There’s a follow-on thought to my last post that I simply didn’t have time to explore properly. I figured four thousand words was more than enough for everyone for one day and the only way to get into the issue while still pretending to care about economy of words would be to say something extremely flip that would make me look like an ass. I try to avoid looking like an ass, especially in situations where I’m not even trying to be an ass but have a pretty strongly held opinion. So let’s to it, then.
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I started the Being Me posts on a story that the kids on the internetz would refer to as “triggering.” I would, in fact, say that it was triggering. I pretty much admitted to being triggered in the very next post when I pointed out that it was still bugging the hell out of me twenty-four hours later.
I also ended the Being Me posts on a story that was triggering. The outcome of that story was very different, however. It is in the space between these two stories that I want to discuss why I think the whole trigger warning thing on the internet is good but can also get completely and totally out of hand.
Mostly I’m going to tell stories.
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Triggers are simply a way to register mental pain. They mean that something has happened and that thing needs to be dealt with. There’s really no other, additional magic in the whole thing.
Let’s say your friend breaks his leg. You go and see him a week after the leg breaking incident and he’s sitting on his bed with his obviously broken and unset leg propped up in front of him. You’re concerned and confused.
You say, “Hey, haven’t you gone to the doctor to fix that broken leg?”
He responds with, “Hey, man, don’t talk about the leg. You’re reminding me about the pain.”
You’re taken aback, but you try again. “The pain will go away if you get it fixed, you know,” you tell him. “And unset broken bones can cause all kinds of other problems, like gangrene. If you leave it long enough they’ll probably have to amputate and that’ll be even worse.”
“Hey!” he says, “What did I tell you about talking to me about broken legs? Don’t you know that it hurts me to have to talk about this broken leg?”
At this point your buddy is cutting off discussion. Specifically, he’s cutting off a discussion that he really needs to be having. There might be some sort of valid, underlying reason why he’s not going to the doctor. Maybe he doesn’t have insurance. Maybe he had a pediatrician who was a real dick. Maybe he broke his leg in high school and some kid drew a penis on the cast and everyone made fun of him for it. All of these things might be a valid reason to have trepidation about a visit to the doctor’s office. None of these things are a valid reason to not get his broken leg fixed. Further, there’s absolutely no reason to allow that underlying shit to keep the thing that needs to get done from getting done because it will be so, so much worse later.
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This is the root of my discomfort with the whole trigger warning thing. For the most part I think the triggering events are a sign that something or other is going on that needs to be fixed, so running around and saying, “Hey, you can’t talk about this!” or, “Hey, warn me before you bring this up!” is really just a way of publically not fixing a problem and making it someone else’s fault that you’re not doing so. It’s also a really good way to wallow in misery and try to drag other people into your misery, too.
I was in my first car accident my junior year in high school. I worked at a shop at the time and that was the shop that I had my car towed to. When I got there everything was pretty busy, so my boss said to me, “Hey, since you’re not doing anything can you take that car over there and [whatever, test drive, part pickup, I don’t remember]?” I got into the car and for a moment had this, “Oh my god, I can’t do this,” response. But I did whatever needed to get done and spent the entire time worried that I might get in another accident because I’d just gotten in one. I doubt I’ve been more careful and alert while behind the wheel of a car since that afternoon.
Nothing happened. Well, nothing bad happened and certainly nothing memorable beyond the thing itself. So I got on with my life and I’ve been driving ever since. I even drove tow trucks for a while and often found myself at the scene of an accident that was much, much worse than the one I’d been through. I never even thought of my own accident during those calls.
This is, admittedly, a pretty minor thing. But what if I hadn’t gotten into that car that afternoon? What if, instead, I’d had a panic attack and then refused to drive for the rest of the year? What if I’d used that to fuel a massive fear of driving cars and even now, a decade and a half later, I was still completely and totally sans automobile?
