Trigger warnings have gained enough cultural currency that they’ve started to pop up into really whiny think pieces. Sigh.
Okay. Let’s get this out of the way.
Let’s start with the basics. What is a trigger warning? Trigger warnings are an emergent behavior of online communities which strive to ensure that all participants in a conversation are participating voluntarily and with informed consent about the topic under discussion. That’s it. They’re an effort to make sure that people who believe that they would suffer psychiatric harm from encountering a certain topic without warning have enough advance notice to either bow out of the conversation, or emotionally steel themselves to withstand it. They usually take the form of a short note at the beginning of an essay, or a video, or so on. They are more common in text works than video or audio works, but not unheard of in all mediums. The term has its origin in the concept of triggers in PTSD; a trigger is a stimulus that can cause an episode of symptoms in people with post traumatic stress disorder.
This is, basically, a good idea. If you’ve never been triggered, and don’t understand what the big deal is, that’s great. Really. Please understand that other people do get triggered. And for them, it’s not the same as being uncomfortable, so much as it’s a real health hazard. And really, trigger warnings are no more intrusive than many other content notes we already smear all over our communications. Video games, movies, and TV all have content ratings and sometimes even audible warnings. This has been happening for years, and hasn’t caused the death of culture yet. (Books, essays, and such are traditionally exempt from that kind of rating, except of course when they’re comic books because new media is evil and must be punished.)
I don’t really see a problem with the idea of trigger warnings, and I think that if you do, you might really want to consider why you oppose them. Does it actually hurt you to see a warning? Probably not. But it may save someone else from getting hurt. So step outside yourself and consider which is more important to you: the safety of others, or your right not to be reminded that other people have problems you don’t.
Okay? Okay.
So that’s my headline, above the fold stance on trigger warnings.
But I also happen to have this handy can of worms right here and it doesn’t look like it’s going to open itself, so lets get down and dirty with some caveats and criticisms. There are a few arguments against trigger warnings that I think are worth taking seriously and discussing on their merits.
THEORY
One argument against trigger warnings that I can see and even sort of agree with in a very limited, contextual sense, is that it’s a way to force people to speak about certain topics only in certain, community-approved ways. “You can talk about rape, but only if you include the magic trigger warning at the top,” says the scold. (And yes, online social justice communities have a real problem with scolds in their ranks, but that’s a conversation for another day, and a braver blog.) That kind of power play can seem really intrusive and, if not censorious, then certainly in the same ideological realm. “Communication must be contained, controlled, and classified according to the Greater Good, comrade!” This is why I am adamantly opposed against making them mandatory, or even setting the expectation that they should be included by default in all arenas. And I think this is the main source of most objections to trigger warnings.
People do not like being told how to speak, and if they feel like a trigger warning has become some kind of community-mandated certificate they must apply to everything they say, then they may rebel against the notion. If we want them to work, they’ve got to remain voluntary. The moment they become mandated, they stop being a bottom up emergent behavior, and start being a top down rating system. Rating systems never work. This kind of thing can’t be imposed upon a community, particularly not a community which inhabits a mostly online space, where top down directives inherently operate at a deficit of efficiency. Additionally, there is no single online community, and many different communities have different standards. I’m part of a mailing list where the group ethos is to be caustic bastards, and I have found a lot of value and strength in being part of such a community. Such a group is not for everyone, but for those of us whom it fits, it is a wonderful thing. Trigger warnings would ruin the whole ethos of the place.
Additionally, a trigger warning puts a lot more responsibility on the author of a communication for how the communication is received and interpreted. This is, to put it mildly, a problematic notion. Trigger warnings can seem to be implicitly shifting a lot of the responsibilities readers have for interpreting text* onto the shoulders of the people who authored that text. There’s a quite reasonable fear here: what if I write something that hurts someone because they had some baggage I had no way of knowing about or accounting for, and I’m held to be culpable? Is it fair to hold authors** wholly accountable for every possible reaction to their work? I don’t think so. Authors certainly have a responsibility to write with care, and empathy, and concern for their audience. But that responsibility can only go so far. Meaning is created when a reader interacts with a text, not when that text is laid down. Meaning is a negotiation between reader and text. The author has responsibility for her words, but not your reading of them. An obvious consequence of this is that different people will negotiate different meanings from the text. You can see this principle at work in any OTP flame war. (“Harry/Hermionie will never die! The text supports it! JK Rowling was wrong!“) A trigger warning can be seen to undermine this principle; it can seem to implicitly support the notion that an objectivist reading of the text is the “correct” one, that texts have a single meaning, and that the meaning a reader will take from a text and consequences of that meaning upon the reader can be reliably predicted a priori.
To be blunt, this is a terrifying notion, and while I do not agree that trigger warnings work in this manner, I do not dismiss the concerns of those who do. I personally consider trigger warnings to fall into the field of things that you can do to show your concern and empathy for your reader, because while you cannot be assured ahead of time how people will read your work, you can be reasonably confident that discussing certain topics will elicit painful reactions for certain people. You can’t predict everyone’s trigger, but that doesn’t mean that no effort should be made to provide warnings for the very common ones. (Although please remember I do not think they should be mandatory.)
