Hadley Freeman on trigger warnings

I think there was actually more understanding of human distress and pressures in the past

People knew of babies and children who died young, mothers who died giving birth, neighbours, friends who died of disease and men who died in war and having to flee invading armies. That's on top of the everyday distress like losing your job and having to resort to the workhouse, being thrown out by your landlord or finding out your husband has gambled and drunk away the housekeeping and you're all going to go hungry. They couldn't avoid suffering by way of trigger warnings, they were in the thick of it and they had to deal with is as God's will or however they saw it.

We live in a society in the west that's largely sanitised and safe, certainly the most sanitised and safe it has ever been. Doctors can cure conditions that fifty years ago would have been a death sentence. Cars are the safest they've ever been and health and safety warnings proliferate. We can take for granted clean water, heat and light and sewage so diseases our great grandparents would have encountered are practically unheard of. Trigger warnings almost feel like they're putting that danger back into life - 'warning! you're reading a Thomas Hardy novel that might arouse uncomfortable feelings and make you sad!' 'Careful, you might see blood on these biology slides!' 'Beware! this book was written in 1923 and has the attitudes of the time!' It's like a mass infantilisation.

(Disclaimer - I do realise that some people have suffered genuine trauma and trigger warnings work for them).

Rupert Murdoch explicitly has never had editorial control of the Times and Sunday Times. Glibly sneering at these papers with their long and continuing history of investigative journalism is a facile attempt to deflect from the content.

The culture of safetyism continues to permeate.

Which publication should Hadley Freeman write for? She was made persona non grata at another newspaper , I assume she works for the reasons we all, so what should she do?

Trigger warnings annoy me so much. Life is sometimes upsetting. Sometimes you will hear or witness things that don't make you feel great, but if you avoid everything you think may upset you then you will never build resilience and be able to function in life.

We are seeing this with the current generation of young adults raised on trigger warnings all over everything. They seem so much less able to cope than previous generations.

Here's a shared link to the Sunday times article itself - I didn't have time to read yesterday, there's a column by Kathleen stock too so id better grab a coffee and read them before more MN!

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-easiest-way-to-fail-a-child-never-let-them-fail-b7b2fqdbx?shareToken=73150f6f065e5dbc1b8a999c591737f4

It’s good that you are privileged enough to scoff at this, but I’ve taught children for whom that warning would be very necessary and you would not even want to imagine the reasons why.
In general, resilience is great but offering a trigger warning is kind and often necessary.
As for Hadley Freeman, I don’t believe that she is interested in the world being a better place or she wouldn’t be working for Rupert Murdoch

Also i have no idea what Covid is doing in that article - she doesn't follow that up. Feels like she started writing one piece and ended up somewhere else.

Wtf?!

Apparently Thomas Hardy novels now come with trigger warnings.... at university. Jude the Obscure causes anguish because the children kill themselves. I know he's not the cheerful type of author, but do 18-21 year olds really need a trigger warning?

I agree with the argument that helping your children develop resilience is a really important part of being a parent.

I'd also agree that trigger warnings are mostly about loudly proclaiming that you understand other people's trauma, and that they frequently miss the things that actually trigger people, which can be incredibly specific.

I was triggered to a point of escalating distress the other day in a work meeting. It was truly horrible. I ended up leaving the meeting and I did take a bit of time to regroup. I think people should be allowed to do that. But we can't not discuss the risks involved in our work.

I think there was actually more understanding of human distress and pressures in the past. The vast majority of children never took exams, they left school quite young and had a job sorted out for them usually by their parents. They wouldn't be constantly bombarded with images and stories of disasters and tragedies of every type from all round the world. They wouldn't be required to learn how to manage huge debts of more than they are ever likely to earn; most people didn't have bank accounts. I'm not hankering after the past but it's also in fact completely reasonable that resilience varies in the face of these factors.

My daughter had some slides from school for biology and I'm not joking there was a content warning for 'blood' on the opening slide.

Blood. In a biology lesson.

I recently heard a snippet about girls who play football have more confidence (though do they join a team because they have the confidence to go against the grain already?)

I think it was Leah Williamson who said that being in football as a teenager saved her from body issues as she was more focused on being strong and fit than having a specific body type.

Yes, she writes very well about this in her book, Good Girls. About how anyone trying to avoid triggering her when she was anorexic was doomed to failure as everything was triggering in some way, and even the avoidance of topics was also triggering because she knew they were avoiding them! She argues that it isn’t the responsibility of the rest of the world to tiptoe around trying to avoid upsetting or offending someone who is 100% bound to be upset or offended regardless.

Excellent article. Unbelievable that students studying law in the US didn’t want to know about rape law in case it was too “triggering”.

Thanks for sharing this.

She’s brilliant. And she’s so right on trigger warnings.