It might make perfect sense to me. To an outside observer, however, I’m just some dude totally overreacting to a minor fender bender from a really long time in the past.
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This isn’t to say that there aren’t major traumatic life events that have far-reaching consequences. I think it’s important to be sensitive to that and not increase anybody’s pain unnecessarily. As such, if I know I’m going to be talking about something that can be a pretty big deal I’m now in the habit of trying to make sure I point that out. I think, though, that the entire trigger warning thing, at least in the places I tend to frequent, tends to tilt in the direction of over the top unintentional self-parody.
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When I was in college I had a friend who had a really long last name. I was hanging around with her one day right after I’d been listening to the Singles soundtrack and, specifically, Paul Westerberg’s “Dyslexic Heart.”[1] There’s a line in the song that goes “Is that your name or a doctor’s eye chart?” One thing led to another and I nicknamed my long-named friend “Eye Chart.’
A couple months (weeks? I don’t know) later I was hanging out with some other people and Eye Chart wasn’t there. I made a reference to her and one of our mutual friends ripped into me. She informed me in no uncertain terms that Eye Chart hated that nickname and I needed to stop using it because I was being a total ass.
This surprised me, as I hadn’t gotten the impression this was the case. So the next time I saw Eye Chart I said, “Hey, I just found out that you don’t like it when I call you Eye Chart. I didn’t know. I’ll stop.”
Her response was a blank stare and a, “Who told you that?” I told her and she said, “I never told her that and I don’t know where she’s getting it from. I don’t have a problem with you calling me Eye Chart.”
I later figured out that the person who jumped all over me had a whole lot of issues and apparently a lot of them were specifically with me for reasons I couldn’t really understand. Actually, I kind of knew it at the time, but it didn’t sink in until later. She accused me of shit I didn’t do on several occasions and eventually precipitated one of the worst evenings of my life. I started trying to avoid her within about six months of meeting her.
I offer this as a cautionary tale. It’s a good idea to listen to people and take them seriously. It’s also a good idea to be aware of the fact that some people have agendas or a skewed view of reality or might just fucking hate you for no discernible reason. C’est la vie.
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I tend to think of that story whenever I see the, shall we say, sillier trigger warning arguments. Somebody on a blog says something. Someone else pops in and says, “You shouldn’t say that, or if you do you should really put a trigger warning on it because it might bug someone.” The whole thing then devolves into a bizarre argument about triggers wherein absolutely none of the people involved have actually been triggered by the theoretically triggering passage and no one can present anything other than anecdotal evidence about a former acquaintance who had to deal with something that was kinda-sorta similar.
It’s basically a derailing or a heckler’s veto. And I think it goes back to my general theory of the shortcomings of Web 2.0 and the fact that people read things that have comments and all they can think about is what they will say at the end. The trigger warning warner, then, is just someone who wants to make the conversation about them and only them and make sure that they educate everyone else about how awesome and inclusive they are and how much of a rotten jerk the person who wrote the original post is.[2]
This is also where it’s hard to talk about much of anything as a straight, white male without knowing someone, somewhere, might stumble upon this post and say, “You just don’t get it, you privileged, mansplaining jackass!”[3] In and of itself that’s an internalized derailing or heckler’s veto, I suppose. That’s part of the reason that I’ve had thoughts on this subject for a while but I never managed to bring myself to write them down.
On one level that doesn’t matter. I’m not going to change the world for better or worse with this post, mostly because nobody’s gonna fucking read it.
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[1]I’m listening to it right now. It’s kind of a terrible song. Apparently Paul Westerberg was the early ‘90s secular Rick Cua.
Don’t watch that. It’ll fuck your earholes up.
[2]This is not to say that everyone who pops into the comments and says, “Really? I can’t believe you just said that,” is wrong or just trying to get attention. As an example, Ed Brayton recently wrote a column about Chuck Norris’s reality-free fantasies about going underground to start some secret project to save the country from the godless libruls with a joke about Norris infiltrating a cocktail party in heels and a dress. Someone in the comments asked why he’d make such an insensitive joke.
