Trigger Warnings
 

I've gotten into a discussion on trigger warnings or Simon Hunt's Metrical Facing Time thread, and it really should be transferred to General Talk to avoid distracting the thread more than I have already. Our discussion in the thread is fairly self-evident, and here is a very recent article from the Atlantic on the subject, which was resonating with me when I saw Simon's post, (I hope it shows, and it just isn't readable for me because I'm a subscriber), as well as a teaser first paragraph:

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.


Comments?

I think it's an interesting/significant topic, but: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=22937.

Coming back to add a comment. Once I started reading the Atlantic article, this passage from Alan Watts's The Book: The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are came to mind:

Safety first! (Reality and its messy imperfections, way down the list.)

I guess I should say something since my poem-thread led to this thread and since I am not going to enjoy seeming briefly to be the poster-boy for political-correctness-run-amok or whatever.

In fact, I think I would largely agree with Michael Cantor about matters of politics, intellectual freedom, the value in confronting difficult matters, the importance of humor, censorship, etc.

However, while Michael (and Andrew?) might lump "trigger warnings" (of the kind I appended to my poem without much thought--and do I regret it now? anyway, feel free to stop by...) into a dangerous larger cultural phenomenon, I would point out the following:

such warnings are intended as a courtesy to people who might find what's ahead traumatic; in this sense they do not censor but fore-warn; to make an analogy with what Andrew quotes, they're not so much like signs that forbid everything fun as like signs that say "Hey, there may be poison oak on the trail ahead."

Honestly, I don't have a dog in this fight, but here I find myself. Best wishes, all.

Quoting from Andrew's quoted segment, about signs in public areas:

I'm not at all persuaded that those signs are motivated by concern for safety. I submit they're there as protection against liability in the rare event of some accident or injury. Blame the lawyers.

The call for trigger warnings discussed in the Atlantic has a different motivation. It's a different, second issue, and I'd prefer not to get into that discussion.

A third different issue is the Sphere's long-standing preference for title-field warnings about language or narration that will bother some readers. We all know some Sphere members wish the guidelines didn't call for those warnings. But they do. Innocent posters who are simply trying to comply with the guidelines should not have to fear getting involved in this fight, and distracted from the poem, every time they want to post edgy material.

If you want a guideline change, get together with like-minded members and bother Alex, not other poets.

If this thread aims to find like-minded members, fine. (Incidentally, I'm not one.)

There's a big difference between finding something offensive or disturbing and having one's post-traumatic stress disorder triggered.

Here's a good reply to the Atlantic essay, from the perspective of someone who does get triggered by reading material. (My triggers are things like having a large man suddenly looming near. I've never been triggered by reading material, but I still wouldn't wish a PTSD episode on anyone.)

Note that the author of the reply essay doesn't use the warnings to avoid reading difficult material. Trigger warnings just give her the opportunity to mentally prepare herself to engage with that material, and perhaps save it until she's in a more convenient (e.g., private) setting. Her perspective is similar to that of a student veteran I spoke with a few years ago. He appreciated trigger warnings for scenes of graphic violence, so that he could postpone the reading of that material until he was home.

Trigger warnings (and strong language warnings, for that matter) aren't censorship. They ADD information, rather than taking information away. The kinds of things talked about in the Atlantic article attempt to make professors restructure curricula to avoid potentially distressing topics. Those things constitute censorship and an assault on academic freedom, and I decry them, but I hope we can agree that these things are SEVERAL hues down the spectrum from simply making readers aware of possible triggers.

For those who haven't clicked, here's the conclusion of the piece Julie linked above:

"If you do not find a particular piece of content triggering, do not automatically assume that it will not trigger someone else. It is a privilege to not feel pain or trauma in a way others might. You lose nothing by showing people the compassion my professor showed my peers and me. Rather than claiming that you are "afraid" of backlash, treat others as people who are coming to the table with vastly different experiences from you. In doing so, you'll establish vital connections and earn the respect of those around you."

Pretty well said. The "privilege" part is especially striking.

