[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Just jumping back in to say, after reading Michael's original post, I don't see how that sensitivity can reasonably transfer into ideas like let's not teach rape law without becoming mischievous nonsense.

[James Brancheau]

I liked it a lot, but that's one messed up movie. I'm thinking Herzog was right about those tapes. (Vaguely reminds me of the ending of Blow Out...)

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by James Brancheau

I liked it a lot, but that's one messed up movie. I'm thinking Herzog was right about those tapes. (Vaguely reminds me of the ending of Blow Out...)

Yeah. I wouldn't wanna click on that tape without a trigger warning. Before you can process what you are hearing, it has hit home. Some things when made into an artifact become a weapon.

Just adding that I haven't seen any trigger warnings in school or elsewhere but having just read through what sort of places people have demanded them, it is prolly wanna of those ideas that sounds fair but can't really work without becoming nonsense.

[AZ Foreman]

I'm having a Lewis Black moment

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

The ptsd articles linked to here in this articles below were helpful in thinking about this. I hadn't thought it through yesterday. Sorry. I blame it on the bear tape.


http://www.psmag.com/health-and-beha...research-81946

[Brian Allgar]

I wish people would add a trigger warning before splitting an infinitive.

[John Whitworth]

Andrew, those figures are remarkably low. Is there any woman who hasn't had a willy waved at her. It happened to my sister all the time on her way to school in Edinburgh. And there was a chap hung about outside my daughters' school. Everybody had seen him, as far as I coud see.
And only 2.&% of men sexually asaulted? Come along now. Were they all exceptionally ugly little boys? Did they know no vicars, scoutmasters or bachelor uncles? Or am I reading it wrong.

Perhaps it's different in the USA. You know what they say about the depravity of Europe.

[Quincy Lehr]

There is a tendency to blur trigger warnings--say, letting students know that a story features extreme violence, or that an account of the Holocaust will be especially graphic so that they can brace themselves (which is, I think, what Julie is talking about)--and the right-wing students who raised a stink when I was at Columbia because a climate scientist made a wisecrack in a lecture about the Bush Administration's environmental policies. Or a student complaining to the dean about being busted for plagiarism in a manner that he or she found insufficiently sensitive. Perhaps a significant part of the problem is that we have redefined traumatic experiences to include those where we get pissed off, our sensibilities are violated, or we simply disagree, whether in possession of the facts or not. It isn't a matter of "political correctness," necessarily, or David Horowitz-esque attempts to mobilize right-wing students against left-wing faculty--at least all the time--but, I suspect, increasingly margin-driven university administrations unable to use best judgment or, increasingly, respect academic freedom (see the case of Steven Salaita) if they think students or donors might get in their faces, whether for real or trivial cause.

[Julie Steiner]

[Edited to say: I repent of having directed the following to John, after I misread his reply to Andrew.]

Oh, honestly, John!

I agree that there is a wide, wide range of unwelcome sexual behavior...but I don't appreciate having my experience trivialized as my being unable, forty years later, to get over having had a willy waved at me.

Sheesh. Give me a little credit.

Yeah, I know you weren't talking about me personally, but still. Every woman's had a willy waved at her, so rape victims don't need trigger warnings? Seriously?

I do agree that boys get sexually assaulted far more often than is reported, by both men and women. I don't agree with your apparent implication that it is therefore not that big a deal. Some victims probably manage to shake it off and function just fine afterwards, but I know several who say they will never fully get over the negative impact of that experience. Especially if religious personnel were involved.

I mentioned my PTSD in one of the sonnets in my "Sensory Integration" series, in the current issue of Able Muse. Just to be clear, flashbacks are not bad memories that one voluntarily wallows in, instead of choosing to focusing on the bright side of life. They are involuntary time travel back to the original traumatic event--smells, sounds, sensations, etc.--accompanied by an overwhelming sense of dread and panic. I've got mine down to a second or two after they start now, which means I can break out long before the really bad bits start, but no amount of cheery philosophy is ever going to spare me the initial horrors. (Maybe if I stuck around for the bad bits, I wouldn't have flashbacks at all anymore...but I remember the bad bits well enough to know that I really, really don't want to relive those. And maybe reliving one episode would just cure that one, and still leave me with all the others. Not worth it. I'm outta there as soon as I can get.)

Anyway, I'm sympathetic to those whose traumas are more recent--we all know that campus rape does happen, right? and that there are lots of returning soldiers at universities?--who haven't yet learned to deal with their flashbacks.

I think asking professors to give a general heads-up about graphic sex or violence is a reasonable accommodation. I'm not so keen on minutely detailed trigger warnings. (Misogyny? Really? That can be deeply, deeply offensive, but I can't imagine it would actually trigger a PTSD flashback in anyone. Racism could, though.)

Here at the Sphere, it used to be standard etiquette to slap a general "content warning" on some poems, without giving away the plot specifics. And aside from the fact that some sexual profanities are demonstrably triggering for some folks, I find that an appealing practical advantage of using the "language warning" tag is that it cuts down on the people who scold you for having deployed an eff-bomb in your poem, when that kind of diction obviously suits that narrator and the tone of the piece. Of course, people are still free to criticize your use of strong language in the poem, but generally those who make it past the "language warning" tell me that I haven't been strong enough, heh.

Moving on to academia....

As I said before, I agree that some of the demands for sensitivity on university campuses are both ridiculous and dangerous, and are undoubtedly the result of good intentions run amuck within a mob mentality. We have right and good on our side! We have strength in numbers! We have the power to effect change! Let's stamp out everything that could ever conceivably offend anyone!

That said, I understand the motivation behind jumping on such torch-and-pitchfork-laden bandwagons (hmmm, mixed metaphor, but I kinda like it--sounds festive), even if I think they've gone way, way too far on numerous occasions, in terms of silencing things they don't want to hear.

To those who ask why it hasn't occurred to anyone to ask for trigger warnings in academia before now...well, I'm pretty sure it's the same reason why Bill Cosby's accusers haven't come forward before now. Because no one was ready or willing to take these individuals seriously, until they formed a mob.

I thought the recent cover of New York Magazine, was beautifully, chillingly evocative. It shows thirty-five of Bill Cosby's accusers sitting in chairs, plus an empty chair. The chair could be for the other eleven accusers who are on record but not pictured; or it could be for who knows how many others who have not wanted to face the scrutiny of coming forward publicly with accusations against Cosby; or it could be for all the women in the world whose voices have been drowned out by the ridicule, humiliation, vilification, etc., that comes along with society's general attitude toward the raped: surely they must have done something to deserve it, because nice people don't get raped.

Granted, there has not been a trial, nor is there ever likely to be, and our judicial system is supposed to be based on a presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. But my point is that if we don't like mobs, and the inevitable excesses that come with them, maybe we--society, educational institutions, the justice system--could do a better job of taking individuals seriously, so they don't feel they HAVE to form a mob in order to be heard.

[John Whitworth]

I said nothing of the sort, Julie. I was not commenting on you or your obviously truly unpleaant experiences. I was talking about what Andrew had drawn our attention to. Perhaps you might like to read it. I don't want to go on about it, but I was sexually assaulted by a dirty old man in a tenement. As have been many, many little boys. More than 2.6% of the population anyhow.

It reminds me of the other statistic we see these days. That 1.5% of the population is gay.