I had pretty much passed it over, but the comment got me to stop and think and I realized that, yeah, that joke was pretty insensitive. It plays off an old trope of men dressing as women in movies and TV shows and whatnot to infiltrate things. That trope, though, plays off of the, “Ha, ha! Look at that big, manly man in a dress! Isn’t that so hilariously funny?” The reason it’s funny, though, is because men aren’t supposed to dress like that and anyone who does dress like that is to be mocked. On one level that’s an insult to cross-dressers and transfolk based on strictly enforced gender norms. On another level it serves to reinforce gender norms and conformity. So for someone who claims to not like that sort of thing to make the joke indicates that either they’re not actually as open-minded as they thought or that they have a blind spot that ought to be examined.
Further, in the first paragraph of this footnote I used the phrase “or just trying to get attention.” The more common vernacular for that is, “or is an attention whore.” I’ve waded through a metric shit-ton of posts and comments arguing on the appropriateness of the term “attention whore.” Mostly it boils down to an argument of “it’s a gendered insult directed primarily at women” against “it’s such a common phrase in English that it’s been stripped of all connotation about how whore is usually synonymous with women. It’s like sinister.”
On the one hand, I tend to side with the folks who say it’s been stripped of most of the connotations from a gender perspective. That’s the side I tend to come down on for certain other debates, too. “Hysterical” comes to mind, but I know there are a few others floating around out there. On the other hand, I’ve pretty much stopped using the phrase “attention whore” and I don’t really use “hysteric” in any of its myriad forms anymore. On a purely functional level it’s just easier. On a deeper level, though, I recognize that terms like that do actually hearken back to a time when those words very specifically referred to women and were used to marginalize them. So I’m forced to ask myself whether my belief that men and women should be treated equally is more important to me than my continued ability to make unfettered use of words or phrases with a specific bias against the female gender? The answer to that is pretty simple. It’s no, by the way.
My turning point on this, by the by, was the use of “gay” as a pejorative. My use of that term as an insult was vanishingly small to begin with, but hearing other people use it never really bugged me. Then one day it occurred to me that I knew a bunch of gay people and I liked them or, at least, had fond memories of them even though I hadn’t talked to them in a long time. It also occurred to me that I thought that gay people, my gay friends included, should be treated the exact same way as I am treated.
I imagine that I would feel pretty bad if some dingus on the internet replied to a bad beat in the multi-player mode of First Person Shooter Oh-Thirteen with, “Aw, man, that’s totally Geds.” I also imagine that I’d feel bad if they did so with something that I consider an integral part of my personality, like, “That’s totally writer, man!” or, “What kind of person-who-finds-Louise-Post-insanely-attractive-in-the-‘Volcano-Girls’-video cheating motherfucker are you?” So why the hell would I condone someone using the word gay in that fashion?
And, yes, I just tossed that bit about the “Volcano Girls” video in the last one as an excuse to link to the “Volcano Girls” video. But that’s just because I want to retroactively declare that the song of the year for the last fifteen years. And that’s a really hilariously super specific insult. I also chose it mostly because I couldn’t take myself seriously turning, “That’s so heterosexual,” into an inverse of, “That’s so gay.”
This whole thing is insanely selective and pretty arbitrary, though. Like, I’m totally okay with calling someone a giant bag of dicks. A few years ago I randomly coined the word “dickshitter” to yell at people who were being total idiots while driving. I intend to continue yelling, “Dickshitter!” at idiots in BMWs. If someone were to show up and call me a dickhead I’d be fine with that. Okay, I might not be fine with it, but I’d take no issue with the choice to use “dickhead.” And why is that? Fuck if I know. I’m guessing it’s a privilege thing, but operating in reverse. Basically, I’m a middle class white dude, which means that I’m going through life on easy mode so I can afford to not worry about insults that also serve as reminders that I’m operating on easy mode. It’s kind of like a double-standard, I guess. Maybe.
