Trigger Unhappy | National Review Online

Trigger Unhappy | National Review Online

Before I continue, I should explain what a trigger warning is.
It started on left-wing and feminist websites. Like a spoiler alert in a movie review or a more specific version of the movie-rating system, trigger warnings are intended to alert very sensitive people that some content might set off, or trigger, their post-traumatic stress disorder or simply offend some people. According to most accounts, this was a conscientious accommodation of people who’d been raped or otherwise horribly abused.
But soon the practice metastasized. Trigger warnings were provided for an ever-increasing, and ridiculous, list of “triggers.” For example, one website offers a trigger warning that it contains images of small holes, lest it terrify people suffering from trypophobia, which is — you guessed it — a fear of clusters of small holes. Another website warns visitors that it will not tolerate any debate over the validity of its trigger warnings for, among many other things, trypophobia, pictures from high places, audio of snapping fingers, or images or discussion of spiders, food, escalators, or animals in wigs.
Now, the Internet is a very big place, and there’s nothing wrong with obscure websites catering to the boutique anxieties of troubled people.
But now the cancer has spread to the college campus. At UC Santa Barbara, the student government has formally requested that professors provide trigger warnings on their syllabi. The idea was initially suggested by a student who had been the victim of sexual abuse. Her class was shown a film that depicted a rape, and while she herself was not “triggered” by it, she felt she should have been warned.
I have no problem with expecting professors to warn students that some material may be graphic or upsetting, and my hunch is that most professors do that already.
But as is so often the case, common sense is barely a speed bump for the steamroller of political correctness. Oberlin College’s Office of Equity Concerns advised professors to avoid such triggering subjects as racism, colonialism, and sexism. They soon rescinded it, perhaps because they realized that if such subjects become taboo, much of their faculty would be left with nothing to talk about.
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And what a strange madness it is. We live in a culture in which it is considered bigotry to question whether women should join combat units — but it is also apparently outrageous to subject women of the same age to realistic books and films about war without a warning? Even questioning the ubiquity of degrading porn, never mind labeling music or video games, is denounced as Comstockery, but labeling The Iliad makes sense?