Then there is the school of thought that says that trigger warnings are just another part of the continuing effort of some people to carpet the world in eggshells and call that safety. I have mixed feelings about this objection. On the one hand, I see where it is coming from. Some people–not many, but a few–seem to only be able to operate inside a carefully maintained safety bubble, and instead of using that bubble as a refuge to grow stronger so that they may engage with the world as an independent adult, they seem more intent on annexing more and more of the world to sit within their little bubble. This is a tremendously entitled attitude, because it presumes that their needs are (or should be) preeminent over all other concerns. It presumes that if the rest of the world finds something to be innocuous, but they find it to be poisonously objectionable, that their objection should have priority. Worse, this attitude is self-defeating. The thing about comfort zones is that they are constantly shrinking unless you make a point to step outside them every now and again. Comfort zones are, as the name implies, comfortable. But you don’t want to let them become a prison.
On the other hand, we’ve had warnings and labels on media for decades now, and while I would argue that ratings systems are generally bad and impinge upon art and expression, they haven’t destroyed our culture yet. If you oppose trigger warnings out of some principled opposition to labeling any media, then that’s at least consistent, but I’ve never actually seen anyone advance that position. What I have seen is an extraordinary level of fury directed at an emergent behavior that first showed up in spaces primarily controlled and mediated by women, and I don’t think that is a coincidence. So is this really an effort to sand all the rough edges off of life? Or is it a movement to get people to voluntarily provide information to the other members of their community so that they may make informed decisions on if they wish to consent to a particular conversation? Remember that trigger warnings do not necessary imply the attitude I described in the paragraph above; there are plenty of people who use them just to be neighborly. If someone wants to step outside their comfort zone, that’s great, but they should have the opportunity to give informed consent before doing so!
Like I said, I’ve got mixed feelings on this point.
So that’s the three main theoretical objections to trigger warnings that I am aware of and consider worth engaging. There may be some other theoretical objection I’m forgetting at the moment, and if it is brought to my attention, I’ll take a look at it as well.
From this point on we move out of objections to theory and into objections to practice. It might be tempting to say that these objections are less important because they are not objections to the very concept of trigger warnings, but I don’t think that is fair or accurate. A lot of the most passionate arguments against trigger warnings have been objections to how they manifest and are applied to texts, and so it is worth taking a look at these arguments and seeing if there is any merit to them. (Spoiler: I tend to agree with these a lot more than the theoretical objections.)
PRACTICE
The first and most important objection to how trigger warnings actually manifest in the real world is that they can be used to bully and control people. This can take two forms.
The first is the one that people tend to think of when you talk about bullying via trigger warnings: an angry hothouse flower demanding that trigger warnings be included on everything, and if you don’t include them you’re a Bad Person and Bad People deserve all the abuse that can be shoveled onto them. I have not seen this behavior in the wild very often, but it does happen. Usually, people who behave this way are so obnoxious to be around that they get sidelined pretty quick by anyone who doesn’t already think exactly like them, and so are not a very large concern. Remember there are assholes everywhere, and in every movement. You don’t have to take everyone seriously, and don’t let the most embarrassing members of a movement define the entirety of that movement for you.
Much, much more troubling are the people who try to weaponize trigger warnings as a means of marginalizing other people. A very dear friend of mine was once told point blank that the fact that she is fat and disabled was triggering to someone else, and so she should not participate in a public activity. Alternatively, they may have been satisfied by her walking down the streets while ringing a bell and shouting “UNCLEAN, UNCLEAN.” Let us be very clear on something: if another person’s mere existence is a trigger for you, then that is your problem to solve.*** They are under no obligation to curtail their life just so that you won’t have to deal with the horrible trauma of living in a world with people who aren’t like you.
In summation, if you have ever felt the need to write something along the lines of “trigger warning: black people” or “trigger warning: mental disabilities” then please go fuck yourself with a lit road flare.
Another practical objection is that trigger warnings, as they are currently used, seem to be devaluing the concept of triggering. A trigger, in PTSD terms, does not mean “that makes me uncomfortable.” It means “I am having a psychological episode and the thing you are doing is making it worse.” Being triggered into an episode of PTSD is dangerous. It can cause an episode of depression, it make someone temporarily unfit to do their job (with all the professional consequences that implies), and can seriously impinge upon a person’s quality of life, or even their basic self-sufficiency. At the extremes, it can set someone up for an episode of suicidal ideation. It is not simply being made uncomfortable until the uncomfortable stimulus leaves.
And yet we have people claiming to be “triggered” by various things when their behavior suggests they merely found it distasteful. This is one of those things that’s hard to give guidelines for spotting, because it’s so contextual, and because PTSD manifests in so many different ways. As a general rule of thumb, don’t just assume this is what is happening when someone says they are triggered by something that you find to be innocuous. But at the same time, if you spend enough time in certain corners of the Internet, you’ll find colonies of people who seem to be triggered by everything from paying their bills to tying their shoes. Who get “triggered” in one minute, and then enjoy a fascinating, not-at-all-troubled conversation in the next. Who use “you’re triggering me” when they really mean “shut up.”
