Trigger warnings

PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS ABOUT TRIGGER WARNINGS IN UNIVERSITY CURRICULUMS PISS ME OFF SO MUCH OH MY FUCKING GOD.

"People these days are just too sensitive" they say. No. NO. People these days are just more aware that SOME PEOPLE HAVE LIVED THROUGH TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES AND DESERVE FAIR WARNING WHEN SOMETHING MAY CAUSE THEM TO RELIVE THOSE EXPERIENCES.

These people are not being sensitive in wanting to be warned before getting into content that may contain triggers for them. Trigger warnings are not about people in general not being able to read about touchy subjects. I am so fed up that people keep insisting that they are.

If you lived through a horrible experience as a child and are now a functioning adult who for the most part is okay but can't handle violence against children in movies or books, and decide "hey I'd like to take a university course on (x)" and that course involves readings that contain depictions or discussions of/about violence against children, that person might not handle it so well, and can you blame them?

This isn't to say that people who have lived through those experiences will all react this way. Perhaps that person has truly moved on from their past and is able to handle reading about things similar to what happened to them. I don't know. I can't speak for all traumatized people ever, but I do understand what trigger warnings are for.

I'm not sure about trigger warnings for things like "red meat," which seem just a little off to me, but then again I don't have an explanation for/against them so I don't really want to have an opinion just yet.

Also, I should mention that I'm lucky enough to have lived life without having lived through a traumatic experience. I've reacted poorly to things like assholes in middle school teasing me relentlessly and being woken up not by a fire alarm but by my mother's screaming (because she has night terrors) in a hotel one time (that fucked me up a little, to the point where I just avoid alarms in general because they freak me out more than they should and make me want to cry and make it hard to sleep), but I wouldn't really qualify those as traumatic experiences. So I guess I'm kind of writing about this to a certain extent from a position of not knowing a lot about trauma.

Anyway. This is really just a definition, and my own anger at people who think trigger warnings mean we're all turning into a bunch of sensitive wusses. I think they do make us sensitive, but sensitive in the way that we acknowledge that bad things happen to people and giving them a chance to not relive or be reminded unnecessarily of those bad things. That's called empathy, and it is a common trait of decent people.

yer pal,
swegan