May 24, 2014

"Many of the op-eds and articles on trigger warnings published this week have argued on behalf of the sanctity of the relationship between the reader and the text."

"For the most part, I have agreed with them," writes Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker.
A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.

I relayed these thoughts to [Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing], along with the anecdote about my professor and “Lolita.” 
His professor had proclaimed: "When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl."
“What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered, and I recalled the severe annoyance I’d felt in college seminars and coffeehouse conversations whenever a white person would say a bit too ringingly that a book written by a person of color somehow “transcended race,” as if that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a work written by one of us poor, striving minorities. Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college....
Every reliable figure?! That sentence really undercut Kang's credibility for me. I note that he says "sexually assaulted" and not "rape" (a word that appears 7 times in his article), and depending on what the meaning of sexually assaulted is — does it include getting grabbed? — the number is up for grabs. But we're seeing that notoriously spurious statistic in a paragraph that's in the middle of Kang's essay. It's a sop to the feminists, a place on his narrative arc before he ultimately delivers us back where he started and agrees with his own original orientation against trigger warnings.

In his final paragraph, he announces that "In a good novel... every word matters." So: "Any excess language—in the form of a trigger warning—amounts to a preëmptive defacement." The author should control the roll-out of shocks — lulling and luring you into a dark alley where — if it's his way — he can rape you mentally assault you.

24 comments:

campy said...

"...depending on what the meaning of sexually assaulted is — does it include getting grabbed?"

I think it includes getting ogled.

rhhardin said...

Authors rape readers all the time.

It's what writing is.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Lulling and luring Lolita... I've been triggered.

rhhardin said...

Warning : writing.

Anonymous said...

Blogger rhhardin said...

Warning : writing.

And that is why I love rhhardin.

Anonymous said...

The preface "Crazy Street Corner Guy Off His Meds Says" functions as my Trigger Warning.

Meade said...

Trigger Warning: Blog commenters mocking trigger warnings.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

He lost me at "sanctity."

Meade said...

Oops... too late.

Fen said...

"Trigger warnings" are crap. I hope China or Islam invades quickly to put us out of our misery. Fricken pussies.

lemondog said...

Trigger Warning:

White men
Old White men
Racist White Men
Racist Old White Men

or just:

White Men

Is there a check list of Trigger Warnings? How many trigger warnings allowed on any one book:

To Kill a Mockingbird.

Racist Southern Town
Old White Man
Mentally Challenged White Man
Lying White Woman
Racist White Woman
Children attacked by Old White Man, father of Racist Lying White Woman
Dead Old White Man

cubanbob said...

Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college….


Every person with two firing neurons knows this is utter crap. On the other hand this idiotic statement is an aggravated assault on one's sense and sensibilities.

Zach said...

"Trigger warnings" are just censorship. Nobody gets to say anything without the official stamp of approval or disapproval.

Stephen A. Meigs said...

At first I was going to argue viewing so-called "triggers" as rape-like had to do with equating females who want to fuck cleanly of their own volition with abused females and rape victims. But off hand this seems a sort of flip side of that as far as what gender is being manipulated when. If a male is willing to fuck a female but not to marry her, somewhere along the way he'll have to express that, at least if both sorts of relationships are to be workable. Get males in a spirit where they feel rapist-like telling females they want male-responsibility-free sex, and that makes male-responsibility-free sex unworkable. Get females in a spirit where a female feels getting raped is like forthrightly being told by a male he wants to fuck her (instead of marrying her) and they'll be easier to rape or forcibly sodomize, at least if the females are unselfish enough not to be marriage-fanatic whores and intelligent and practical enough to see that a female should nevertheless prefer sex with male-commitment somewhat to getting fucked (assuming she feel equal love and sexual pleasantness) and to see that male forthrightness saves much time for females when they deal with males they love enough to let marry them but not to let fuck them. The disadvantage of getting raped or forcibly sodomized comes from getting raped or forcibly sodomized, and not from some more general sensitivity against abrupt forthrightness. But both (1) females more-or-less universally unwilling as if by principle on account of whorishness to want sex without male commitment of resources and (2) rapists and forcible sodomizers need people to think of rape and forcible sodomy in a broad sense, as is encouraged by undue concern about rape triggers, etc. Wherever you've got two disparate kinds of bad people (in this case, priggish women and rapacious males) united in encouraging something, that something may well happen, in this case a conflation of rape and forcible sodomy with forthright discussion.

