The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

I guess in the same way that what you do as a rebellious young person can come back to you via scandalous FB photos, what you do as a young person in the social sphere can come back to you via an article from the establishment shaming your way of protest.

Unless the article starts with "We should raise minimum wage for teachers nationally and make drastic cuts to tuition." there is no reason for any school-going folks to listen to these clowns. If student protests are supposed to be held to some national standard then let's make public tuition free. If teachers are expected to add more micromanaging to their already overflowing schedules then let's give them some of that plutocrat dough.

Some anti-free speech bollocks from the opposite direction:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/goldsmiths-diversity-officer-bahar-mustafa-receives-court-summons-wake

I did wonder if anyone on ILX was going to bring up that specific case and the background to it.

It seems like understanding the context of a joke meme like "#KillAllWhiteMen" requires a kind of nuance with regards to understanding the context of what it's like to be a woman living in a world of constant male harassment, and what it's like to be a PoC living in a world of constant racist harassment. This is nuance that gets lost, but it's harder to get people who have never experienced any of it to recognise, let alone care about that kind of nuance.

I've been going back and forth about even reading this thread, let alone contributing to it... to be honest, I can't even begin to explain the kind of cringe I experience on contemplating getting involved. Like, even down to the titles, and how they already slant the discussion in certain ways: the specific choice of phrases like "creepy liberalism" and "coddling" just indicate to me that a certain opinion and mindset has already been formed about them (a negative one) and as someone who is not just in favour of trigger warnings and content warnings but (gasp... even worse!) is the kind of person who needs them is starting, not with a level playing field of "what's this about" but already facing an uphill battle of having to justify one's own existence.

I've been operating for over a decade (maybe more? the idea of content warnings were discussions I was having in the 90s, though we didn't call it that, then, because we lacked the terminology) in communities that now use them by default. It's never been a big deal. But I've given up on reading news articles about them because the blatant lack of understanding or misrepresentation of What They Are For and How They Work just bears absolutely no resemblance to how I've seen them function in communities I'm in that use them. I honestly sometimes feel like, if Trigger Warning were a doom-metal band from Siberia releasing lathe vinyl on some trendy label, you can bet that every dude on ILX would have found more relevant an accurate information about what they were than simply taking the word of scaremongering Atlantic thinkpieces making them the scapegoat for the ills of the American educational system. But "it's a Social Justice thing" just seems to make some people kick in an automated defensiveness where they do not want to investigate further than reacting to what is presented in some kneejerk thinkpiece. If you find yourself missing "nuance" in the discussion of things, maybe that's a gap in your own knowledge and understanding, that you could remedy?

I have a lot of experience (on both sides) of What Trigger Warnings Are For, Who They Are For, How They Work, that in a perfect world, I'd be happy to share. But it's obvious from just skimming this thread that there's a vast disparity in terms of knowledge, and I don't want to over-explain to people who already know all about the subject and are tired of it, or under-explain to people whose literal only exposure is to Atlantic articles or "college kids today are kinda weird and I don't understand their lingo." And I can't shake the nagging suspicion that a lot of the hostility directed towards "Trigger Warnings" is actually veiled hostility directed towards "The Kind Of People Who Need Trigger Warnings" - that is, ~college kids~ as cipher for feminists; rape survivors; abuse survivors; refugees; veterans; people who have been on the receiving end of hate crimes for race, gender, sexuality etc; people with mental health conditions (and how scary and needy and yet oddly... "Coddled" we are?) This list is starting to look, kinda... hmmmmm?

Talking about this stuff is hard. It often makes people uncomfortable. But I often feel like people who experience discomfort at these conversations (because they are not part of the groups likely to need these things) project this idea of "this is awkward and discomforting for me to hear" into their mental picture of what People Who Want Trigger Warnings are talking about when they say "Triggered". It really isn't; it's people who are dealing with the kinds of trauma that may be totally outside of your experience. I get nervous when I see "I want a nuanced conversation" becoming a kind of code for "I don't want to feel awkward or uncomfortable by difficult conversations that implicate people like me." So it becomes this kind of handwaving ~why can't we all be more reasonable~ which is again, not a level playing field, when for one side of the debate, it's an academic discussion involving "something they read on the internet" and for the other side of the debate, it's a highly charged emotional discussion asking people to defend and justify their experiences of some of the most harrowing events of their lives.

