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Trigger Warnings? (with update)

Trigger Warnings? (with update)

Last updated on: May 25, 2014 at 9:29 pm by Jane the Actuary

Trigger Warnings? (with update) 2014-05-25T21:29:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Everyone’s writing about trigger warnings — that is, the idea that bloggers, journalists, professors and writers of all kinds should warn their readers of content which may be upsetting to individuals who have faced certain kinds of trauma, specifically, sexual assault — these days, so I’ll add my two cents.

First, some links: A Chronicle of Higher Education blog post, “Treatment, not Trigger Warnings.” As the title indicates, the post argues that

The solution is not to help these students dig themselves further into a life of fear and avoidance by allowing them to keep away from upsetting material. . . . It would be much more useful for faculty members and students to be trained how to respond if they are concerned that a student or peer has suffered trauma. Giving members of the college community the tools to guide them to the help they need would be more valuable than trying to insulate them from triggers. Students with unusually intense responses to academic cues should be referred to student-health services, where they can be evaluated and receive evidence-based treatments so that they can participate fully in the life of the university.

The post also point out that for someone with PTS*, triggers are not as simple as viewing or reading about a violent event, but seeing “innocent”-seeming things or people that are connected with the specific event.

(*According to George Bush in an interview I saw not long ago, advocates are now dropping the “D” = “disorder,” in hopes of reducing the belief that people suffering from post-traumatic stress are “disordered.”)

Here’s an example of a proposed “trigger warning” requirement, excerpted (linked to in the above article as well):

The current suggested list of Trigger Warnings includes Rape, Sexual Assault, Abuse, Self-Injurious Behavior, Suicide, Graphic Violence, Pornography, Kidnapping, and Graphic Depictions of Gore.

Whereas: Having memories or flashbacks triggered can cause the person severe emotional, mental, and even physical distress. These reactions can affect a student’s ability to perform academically.

Whereas: College level courses may contain materials with mature content. These particularly affect students if material is being read in the classroom or a film is being screened, as the student cannot choose to stop being exposed to the material.

Therefore let it be resolved by the Associated Students in the Senate Assembled:

That the Associated Students of UC Santa Barbara urge the instructor of any course that includes triggering content to list trigger warnings on the syllabus.

Here’s the proposed policy at Oberlin (cited from National Review because it seems a bit too likely that the material will ultimately be removed from the Oberlin website).

And here’s what’s flaky about all of this:

The term “trigger warning” builds a “protected class” of fragile “PTSD” survivors, that is, survivors of some kind of sexual assault. How many such cases are there? The more I read about it, the more improbable it seems that an unsuspecting student could be traumatized because of “triggering” material. The concept of the “trigger” just doesn’t seem credible. If a student suffered trauma in the past and reading such material does cause them distress, then such a student is much better off making more careful course selections and discussing classes with the professor in advance. In practice, these “trigger warnings” came out of the Women’s Studies world, and feel much more like a desire on the part of the aggrieved to make their grievance known to those around them, and to ask for acknowledgement of their distress.

The odd thing is that content warnings are not new: television shows regularly carry, not just the “TV-14” or “M” rating, but a notice that the subject matter may be “distressing for some viewers.”

At the same time, we have, in our media, much more explicit content than ever before: each Marvel movie has more violence than the one that preceded it (which is really irritating as a mom trying to decide which movies cross the line to “too violent for my preteen to see”). Books, too — one of the reasons I stopped reading fiction is that it seemed like I’d pick up a random title and the “deep secret” the book jacket promised, would be something a bit too extreme for my taste.

And our kids: from what I read in the papers (I’ll experience this more directly starting next year), in an effort to be “relevant,” high schools are assigning kids texts with a lot more graphic sex and violence than in the past.

Of course, to be sure, it’s not as if “great literature” in the past was free from sex and violence (e.g., The Canterbury Tales), but I do think that it’s become a lot more graphic. Authors also are much more ready to throw in all manner of obscenities. (My son asked the other day whether an author, thinking the word would fit the storyline best but not wanting to be direct, would ever write of a character, “then he said the F word.”)

And if a student doesn’t want to read such books, or if a parent disapproves, we call them prudes and ridicule them, and, so far as I know, school districts are uneven in the extent to which they allow a student an alternate assignment.

At the university level, I’m not sure if even this is an option, when a university assigns a book for all sections of a freshman composition class, for instance.

Which brings us to the “trigger warning” — because our betters have told us that preferring to avoid graphic sexual or violent content because we find it unpleasant or it offends our religious sensibilities, isn’t allowed any longer, feminist activists have found it necessary to label it “triggering” to justify their decisions, and to mark their desire to avoid reading the item in question as “legitimate” rather than just a matter of inappropriate “prudery.”

UPDATE:

Turns out, The Other McCain blog has an alternate theory for trigger warnings, that Feminist Studies departments are, in fact, disproportionately populated by women with genuine mental illnesses.

What we may surmise — trigger warning for logic — is that “feminist spaces” are disproportionately populated with women who have suffered such traumatic experiences and who, rather than dealing with their psychological problems through therapy, have instead decided that “the personal is political,” so that their feminist politics are actually an attempt to rationalize their personal problems.

It is not at all uncommon for women who identify themselves as feminists to admit that they suffer from mental illness, without seeming to recognize the significance of these admissions.

The author then cites various anecdotal examples, and, while I’m generally not a fan of arguing from anecdote (which he does in another post, in which he cites prominent feminist authors writing about their intense dislike of motherhood and children, to claim that Feminism in general is at a dead end because Feminists won’t reproduce — a post which, I think, was linked to by instapundit.com and first brought me to this site), the logic makes a certain amount of sense. And, again, anecdotally, an old friend of mine who was rather assertively feminist, to the point of (when, years after we both left grad school, I found her blog) getting herself ordained by some kind of splinter/heretical group and holding herself out as a Roman Catholic priest, turned out to also have mental health issues, ultimately being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. And if Women’s Studies departments disproportionately draw people with traumatic incidents in their past and mental disorders presently, it would certainly explain their perception of the world as an exceedingly troubled place.

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