All this would seem not particularly related to whether a male or a female should move first. A male not wanting to allow sex with a female because he feels she is too beautiful or good for him doesn't really make sense because if she be that beautiful or good, he should trust her opinion if she thinks the sex between them is right. If a male is not concerned about dangers such as diseases, he will always tend to prefer fucking to no sex at all (assuming the fucking is really responsibility-free, which requires trust or maybe even more given the bad laws enforcing male responsibility outside marriage). Similarly, if a female were to think a male so great it were best for him to not waste caring on her, but to just have sex with her, then if he is that great she should trust him if he wants to marry her. So in a way, if a female wants sex with a male and she isn't afraid of being made a prisoner by marriage, she always wants to marry him more than to be fucked by him, just as males always tend to prefer safe responsibility-free sex to no sex at all.

The whole issue is confused by it not being particularly clear whether "fuck" denotes sex outside of marriage, sodomy, sex that involves the male having pro-sodomy feeling, or sex when the male lacks loving feeling. Perhaps somewhat arbitrarily I only use the unmodified word in the first sense, though saying "fuck up" for sodomy I am okay with allowing myself, and the expression "WTF" is amusing on account of it expressing the highly conflated reality of the word. One could just not say "fuck", but that's the very kind of false politeness I am arguing against. Usually, using circumlocutions, coined words, and lengthy phrases to denote simple important concepts seems less preferable to using simple common words and restricting their denotations.

Zach said...

“What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?”

What a delight it must be when every discussion of controversial topics includes a mandatory finger-wagging recitation of your point of view.

Note the grating disconnect of Kang asking Brodsky about a piece of literature. Kang is a Columbia MFA, a published novelist, and he's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and several other places. Brodsky is a law student. Her profile at Feministing says

"her writing has been published by the New York Times, the Guardian, Al Jazeera America, Bloomberg View, Salon, Slate, and the Nation."

Advocacy journalism start to finish. Is there any proof that Brodsky has ever even read a book?

Wince said...

Funny, whenever I receive a "trigger warning", I just try to think about baseball.

Zach said...

A hypothetical to explain my position:

There are, of course, a great many evangelical Christians in America. Many of them have websites and blogs telling them which movies, songs, etc, are family friendly and which contain depictions of sinful acts.

Should it follow that a lecturer should give a preamble before any lecture that describes or touches upon material an evangelical Christian might find sinful? Gay sex, sex outside of wedlock, abortion? It doesn't need to be long, it just needs to firmly establish that the lecturer is against such things, and the student ought to be against them, too.

If your answer is that the first amendment prohibits such things, then I ask whether it should be the practice on private colleges, or in England where they have an official, established religion?

I say that forced speech is just as bad as forced silence, and that a strong principle of free speech should prohibit both trigger warnings and sinful activity warnings.

Krumhorn said...

Isn't this just an extension of the post modern critique of Western society and its monumental achievements?

I am writing my Fall business law syllabus. I'm thinking that the following would be fun:

Grunden-Martin v. Fairmont
Trigger warning: rapacious capitalism

Currie v. Chevron USA
Trigger warning: immolation by lesbian lover

The irony is that if I decide to do this, my ass is grass. Lefties do not like to be mocked.

- Krumhorn

stlcdr said...

Someone said tome thing like 'stupidity is limitless'.

What it is unfortunate is not that people say stupid things, but that there are so many people that take is seriously.

Sam L. said...

Warning! Here be Tygers! They're everywhere, they're everywhere. If you feel you need trigger warnings, you should stay inside...or stay long enough outside to get over that need.

hawkeyedjb said...

If, as president Obama says, women are roughly 100 times more likely to be raped or assaulted in college than in the general society, why are colleges allowed to exist? Why haven't these cesspits of malevolence been shut down?

Lewis Wetzel said...

Lolita isn't about Lolita. In the end Lolita destroys HH by simply not caring about him at all.
I wouldn't call it a feminist novel, though.

jaed said...

The irony is that if I decide to do this, my ass is grass. Lefties do not like to be mocked.

Maybe so, but they also tend to be tone-deaf. Who says they'll realize you're mocking them?

If someone accuses you of mockery, just go all indignant and more-easily-triggered-than-thou on them. You can get away with this cold, and give a good chuckle to yourself and those of your students who aren't tone-deaf.

Jupiter said...

"His professor had proclaimed: "When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl."

I once started to read Lolita, having read that it was a work of literary genius. Then I realized that it was a book about the systematic rape of a young girl. Then I threw it in the garbage. I guess I don't have what it takes to be a "Professor". What do they profess, anyway?