Having your column openly trash-talked in front of you falls fairly low on the ‘Fun Scale’. It probably falls somewhere between waiting alone for your Van of Life chips sober in the rain (I have never done this) and having your late-night romantic transgressions caught on CCTV by your college porters (again, no idea what this would feel like).

As a journalist, I publish my views and I know that not everyone is going to agree with me. But as I sat in hall munching my way through a delectable plate of mildly subsidised food, it was not a reasoned, incisive debate that I was suddenly subjected to. Let alone that, I was not even granted the respect of being involved in the conversation. My friend had asked me if I was aiming to end up as the next Caitlin Moran, and the group next to me suddenly erupted. Caitlin Moran?! Just a silly ‘gossip columnist’, markedly unworthy of her place at The Times, she has nothing to say of value. My mouth was still full of chicken at the time so as this cracking banter passed back and forth I didn’t really have the chance to clarify whether I too was indeed a ‘silly gossip columnist’, but the implication was fairly clear. My friend and I looked at each other in silence and our conversation was over.

Safe spaces get a lot of flak. Depending on which particular sub-species of identikit think-piece you read, they are either growing conglomerations of excessively molly-coddled students or a dark Stalinist plot to upend society as we know it. Maybe both. Over the past week in Cambridge we’ve learned that they’re also just fronts for sinister, university-endorsed drug cartels. Who knew, eh? Don’t mind me, I was just here for the self-care tips, not the crack and heroin.

Yet after this particular incident in hall I was reminded of my need, as a woman, for the safe spaces I have available to me. These are places where I will not be ridiculed, reduced down to the nearest available stereotype. Yes, safe spaces are a place where ‘debate’ takes a backseat to respect. And this is vital.

Because anyone’s interest in social justice will almost invariably come from a place of immense pain. No one chooses to be a feminist for the fun of it, just to rile The Spectator every once in a while. When a social justice campaigner speaks, it is not a detached intellectual exercise. It is by its very nature inextricably emotional. When we speak, we are not debating the character of neutral truth. We are fighting for the respect we deserve yet have not been given, we are fighting against everything that has made us feel so small, not for the things we do, the columns we write, but the things we are. Debates are never neutral - what’s being debated is our identity.

So this is why it’s shameful that the student press has capitalised on the WomCam debacle in the way it has. Demands for accountability in CUSU-supervised groups have somehow become synonymous and interchangeable with the complaint that in such groups one has to ‘walk on eggshells’ to avoid giving offence, a place where you can’t instigate a good old debate.

I will say it until I am blue in the face. Safe spaces are not places for debate. Safe spaces are places where there is an agreed, existing consensus on certain points. You go there for solidarity, you go there for healing. People in safe spaces aren’t being shielded from debate; they’re just tired – tired, in fact, from having these same debates over and over again. A survivor of sexual assault is tired, and understandably traumatised, by the debate society exposes her to all the time over victim-blaming, that she should somehow shoulder the blame for an assault committed against her. If as a white woman in a safe space you are asked to check your privilege, someone is not using race as a weapon. Feminism has traditionally marginalised women of colour, and we need to centre in on those voices to redress the balance. If it’s a debate you’re after, you probably got lost on your way to the Women’s Campaign Discussion Group. It’s just around the corner.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sometimes more than up for debate, although as a disillusioned member of the Union it seems like it’s usually more about winning than uncovering some ultimate universal Truth™. Nevertheless, I write this column because I am fortunate enough to occupy a place of relative safety from which I am happy for my views to be publically debated. But being openly demeaned is neither debate, nor something I’m prepared to sit and endure.

On a side note, while anti-depressants don’t taste very nice (pro-tip: don’t chew), what leaves an even worse taste in the mouth is The Tab’s sensationalist approach to medication in its reports. Sharing medication is something I would personally not condone, but let’s not stoop to the level of Daily Mail-style infographics describing the side-effects of what The Tab calls “strong” anti-depressants (what’s a ‘weak’ anti-depressant, a cup of tea?). If we’re arguing for people taking these medicines while fully informed, in close consultation with their GP, let’s not turn The Tab into some pseudo-scientific drugs education body. Implying that those who take anti-depressants are members of a sinister “drug ring” experiencing “lack of emotion”, “yawning” and “blindness” isn’t really helping to reduce stigma.