I'm not sure where people are seeing all these specious trigger warnings. I see them primarily on forum posts, here and therabouts, and I read about them happening at universities, but not often (and, with a few exceptions that I tend to read with skepticism, handled fairly reasonably). The only common trigger warnings I see are movie and TV ratings, which are indeed crude, but not entirely useless.
And I'm not clear how they harm anyone. Back in the stone-age days of Usenet, they were pretty common. And they didn't restrict what you could talk about - they freed you up to write as vividly as you needed to, because you didn't have to worry about people sensitive to your subject matter - they weren't reading, because you'd already warned them off. Trigger warnings expanded what you could comfortably discuss.
That's exactly the thing. In the past, these topics often weren't discussed at all. By putting a warning in, people have the choice to not read it if they don't want to.
I don't see that it's any different to warning about anything else, e.g. swearing, nudity, whatever. Or like on DVDs where it has info next to the certificate, saying why it's got that rating, e.g. for The Heat it has "15 - contains strong language, violence and sex references". I have kids and this is very useful info to know what's suitable for them and what's not.
Seems to me the alternative is either to ban everything (i.e. like banning any film that doesn't have a U certificate), or to have no information about the content of anything whatsoever, meaning that people who know they're sensitive to certain things, and parents who want to keep things age-appropriate for their kids, not to mention NSFW warnings for people viewing the internet at work won't have the information they need to make an appropriate decision. This would lead to massive amounts of complaints about things people found offensive in films, books , forum posts etc which would be completely avoided with simple warnings.
I hate the term "trigger warning" though. Why not just call it a warning? If people are getting their knickers in a twist over the idea that a "trigger warning" is a completely new thing, then maybe just call it something else.
Unless trigger warning means something completely different to the above?
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