, does not mean that any organisation must give you space to say it.
By choosing to host a speaker, an institution is always to some extent endorsing the terms of the debate, and vouching for the participants’ qualification to speak on a certain issue – O’ Neill and Stanley have little relevant lived experience to recommend them to speak about abortion other than their own opinions.
In Tim Stanley’s article, which has miraculously evaded the censorship of Oxford feminists to reach tens of thousands of readers, he refers to our ‘authoritarian’ mindset, our wish to ‘eradicate contrary ideas.’
This is a vast overstatement of the scope of our action: a small group of students do not have the right or the power to repress. Let’s consider the fact that Stanley was writing about his censorship in a national newspaper: he was denied a platform on one evening, at one specific place, in our university.
He is a powerful journalist with many platforms of his own. Criticism levelled at us has been characterized by the absence of any recognition of this balance of power.
Brendan O’Neill, among others, criticizes this generation of students for not being radical enough, for shrinking away from rather than challenging the establishment’s ‘orthodoxy’. The irony is that he is the establishment – and over the past week we have challenged his entitlement to speak for and over women.
To quote Tim Squirrell’s article on the OSFL controversy ‘We are challenging the claims of privileged men to have the right to speak wherever they want, whenever they want.’
I’m yet to read an objection to our opposition to OSFL’s debate that hasn’t been written by a cisgender white man. This generation of students and activists is standing up and saying that, for too long, men have spoken over women, trans and non-binary people, just as white people have spoken over people of colour.
My generation is saying that we should understand how this act reinforces oppressive power structures and social hierarchies. And although this may be a repulsive idea to some, sometimes this involves rethinking our right to speak at all times, for all people, on any topic.
Niamh McIntyre and Anna Burn are students at Oxford University. Follow Niamh on Twitter
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96 Responses to “Free speech is a right, but a platform is not”
Smell the BS
Engaging with the bogus terminology that these pseudo-intellectual hobbyists employ (cissexist, non-binary, rape culture, patriarchy, and so on) is like agreeing to play a game of chess with modified rules where your opponent is allowed to make up the rules as they go along, while you are not. I.e. it will lead you nowhere. The ideas and terminology they throw around all come from a very narrow, very select clique of parasites, all of whom hate the West and have been working since the end of WWII to poison the intellectual well of Western thought. Better to conserve energies to take on more intellectually honest adversaries and leave this travelling circus to its own devices.
Smell the BS
Engaging with the bogus terminology that these pseudo-intellectual hobbyists employ (cissexist, non-binary, rape culture, patriarchy, and so on) is like agreeing to play a game of chess with modified rules where your opponent is allowed to make up the rules as they go along, while you are not. I.e. it will lead you nowhere. The ideas and terminology they throw around all come from a very narrow, very select clique of parasites, all of whom hate the West and have been working since the end of WWII to poison the well of Western thought. Better to conserve energies to take on more intellectually honest adversaries and leave this travelling circus to its own devices.
...
So that response is quite reductive in many senses: it reduces the points I’ve made back into your own configuration of ‘white males should not be listened to’, that’s clearly a reductive simplification of the nuance I’m positing and is symptomatic of why your initial interpretation was accordingly reductive; it reduces the nuance of the specific situation being discussed to an ill-fitted analogy of ‘only men fight wars’ (I’m not trying to reduce you here, I’m just trying to paraphrase for brevity) – analogies rarely work in that an analogy expunges all the specificities of the original (and, here, it is the specificities that are really central), and instead posit an apparently similar argument that can be more readily broken down, it’s called strawmanning, and it has no place in such a highly wrought point as is being discussed here; and it reduces the very specific situation of the protest, JCR motion and Christ Church college procedure into ‘it was shut down’ and ‘literally stifled’ – so many “free speech woo” responses emerge from a point of generalisation that seems to forget the whole nexus of reasons and parties and things that were the involved in the happening/non-happening of the debate. It’s the very misplaced and unhelpful reduction that this article and many of the original article’s defendants keep trying to stress as problematic. Also, your closing hypothetical sort of undercuts itself: the whole point is they these speakers DID have alternative means and the marginalised DO NOT. That is because of those normative, latent, self-perpetuating oppressions that I say there is great value in trying to expose, question and subvert. Asking ‘what happens’ if the marginalised were not marginalised is very pertinent; we don’t know, because they are entrenchantly oppressed in the self-perpetuation of what I’m arguing against.
