The Results Are In: Trigger Warnings Make Life Worse
Trigger Warning: Controversy, opinions, flying feathers.
All the way back in 2022, I wrote about trigger warnings. Reading it back this week, it turns out I was just my usual opinionated self. When I get a bee in my beak I don’t hold back. For context, back then I’d just heard about a trigger warning being placed on a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet here in London.
A piece of creative writing so ubiquitous and widely read that most ten-year-olds in the world can tell you the plot.
Here’s me going full Penguin snarktillery.
This appeal to a higher authority to provide moral arbitration and come down on the side of safety and complicit silence is indicative of a quiet and insidious paternalism. A paternalism evoked by the sort of people who will listen when some idiot suggests putting a trigger warning on a four-hundred-year-old play.
Instead of laughing and refusing like I would.
Were I to refuse I would’ve been carted up in front of a social media based welfare and equality tribunal. Fairness by force which challenges the structures of patriarchy largely by metaphorically cutting its penis off and doing the exact same thing — like the Stasi but with unicorns and better branding.
