Back in early July, comedian Jimmy Fallon tripped on a rug in his kitchen, caught his wedding ring on the counter as he fell, and suffered a gruesome injury called a “ring avulsion”– basically, a medical term for ripping your finger off. Fallon spent 10 days in intensive care and came close to losing the digit, which, unfortunately, most ring avulsion sufferers do. Explaining his massive white bandage when he returned to his late-night show weeks later, Fallon warned: “If you Google it, it’s graphic. So don’t Google it.”
It’s a perfectly ordinary thing to say – considerate yet mundane, a throwaway line that’s also highly functional. It lets you know, efficiently and unobtrusively, that a Google search for “ring avulsion” will turn up disturbing photos of bloody finger stumps, which is useful because most people find it jarring to be unexpectedly bombarded with photos of dismembered human body parts. Some people faint at the sight of gore. Some vomit. Some panic. Some don’t mind at all.
If Fallon were to actually show the images on TV, a quick, “Heads up, time to gird your loins/grab your barf bag/take a deep breath” would be basic human decency, and no one watching would think twice about it.
I keep returning to Fallon’s little Google aside this week as I watch the internet devolve into bedlam over the supposed forthcoming doom caused by academic trigger warnings. A trigger warning, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a note tacked on to a piece of media – whether it’s a novel, blogpost or live event – letting the audience know about potentially disturbing content. Common iterations include “trigger warning: rape”, “trigger warning: abuse” or “trigger warning: suicide”. It gives the audience a modicum of control over if and how they engage.
Commonplace on social media and personal blogs, especially progressive communities on Tumblr, trigger warnings have begun finding their way into academia: some professors are voluntarily adding trigger warnings to their syllabuses, giving trauma survivors a chance to prepare emotionally before class. Some student groups have requested more widespread trigger warnings in their academic programmes and, in one famous incident, a committee at Oberlin college suggested some potentially over-reaching guidelines that were then rejected. There are, undoubtedly, certain boundaries to be set regarding the utility and scope of campus trigger warnings, a line that I think all of academia is more than qualified to navigate.
The goal is not to keep challenging materials off syllabuses or allow students to meekly excuse themselves from huge swaths of the literary canon because bad words hurt their feelings: it’s to increase engagement and increase accessibility by allowing students with trauma histories to manage their mental health. As Maddy Myers explained in a piece about trigger warnings and PTSD for geek culture blog The Mary Sue: “A trigger warning doesn’t necessarily stop me from engaging with content, but it does help me prepare for what I might endure.” Academia before trigger warnings didn’t teach trauma victims how to be tougher (and, by the way, maybe we can leave students’ psychiatric care to their psychiatrists?), it hindered their ability to engage in their own education. Attending to the needs of students with PTSD doesn’t hinder academic freedom; it expands it.
Predictably, as with any cultural phenomenon associated primarily with young women (see also: vocal fry, pop music), campus trigger warnings have faced a swift, imperious and borderline unhinged backlash. The Daily Beast told college students to “grow up” and argued that they’re “incapable of living in the real world”. An Atlantic cover story recently described undergrads as “coddled”, claiming rather hysterically: “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” The authors then make a truly remarkable leap to accuse trigger warning proponents of engendering “campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers”, as well as exacerbating mental health problems by shielding trauma victims from triggering texts that could serve as “exposure therapy”.
It’s a tidy way to link trigger warnings with the other progressive bogeyman du jour, political correctness, and all its sinister attendants: microaggressions, the supposed erosion of free speech, and the “right not to be offended”. But all those concepts, when examined honestly, just boil down to treating marginalised groups with respect and humanity and striving to correct harmful imbalances. Thinking critically about the harmful assumptions inherent in, for example, the phrase “I don’t see colour” is not “[scrubbing] campuses clean of words”. It’s being a responsible human being.
Political correctness is, essentially, a family of suggestions: don’t talk over people who have been historically silenced; demand and make way for diverse representation; trust people to be authorities on their own lives; be cognisant and careful with other people’s trauma; listen, and be kind.
That’s only threatening if you’re part of the group being asked to scoot over and let those margins take up some real space. Odd that the anti-free-speech brigade isn’t up in arms about announcements such as Fallon’s – surely he, too, is “coddling” his audience, withholding valuable “exposure therapy” for avulsion victims and infringing on Google’s free expression. It’s almost as though, coded as feminine and largely associated with rape victims, the antipathy toward trigger warnings is about something else entirely.
The anti-trigger warning “coddled co-eds” narrative has a lot in common with the “false accusation” narrative used to derail discussions of on-campus rape. The first scoffs at people’s attempts to cope with trauma once they’ve already been traumatised; the second undermines their efforts to avoid being traumatised in the first place. Both are symptomatic of our culture’s deep investment in minimising and normalising sexual assault.
Maybe we can all get flippant and condescending about trigger warnings after we build a world where more than 3% of rapes lead to conviction, where we don’t shame and blame people for their own victimisation, where men don’t feel entitled to women’s bodies, and where millions of people aren’t moving through life yoked with massive, secret traumas.
Political correctness isn’t a new battleground in the culture wars – this conversation has been going on, with various targets, for at least three decades now – and it seems to function, encouragingly, as a side-effect of progress. It’s the whimpering of the status quo. People hate trigger warnings because they bring up something most don’t like to remember: that the world is not currently a safe or just place, and people you love are almost certainly harbouring secrets that would break your heart. Even if it’s unpopular, the fact that we’re having that conversation at all is progress.