Best,

Bill

We had a discussion on this not that long ago. I ask a question to anyone who supports the use of trigger warnings: Can you give me an example of serious literature that does not require a trigger warning of some sort? And if you cannot, can you concede then that art often deals with unsavory aspects of life, and that this had been understood implicitly by everyone up until earlier this year when a few intellectually-lacking students chose to flaunt their ignorance of art and life and good taste?

Bill, privilege to not feel pain does not exist because all people feel pain of some sort. No one has that "privilege."

Caitlin Flanagan's "That's Not Funny!" in the same Atlantic issue covers the death and dearth of humor among college students.

Too much pussyfootin'. And I thought college was supposed to be a liberating experience. Well, it was in the 60s anyway.

Sorry. This was irrelevant. I had misunderstood others' take on the subject and now realise that mine was irrelevant to the discussion.

I don't think you can wrap life in cotton wool, I doubt if avoiding 'triggers' is helpful to those trying to cope with PTSD.
Michael's initial examples are almost bizarre, University should be a place where youth confronts and tries to understand the dreadful realities of life that childhood is shielded from.
I am still haunted by watching the last interview with Ted Bundy, seen at Uni, I sometimes wish I hadn't watched this interview with a notorious serial killer, but on the other hand it taught me a great deal about how normal evil can appear, Ted Bundy was intelligent and handsome, it was only for a split second that the mask dropped and the monster within revealed itself.
The idea that you can avoid these aspects of life, rape, child murder, torture, etc is absurd.

Well said, Ross.

Whilst I am totally sympathetic to anyone's suffering, whether you call it PTSD or something else... life has to be lived, and we all have to learn to deal with the unsavoury aspects of it.

Added in: I was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, but any mention of the subject doesn't traumatise me all over again. I don't require a "trigger warning" every time I read something about it. It happened; I can't change that, but I can ''pigeon-hole'' it - and get on with my life, being happy with the good bits, in the meantime.

Always they must see these things and hear them
--Wilfred Owen, "Mental Cases"

[Edited to say: Sorry to hear that you were a victim of childhood sexual abuse, too, and very glad to hear you don't have PTSD flashbacks to it. I do to mine. But everybody's different.]

[Edited again to add: I think the question of whether trigger warnings (or strong language warnings) are appropriate in a college classroom is a very different question than whether such warnings are appropriate in this forum, in which no one's grade is penalized for not being able to participate in a discussion that feels too personal, and our emotional reactions are only public if we choose to make them so.]

I'm really sorry that you still suffer, Julie. I do have flashbacks - of course I do, from time to time, but I have loved my life for the most part, ...so far! :)

The man who was responsible for abusing me is long dead (Yay, I rejoice about that!), so I just don't see the point in letting him have an effect on me, certainly not so that I continue to suffer from his actions. I won't allow the bastard to have any power whatsoever over my life!

That's my way of dealing with it, but I wholly understand that it's not as easy as that for everyone.

Jayne

I think trigger warnings are (or should be) context dependent. In a college-level literature class, I think there shouldn't be trigger warnings on anything, really. My undergraduate institution was pretty good about that. One particular theory professor I had would go on tangents about virtually every "sensitive" subject under the sun, whether that was rape, racism, politics, pornography...you name it. So far as I'm aware, he never received a complaint, as it was all contextualized -- it could all be related back to literary theory in some sense.

Last week I circulated that Atlantic article to a few colleagues who specialize in academic writing -- rhet/comp particularly. One of them is utterly against trigger warnings, and the Atlantic article meshed perfectly with his teaching M.O. Mine too, come to that. Again, in academic contexts, I think trigger warnings are generally unnecessary and tend to create sensitivities where analytics are preferable.

In other contexts, however, I can see the need for trigger warnings. I don't think they're necessary in workshop poems at the 'Sphere. And, I should point out, they're not actually required in the header -- I caught a bit of heat for adding one in TDE a year or so ago when I was under the impression that header warnings were required. A thorough reading through the guidelines reveal that they're not. But sometimes there are things that I really don't want to see or read. Things that have a deeply unsettling impact on me that I would like a warning for. For instance: last year one of my "Facebook friends" posted a link that showed a picture of a toddler -- no older than three years old -- with her head caved in by some munition of some kind. The look of anguish in her father's eyes as he was holding her, combined with the sheer horror of the situation literally traumatized me. It's hard to express on an Internet forum that I have a strong constitution and wouldn't throw the term "traumatized" around casually, but suffice it to say that it created afterimages for me, and I would wake up and see the picture before my eyes... Had the story not led with a horrific graphic picture, and instead said "Israeli Toddler Killed by Mortar -- WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES," you can be assured that I wouldn't have looked at it.

