as small as a world and as large as alone

6:42am March 11, 2014

some-of-the-patterns:

slashmarks:

some-of-the-patterns:

pervocracy:

ozymandias314:

the two eternal truths of discussions about trigger warnings:

• there are good arguments against trigger warnings
• no one will ever make those arguments, instead choosing to explore such burning issues as “is warning people before you force them to sit through a graphic depiction of rape and not penalizing them for leaving CENSORSHIP?” and “but what if accommodating mental illnesses just makes people more mentally ill?” and “I think you are just being TOO SENSITIVE”

My poorly-collected thoughts about trigger warnings:

• I’m trying to move to saying “content warning” or just “XYZ below” because the important part is “hey, there is some stuff coming that you may not want to read,” and letting people make that choice.  It doesn’t have to be technically a trigger for them to choose not to.

• I have very idiosyncratic triggers and I don’t really expect people to warn for them.  I’m not trying to make a “I suffer so everyone should” argument here, but it’s something I reflect on in these discussions—a lot of triggers aren’t obvious things like violence and bigotry but hopelessly specific things like gumballs or men who are going bald in a particular way.  And there’s really no way to universally warn for those.

• Although it really shouldn’t be this way (i.e., gumballs), “trigger warning for X” is often used to convey that X is bad, which feels like an appropriation and is also very annoying when it’s being used to pass judgement instead of out of actual consideration.

• Not everyone experiences mental illness symptoms equally so “this is what a real trigger is like, if you it doesn’t make you acutely ill for hours then it’s just a dislike” posts kind of bother me.  ”You must be more mentally ill than this line” policing is not an okay response to appropriation.

• ”Real life doesn’t have trigger warnings” arguments are terrible because… that’s like saying “it’s cold outdoors, therefore it doesn’t matter if our house has heat.”

• I don’t really have a good wrap-up here, except that I think it’s generally a good idea to let people know if something likely to be upsetting is coming up, and whether you call that “trigger warning” or not is… clearly complicated.

There’s also this weird thing where being triggered is sort of… taken as indicitive of having the right values? Like that one *ought* to be triggered by depictions of evil?

Tags as trigger warnings and warning for, for instance, mentioning rape, surveys and information about the frequency of rape, and graphic descriptions of rape identically make it almost impossible to actually avoid triggering content. This gets even worse when we’re talking about phobias and people trigger warn anything even slightly related because they don’t understand the phobias very well.

The acceptance of trigger warning as an obligation can make spaces really unsafe for people who can’t do it for whatever reason. (Language problems and categorization problems.)

I think that places in which trigger warning is very common and treated as an obligation also seem to adopt this… strange attitude surrounding being triggered, where any time someone is triggered has to be Someone’s Fault. And also lose sight of the fact that, and I say this as someone who does have the sort of triggers that can completely ruin your day, being triggered is still ultimately an emotional state. It feels awful while you’re inside of it, yes, but it can’t actually do lasting harm in and of itself for most people*. You can do lasting harm to yourself while triggered, but this really is not all that common. For most people, it’s just going to the end of their ‘feeling bad’ range in whatever form that is — anger, upset, dissociation, etc — and that happens without being the end of the world.

And those two attitudes combined are really dangerous, because people start using it to control other people’s behavior by claiming that how they’re acting is triggering (things like saying no, or saying that someone is wrong, or making sincere accusations of abuse) and punishing people in awful ways that DO do lasting harm for doing things that triggered someone unintentionally.

I’m not saying trigger warnings are a bad thing, just that they’re used clumsily and people need to think about some of the attitudes surrounding them.

*there are medical conditions where being upset/your body trying to get an adrenaline response/etc can cause really serious problems, but that’s not usually what people are meaning to talk about

Yes and then there are the things that don’t have words, they’re a pattern of thinking.

I only sporadically trigger warn.  And I don’t splat out words very often at all.  And many of these things are why.  I have other reasons, but after just writing a long post I’m too drained to discuss them.

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