Trigger Warning: No Trigger Warnings
I just did a search. 4,663 posts on ErosBlog, and the phrase “trigger warning” does not appear in any of them. Sadly, with this post I am blowing my perfect record.
For interest, I searched all 19,233 comments, too. No “trigger warning” phrase in any of them, either. I interpret this to mean that nobody has complained about the lack. (That’s not the only possible explanation; a complaint like that might have been moderated away if it was sufficiently jerkish. But I don’t remember anything like that ever happening.)
I don’t use trigger warnings. I don’t think they make sense. But I have refrained, ere now, from sharing this opinion, because I was (and remain) open to the possibility that my antipathy reveals me as a giant dick. But still, I don’t use them. I don’t think they make logical sense. No stranger can predict what will “trigger” another stranger. Put it another way, you got your trigger warning when you turned on your computing device. It’s up to you to protect yourself, using all the contextual clues that everybody uses in deciding what they should or shouldn’t read and view on the internet.
Although I don’t have much more to say about that, Erin Kennedy at Sex For The Rest recently explored the subject at length in the post Trigger Warnings Are The Arm Floaties Of The Internet. This part of the post does a good job of explaining my perspective:
Trigger warnings create an unrealistic expectation that people will cater language and behavior to accommodate you.
In kink culture, you’re responsible for your own self-care. If you’re walking through a dungeon and happen upon a scene that really squigs you out, you do not have the right to step into that scene and ask the participants to warn you the next time they decide to shove metal rods up someone’s urethra. Kink colloquialisms vary from city to city, but in my hometown if you see something you want to unsee, you say, “I’m going to go get a cookie.” Then you leave the room and have a cookie and a breath. Because the locus of control over your emotions is internal. It is not up to the people doing or saying the potentially disturbing whatthefuckever to tailor their expression to your comfort level.
Sex therapist and writer Buster Ross had similar feelings and expressed them at his workshop with Dr. Chris Donaghue about sex shaming at Catalyst Con:
how about we just all agree that the internet will trigger emotions, and then use it and take care of ourselves.
— Buster Ross (@LGBTGIF) September 11, 2015
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=14973
Context matters. If I’m on your site or following links from your site to another, then what you said makes sense. If I’m on a banjo related site, as I often am, and that site feels a need to link to a site with graphic descriptions or depictions of rape, I think it makes sense for the linking sure to put up a warning.
That’s an extreme example, but it seems like the principle holds.
Tim that’s not so much a Trigger Warning as a NSFW tag, which is different. I think the problem is more in a lack of descriptive headlines endemic in modern media (although by no means a new thing). With so many stories using clickbaity headlines, you’re likely to end up on something that has surprising content.
Yes, yes and yes. I wrote about this subject a little while ago basically saying exactly the same thing. Someone left a comment on my post at the time saying that she totally agreed with me. She had been raped but the thing that really triggered her was the song that had been playing at the time of her assault. She encounters that song in restaurants, and even shopping malls sometimes, and it never comes with a trigger warning, nor should it.
Mollyxxx
“Trigger warnings create an unrealistic expectation that people will cater language and behavior to accommodate you.”
This is exactly what has happened in my experience. I had a visitor to my site complain that the story trigger warning itself was ‘triggering’. It was a thinly veiled attempt to make me feel bad for writing it.
As far as I can tell, trigger warnings function as huge neon signs that attract people who are crawling the net to find something to take offense to.
Imagine the trigger warnings needed for a book like William Burroughs’s ‘Naked Lunch’? Would be almost as long as the book itself.