I understand this may have contributed absolutely 0 to the thread or the debate or whatever. But this thread has been eating away at me for days now so there it is. I'm not going to be in for the rest of the day to discuss it any further though.

If you need a place to vomit, the toilet is that way.

Wow. I have literally no idea what you mean by that statement.

Here's another piece on Bahar Musafa and power dynamics and the idea of "safe spaces" and the reaction to them

http://mediadiversified.org/2015/10/07/from-safe-spaces-to-court-summons-how-did-we-get-here/

― Three Word Username, Wednesday, October 7, 2015 6:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf -- flagging post

Aw come on - it's a lot of words, but some of them are quite short!

"I am not contributing to this thread, but it bothered me. I will not be back to read it." So you are just releasing bile and running. Nothing wrong with that, just no need to do it here.

It seems like the social context for these issues is significantly different in America and Britain. I'm fully willing to admit that the American veneration of free speech above practically all else can go to far (and maybe even more so in internet forums dominated by Americans). But when I see the text of the British Communications Act of 2003 outlawing "sending by public communication network an offensive/ indecent/ obsecene/ menacing message/ matter", it just seems wide open to authoritarian abuse. Maybe again my view is colored by the American lens of distrust of authority.

Maybe "I feel uncomfortable contributing to a thread because of reasons that I detail in my post; but I really think it's necessary because I seem to have experience and perspective that does not appear to be represented so far. P.S. I'm on an overground train going in and out of signal for most of this afternoon so I can't respond at length" is a more nuanced interpretation of my post if you could get past that bile of your own that you clearly feel towards me!

Now why might I feel weird about participating in threads like this, facing posts land attitudes like that? Why? I have no idea!

Oh, come on - I've can't remember seeing you join any thread, on any subject, where something almost exactly like that wasn't your opening gambit. "I'm a trauma victim/Most of you are horrible/I don't know why I'm even here since most of you are going to be horrible/Here's what I think anyway/I don't really want to discuss it further." You do this every time. Eventually you post something productive, but there's always this ridiculous poor-me throat-clearing first.

X-post because it took 4 stations to get enough signal to post that...

See I just do not understand the framing of trigger warnings as a "Free Speach" issue. Every community I've been in that employed them, it lead to a larger conversation, with a wider audience than I ever encountered in communities that didn't use them. They have always *functioned* in practice, with self imposition, as a way of producing more and freer speach.

But, like this Communications Act was probably introduced with propaganda about protecting "women from threats" and "minorities from hate speach" yet gets used by a racist and sexist institution as a blunt instrument of power against ... you guessed it. Not a surprise. I don't know the answer either.

Sorry for phone typing!

You say "more nuanced interpretation", I say "less bothersome second draft", let's call the whole thing off.

Dude. I get criticised if I post without a thousand apologies and clarifications and couching terms first. I get criticised even more if I do. There is literally no position I can take that pleases people who have already decided to see me (and people like me) in certain ways.

I do think it the tendency of nuanced concepts designed to make more and better conversations happen to eventually be pick up and used by dummies as magical silencing spells. That's where we are the phrase "trigger warning", although I suspect powerful people screaming in terror at the very concept are the bigger problem. This phrase does have a curious mix of political and pseudo-psychotheraputic about it that I think makes people want to pay attention to it one way or the other.

x-post

See I just do not understand the framing of trigger warnings as a "Free Speach" issue.

i dont think they are a "free speech" issue either. it's an education issue. i think the majority of the legitimate concern about trigger warnings comes from a sense that it is not a concept that can be effectively, fairly, or coherently deployed without negative consequences in the education system. the whole idea immediately cascades into a infinite regress of individualism and special dispensation that is an intensely difficult thing for the current education system in the US to cope with. so what's at stake--as far as i can see--is a shift in what we think it means to "get an education" or "be educated."

some people seem ok with the idea of education being entirely "overcoded" with political (or moral) values, but perhaps they only think that way because many campuses tend to be guided by political values they already agree with. when the other guys get in power they may feel differently.