This is sort of related to the first of the two bully/control objections, but I’m breaking it out as a separate point here because I think it is important to point out how this dilution of the concept of triggering can hurt people who actually have triggers. Because if the group ethos implicitly decides that a “trigger” is really just a matter of courtesy and decorum, and not, you know, a fucking medical issue, then that means the whole space becomes less safe for people who really do need the ability to identify various stimuli as being actively dangerous for them to be around.
This tendency towards dilution becomes especially dangerous in places where these communities abut the internet at large, because people who aren’t familiar with these conversations will observe trigger warnings being requested and given for all manner of exceedingly mild things (I have seen a trigger warning for profanity, for example ) and may eventually conclude that the whole idea is milquetoast bullshit and should be done away with. And so now, another potentially helpful tool has been squandered, and my friends who have PTSD are, for most intents and purposes, back at square one.
The last objection to how trigger warnings are used in practice is that sometimes people who advocate for them behave badly in ways that are unrelated to the actual substance of trigger warnings or their absence. This is a stupid fucking argument and should not be taken seriously.
IMPLEMENTATION
Now, with all that written above, you may have noticed something odd. It sure sounds like I like trigger warnings, and yet there are none on this blog. Here’s why: I don’t use them. I never have, really. There was a time when I found some of the arguments described above to be a little more convincing than I do now, but the root of my opposition to using them was always this:
Triggers can be anything, and everyone is equally valuable, so how can I warn everyone equally? Some people are triggered by seeing dogs; should all posts with pictures of dogs in them come with trigger warnings? Some people are triggered by some of the most random, otherwise innocuous stimuli. It’s impossible to effectively warn for everything, but to warn for some triggers and not others is implicit favoritism.
I’ve since abandoned this position because the perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and just because I can’t warn everyone for their trigger doesn’t mean I shouldn’t warn for really common triggers. Of course, I still don’t use trigger warnings per se. What I use are content notes.
A content note works better than a trigger warning, I think, for a variety of reasons.
First, they don’t devalue triggers. You can include a content note for some content that may not be triggering to many people, but which will reliably make many of them uncomfortable without implying that triggers are merely a matter of comfort. Comfort matters! It really does. But it’s not as severe an overriding concern as triggering a medical episode is, and so we should not conflate the two. With a content note, you can be courteous to your readers without feeding the dangerous notion that triggers are just things some people don’t like. Meanwhile, those who really would get triggered by whatever it is the content note is signposting get all the warning they need to protect themselves. It works for everybody.
Second, they put the focus on the work, not on people’s reaction to the work. The first page of my first novel has only one sentence on it: “Content note: this book contains depictions of sexual assault.” The sentence is clear, concise, and focused on the contents of the text, not any person’s reaction. It’s not a promise I’m making to the reader, or the fulfillment of an obligation. It’s a note between the text and the reader about the text the reader is getting ready to engage with. The space between the text and the reader is where meaning is negotiated and created, and so that is the most appropriate place to situate such a note. It says to the reader how you take this text is up to you, but heads up, here’s something you might want to know before continuing.
Could a trigger warning carry the same meaning? Quite likely. But I think it also implicitly carries a lot of other baggage. A trigger warning is not a note about the text, it is a note about the presumed reaction to the text that some readers may have. And in that, it somehow seems to trespass upon a space that I hold sacred, the space between reader and text. I have my favorite authors, the ones who reliably create texts in which I find great meaning or even just a fun few hours, but that does not mean that I think they are wholly, or even mostly responsible for the experiences I have when reading. When the author steps in to warn me about an experience she thinks I may have, rather than simply providing me with a note to tell me about some of the text I am about to read, it is as if she is jiggling my elbow, and whispering in my ear. No, stop. Your part in this ended when you sent it out for publishing. Now it is the reader’s.
I am aware that this is really deep into lit nerd territory, and so others may not find this argument to be persuasive, but this alone is enough for me to favor an alternative to trigger warnings. For most people, the first point is probably the more important one.
Another facet of how I use content warnings is that I use them sparingly. I do this because I don’t believe in safe spaces, and I think attempting to create them is a bad idea. There are safer spaces, considered spaces, but no place is truly safe. However I do care for my readers, and so I want the warnings that I give them to be taken seriously. If a warning becomes routine, it loses its efficacy. Does that run the risk that someone could see something on this blog that unsettles them or makes them uncomfortable or even triggers them without being warned ahead of time? Well, yes, but that’s a risk that we all take getting out of bed in the morning. I can’t promise safety, only consideration and my best efforts.
I think that’s what most people who use trigger warnings think, too. We know we can’t promise safety, we can only do the best we can. They just reached a different conclusion than I did about what that means for them.
Which is fine.
*I’m using “text” here in the litary analysis sense; that is to say, the sum body of a peice of communication, even if it is not literally text.
**Have you ever written anything online, ever? Then you’re one of these authors I’m talking about. Don’t think this only applies to professional writers.
***An exception can be made here for, say, someone who tried to rape and murder you, but that’s an individual who has made themselves unwelcome in your life for what they did. That distinction is critical!