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4:22am March 23, 2014

some-of-the-patterns:

I really don’t like the convention of bleeping slurs.

Because there’s more than one r-word and they mean different things and those differences are important and that convention makes it hard to talk about them

What I really don’t like is people telling me I should have to use splats on slurs that are continually applied to me in everyday life.  It feels like people are saying I shouldn’t be able to talk openly about words that I hear, directed straight at me, all the time.

Splats are those asterisks people put in slurs.  Like re***ded.

There have been heated arguments over whether splats are a good way to handle triggering words in general (they didn’t originate specifically with slurs), for at least twenty years on the Internet.

There are some places on the Internet where splats have become such a norm that messages can become almost unreadable.  Because the idea was that people somehow wouldn’t be triggered by a word with asterisks in it, even if they were triggered by the word itself.  I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work, because it doesn’t work on me – I just learn the splat pattern and then the word is as disturbing as ever.  It also makes it extremely hard for me to read, especially with the way my brain processes language and visual information.  I need as much visual information as possible to make up for my visual processing problems and this stuff doesn’t help me.  It completely fouls up my word recognition.

In some places you only splat out the vowels, but in other places you’re supposed to splat out most of the word.  And you can get sentences where at least three or four words are splatted into unrecognizability.  It gets to where any word that even describes a topic that can be upsetting gets splatted.

It makes trigger warnings even more difficult than they actually are, too.  Like you’ll see something like this:

“Trigger warning for r**e, in***t, th***py, tr**ma, ab**e”

And unless you're really used to how the splats go, you won’t be able to tell they’re warning for rape, incest, therapy, trauma, and abuse.  Which completely defeats the purpose of a trigger warning.

So needless to say there have been a lot of extremely heated arguments over the past couple decades over splats, spoilers (the practice of putting a large amount of space at the top of a message so a person has to scroll down before they’ll see it, often accompanied by a trigger warning at the top), and trigger warnings.  And nobody has ever managed to come to a conclusion that satisfies everyone.  Meanwhile the arguments get so heated that everyone on every side gets convinced that everyone on the other side is pretty much evil incarnate.  So these arguments long predate tumblr, and become very vicious sometimes.