(also worth pointing out that the entire reason college campuses in the US can be such bastions of liberalism is paradoxically because the education system has this measure of autonomy from the political, so maybe that's the sense in which this issue intersects with "free speech.")

I think warning people about content, as a signal of mutual respect and understanding, is an action that can help build trust and frame conversation.

The vocal minority of people who are getting highlighted (scott's link, etc) are college students, which, as always, is a convenient tip of the iceberg for people to write about, even if they're not necessarily representative of groups that use content warnings constructively.

I don't think "college kids" is being used as a cipher here, just a convenient target for analysis considering it's a visible, identifiable group that always has more than enough members that latch on terminology/concepts and use them as a bludgeon with no grace or tact. Trigger/content warnings are, at heart, about helping to claim mutual safe space, but there's a better lede for a story in concentrating on the individuals who, wittingly or unwittingly, use the same tools to _take_ space.

The word sophomore was not coined by accident; college students are very often wise idiots. To the extent that identity politics are loudest among young people without fully formed identities and a psychological tool is being self-prescribed by immature souls, it makes sense that people are freaking out and hollering. I just haven't seen any real evidence of real harm coming from a mass trigger warning movement.

That is to say, the majority of time it's about finding common ground and shared space, but for someone who's skeptical, it's easy to see insistence on warnings as a power play, and the more insistent of critics will find a myriad of microaggressions to be tallied in any response from, say, a professor or teacher who feels criticized. A college class doesn't need to be a "safe space," but it does need to be a space based on mutual respect.

I'm not overly familiar with Bahar Mustafa’s case, but as far as I can tell I'm completely in favor of what she was doing. White people (especially white dudes) need to stop feeling disrespected when other people just want breathing room.

I think there's a pretty broad variation in life experience and maturity among college students, let alone the population at large. No need to tar them all

There is no need, and I didn't do it. Most undergrads are under 21, and I am talking about many of those most, which is a long way from all.

I know we're all olds here but tbh if a college kid was in the room telling them they're a wise fool isn't exactly going to endear them to your point of view

nice rhetorical flourish, though

It's kind of not about endearment, which is something I learned in college.

Nice post Branwell. Good stuff.

Mostly I'm confused about what exactly these types of articles want. It's not as if we can really stamp out Trigger Warnings etc by now. And if the point is to make sure students don't grow up shielded and ignorant of the world, well that now includes a world full of Trigger Warnings and PC culture, particularly in digital/new media spaces. By testing and experimenting with that new social world the students are learning how to function in it. So again, what exactly is to be done? It seems like a 'problem' with no offered solutions.

Beyond cutting the budgets to these schools. That is a fake solution.

if a college kid was in the room telling them they're a wise fool isn't exactly going to endear them to your point of view

Again with the coddling! Jeez...

I think they want readers and clicks on their ads, tbh xp

bbl, have to do my daily work of being a foolish fool

In my experience common ground and shared space don't always make for the best educational environment. This probably depends on what is being taught, and who is doing the teaching.

I've been operating for over a decade (maybe more? the idea of content warnings were discussions I was having in the 90s, though we didn't call it that, then, because we lacked the terminology) in communities that now use them by default. It's never been a big deal. But I've given up on reading news articles about them because the blatant lack of understanding or misrepresentation of What They Are For and How They Work just bears absolutely no resemblance to how I've seen them function in communities I'm in that use them.

otm

ffs trigger warnings are not about "coddling" anybody, they are about (among other things) working with people dealing with PTSD and dealing with them as human beings about whom you care, and for whom you would like your classroom to be a maximally educational, useful space. from what i know you don't learn a lot when you're experiencing a panic attack.

