In recent news, the dean of the University of Chicago sent out a letter to students taking a stand for academic freedom, against censorship, cancelling speakers, and trigger warnings. One of these things are not like the other.
Despite the popular association, trigger warnings have little to do with censorship or academic freedom. Many SJWs such as myself apply trigger warnings to their own writing. SJWs are clearly not trying to censor themselves.
Trigger warnings are similar to NSFW tags in that they advertise content, and allow people to approach it under the right conditions. Perhaps you’re one of the people who never has to worry about viewing NSFW content in a workplace, or who never experiences triggers. Even so, you probably don’t mind the advertisement.
Although the issue of trigger warnings and the issue of censoring speakers are both interesting, I don’t see why they are always considered together. A university could have a sensible policy on trigger warnings while also refusing to ever cancel an invited speaker. Conversely, a university could invite a bunch of terrible speakers, rescind the invitations upon protestations, all while taking a stand against trigger warnings.
I don’t understand how “Head’s up, we’re gonna talk about rape” ended up being “We’re not allowed to talk about this because it’s way too controversial.”
Blockquote derp. Curse you HTML!!!!
I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons that people have such a gut reaction to trigger warnings is that for many people, the closest thing to trigger warnings they’ve ever experienced are MPAA ratings – which very much are a censorship system, wherein content deemed “inappropriate” is promptly prohibited in many settings and creators are strongly pressured to conform to a narrow, moralistic set of opinions of a minority of individuals in order to be able to feature their work publicly. This is also why I groan every time a pro-trigger warning person tries to defend the concept by saying “it’s just like giving things PG-13 vs. R ratings, perfectly harmless!” Like, no, that metaphor has implications you really don’t want…
In some ways, the NSFW tag metaphor has some of the same issues – like, you can say it’s just a helpful informative tag, but at the same time anyone who has had to use a workplace computer with content controls, or anyone who had accounts hidden or deleted because they decided to helpfully check off nsfw tags knows that such tags are often used as shortcuts to ban and limit content, even if that’s not the initial intent.
I think some of it is also a gut reaction to bad experiences with the more trollish uses of triggers (like, it’s taken me a lot of work to get over my gut negative reaction that stems from initial exposure the term in contexts like…individuals who made arguments of the type “I can make whatever unsourced claims I want, and you calling out the incorrect ones triggers me so you need to shut up”. Like, that’s obviously not how triggering works for most people, and I learned more eventually, but for me that kind of exposure was some of the first I ever got, and it takes work to get over that first impression; I bet the same is true for many academic types.
And for all that trigger warnings shouldn’t *in theory* have anything to do with bans, I’ve been in the presence of enough overzealous groups where “this can be triggering” led to “therefore we need to be sure to prevent any reference to it” that I don’t think it’s necessarily a strawman to have that fear. The incorrect assumptions that opponents of trigger warnings have are often just as common in certain segments of their proponents, just to make everything more confusing.
Still, it’s impressive and telling how much more positive people feel when you call them something like “content description” or even “content warning” as opposed to trigger warning.
It’s also a demonstration that the anti-trigger warning crowd don’t have much substance to their argument given that “trigger warning” and “content notice” fulfill the same function.
I don’t. I’m an academic type that needs to brace myself because certain topics require emotional labour. Gendercrit and rape are the big two. If I haven’t invested emotional spoons prior to engaging, I can’t partake in the conversation at all. And I run my own section on this blog where I am extensively researching, investigating, and citing my claims on both topics.
More plausibly, I think people who’ve had privileged access to everything want to continue to have privileged access to everything and so any accommodation made for people without privilege is seen as some kind of personal attack.
I don’t buy it. I definitely don’t have much respect for this debate to begin with, because TWs/CNs should just be common fucking courtesy and entirely unremarkable.
I can think of a few specific cases where people have (ab)used triggers as a form of censorship or attack.
First, there’s a group on tumblr who claim that the word “queer” is triggering and should not be used (to be replaced by less inclusive terms like SGA). This is strange, because under the standard approach to triggers, I would continue to use “queer”, and simply warn people about it. Also I don’t really believe that they are triggered, because–I mean, it’s a real thing for people to be triggered by “queer”, but it tends to occur among older people and in more conservative locations, whereas this tumblr group skews very young. I think it’s one of those situations where people are backing up their arguments by appealing to hypothetical harm to some marginalized group, but they haven’t actually checked in with said marginalized group.
Second, Julia Serano has referenced abuse of trigger warnings by gendercrit types:
Clearly asking people to put trigger warnings on their whole existence is asking too much.
When people abuse trigger warnings for use as censorship, I regard them with similar suspicion to the dean of UChicago.
To Siggy-
For the most part it’s just gatekeeping. They don’t want bi- and these days asexual- people to be part of their community so they’re twisted the terms into pretzels in order to justify this.
Of course. It’s a classic tactic to frame one’s request as a reasonable boundary, which sets you up to be an asshole if you defy it (even though the boundary is ridiculous. Just stop existing, Siggy!) I certainly agree it’s possible to abuse the concept of trigger warnings. I just don’t think specific examples have been provided in this debate where a campus has unfairly applied them. Hence a lot of “talking past.” Since you point to a specific example, of course I can talk about how ridiculous that particular example is, without conceding that the concept of content notices can be helpful.
Like how a hammer is both a tool and a murder weapon.