Do you ever have that feeling that you’ve seen it all before? Do you ever encounter a place, or a person, or a situation that just kicks off that strange, dissociative feeling we call déjà vu? You’d be forgiven for that, I think, had you been around to experience the latest falling-out in Cambridge comment writing.

When a piece appeared on Get Real under the title “Feminism’s Duty to Gay Men”, the force of that feeling could have knocked one off one’s feet. One could have set one’s watch in anticipation of the inevitable response piece from someone associated with the Women’s Campaign, and along one came right on time, on Gender Agenda, the Women's Campaign's online zine. I had quit Twitter at the time to work on my dissertation, but like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III, just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in.

It is unnecessary to talk about the merits of the dispute between the authors of these respective pieces. What I was reminded of was an old saying that characterised the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, the phrase that caused Christopher Hitchens to remark in his book Letters to a Young Contrarian that he had realised that “a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse”. In 1970, the radical feminist scholar Carol Hanisch published an essay that popularised the now well-known slogan “The Personal is Political” (though she declined to be credited with authorship of that now well-worn slogan).

This article is not written to trash the work of 1970s feminism. For all the good and bad ideas that come from a movement as broad as feminism, opening discourse to the private experiences of marginalised groups can only be a good thing. In Cambridge, though, the idea that the personal is political seems to have taken on a rather different meaning: now it seems to mean that your personal vendettas and your personal advancement can be cloaked and guised in the language of liberation, and no-one will bat an eyelid.

It was bad enough in the first place to see the initial author selfishly demanding the attention of the Women’s Campaign and CUSU LGBT+; it was worse to see the response piece sniping at the initial author in every other paragraph, dredging up old disagreements and arguments and what might charitably be called ‘bad blood’. Worst of all was seeing this personal argument – which is what it was, let’s not pretend it was anything more high-minded than that – wrapped in the language of women’s liberation and LGBT rights.

Let’s start with the ritual condemnations of both sides. The initial author was guilty of extreme historical illiteracy, not to mention the downright immoral use of the vocabulary of oppression to advance their social aims. There really is no way of reading the piece in any other way: it was not written out of genuine concern, it was written to rile the Women’s Campaign and trigger a response for the purpose of social advancement, and it is disgraceful. The response piece, on the other hand, was not written to genuinely advance a case of intersectional liberation, it was written to settle a long-standing grudge and to air the dirty laundry between the two authors for all to see. That is likewise disgraceful.

How have we got to this stage, now, when the leading lights of liberation theory in the greatest university in the country spend their valuable time and use their significant platforms to advance their own social aims or to exact jealous vengeance on one another? What has this argument been for? It doesn’t serve women, least of all LGBT women, and it certainly doesn’t serve the cause of gay men’s rights in Cambridge. Nobody who might change their behaviour in a way that might actually affect the lives of oppressed people will read either piece (and why on earth would they?). All it serves is to call up rival tribes and start a fight that leads to bitterness and resentment and two days wasted, for no reason whatsoever.

I am graduating in June. In a matter of weeks I will be leaving this place behind. I am sad beyond measure to see time and space being taken up by an argument that does not mean anything. Gay men face societal disadvantage, as do women, particularly women whose sexualities are not traditionally acceptable. This is obvious. I fail to see how shouting at each other on Twitter – on Twitter! – makes any difference to the lives of the people whom the authors purport to stand up for.

If this is the state of Cambridge liberation campaigns, I am delighted to be leaving it behind. Watching it become an ego parade over the last number of years has been disappointing, to say the least. I can only hope that the elections at CUSU have changed things, but I am pessimistic. After all, personal animus drives clicks, which drives social engagement. Millennia of evolution tell us to support our groups and despise all others. Even on the internet, old habits die hard.

But we are better than this. We can do better. And gay men and women of all sexualities deserve better. Isn’t it time we tried to serve them, instead of ourselves? Perhaps then we might stop repeating the past, and start shaping the future. As Cambridge students, we have that obligation; let's start honouring it.

Correction 01/04/2015: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed the response piece cited above to the Women's Campaign, rather than to one of its members writing for the Women's Campaign's official zine, Gender Agenda. The piece has been corrected.