my perspective here is as an educator struggling (and often failing) to be a good educator, which i think is not mutually exclusive with being an ally and being a good human being. i also have a lot of problems with the idea that the only kind of learning possible is the one where students are "challenged" at every minute, and that anything that isn't "challenging" them is "coddling." but i teach in a field (architecture) that has really internalized a lot of fucked-up practices with regard to students and their well-being and their intellectual development so maybe i'm particularly keyed-up about this. i'm not saying i have found a perfect feminist mode of practice; i have a ton of really bad ingrained habits that i would like to root out one by one. but this is where my head's at.

it's also just weird like, ILX has a whole thread, maybe multiple ones, mocking the "political correctness GONE MAD!" trope in right-wing discourse. but when it's "trigger warnings GONE CODDLEY!" we pretend it's a serious expose of a major issue of our times or something. it's all bullshit and it all comes down to (a) "in my day we learned better when the teacher told us to shut up and had the switch at the ready" and (b) "these kids in these colleges, it's just a big liberal feel-good fest, they don't learn anything!" which also includes (c) "the liberal arts are bullshit." fuck that.

branwell & casino otmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

it's also just weird like, ILX has a whole thread, maybe multiple ones, mocking the "political correctness GONE MAD!" trope in right-wing discourse. but when it's "trigger warnings GONE CODDLEY!" we pretend it's a serious expose of a major issue of our times or something.

wonder if this isn't also a symptom of aging ILX

i haven't really contributed to this thread much apart from calling out some posts as very truthful and otm. i'm so annoyed by these kinds of articles and i feel a little exhausted by the attention they are getting. i work at an research university that was once almost entirely white men and is now one of the most diverse elite schools around right now thanks to enormous amounts of work done by people who were sick of sexist and racist bullshit. this is a far better school than it was before thanks to this work. people say far less racist and sexist things than they used to. that shit is not tolerated anymore and as a result so many different types of people other than white dudes are able to succeed here. the global impact this school has is far more immense now that we have all types of people enrolled here. i run a "diversity/inclusion/social justice" committee in the dept i work in and it is astonishing how much more of an effective, caring, and open department we are now than before when people weren't having these types of conversations. people are waaaaaay happier than they used to be. the cluelessness and yes definitely "political correctness gone mad!!!!" bullshit spoken about social justice movements on campuses is so fucking exasperating.

branwell, casino, marcos otm, great posts.

yeah, bravo.

yeah but can Seinfeld visit your campus

Can Kramer?

You know I didn't even see this yesterday because of train/bus posting, but I'm just going to put this out here. Because when I say something like... "I find it difficult to participate in some threads because of baseline hostility, ad-hominem BS, deliberate misrepresentation of the intent behind my words and behaviour" for someone then to reply like this, and pretty much confirm everything I've just said:

Oh, come on - I've can't remember seeing you join any thread, on any subject, where something almost exactly like that wasn't your opening gambit. "I'm a trauma victim/Most of you are horrible/I don't know why I'm even here since most of you are going to be horrible/Here's what I think anyway/I don't really want to discuss it further." You do this every time. Eventually you post something productive, but there's always this ridiculous poor-me throat-clearing first.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, 7 October 2015 12:23 (Yesterday) Permalink

Dude, how dare you speak to me like this. This post is unkind, uncharitable, totally un-empathetic, and indicates some fundamental-level failing of basic humanity.

Yes, sure, I am sometimes defensive or less than 100% enthusiastic or less than 100% super-chirpy-polite on threads about topics that are highly emotive. But when routinely faced with this kind of just nasty, malicious, *mean* little comments, do you *wonder* why I might feel defensive, or might reply to stuff like this, not with apologetic politeness, but with a plain and blunt "Wow, that was a shitty thing to say."

I do wonder if a lot of the specifically academic resistance to the idea of trigger warnings comes from the fact that it's such a grass-roots, bottom-up concept.