[3]Is that an insult against our donkey brethren and sistren?
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I started the Being Me posts on a story that the kids on the internetz would refer to as “triggering.” I would, in fact, say that it was triggering. I pretty much admitted to being triggered in the very next post when I pointed out that it was still bugging the hell out of me twenty-four hours later.
I also ended the Being Me posts on a story that was triggering. The outcome of that story was very different, however. It is in the space between these two stories that I want to discuss why I think the whole trigger warning thing on the internet is good but can also get completely and totally out of hand.
Mostly I’m going to tell stories.
-------------------
Triggers are simply a way to register mental pain. They mean that something has happened and that thing needs to be dealt with. There’s really no other, additional magic in the whole thing.
Let’s say your friend breaks his leg. You go and see him a week after the leg breaking incident and he’s sitting on his bed with his obviously broken and unset leg propped up in front of him. You’re concerned and confused.
You say, “Hey, haven’t you gone to the doctor to fix that broken leg?”
He responds with, “Hey, man, don’t talk about the leg. You’re reminding me about the pain.”
You’re taken aback, but you try again. “The pain will go away if you get it fixed, you know,” you tell him. “And unset broken bones can cause all kinds of other problems, like gangrene. If you leave it long enough they’ll probably have to amputate and that’ll be even worse.”
“Hey!” he says, “What did I tell you about talking to me about broken legs? Don’t you know that it hurts me to have to talk about this broken leg?”
At this point your buddy is cutting off discussion. Specifically, he’s cutting off a discussion that he really needs to be having. There might be some sort of valid, underlying reason why he’s not going to the doctor. Maybe he doesn’t have insurance. Maybe he had a pediatrician who was a real dick. Maybe he broke his leg in high school and some kid drew a penis on the cast and everyone made fun of him for it. All of these things might be a valid reason to have trepidation about a visit to the doctor’s office. None of these things are a valid reason to not get his broken leg fixed. Further, there’s absolutely no reason to allow that underlying shit to keep the thing that needs to get done from getting done because it will be so, so much worse later.
-----------------------
This is the root of my discomfort with the whole trigger warning thing. For the most part I think the triggering events are a sign that something or other is going on that needs to be fixed, so running around and saying, “Hey, you can’t talk about this!” or, “Hey, warn me before you bring this up!” is really just a way of publically not fixing a problem and making it someone else’s fault that you’re not doing so. It’s also a really good way to wallow in misery and try to drag other people into your misery, too.
I was in my first car accident my junior year in high school. I worked at a shop at the time and that was the shop that I had my car towed to. When I got there everything was pretty busy, so my boss said to me, “Hey, since you’re not doing anything can you take that car over there and [whatever, test drive, part pickup, I don’t remember]?” I got into the car and for a moment had this, “Oh my god, I can’t do this,” response. But I did whatever needed to get done and spent the entire time worried that I might get in another accident because I’d just gotten in one. I doubt I’ve been more careful and alert while behind the wheel of a car since that afternoon.
Nothing happened. Well, nothing bad happened and certainly nothing memorable beyond the thing itself. So I got on with my life and I’ve been driving ever since. I even drove tow trucks for a while and often found myself at the scene of an accident that was much, much worse than the one I’d been through. I never even thought of my own accident during those calls.
This is, admittedly, a pretty minor thing. But what if I hadn’t gotten into that car that afternoon? What if, instead, I’d had a panic attack and then refused to drive for the rest of the year? What if I’d used that to fuel a massive fear of driving cars and even now, a decade and a half later, I was still completely and totally sans automobile?
It might make perfect sense to me. To an outside observer, however, I’m just some dude totally overreacting to a minor fender bender from a really long time in the past.
