"There is something about making things beautiful, and we sometimes call that art, that has something to do with creating a commonality between human beings so that they don’t kill each other. And whatever that impulse is, and wherever it comes from, it certainly is contained within every human being. … Sometimes, the opportunity to articulate it occurs; sometimes, it remains dormant for a lifetime." -- Milton Glaser, artist and designer of the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo
CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSIONS OF RACISM, MISOGYNY, SEXUAL ABUSE, CONFEDERATE IMAGERY, SLAVERY
Trigger warnings are a good thing.
No. Stop typing. If you don’t like trigger warnings, all that means is: they’re not for you. They don’t hurt you in any way, they don’t affect the rest of what you’re reading or watching in any way, and if they bother you that is a personal annoyance and nothing else. And if that doesn’t convince you, then you’re a big whiny baby who needs to grow up.*
*There’s an important distinction that needs to be made when discussing the current “trigger warning” discourse. A lot of people are suspicious of content warnings, and react negatively to news about one being added to a popular piece of media, because there has been a long history of cultural conservatives/”concerned” parents/Tipper Gore-types using content restrictions as a form of de facto censorship and economic sabotage. If you’ve ever wondered why people in comics and Hollywood react so quickly to condemn any signs of pressure to restrict themselves according to the political and moral demands of outsiders, it’s because for those industries the vast majority of pressure to put content warnings on their products has come in the form of censorship campaigns like The Comics Code Authority and the Hollywood blacklists. The threat of these kinds of moral panics and de facto censorship campaigns are still very real, which is why we’re going to make it clear right now: we’re not talking about those kinds of content warnings.
For the sake of clarity, this article will use terms like “trigger warning” and “content warning” to refer to the ones being advocated from below, not from the mainstream consensus or above, and only to content warnings that are meant to further a progressive political agenda.
It’s also worth remembering that some imposed content warnings/ratings were compromises that allowed for freer artistic expression in mass cultural art: the current movie rating system (G, PG, etc.) was created to fend off attempts to censor mature content and “difficult” topics, by creating additional ratings other than the then-used binary of “general audience”, or an X-rating that doomed any movie it was put on to being ignored and feared by the general public. Also worth noting: one of the current Hollywood rating system’s longest and loudest critics is the man who created it, who says the system is too restrictive to moviemakers and has been coopted by financial interests and moral censors. That’s all an exception to the norm, though, so we’ll treat it as the exception that proves the rule.
First things first, let’s get our definitions straight: a content warning is a statement at the beginning of a piece of media that warns the audience about potentially inflammatory or upsetting topics, issues, and/or traumatic experiences that the media will discuss or allude to. Ideally, a content/trigger warning includes a description or a list of what those inflammatory or upsetting topics, issues, or experiences are; because that’s the point of a content warning. The reason these kinds of warnings are included is to warn people who want to avoid the subjects/experiences listed in the content warning before they start consuming or engaging with a piece of media. A content warning might dissuade someone from engaging with a piece of media because they find it distasteful, or they are not in a mood where they want to engage with serious or difficult issues.
There are other types of content warnings than those that warn consumers of potential triggers. Content warnings are designed to warn consumers about entertainment products they might not enjoy. Some content warnings are used to contextualize works from the past that espouse beliefs or have portrayals of certain peoples that are no longer acceptable according to modern science or values, or that need explaining to a modern audience (an especially useful thing for students and teachers). Whether a piece of media is a television show, a textbook, a movie, a news broadcast, a YouTube video, etc. etc. etc., the purpose of a content warning is always the same: to inform the audience about what some of the things a piece of media includes are, so that the audience can appreciate the proper context and make informed decisions as consumers, students, teachers, artists, etc..
More importantly, there are a specific type of content warnings called trigger warnings, which serve a more specific purpose.** Trigger warnings are included because for some people, especially those who have experienced long-term trauma from abuse, engaging with upsetting or disturbing topics/scenes/etc., can have a subconscious reaction that causes them to relive the emotional experience that caused their trauma. The psychological term for that kind of subconscious reaction is being triggered. Whatever it is that causes that subconscious reaction is a trigger, because it activates the subconscious mental process that leads to someone having their traumatic memories and experiences triggered — and to be clear, “triggered” is an official psychological/medical term. These kinds of “triggered” reactions can be small and pass quickly, but for others they can cause serious emotional disturbance from fully reliving the worst experience(s) of their lives. Trigger warnings give people a chance to avoid that painful experience, or any other potentially unpleasant reactions, before it happens.
