The coddling of young women at university is deeply anti-feminist

The overprotective bureaucracy of universities is hampering young women by making them scared of their own shadow, writes Felice Basbøll

‘Don’t walk home alone at night.’ Every time a night out ends, the gallant young gentlemen of the group will ask the women if they would like to be walked home. And while this, more times than not, is a clever ploy to spend some more time with a nice girl one might hope to seduce, there is also another hidden narrative – or else. You know what happens to young women who walk home alone at night. 

Statistically, this fear is misplaced. Men make up 80% of murder victims and the vast majority of assault victims. The only category where women surpass them is sexual violence, but this is more likely to be committed by someone you know than a stranger. So, in the interest of fairness, we should really ask whether the young gentlemen would like to be walked home. But of course, we don’t. Because in this cohort, we recognise crimes against individual members of a group as what they are: horrific individual cases. 

Even though the culture war has moved on, now being waged over a multitude of other isms and phobias, the narrative of female victimhood has done its damage on university campuses. The exaggerated rape statistics that spread like wildfire across the internet in the wake of the #metoo movement live on in the collective consciousness of our generation. A study of Irish universities from 2021 found that only 22% of women feel safe socialising at night on campus, and this number drops to 8.5% who feel safe off campus. 

This fear, when scrutinized, is the fear of harassment, a behaviour that our current culture has decided is akin to sexual violence. But being treated badly, getting rude comments, or having your personal space invaded are not experiences that are unique to women, especially in an environment that is rife with excessive drinking and raging hormones. There is no way of going about your business in the real world without encountering at least a couple of jerks who don’t have your best interest at heart, and university is a great time for young women to learn that lesson. Especially since sleazy and objectifying comments are disproportionately hurled at women. 

The calls for increased safety measures like the censoring of online misogyny are well-intentioned, but, ultimately, they are unnecessary and arbitrary curtailments of freedom of expression. And left unchecked they have serious implications for the way women are viewed in society and more importantly, how women view themselves. It is reminiscent of an age-old argument for curbing women’s freedom; our delicate dispositions need protection from the dangers of the world around us. Indeed, young women increasingly believe in their own fragility, as Heather Mac Donald pointed out last week in City Journal: ‘Female students disproportionately patronise the burgeoning university wellness centres, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles.’ 

University should be a time to experiment, test our convictions, say the wrong things, and sleep with the wrong people. For many, it is the place where you learn to navigate the murky territory of romantic and sexual relationships, and people will inevitably make mistakes and cross more than a few boundaries. Signals will be misread, and a lot of feelings will be hurt. There is no way to fix all of these things, we don’t need to and we shouldn’t want to. Women are just as capable of handling adversity as men, and in life in the public realm, it is inevitable.

As women, we can’t wait until the world is perfectly safe to make our mark as it certainly never will be. There is no reason for young women to be more afraid than men of going out or walking home alone at night, and we don’t need overly rigid rules to decide how we want to conduct our personal lives; most women are not interested in consent contracts either. As young female students, we do not need an overprotective university bureaucracy to coddle and terrify us. We need to have more faith in ourselves and our ability to set boundaries and make our own choices. 

Of course, young men who would like to walk a woman home after a night out should continue to do so. But it should be as a comfortable kindness, a charming flirting strategy, not a paranoid reflection of impending doom. It’s time we begin talking about the reality of being a young woman today with excitement and possibility instead of victimhood and fear. As female students, we must escape the bower of bliss and take on the challenge of liberation where modern feminism has failed us.

Felice Basbøll is a politics and history student at Trinity College Dublin.