Trigger Warnings

Last year's viral trend was the Ice Bucket Challenge, when all your high school classmates flooded Facebook with videos of dumping water on themselves. That was silly - but also hugely charitable! This year's trend - slapping "trigger warnings" on anything that anyone could possibly disagree with - is just plain nuts.

Some students at Columbia have argued that Greek mythology needs a trigger warning. A Rutgers student said that The Great Gatsby should come with a disclaimer about its "gory, abusive and misogynistic violence." Oberlin College asked faculty to place trigger warnings in their syllabi; there was a push at George Washington University to instate a similar policy.

Some "trigger warnings" do have a purpose. If something is extremely graphic, gory, what-have-you, then a word of caution is hardly out of line.  A perfect candidate for such forewarning is the Planned Parenthood videos, with their images of horrific things being done to fetal remains (the videos I've seen all have a slide stating that the images could be disturbing to viewers; good on the Center for Medical Progress for including it).

But, mythology? Literature? These students do understand that they're works of fiction, yes? If you can be "triggered" by something that never happened, between people who do not actually exist, then I wonder how well you can handle reality.

The "trigger warning" is used for malicious purposes when applied to speakers and subjects with whom a Special Snowflake disagrees. When Brown University hosted a debate between a liberal feminist and a libertarian, the libertarian's views were deemed to be so cruel, so harsh, that students set up a "safe space" with coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies." The message is clear: These people don't want debate. They won't be mollified until opposing viewpoints are entirely excluded from the conversation, and replaced with your standard preschool activities (I mean, the coloring books...really!?). The kerfuffle at Brown was not unusual; trigger warnings followed Christina Hoff Sommers, a respected author and scholar on gender issues, on the lecture circuit a few months ago.

Curiously, it's never the conservative or libertarian students who feel "triggered." Liberal feminists would have you believe that they're fierce, strong, independent women-in-charge...who need to slap a warning label on anything that just might slightly offend their delicate sensibilities. Oh no no no. I believe in feminism because it means women's equality - and that means that we are capable of thinking and discussing and debating just as well as men (if not even better - if you watched Carly Fiorina in the first GOP primary debate, you know exactly what I mean).

A "trigger warning" is a license to ignore whatever follows. If it's triggering, well, no one can blame you for avoiding it. In the mind of the progressive, you were just protecting your emotional well-being!

And that's where they're wrong. Experiencing something that challenges you is not usually harmful to your well-being. In fact, well-being requires that we learn, that we grow, and that means seeking out challenges - testing our views, and encountering things that push us beyond our comfort zones.