There's a school of thought that maintains that seeing or reading disturbing things is good, because it provokes a response, and hopefully, a reaction. But I don't think that's the case very often in legitimate real-world scenarios. Atrocities are perpetrated every hour of every day worldwide, and there has to be some filter (self-imposed or otherwise) for us to effectively cope in an arguably violent world.

Again, as in most things, context is key.

Trigger warnings in academia and journalism can be harmful. We need to grapple with life's difficulties and feel how others are suffering. College classes and the news should facilitate these things.

When we ask others for help, though, we should be considerate of them. If it occurs to a poet that some of her colleagues might be triggered by something in a workshopped poem, I see no harm in a trigger warning. The worst result is that some may find the warning ridiculous.

Simon, sorry about the misunderstanding but I actually hadn’t read your thread yesterday, so my comment had nothing to do with it. The Atlantic article triggered me. :D My take on the Alan Watts quote is that he meant to say that the mechanized modern nation-state is straitjacketed by rules and regulations, whether the lawyers are behind it (as Maryann suggests) or not. And that is why I see the quote as relevant to what the Atlantic article talks about. It’s a collective mindset.

Having read Simon’s poem now, my feeling is that while it does explore shadowy areas, it is mild and inoffensive compared to, say, Frank Bidart’s sex-deviant serial-killer poems. And if the Bidart is taught in college courses, as I suppose it must be, I wouldn’t want the course description beforehand, or the professor in the middle of the course, to have to issue any “trigger warnings,” since I assume that anyone old enough to be in college knows that literature can often be dark or disturbing. Why can’t students simply be advised to inquire ahead of time, if they’re concerned a course might have subject matter they’d want to avoid for the time being (a perfectly valid choice)? The onus should be on the students to seek out that information in advance, not on the generally overworked and underpaid teachers.

Should trigger warnings be mandatory?

--I'd say NO on the principle of free speech, as well as that of intellectual freedom.

Should trigger warnings be prohibited at all times?

--I'd say NO on the same two principles.

Should trigger warnings offered as a courtesy (however unnecessarily or even ridiculously) be publicly criticized?

--With all due respect to Michael Cantor, whom I like, learn from, and respect for (among other reasons) the (trigger warning. Ha!) bullshit-detecting that enhances our collective experience here, I'd say NO based on the logic above and on, like, manners. Would you criticize publicly somebody who held a door for you that you preferred to open yourself or wished you a happy "wrong" winter holiday?

By the way, I was offline for 24 hours to camp with the scouts, so I'm behind on reading and responding to this thread (for which I feel some responsibility) and the original poem-thread. Also, I showed my wife this thread and told her how I created a mini-kerfuffle by deviating from my usual practice. She said, "Duh, you gave a trigger warning because YOU were traumatized by writing the poem [it's true as I described in the poem-thread in a reply to Julie...]. Also, your little computer friends need to lighten up." Sorry, Michael...

Too close to call, really.
 

FWIW, I wonder if those of us who attended university in the 1960s and 1970s see any similarities here. Speaking objectively, I'd say today's students have an ever-so-slight edge in humourlessness but we outpip them in sanctimony.

Colin

Privilege to not feel pain doesn't exist. True. But the desire to explore ways to at least not add to the pain is hard to fault. I don't find myself triggered by creative writing of any kind. So it would be easy for me to jump on the "too much pussfooting" wagon. But then I remember hearing a bit of this recording that was supposedly a piece of the real life recording of the death by Grizzly of two humans that inspired the end details of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. Even Herzog after hearing the tapes suggested they be destroyed and censored the recordings from being used in the movie. There is a power in the combination of actual trauma and technological transportation of that trauma into spaces incongruous with its nature. That tape can infect your soul. I imagine for some people, their lives make them open to that sort of pain from things that I wouldn't even notice. Until I understand the stakes, I would rather be too careful than too certain. I think so, anyway.