It's seen as something that comes from "the youth" and something that comes from "the internet" because those are the spaces where this stuff was hashed out. And because it's internet-y and youth-y that's going to provoke a kind of "ugh, it's awful" which has little to do with the actual content of the stuff but with defensive kneejerk fear of who's coming up with it. There's not an old white European philosopher dude spreading a Grand Paradigm Theory of Why This Should Exist at the top, it's a set of conventions and protocols and ways of proceeding that were hashed out in small groups and slowly coalesced from the bottom up.

Is this argument about free speech, about education, about... I dunno. I always saw it as being about consent. (Education comes into this, in terms of... does a student have the right to consent or withdraw consent to an education which they may find damaging?)

This is one personal perspective on using them, which people may find useful context as one example (or not!) followed by more general comments.

The first place I encountered it was not actually in feminist spaces, but way back in the mid 90s, in ~internet fandom~ spaces which were full of a mixture of women who were feminist, either through study or just experience. The first discussion I ever had about content warnings was in the editorial committee of a site I hosted that published amateur fiction, fan fiction, short stories. There was a warning of a "naughty zone" for materials of an adult nature (usually sexual) with an age limit on it. But some of the writers were getting into some quite... dark territory. Editors, and readers, and writers discussed the need for something beyond just "rated adult" in terms of expressing what it was getting into (was it just sex, or was there violence, non-con, drug use, etc.) I knew (I was!) some of the writers who were writing the "dark" stuff were people who were using writing as a form of therapy to cope with and come to terms with some pretty horrific and brutal stuff. But at the same time, there were groups of readers who were "wow, this is not OK with me. I came in here to read some fun smut and I just smacked in the face with some brutal flashbacks" and readers who were "wow, reading this really helps me to come to terms with / understanding stuff."

These conversations went on for years. Decades. It was sometimes people bringing arguments from feminist spaces to fandom spaces and sometimes it flowed the other way around. They intensified in the mid-00s as ~fandom~ as a whole moved over to platforms like LiveJournal, with its mixture of ~fandom communities~ and personal journalling and blurring of boundaries. Conventions varied from community to community, with stuff getting hashed out in discussion and debate. There was master links lists of "discussions people have had about warnings" which would accrue and get revised, but it was a hugely collaborative project of people finding out together what worked for them.

It was always an *alternative* to outright censorship. Instead of saying "there will be absolutely no rape or non-con stories on this site, verboten" the admins would say "you can write whatever you need to, under the condition that you give advance warning so people have a choice whether to go there or not." It produced more, varied writing, rather than pre-emptively excluding something ~problematic~. And once you'd established those ground rules, in the comments threads, in people's personal journals, people would open up and start sharing their own experiences. Amazingly, "You have the choice whether to participate in the Bad Stuff or not" lead to lots and lots of individual and group discussion of The Bad Stuff. "Why do you warn for this?" often functioned as a conversation starter: "This is A Thing" followed by "Oh, I didn't know that, and now I do" or "Wow, me too, I had no idea other people had experienced this, too, can we talk about it?"

Back to more general comments:

I think if you were part of the process of hashing this stuff out, it makes a much more instinctive gut-level kind of sense. If you are someone who grew up within those communities (my experience of kids is: I don't think they're idiots - or wise fools. They are people who are actively in the process of figuring stuff out, and can often be hugely helpful in terms of *teaching* you, when you are making up a collaborative process as you go along) then you've already seen it in action. If you are encountering this for the first time as a older college professor or a confused middle aged dude on the internet, it's like... WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?!? Everywhere. But mostly crazy kids and their internets. WHERE IS THE BOOK ON IT, WHERE ARE THE FOOTNOTES??!? There are none. It was built as a collaborative process. (Even what you are able to find out about it will be the result of your particular filter bubble.) I suspect that to Academics with a specific view of how learning advances, and who advances it, the idea of THE THING WITH NO CITATIONS is terrifying!

