Get your finger off the trigger by Eric Beetner

 Your thoughts on authors asked to write Content/Trigger Warnings for their novels?

In short, I'm against it.

Most people take the approach that art should make us confront things, oftentimes ugly things. I think pure entertainment is the same way. I don't think art/entertainment needs to be confrontational, however. There is a difference. But the idea of "comfort zones" is absurd to me.

We all like what we like and there should be no obligation to read subjects we don't like or that make us uneasy. We all know our tastes and our limits for either violence or darker subject matter, which is what this usually boils down to. But yours and mine may differ. To provide some sort of warning plays to the lowest common denominator, or in this case, the most easily offended.

The thing about being offended is that it's all about the offendee, not the offender. Because, again, what you may find offensive or over the line might not be the same for me. I've certainly never written anything to be intentionally offensive, nor would I. But I also know I have books of mine, or just certain scenes, that aren't for everyone. Every writer does.

In the 1980s I bristled at the PMRC and their campaign to put warning labels on records. It was a form of soft censorship and I abhorred it then, as I abhor it now. Those were trigger warnings before we had the term. There is an implication there that what the artist has created is somehow beyond what "normal" people should be exposed to, and I reject the idea that anyone has the power to decide that for anyone else.

Subjects like suicide, mental illness, eating disorders, etc. that some people choose to flag with warnings to protect the incredibly small percentage of readers who might be "triggered" by the mere exposure to those ideas, I feel is a disservice to the vast majority of readers who accept these, admittedly difficult subjects, as a fact of life. Denying that bad things or bad people or bad actions exist won't make them go away.

I certainly feel like subject matter should be out in the open with any book/movie/story. I don't want to go into something expecting one thing and then be whiplashed with topics I didn't know were coming. But if I know a story deals with something like pedophilia, I know I will probably stay away because that's simply not entertaining for me. But if that's the story someone is compelled to write, putting a label on it stigmatizes the work in a way that I find unfair. 

I'm an atheist and if a story goes too deep into a religious vibe, I'll probably start to tune out. Doesn't mean I shouldn't be exposed to those ideas or that I automatically close off a compelling story because make believe characters on a page think and behave differently than I do. That's why I read – to be taken to different worlds and shown different points of view. It's very likely that the very thing that triggers a reaction in me is the thing that will change how I see the world.

Where do you draw the line? Who are the trigger police? Is there an accepted list of triggers? Does that list keep expanding until one day anything to do with death or violence is a trigger? Because that's the day when every single crime and mystery novel gets a label.

In the end, putting warning labels on music did nothing to curb the content. If anything it made the offending material more enticing to exactly the crowd they were trying to "protect". I feel that trigger warnings are likely just as ineffective in the end. That would seem to make the case for putting them on so people who want to ignore them can do so. I do feel like it can have the chilling effect of perhaps a bookstore not shelving a book with a warning. Or at least keeping it off the front table, hiding it in the back with the other "bad" books. 

If that starts happening, if I need to be escorted to a special section of the store to find many of my favorite authors, then I think I'll be triggered. 

EDIT: As soon as I scheduled this post I got this notice from Blogger:

I guess we're already living in a trigger warning world.