That’s it. That’s all a trigger warning, or a content warning, or whatever else you want to call it is. It’s not an insult, to a piece of media or its audience. It’s not a punishment, and it’s not a moral or personal judgement of any kind. A content warning is a description of what a piece of media includes, to inform the audience. If you’ve ever read the back cover of a book or the track list on an album, or have browsed tags on a streaming service, then you already know that a description of a work’s content that gives the audience information on what they are about to consume does not harm the audience or change the rest of the media’s content. A back cover provides information on genre, plot, characters, and sometimes the author, all to inform you about a book’s contents so you can make informed decisions. A content warning is the same thing, but instead it describes different aspects of the media’s content so that audience members who have other concerns than just plot or genre can make informed decisions.
Oh, and btw? When you complain about how trigger warnings make you feel attacked and unappreciated, and how they hurt your feelings in a way that does serious harm to you as a person, or in a way that excludes your viewpoint so completely that you think the rest of society has to get involved to make it better? That’s being triggered. So, again: pull your head out of your ass and grow up.
**Once more, for the sake of clarity we’re not going to consider trigger warnings for seizures or similar visual stimuli-based warnings because those usually aren’t the types of trigger warning the current mainstream media debate is about.
The most common smear against trigger warnings is they’re just there to make people feel bad. Instead of considering who might find trigger warnings useful or helpful, the reactionary response to trigger warnings is for people who don’t need them (or don’t think they do) to act like the existence of trigger warnings imposes on them, or otherwise restricts how they can personally engage with a piece of media. It’s a simple argument, and it’s even simpler to disprove, given how the basis of most people’s objections to content warnings is their feeling that content warnings are something being imposed on them: the only way a content warning that is meant for someone other than you is an imposition on you, is if you think being reminded other people exist and have their own experiences somehow takes something away from you. So either you’re a huge asshole, or you might want to talk to a therapist to help you work through whatever it is that’s making you so hostile to other people’s opinions on the things you like; you might even have a couple of psychological triggers that subconsciously remind you of hurtful or traumatic experiences. If that’s the case, as a responsible writer and editor I feel the need to inform you that you might want to come back to this later or skip it entirely, because the same subjects are going to come up again.
See? The trigger warning worked!
So, just to make it clear:
Content warnings, trigger warnings, whatever you prefer to call them, are a good thing.
Another important thing about content warnings that often gets lost in the partisan political narratives:
Content warnings are not apologies.
The centrist conception of content warnings is that a content warning’s only purpose is to remind people that bad things have happened in the past and they should feel guilty about it. The root cause of the mainstream public’s suspicion towards content warnings is the obvious one: the empowered classes feel uncomfortable thinking about societal injustices happening around them in ways that benefit them, as the empowered classes do in all societies. Some of them are outright bigoted and will always follow their reactionary instincts by defending the status quo for the admitted purpose of excluding the already-excluded. But the mainstream opinion about trigger warnings isn’t that extreme, and most people are not as reflexively hostile as right-wing panderers are to the idea of considering other people’s basic dignity (when I started writing this months ago, anyway…).
The most common misconception about trigger warnings aside from that, in both the public and the mainstream media, is the mistaken belief that trigger warnings are directed at the entire audience, and are directed at all the individual members of the audience equally. Whenever there’s a news story about a trigger warning being added at the front of a textbook or a piece of classic literature for educational purposes, the media almost always does its usual thing of presenting the “issue” as a debate between two equally valid opinions from two equally respectful viewpoints. The liberal centrist response to Right/Republican attacks on content warnings (again, as of when I started writing this, anyway…) usually takes the position that content warnings are excessive and selfish, but that’s still a more positive and productive attitude than Republicans’ position of, “Fuck you.”
