Of all the contested issues between millennials and those who came before us, perhaps none is so emotionally fraught as trigger warnings. Considering the fact that they’re only a sentence or two about the content of a lesson, movie, article, et cetera, one wonders why so many articles (and here’s another) have decried or passionately endorsed them.
To many young liberals, trigger warnings are a safety measure for those who’ve been through trauma. To many adults, they’re a dire sign of the erosion of freedom of speech. The little phrases stand for issues that people care about deeply—and for good reason.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about trigger warnings, since I’m an English lit/creative writing major. I’m currently querying a novel and a children’s book, and I write for my college newspaper and am on the editorial board of our literary journal. Trigger warnings affect people in my business—whether for good or for ill—more than almost any other.
Here’s the thing. Trigger warnings as a concept are entirely too broad to label as good or evil. That’s like saying that speech is good or evil. It can be both. It has been both. Trigger warnings can be used for good or for ill.
What can, at least in my mind, be placed squarely in the Bad Idea camp, is mandating trigger warnings.
For instance, if you, in a Creative Writing 101 class, say that for the duration of this term, we’ll all put content warnings on our pieces, inevitably someone will ask “What sort of content do I label?” Say you ask the class what they’d like labelled.
The answers will vary, but most of them will deal with things people find disturbing—violence or discrimination, or things that might relate to their own trauma.
To which most reasonable people will say: sure.
But I remember high school, when I first came out of the closet. I remember people being afraid of being in locker rooms with me, I remember the disturbed faces whenever I’d mention liking another girl, and I know for a fact a few of the more vicious kids, given the opportunity, would have said: “Eve being bisexual triggers me. Can she warn us if she’d going to talk about it?”
And I know that sure as hell wouldn’t have felt good.
And maybe there’s a way to prevent that kind of thing, to prevent trigger warnings from being used in that way. However, I’m at a loss as to what it is.
In our theoretical Creative Writing class, who decides what’s disturbing enough to be warning worthy? The teacher? Too authoritarian, if you ask me. The class as a whole? Better, maybe, but I can see my 11th grade classmates banding together and calling my sexuality (or Rachel’s chipmunk obsession or anything else that annoyed or confused them) triggering. I can’t really see them growing up past that after high school, either.
Any time free speech is constrained—in absolutely any way, even a way that surely seems like good idea—it affects all of us. It makes speaking out harder. And that’s dangerous.
Moving beyond Creative Writing 101, trigger warnings have bigger implications. If the government could mandate trigger warnings, conservatives would call reproductive health information triggering and try to regulate how and where Planned Parenthood could advertise. The government already tries to regulate speech on the grounds of morality and safety—as Edward Snowden, who revealed information about the NSA that many Americans found deeply troubling knows all too well. Authority often isn’t kind to those underneath it, and any way—any at all—for it to silence people who disagree with it isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous.
Trigger warnings certainly aren’t evil, but people often are. Giving them a weapon to regulate speech, to silence dissenters, to decide what’s fit to hear and print isn’t safe for any one. Especially if the rationale for what’s worthy of being labelled is something as subjective as morality. To constrain the freedom of speech of a hate-spewing preacher is to constrain the freedom of speech of a young activist.
The only way to prevent trigger warnings from being manipulated by authority is to leave them at the discretion of the individual. Unfortunately, the same people who post screamer videos on the internet and play cruel practical jokes will leave warnings off things that should probably have them. But I think that this risk pales in comparison to the normalization of silencing others. Silence, as history and Paul Simon have warned us, can be dangerous.
To conclude, I think that trigger warnings, like speech, like writing, like anything else we’ve been clever enough as a species to come up with, should be used responsibly.
