I understand the idea of shielding people from content that would be upsetting, but my own experience is, that I feel a little anxious as soon as I read Trigger Warning […].
How is your experience with it? Are you happy with it, or do you thing there are better ways to address dark topics?
Nope. Quite the contrary.
But it may be worth mentioning I’m getting old (nearing my 60s) and I have been educated in a now remote time where the idea that being confronted with hardship and with failure is what would help us learn to overcome them. Not being shielded from them.
Confront shit ideas with better ideas. The rest, any form of censorship or control, never works, never did and I doubt will ever.
Heck, aged 16 my best friend and I decided to read Mein Kampf in order to understand how that ‘Nazi’ stuff managed to seduce so many people. While we were reading it, as seriously as we would have read any other book, we just discussed it freely meaning without fear of being judged (‘being cancelled’ one may say nowadays): we would point out stupid shit as well as things that seemed not, to young us at least, not that stupid trying to confront them through a free and open discussion. Decades later, I can safely say it was one of the best cure against me ever risking getting ‘seduced’ by those shit ideas and the hate they thrive(d) on.
There’s an episode of the excellent podcast “Search Engine” about this, it’s called “What do trigger warnings actually do?” and it brought me from the “maybe they’re effective” thought group to the “they are not effective” group.
Thx for the podcast, I did not know it.
Here is a link to the relevant episode, for anyone interested: https://www.searchengine.show/what-do-trigger-warnings-actually-do/
Thank you for the link, I was lazy. I heavily recommend it, the host has on a lady who is an “expert in trigger warnings” (like a legit expert) and her research is very enlightening. I can relate—when I was young, I would deliberately seek out things with trigger warnings that I knew would affect me because it felt good to look at those things! I still click on anything with warnings, but I don’t actively seek stuff out anymore cuz I’m lazy.
Content/trigger warnings are not about “being shielded from hardship;” they’re about not springing trauma triggers or upsetting shit on unsuspecting people (or not causing actual physical harm to people, in the case of epilepsy warnings).
Like, OK, cool, you read Mein Kampf. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to do, for the reasons you did it. But you did that freely and knowing what you were getting into (“by Adolf Hitler” serves as an implicit content warning IMO). Suppose you were a Jewish student and your history teacher sprung a reading from Mein Kampf in the middle of a lesson with no warning. Or hell, just imagine having “Old Yeller” sprung on you the day after your dog died. I don’t think it’s babying anyone to warn them about something that could ruin their day.
Ruining your day isn’t ruining your life.
Life sucks. Get a helmet
Seeing something objectionable in media is not a “growth through suffering”. It is also not censorship. Nobody ever became a Nazi simply by reading Mien Kampf. (It’s usually complaining about made up shit like cancel-culture that pushes the dim-whited into the far-right).
There should have been a content warning on this thread: graphic depictions of boomer philosophy.
You know, fairy tales for children generally involved horror, murder, dismemberment and worse.
To get the kids to be aware of the actual horrors of the world, which are worse.
Hearing a story about, or seeing a fictional or even actual video of some of the fucked up shit people do to each other for stupid fucking reasons is still not actually traumatic.
Experiencing depictions of such shit should absolutely bother you. Should absolutely put you a bit on your toes, in real life, on the daily.
So you can avoid those situations. So you know shit like that’s possible, and fucked up fuckers have done it and will do it, and they’ll think they’re right the whole time.
Because when it does actually happen, that’s when it is traumatic, and not just being smart and aware
thx for this fine demonstration.