I’m totally serious about this. Seeing a discussion about trigger warnings on Twitter or any other social networking site, almost instantly raises my blood pressure. I immediately get depressed and pissed off.
Trigger warnings are intended to help people who are so emotionally fragile that they should not be involved in real discussions on social media or the real world.
The world is NOT a safe space. If you want a safe space, then you are not ready to participate in the marketplace of ideas that is the real world.
When I was growing up, if we felt afraid of something, we didn’t have the option of ignoring it. We had to deal with it. Yes, it’s traumatic to deal with stuff that happened to you. It’s hard. It’s not fun. It takes a hell of a lot of work. It may even take professional help from a therapist and/or licensed physician who provides chemicals to help.
And yet, here we all are. Relatively normal people. We survived.
I totally understand that some people have gone through unbelievably powerful trauma and that those things cause real problems in their lives. See the above comment about getting help.
Here’s what I want to see. Some kind of data that supports the idea that trigger warnings are useful. I’ve seen psychologists generally argue that they are not.
Regardless, for me, trigger warnings cause stress. Anyone who thinks that my claim here is not valid should then take a close look at their privilege and they are not giving my feelings the validation they deserve. In other words, anyone claiming that my stress is not sufficient to need a trigger warning, while requiring trigger warnings for something else, are being hypocrites.