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This isn’t to say that there aren’t major traumatic life events that have far-reaching consequences. I think it’s important to be sensitive to that and not increase anybody’s pain unnecessarily. As such, if I know I’m going to be talking about something that can be a pretty big deal I’m now in the habit of trying to make sure I point that out. I think, though, that the entire trigger warning thing, at least in the places I tend to frequent, tends to tilt in the direction of over the top unintentional self-parody.
--------------------
When I was in college I had a friend who had a really long last name. I was hanging around with her one day right after I’d been listening to the Singles soundtrack and, specifically, Paul Westerberg’s “Dyslexic Heart.”[1] There’s a line in the song that goes “Is that your name or a doctor’s eye chart?” One thing led to another and I nicknamed my long-named friend “Eye Chart.’
A couple months (weeks? I don’t know) later I was hanging out with some other people and Eye Chart wasn’t there. I made a reference to her and one of our mutual friends ripped into me. She informed me in no uncertain terms that Eye Chart hated that nickname and I needed to stop using it because I was being a total ass.
This surprised me, as I hadn’t gotten the impression this was the case. So the next time I saw Eye Chart I said, “Hey, I just found out that you don’t like it when I call you Eye Chart. I didn’t know. I’ll stop.”
Her response was a blank stare and a, “Who told you that?” I told her and she said, “I never told her that and I don’t know where she’s getting it from. I don’t have a problem with you calling me Eye Chart.”
I later figured out that the person who jumped all over me had a whole lot of issues and apparently a lot of them were specifically with me for reasons I couldn’t really understand. Actually, I kind of knew it at the time, but it didn’t sink in until later. She accused me of shit I didn’t do on several occasions and eventually precipitated one of the worst evenings of my life. I started trying to avoid her within about six months of meeting her.
I offer this as a cautionary tale. It’s a good idea to listen to people and take them seriously. It’s also a good idea to be aware of the fact that some people have agendas or a skewed view of reality or might just fucking hate you for no discernible reason. C’est la vie.
-----------------------
I tend to think of that story whenever I see the, shall we say, sillier trigger warning arguments. Somebody on a blog says something. Someone else pops in and says, “You shouldn’t say that, or if you do you should really put a trigger warning on it because it might bug someone.” The whole thing then devolves into a bizarre argument about triggers wherein absolutely none of the people involved have actually been triggered by the theoretically triggering passage and no one can present anything other than anecdotal evidence about a former acquaintance who had to deal with something that was kinda-sorta similar.
It’s basically a derailing or a heckler’s veto. And I think it goes back to my general theory of the shortcomings of Web 2.0 and the fact that people read things that have comments and all they can think about is what they will say at the end. The trigger warning warner, then, is just someone who wants to make the conversation about them and only them and make sure that they educate everyone else about how awesome and inclusive they are and how much of a rotten jerk the person who wrote the original post is.[2]
This is also where it’s hard to talk about much of anything as a straight, white male without knowing someone, somewhere, might stumble upon this post and say, “You just don’t get it, you privileged, mansplaining jackass!”[3] In and of itself that’s an internalized derailing or heckler’s veto, I suppose. That’s part of the reason that I’ve had thoughts on this subject for a while but I never managed to bring myself to write them down.
On one level that doesn’t matter. I’m not going to change the world for better or worse with this post, mostly because nobody’s gonna fucking read it.
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[1]I’m listening to it right now. It’s kind of a terrible song. Apparently Paul Westerberg was the early ‘90s secular Rick Cua.
Don’t watch that. It’ll fuck your earholes up.
[2]This is not to say that everyone who pops into the comments and says, “Really? I can’t believe you just said that,” is wrong or just trying to get attention. As an example, Ed Brayton recently wrote a column about Chuck Norris’s reality-free fantasies about going underground to start some secret project to save the country from the godless libruls with a joke about Norris infiltrating a cocktail party in heels and a dress. Someone in the comments asked why he’d make such an insensitive joke.
