Hot Take: The problem with trigger warnings

In one of my English classes, we went to see a play together as a class. Two days before the showing, I received an email in which our professor provided a trigger warning for “explicit homosexuality, a brief scene of a bipolar (manic) episode, and … references to violence.” Following these warnings, we were given the choice to opt out of the showing, provided that we felt we would be “harmfully upset by viewing such scenes.”

Now, I mean no disrespect to my professor — she was obviously looking out for the well-being of her students and doing what she felt was her duty to make sure no one was emotionally harmed by the play. And I understand there are some people who may become extremely upset at exposure to certain things they would rather not view. However, I think that trigger warnings — at least in the way we have adopted them in 2017 — are very, very bad.

For one, trigger warnings cannot logistically work. Who can decide what is or is not triggering for someone else? The things that were included in this warning, such as “explicit homosexuality” and “references to violence” — although perhaps triggering to some people — are not that far beyond a normal level of things encountered in everyday life. Anything could be a trigger for a traumatic experience, so how do we decide what to provide warnings for — and at what point do we include a plot summary of the entire work?

Beyond not being effective from a technical standpoint, the entire concept of trigger warnings is fallacious, hinging on the assumption that we have some kind of right to comfort: we don’t. Life is cruel and unfair, and it doesn’t owe us anything. People are robbed of their comfort every single day. And often, they are victims of pure chance. People are killed and violated, they have their homes and their families taken away from them, they are diagnosed with terminal illnesses, their homes are destroyed in natural disasters and their children are killed by disease.

Imagine an ancient human living in the year 2000 B.C. whose only goal is to survive — literally the entire world is trying to kill them. Now imagine a human living in the year 2017 who is having an emotional breakdown because they heard a certain word, maybe even in a discussion or in a critical way. You can’t just decide that you only want to hear about the nice parts of life: that’s not the real world. Life is R-rated, it’s explicit and it’s not fair.

We shouldn’t want to always be comfortable and safe. True growth and learning do not happen when we are always in our comfort zones. Reading things we already know, practicing things we are already good at and swimming where our feet touch the ground doesn’t teach us anything. You have to get out there and not be afraid to fail, to do something scary or to venture out of the shallow water.

In psychology, when a person steers away from a phobia as a defense mechanism, it is known as avoidance. Avoidance is bad because it reinforces the phobia and the behavior that goes along with it; by shying away from what we are afraid of, we only become more afraid of it.

I understand that some people may have experienced extremely traumatic episodes in their lives. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, and it affects a great many people. Even exposure therapy in psychology involves allowing patients to expose themselves to the phobia instead of forcing them to confront it. The patient has to want to overcome their own fears.

There should obviously be some form of warning for extremely graphic content. I wouldn’t argue, for instance, that little kids should be watching R-rated movies such as “Saving Private Ryan” or “The Departed.” But the level of preemptive injury to which we have progressed is worrisome. When adults are not content without paragraphs of warnings for potentially triggering content in everything they read or view, we have encountered a problem.

In an ideal world, it might be nice to shield people from every worrying, hurtful or uncomfortable concept. But then again, in an ideal world, those concepts wouldn’t exist in the first place. We have to stop pretending that art, fiction and the real world function to reassure us and make us feel safe and secure. Opting out of a new and useful experience because it might make us uncomfortable is unproductive and probably cowardly. We have to go out of our comfort zone and discuss the dark aspects of the world — that is the only way to conquer them.