And again, I suspect also, a lot of the defensiveness about it comes from... some people are just resistant to the idea of accepting that certain kinds of trauma are *real*. It's one thing to accept that a shellshocked veteran coming home from a war with PTSD and flashbacks has been in a traumatic situation with long term mental and physical effects. But, very obviously, to some people, the idea that other forms of trauma - rape, sexual assault, racially motivated violence, being on the receiving end of sustained systematic bigotry-influenced abuse - can have long-lasting psychological effects? People who have never experienced these things have a hard time even seeing them, let alone understanding the effects of them, and this is when you get the "coddled" comments and the "poor-me, always playing the victim" bollocks from shitheads like our friend in the comment above, when someone asks for this stuff, or tries to talk about it.

This gets even more nebulous when you start talking about the other kinds of trigger warnings which don't get so much press. The trigger warnings for mental health stuff around issues involving impulsivity and control: many of the communities I was involved in recognised that things like Eating Disorders, self-harm (especially cutting), addictions, even suicide attempts have a trigger-like element to them. For someone who is at-risk for those behaviours, exposure to depictions or even discussion of those behaviours can provoke a trigger-like urge or compulsion in engage in them. So some spaces will ask people to warn for those things, too. But trying to ask for empathy and understanding and support for (these are horrible terms, but these are the stereotypes I often see these people *described* as) "attention-seeking teenage girls who cut themselves" or "coked-up anorexic model types" ... that is, for many people, an ask too far. Asking for protection and sensitivity for vulnerable people who are often dismissed or demonised - that is the *opposite* of coddling. Yet the resistance comes because of who's doing the asking.

This is an essay now, apologies for the length, and thanks for reading if you made it to the end.

Hi Dröhn Rock,

Just wanted to comment that I appreciate your post. Anything I've read about trigger warnings previously has left me vaguely suspicious of the idea and I am glad to get another perspective, I'll have to think about it more but at the very least its good to get some context about the history the idea. I haven't read any other posts by you but certainly it seems to me that the hostility that you've been met with here is completely uncalled for and as someone on the "other side" of the argument to you I still found it quite shocking, not to mention a little ironic given that many concerns about trigger warnings are based on an assumption that people should be exposed to different viewpoints in an unmediated way!

I'm not academically trained so apologies if I'm off on the terms I'm using, and I'm sure these are points you've heard raised before but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what I presume are common objections to trigger warnings, IE concerns about how wide the net should be cast, given how many possible traumas there are and how many situations might act as a reminder of these it seems like there is almost no cultural artifact which wouldn't be potentially problematic for at least one person's specific set of circumstances. I would be worried that the act of engaging with a book or film requires a certain amount of allowing an argument or nuanced portrait of a set of circumstances or whatever to unfold on its own terms. I feel like a lot would have been lost if every book I had ever read had been mediated in advance with information about its content. Perhaps this is a price worth paying, I don't know, but it also seems to me unrealistic, which brings me to my next concern.

I'm also unsure about how trigger warnings in colleges are supposed to interact with the "wider world". So while I can certainly see the value of trigger warnings in specific situations such as the online forums in which they developed, where you have a self selecting group who are likely to have suffered a particular trauma or experience, and may have different levels of readiness to deal with material which may act as a reminder of the trauma, but it seems to me that if trigger warnings are attached to generic college courses, it is merely kicking the can down the road for when people who might want or need these warnings are no longer in a campus environment, and that this might be counter productive in the long run. (this is how I would interpret the word "coddling" in the atlantic article.)

one thing i'm confused by is the lack of a trigger warning wiki

Branwell forever otm

although i wonder if maybe that's best explained by the fact that anyone who was a point of contact for one would find themselves the recipient of for-the-lols threats of violence

sorry xpost. yeah, branwell otm itt, also difficult listening hour upthread

couple other posters way out of line

its the ilx way

an assumption that people should be exposed to different viewpoints in an unmediated way!

IANAB, but there is overlapping layers of both "I don't have the same problem as someone who would be triggered, so I get to ignore their desires" (which is pretty clearly a dick move) and "I have the same problem, but I don't feel that I need a trigger warning (due to access to various resources of various types, which I have this long list of reasons why they don't mitigate), so I don't think anyone should"

What does the "B" stand for?

Berliner.