Millennie Al wrote: ↑Wed Aug 31, 2022 10:41 pm
You can only tell if something is ineffective once you know what is its intended effect. Like
Parental Advisory stickers, trigger warnings have two effects. The most important is to show that the person doing the labelling is supporting a particular world view - what we might nowadays call "virtue signalling". The secondary effect is to support censorship. Protection of people who voluntarily want to avoid the material is, at most, a minor side-effect.
I'm not seeing how trigger warnings and the like support censorship; I think in practice they might have somewhat of the opposite effect.*
I'm in two minds about them. As I understand it, triggers for things like PTSD are specific, highly individual and not always obvious, so quite hard to warn for. Otoh, trigger warnings for some obvious things might be very helpful and don't seem to cause harm. Content warnings are maybe a little different. When the kids were young, I found the parent's guides on IMDB that tell you exactly what's in a film very useful because age ratings only tell you so much and are quite broad. But that's perhaps an illustration of a difference between trigger warnings (meant to protect the psychologically vulnerable) and content warnings (meant to help you pick out a film/book/TV show you might enjoy) that has become increasingly blurred.
We were at the Tate Modern recently and they had a 'contains references to slavery' warning for an exhibition of Australian art. My gut reaction was, d'uh, ya think? and I brushed it off as unnecessary, but damn if I didn't choke up looking at some of it. I wouldn't have avoided it though, warning or not.
Sometimes it's important to be upset by upsetting things.
*I have used warnings myself. I dabble in a little fanfiction writing from time to time. Now, fanfiction is generally age-rated. Age-rating the written word seems plain weird when12 yr olds can take adult books out of the library in the UK, but I suppose the interwebs being a free-for-all & international kind of changes that. So there's age-rating, and maybe it's not such a big step from that to warnings. Anyway, I wrote about some potentially upsetting topics, one of which was fairly likely to resonant with someone in the mainly adult female fanbase. (Perhaps badly wrote too; this was amateur writing after all.) And my intent was to entertain, not upset. So I warned, which was the done thing in that fandom, even though I find warnings far too spoilery and ignore them myself.
Would I have been as comfortable writing about that topic without a warning? Perhaps not. Perhaps I'd have self-censored some of it. So maybe warnings give people permission to delve into difficult topics. Although that can be a double-edged sword, of course. People can & do write outrageous stuff & then say 'but I warned you' to deflect criticism.