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.

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.

I'm having a Lewis Black moment

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

Exactly. This is a much more common, and for more significant, problem. And here's a little tidbit from today's news:

"“I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it,” Brian Grasso wrote on the Duke University Class of 2019 Facebook page, a closed group. He cited its “graphic visual depictions of sexuality,” as part of his reason. “Duke did not seem to have people like me in mind,” he added. “It was like Duke didn’t know we existed, which surprises me.”"

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement...istian_beliefs

The right complains ceaselessly about trigger warnings and professorial statements, but the right also is ceaselessly saying they shouldn't have to read stuff. How can they have it both ways?

Best,

Bill

My apologies, John--I completely misread your reply to Andrew.

Not at all, Julie. I am glad you see what I meant. You must admit those percentages are peculiar.

It is now accepted by right-thinking Telegraph readers (that's me) that the incidence of homosexuality in the community is 1.5% Really, I never heard such balls.

Yes, Michael Cantor, I do wish to comment on this matter.

College kids are full of piss and vinegar on their very best days. It is a normal consequence of growing up, tweaking the establishment from every side. It is purely angst banging. Some of these young adults bring their brand of deviousness from high school to the college campus just to get a rise out of anyone for their own pleasure. These birds then step back and watch the carnage, drink beer, point their fingers, and laugh their collective asses off, all the while pretending to be serious.It is not a game for the naive to play. Some folks (another commenter or two) in this thread wish to pawn all of this silliness off on politics, left and right, or religion. How silly. These kids are still wet behind the ears. Professors run the risk of annoying these twits every day. Political correctness has run so rampant over the past twenty or so years that adults are scared
sh-tless to confront them. This political correctness is so pervasive and out of control that all of society (except ISIS) seems emasculated.

The same crap is happening to the writing world, especially poets who have been the guard against such crappery. Are there things that we shouldn't see with our eyes? Yep. Are there things we shouldn't hear with our ears? Yep. Are there things we shouldn't say to one another? Yep. But those things are said, heard and seen. Trigger warnings in the poetry here? Show me the monkey virgins who write around these parts. Come on, man. Free speech, Michael, free speech. We don't need no stinkin' warnings. Life is much worse than you can imagine. And better.

Sorry John. I should have been clear. I am interested in PTSD. My daughter deals with it. The section of the article that questions whether avoiding triggers is healthy or part of the problem made me look at things from another side. It may not be a good article. I don't know that site. Quincy and Julie's points makes good sense. I will just listen from here out on this. Sorry for my diversion.
Brian, any time you see my name consider it a split infinitive warning and spare us both the interaction.

Ha! Part one revoked!!

Charlie :Show me the monkey virgins who write around these parts.

I'm your huckleberry.
Wait....what's a monkey virgin.....?

Except for those students who aren't particularly political and are in college to do a degree and get a job, as well as those who are more thoughtful and intellectually engaged without being generally anti-Establishment. I can attest to both kinds of student being fairly thick on the ground.

Again, having grown up around a campus (the University of Oklahoma), attended a couple of universities (University of Texas, Columbia), and taught at four of the things in two countries, I have never, not once, encountered a student of which this is true.

I hear they have necking parties without chaperons, too!

Jeepers! If this were not self-contradictory and not my experience, I'd find it terrifying.

Society's gone down the tubes because some kid spouted off about something in class or on Facebook while drinking a beer and possibly kissing a girl WHOM HE HAS NO INTENTION OF MARRYING?!? Someone call an exorcist!

I kind of lost interest by this bit. I mean, I read it, and it didn't hold together any better than what came before.

Blah blah blah.

The discussion's actually interesting at this point. Can you try not to ruin it for a change, Charlie?

Andrew, I am not critical in any way of anything you said The article, IMO, is a crap article for the reasons I put forward.

I didn’t read this whole thread, but noticed a couple of folks mentioned PTSD. Just a few days ago I read this article called “The secrets of extraordinary survivors.” I found it quite interesting.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2015...nary-survivors

Thank you, Andrew, that's very considerate of you. I shall keep my tranquillizers to hand.