But there is something the advocates of progressive content warnings should be wary about, especially now that corporate entities and right-wing pundits have fully assimilated the content warning debate into their culture war arsenal. In addition to the regressive psychological effects of societal privilege, many “regular people” feel uncomfortable about discussions of sexism, racism, classism, etc. because (among other things) they feel that the state of society is unjust, so they empathize with the marginalized, at least in broad. Most liberal-leaning centrists are members of the empowered classes who benefit from the status quo, but whose actual influence over the structures of power is marginal (at best). The most challenging barrier for anyone in that position is overcoming their subconscious hostility to reminders of societal injustices that are well beyond their control, but which they benefit from just by their station in life. As ridiculous and hyperbolic as some people’s reactions to those reminders are, it’s important to remember how unpleasant those reminders can be even when the other party is being polite as possible, which isn’t always the case (nor should it be). In the final accounting, however, the burden of changing that attitude is on the empowered classes, which will require a lot of them to suck it up at least a little at some point, and save it for the times when the justifiable anger and discontent they feel can motivate and maintain mass action and political pressure.***
If you’re still mad about trigger warnings after all that: seriously, fix your heart, already.
***The good news is, the expectations for anyone looking to jump aboard and contribute are probably as low as they will get, given what the national political realities are right now. There are needs that can be addressed by directing more of that kind of pressure on the right people, but it’s hard to believe anyone expects a nationwide movement to be mobilized by the next election that advocates for anything good for the marginalized and soon-to-be downsized.
With all of that said, there’s another aspect of content warnings that complicates the issue. The problem isn’t with content warnings in general; the issue is how they are often used. Along with all of the other mental and cultural static that content warnings that represent the disempowered, most people in the general public feel suspicious about content warnings because of the way corporate IP owners use them. The average person’s exposure to the current culture war battle over content warnings is a content warning from a corporate IP owner that is not useful in any of the ways progressive content warnings should be. The only thing the kind of content warning most people are exposed to does, is remind the audience that bad things happen, and that they should feel bad about it in the most helpless and resentful way possible — which matches up exactly with what right wing smears against content warnings say they are.
Of all the damage caused by the corporate seizure of the public’s perception of content warnings, one of the most significant is how IP owners are reinforcing the root assumption of conservative/reactionary opposition to progressive content warnings. For the average person, their entire concept of “trigger warnings” is based off of the partisan media that wants to talk about everything that trigger warnings “mean”, except what trigger warnings are for. Their first exposure to an actual content warning usually comes from a piece of popular media whose corporate owners use content warnings to boost their image in a way that pleases investors and partisan commenters. All of these things frame content warnings as an obligation to be endured, and something the audience has to be subjected to as a type of mandated re-education from authority, and only to please the authority subjecting them to that treatment.
The mainstream conception of content warnings is so performative and based on signaling partisan values, the current controversy over content warnings has led corporate IP owners to create content warnings that provide as little information as possible, and are addressed to so broad an audience, they might as well have been designed to attract hostility on purpose. Instead of being informative, these kinds of supposed content warnings only repeat vague centrist talking points that avoid the substance of the issues at hand, to simply demonstrate for the public that the corporate IP owners of a piece of media are taking one side or another in the social/media storm around the “issue” of trigger warnings.
The mainstream-produced variety of content warnings serve no function, other than to inform the audience they should feel bad for things that are out of their control, and be suspicious of an entire piece of media for non-specified offenses. Many of the content warnings applied to mainstream media are not made to appease the people who want or need content warnings, but to appease the suspicions of content warnings’ most tolerant critics, who want content warnings to be as nonspecific as possible about who should feel bad, and to provide no information on why they should feel that way. Content warnings designed for a reactionary audience, who only supports content warnings out of a centrist conception of fairness, will always be useless from a progressive standpoint. All those types of content warnings will say is that something in a piece of media might offend some people, without ever specifying what the specific offensive content is or, more importantly, explaining why a piece of media is deserving of a content warning.
This distorted conception/practice of trigger warnings has created the most damaging and difficult misconception about what trigger warnings are:
Trigger warnings are not apologies.
Coming in part 2: No one watches The Muppets to start a dialogue.
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