Softening the Heart, Not Coddling the Mind

Content Warning: Rape

My first week of university at OCADU, as a wide-eyed 17-year-old at a school brimming with mature students, was turbulent. When asked in my first design class to present a piece—any piece—of “good design” and discuss it, I signed up right away. I’d found the perfect piece: a video of kinetic typography set to a satirical answering machine recording for a mental health hospital. As someone who’d had my own share of experience with mental health issues, I didn’t find the piece funny. I knew that many might find it offensive, but I felt the kinetic typography was on point. “Besides,” I thought, “this is university, and if there were ever a place for edgy discussions, it’s OCADU.” I thought wrong.

Despite prefacing my presentation with a content warning, I was midway through discussing a graphic on the screen when my prof raised his hand. Mid-sentence, I halted. “I just wanted to say that I found that offensive,” he said. Looking around the room expectantly at his new flock of students, he asked, “Who else was offended?”

I stood frozen as a sea of 25 hands rose—all but one of my new classmates. It was the first of OCADU’s many straws that would eventually break the camel’s back and lead to my decision to transfer to UofT one year later.
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I experienced the damaging effects of oversensitivity, or at least misplaced sensitivity. While certainly frustrating, I realize that my experience was the exception, not the rule. In Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s recent article in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the authors conflate the two by using extreme examples of sensitivity to suggest its presence as the over-arching direction taken by our schools and our society.

Ironically, even while describing a tendency of today’s youth to magnify the distress caused by a situation, The Atlantic authors also magnify their own distress by describing some extreme examples of sensitivity. These examples are reminiscent of those who don’t identify as feminists because they disagree with misandry: in both cases, the validity of an entire movement focused on equality is undermined by objections to the extremists at its fringes. Despite the occasional damage of over-sensitivity, there are far more instances of our society being extremely insensitive and intolerant. It should not be surprising that in the push against the current climate of intolerance, there are going to be instances of people taking things too far.

Lukianoff and Haidt suggest that in our schools, sensitivity culture allows students to shield themselves from reality and in doing so, actually weakens their ability to handle the real world and their own mental health battles. However, that argument is very easy to make when you are not the survivor of rape who is forced to sit through a class on sexual assault law so that you can go on to become an environmental lawyer. Since the emergence of more sensitive ideals, there has been an opposing culture that suggests that the world is too sensitive and that people who claim to have needs which differ from the norm are trying to get away with something. This perspective fails to consider the struggles endured by those who have different needs, and subsequently fails to recognize that those battling sensitivity culture are often speaking from privileged situations. The Atlantic article presents that age-old way of thinking, but dresses it up in new-age sheep’s clothing using the rhetoric of mental health.

While certainly a thought-provoking article, it is stunning that people feel threatened by this new culture of sensitivity. As shown by Lukianoff and Haidt, it can make more privileged people’s lives more complicated or uncomfortable for a hot second. Sensitivity to difference is an effort to level the playing field, and in schools it can increase students’ sense of autonomy, allowing them to be individuals instead of conforming to expectations.