All too often, I’ve been reading lively, thought-provoking content from a forum, blog, or online magazine, only to finally get so fed up with the constant "TRIGGER WARNING!"s that I just stop going there. Despite the fact that I’ve only ever seen them crop up in feminist circles, I personally think they are idiotic, obnoxious, **sexist **bullshit.
Case in point: Feministe puts up a post:
And the post links to an article about an Onion joke and comments,
Then the post ends with
Well no shit, Feministe! I was about to click on that link thinking it would be about pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows. Thank God your helpful trigger warning informed me that it was actually about violence against women, a joke about beating a woman to death, and Chris Brown beating Rihanna. I never would have known! Because evidently, as a woman, I’m a moron.
Look, let’s just be fucking adults, put descriptive titles on our posts, and give people a head’s up before linking them to very explicit sexual, violent, or gross content. Fine, good. But please for the love of cross-dressing Thor, don’t label it as TRIGGER WARNING, because the whole concept is insulting and patronizing. The entire basis of this practice is a belief that the women reading these sources are delicate, defenseless creatures. And that we don’t merely have complex emotional and intellectual responses to information, we’re like robots or some kind of sleeper agents for hysteria that can be *triggered *by the tiniest reference to our problem subject.
What are these bozos going to do when they realize that the trigger warning actually contains a reference to the “triggering” subject? Oh noes! We better start just posting “TRIGGER WARNING: something bad.” But, you know, “bad” has negative connotations. It might trigger someone who has had a bad experience. You know what, maybe someone should just act as a kind of gatekeeper over subjects, someone to say, “Oh sweetheart, you’re just too delicate to read about this horrible subject. Your strengths really lie more in the nurturing, caring areas - maybe I can direct you to a thread that suits your natural talents and inclinations better.” Oooh, yeah, this is a great idea. Then all the women would be totally protected and would never be triggered. But the gatekeeper might get still get triggered . . . wait! let’s make it a man! Perfect. Feminism is saved!
(Oh, and for the record, I thought the Onion’s joke was funny, too.)