Scott
You say the marginalised do not have an alternative means to express themselves – are we not responding to an article publicized to give voice to those marginalised groups? And unless I’m mistaken about the law, abortions are legal & easily accessible, and being pro-choice is the prevailing view. Which begs the question: who is the marginalised group? Who is privileged and who is not? It seems those classifications could change dramatically depending on what is being discussed and who is discussing it – as you say, it is nuanced, and there could be a nexus of parties and reasons and things involved. Which means that if important decisions (like who gets to hold a debate, who has a right to talk about this or that issue) are
based on very complicated, difficult-to-define terms, then those with the power to make those decisions are extremely likely to abuse those terms & that nuance to advance their own agendas. It’s the classic excuse of the tyrant – this newspaper must be shut down, these protestors arrested, in order to guarantee the safety of the people. If you have a clear guide, not based on nuance – say, allowing everyone to speak regardless of how unpopular their opinion – then it’s a lot
easier to avoid, you know, tyranny.
There has been a dramatic swing in the gay-rights movement in the United States. The goals of this marginalized group have become increasingly mainstream in the past ten years, and not because
anti-gay voices were shouted down but because they were given free reign to voice their bigoted opinions. People had the chance to listen to their views, digest them, and decide they were crazy. If, however, the religious right had been forced to keep quiet, the debate would never have happened, minds would not have opened, things would have become much more bitter. Encouraging debate among all groups, promoting it at every opportunity, is essential for exactly
this reason.
Esvg
You keep co opting points to align with your argument. Yes privilege is nuanced but only in that it intersectional; i.e. placing someone on a a “privileged scale” is problematic because is works on umpteen axes and the lines of privilege intersect in one heterogeneous person. Nevertheless, where privilege exist on a particular axis is rarely indeterminable, and, to return, as I urge, to the specificities of this argument, these two men are the embodiment of privilege. Hence, who “gets to discuss” – to use your (perhaps slightly reductionist) diction – based on their degree of marginality and privilege does ebb, complexly, ‘depending on what’s being discussed’, but here the loci of privilege and the reason why that privilege being the upheld voice is problematic are both fairly pre-evident. And the use of tyranny – and the constant discourse of the authoritarian and fascist levelled at the author and her agreers – is a real problem: the woman who wrote this is not a government or a power of enormous tyrannical weight, she is a student, and evidently to some extent privileged and to some extent not. Of course micro-aggression and grass-rootism is significant, but to align the no-platforming of this debate with tyranny is, well, simultaneously reductivist and over-the-top. In fact, you use the example of tyrants shutting down papers; I’m pretty sure that’s not akin to the authors endeavours. I can’t profess much knowledge of the content of your last paragraph, though, again, it seems to move away from the point of the article(s) in trying to find an example to argue against it. The lexis of your polemical closing sentence, with its ‘all’ and ‘every’ and ‘essential’ emerges from the absolute free speech standpoint, and you return to the tired and abstract ‘debate opens minds’ argument. Sometimes it might, which is why almost always allowing platform for free speech is sensible, but the value of this abstract possibility of mind-opening is displaced by the pernicious effects it may have; when free speech is platformed so as that the oppressed can speak out against the oppressors it’s very useful, when “free speech” is used in its abstract absoluteness to give further voice to the voicifereous and further silence the silent very bad things happen. That’s why UK law allows the curtailment of free speech ‘in the interests of’ ‘public safety’, ‘the protection of health or morals’, ‘the protection of the reputation or rights of others’.