I’m going to be perfectly honest. Whenever I hear the word “trigger warning,” my knee-jerk reaction is to cringe. Thousands of adjectives rush to my mind to describe trigger warnings, precious few of them flattering, and I can’t help but think of all the criticisms saying that our insistence on trigger warnings makes our generation inherently weaker and more coddled. I hear “trigger warning” and my jaw clenches. And on my snarkier days, I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes.
The short version of all that? I find trigger warnings decidedly annoying.
With as prevalent as the debate for trigger warnings has been, it is fairly unlikely that you don’t at this point have some understanding of the term. Trigger warnings are “a statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc., alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material” (dictionary.com). Basically, they’re like the rating of a movie, in that they give you a heads up as to what’s coming, but they work for a much broader range of medias. Most commonly, trigger warnings are used when discussing topics like rape, suicide, and trauma so that people who have been affected by these things do not have to re-live traumatic experiences.
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with that. In my own life, I have been blindsided by topics that I was not necessarily done processing emotionally, and it is not a fun experience. I would never want a survivor of rape to have to re-live their experience because of a book that they picked up, thinking it would be a fun beach read only to have a reimagining of what they would probably consider the worst experience of their life come out of left field. So in that sense, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting some text on the back of a book or movie or even class description that says: “Hey, here’s what we’re talking about, make sure you’re comfortable with it!”
No, the problem comes when we take trigger warnings too far.
Apparently, it is not enough to let people know that there is potentially problematic thematic content in their books, movies, and magazines. Apparently, especially in academic settings, we need to remove the potentially problematic content all together, lest we offend or upset someone.
This, to me, is absolutely ridiculous, especially in an academic setting. Students are not required to take most of their classes, so if they have an issue with the content that will be discussed or examined in class, they should not be a part of that class. Or they should be taking the initiative to speak to their professors to get an alternate assignment. The answer is not, and should never be, total censorship of the literature in the course.
This comes into play most often in English courses, in which we are often assigned to read and engage with texts that can be difficult. Part of the point of literature is to make the reader uncomfortable, because it is only through this discomfort that the reader can question themselves and their world view and engage with the world in a new way. But eliminating thematically challenging texts to get rid of the possibility that they might be someone’s trigger in a class that is not mandatory, subtracts from the intellectually stimulating environment that education institutions should be striving to create.
Take, for example, my high school English class. In part because of a classmate committing suicide the year before, the books Hamlet and King Lear were removed from the syllabus of a Shakespeare class that was one of three electives. Unfortunately for me, in the classes I decided to take in college there was the expectation that I had already read these texts, since they are fairly standard high school curriculum, and this started me off at a slight disadvantage. Were there people in that high school class who would have been triggered by the content within those two plays? Possibly. But did they have to take the class? Not necessarily.
Frankly, that kind of scenario is exactly why trigger warnings exist. So that students who might be unsettled by content in the class can know ahead of time that it is something they may have to face, and can then make an informed decision about whether or not they are able to handle that class. And if they cannot, it does not make them inferior in any way. In fact, it makes them stronger for being able to identify their limits and remove themselves from a potentially harmful situation. Is it unfortunate if they really wanted to take the class? Yes. But making the choice to put their mental health before their desire to take a class is far more important.
The point of trigger warnings is to allow students and, more broadly, audiences, to position themselves in such a way as to be able to have the best experience with the media they engage with—not to tell professors which books to cut from their curriculum so as not to offend anyone’s sensitivities. By putting trigger warnings on our media, we are enabling choice and putting the power back in the hands of the victims as they heal. By using trigger warnings for censorship, we effectively remove that opportunity for healing. Books and movies with sensitive material can cause an unwanted resurgence of memories, yes, but they can also be cathartic for victims of traumatic experiences. If the material is hidden away in an effort to shelter those who might be negatively affected by it, those people cannot then use that material as an avenue to heal.
I don’t think that our generation’s insistence on trigger warnings makes us weak, but I think what we’re doing with the trigger warnings does. By removing all potentially harmful and therefore challenging materials from our lives, we are creating one of those mind-numbing utopian/dystopian societies that YA authors love to write about so much. As intellectuals, we need to be challenged. We need to get uncomfortable. We need that reaction to allow for introspection. We need to allow our world view to shift. Otherwise, what’s the point of picking up a book or streaming a movie on Netflix? If we’re not going to take the risk that our art and media might surprise us, why engage with it at all? It’s only through these surprises that we can really allow ourselves to be strongly impacted by the works that surround us, and at its core that is what art is all about.