I had pretty much passed it over, but the comment got me to stop and think and I realized that, yeah, that joke was pretty insensitive. It plays off an old trope of men dressing as women in movies and TV shows and whatnot to infiltrate things. That trope, though, plays off of the, “Ha, ha! Look at that big, manly man in a dress! Isn’t that so hilariously funny?” The reason it’s funny, though, is because men aren’t supposed to dress like that and anyone who does dress like that is to be mocked. On one level that’s an insult to cross-dressers and transfolk based on strictly enforced gender norms. On another level it serves to reinforce gender norms and conformity. So for someone who claims to not like that sort of thing to make the joke indicates that either they’re not actually as open-minded as they thought or that they have a blind spot that ought to be examined.
Further, in the first paragraph of this footnote I used the phrase “or just trying to get attention.” The more common vernacular for that is, “or is an attention whore.” I’ve waded through a metric shit-ton of posts and comments arguing on the appropriateness of the term “attention whore.” Mostly it boils down to an argument of “it’s a gendered insult directed primarily at women” against “it’s such a common phrase in English that it’s been stripped of all connotation about how whore is usually synonymous with women. It’s like sinister.”
On the one hand, I tend to side with the folks who say it’s been stripped of most of the connotations from a gender perspective. That’s the side I tend to come down on for certain other debates, too. “Hysterical” comes to mind, but I know there are a few others floating around out there. On the other hand, I’ve pretty much stopped using the phrase “attention whore” and I don’t really use “hysteric” in any of its myriad forms anymore. On a purely functional level it’s just easier. On a deeper level, though, I recognize that terms like that do actually hearken back to a time when those words very specifically referred to women and were used to marginalize them. So I’m forced to ask myself whether my belief that men and women should be treated equally is more important to me than my continued ability to make unfettered use of words or phrases with a specific bias against the female gender? The answer to that is pretty simple. It’s no, by the way.
My turning point on this, by the by, was the use of “gay” as a pejorative. My use of that term as an insult was vanishingly small to begin with, but hearing other people use it never really bugged me. Then one day it occurred to me that I knew a bunch of gay people and I liked them or, at least, had fond memories of them even though I hadn’t talked to them in a long time. It also occurred to me that I thought that gay people, my gay friends included, should be treated the exact same way as I am treated.
I imagine that I would feel pretty bad if some dingus on the internet replied to a bad beat in the multi-player mode of First Person Shooter Oh-Thirteen with, “Aw, man, that’s totally Geds.” I also imagine that I’d feel bad if they did so with something that I consider an integral part of my personality, like, “That’s totally writer, man!” or, “What kind of person-who-finds-Louise-Post-insanely-attractive-in-the-‘Volcano-Girls’-video cheating motherfucker are you?” So why the hell would I condone someone using the word gay in that fashion?
And, yes, I just tossed that bit about the “Volcano Girls” video in the last one as an excuse to link to the “Volcano Girls” video. But that’s just because I want to retroactively declare that the song of the year for the last fifteen years. And that’s a really hilariously super specific insult. I also chose it mostly because I couldn’t take myself seriously turning, “That’s so heterosexual,” into an inverse of, “That’s so gay.”
This whole thing is insanely selective and pretty arbitrary, though. Like, I’m totally okay with calling someone a giant bag of dicks. A few years ago I randomly coined the word “dickshitter” to yell at people who were being total idiots while driving. I intend to continue yelling, “Dickshitter!” at idiots in BMWs. If someone were to show up and call me a dickhead I’d be fine with that. Okay, I might not be fine with it, but I’d take no issue with the choice to use “dickhead.” And why is that? Fuck if I know. I’m guessing it’s a privilege thing, but operating in reverse. Basically, I’m a middle class white dude, which means that I’m going through life on easy mode so I can afford to not worry about insults that also serve as reminders that I’m operating on easy mode. It’s kind of like a double-standard, I guess. Maybe.
[3]Is that an insult against our donkey brethren and sistren?
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