We have officially transitioned from getting offended to getting offended about people getting offended…
Well, some of them presumably got through it okay, Others probably did poorly in a class or two where they were faced with it. Others dropped out entirely.
Just like nowadays, really.
But: Overall, this whole “trigger warnings” phenomenon, as others have pointed out, isn’t really a massive movement or anything like that—rather, it’s an example of a few people’s reactions/demands for trigger warnings being taken to be the norm, rather than being the exceptional cases they are. (I’ve also seen a handful of cases where someone jokingly “demanded” a trigger warning, and had it taken by someone else as if it were serious—so there’s that source of the meme, too.)
So all y’all waxing rhapsodic about how kids these days are weak and horrible and unable to handle normal stresses and so on? Congratulations on being taken in by the media machine. Purveyors of clickbait everywhere thank you.
I have been thinking about the earlier post with the example below:
"I sat in on my friend’s Psychology 100 class. The lesson happened to be on the nervous system and the physiological effects of stress. Toward the end of the hour, he mentioned that scientists insert rods into different parts of a cat’s spine to see how blocking the signal effects the nervous system.
No one groaned or did anything over the top, but 3/4 of the class visibly cringed.
The prof was rather unhappy. ‘What’s wrong with you guys? Would you rather they did it to little kids?!’
Perspective, I guess."
From my perspective, a better question is “What’s wrong with the 1/4 of the class that did not visibly cringe?” I support medical experimentation on animals as a final step toward treatment of human beings. This does not mean that I think that one should suppress one’s natural discomfort at seeing a creature with obvious intelligence and susceptibility to pain being used in an experiment. I have heard that the protocols often call for the experimental animals to be euthanized at the end of the experiment.
There is a line between having a stiff upper lip and being callous. Being resilient is great. Being devil-may-care about effects of one’s work on another person or animal seems wrong to me. Furthermore, upbraiding students for a humane impulse seems wrong to me.
@dfbdfb There may not be many individuals involved, but the trigger movement is spreading rapidly. Including overseas. Oxford University recently posted trigger warns on some lectures for aspiring barristers, saying the material being covered may be ‘upsetting’. These are the same students who will one day try criminal cases and be Crown Prosecutors. That’s worrisome.
@alh “Any attempt to acknowledge or accommodate readers with difficult experiences is tantamount to Stalinism”.
So are people opposed to trigger warnings advocating that people be arrested in the night? Subjected to summery execution? Exiled? Are the physically eliminating those with contrary opinions. That statement is insulting to the REAL victims of Stalinism. It also suggests that many people haven’t read history.
As for trigger warnings being used to silence women of color, an African-American woman at Harvard recently posted the following:
“Students who are objecting to the reading of Twain, or suggesting that covering Tom Sawyer in a class on American literature is anxiety-producing or disquieting, are more often than not white students who cannot face what their ancestors did and feel uncomfortable reading about such deeds alongside victims of segregation and race abuse. African-Americans don’t cringe or panic when reading such works; we faced such realities on a daily basis. White students conversely would prefer the topic to go away, buried under the label of cultural sensitivity”.
@QuantMech Who do you feel “fortunate” that you never had to read Lolita? I’m sure you have done fine despite not reading Nabokov, but the same could be said for most books. As for Apocalypse Now, I attended a lecture at West Point not long ago where one of the officers said that scenes of battle and military hospitals should be compulsory viewing for all Americans, especially our legislators. He said they would then think twice before starting wars. “War is nasty and cruel,” he noted.
@romanigypsyeyes You might find the inaugural speech given by the new (female) Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford interesting. She was speaking on this topic. The Presidents of Barnard and Oberlin have also recently spoken about trigger warnings, as has the former President of Amherst. As my D. said, trigger warnings irritate many students but they just accept them as that is easier than being shouted down by the “loud mob”.
Most likely nothing at all.
They might be studying to be doctors and they understood empirically what was being done and did not viscerally react because they accepted the hard science of it. Who would want their doctor being a “cringe machine” in the operating room? Just because someone does not cringe at something like this does not mean they do not care, are callous, or are without feelings. No bias to make that judgment at all.
exlibris: It seems to me the Harvard student you quote and the author of the article I excerpted in #79 are saying the same thing: once universities were full of young white hetero (or closeted gay) males reading dead white hetero (or closeted gay) males. Now there are alternate readings of these books, and that makes some uncomfortable. Perhaps this is the same group made uncomfortable by Beloved.
Forty years ago when I was in college, the concept of rape culture didn’t exist. A male professor called on me, the only female undergraduate in class, to translate a comic rape scene and ridiculed me to the class when I blushed. I would hope that doesn’t happen today. I would especially hope a rape survivor wouldn’t be put in such a situation. There seems nothing wrong to me about giving a heads up that a rape scene is going to be translated and discussed, and then asking for a volunteer to translate. And then, of course, a class discussion about what exactly is funny about that scene.
exlibris97, I agree 100% that the horrors of war ought to be made vivid to everyone, so that the greatest caution can be exercised before entering a war, which may sometimes be necessary.
Perhaps my comments below should carry a trigger warning themselves:
The element in Apocalypse Now that I specifically objected to was the part where the Viet Cong cut off the limbs of the children who had been vaccinated by Americans. I don’t recall that Apocalypse Now covered the My Lai massacre. Perhaps it did? Portraying the opposing side as inhuman does not help anyone. This is not reality. I think the reality is that some people are driven by the extremes of war to commit horrible acts, that are against the international conventions on war. If a film helped prevent soldiers from committing such acts, it would be beneficial. But I suspect that deliberately cutting off children’s limbs is so foreign to the way that most Americans think that covering it would have no impact on the actions of American soldiers. Just on the basis of Apocalypse Now, I do not know whether that atrocity even happened or not. It seems to me that it would belong in a scholarly history of the war in Vietnam, rather than in a movie that also includes a surfing scene.
While I have read a good number of literary works, there are very, very many I have not read. Is anything really missing by not reading Lolita? Also, why would it make sense for a student who was a sexual-abuse victim as a child to read that book for a class? The “find-out-about-the-books-covered-and-opt-out-of-that-class” option is fine if it is workable. In some cases, there is no realistic option if a student has selected a particular major and wants to graduate on time. Next semester’s or next year’s class is more likely than not to cover the same books. If there are multiple sections of a class, they may all be reading the same books (or not–that probably depends on the university, but this would be true for a number of English lit classes at mine).
I am not calling for censorship here, but what is the drawback about offering a trigger warning re Lolita and offering some option for a student who might be deeply adversely affected by the book? Reading the book might be relevant for a few professions, but strong distaste for it portends nothing about the future in the workplace for the great majority of students.
C’mon, awcntdb, the class that discussed the experiment involving rabbits was described as Psychology 100. The students in that class ought to be freshmen. Even if they are studying to become physicians eventually, and they accept the “hard science,” if they don’t have the cringe factor the first time they hear about something like that, I would question whether they have developed the empathy needed in a physician, by that time. Of course, physicians have to learn to distance themselves from their patients’ suffering while still remaining sensitive to it, over the course of their training. I think there are reports of med students who fainted the first time they assisted in an operating room, but who subsequently became fine physicians. I would be totally happy with that sort of physician.
Well, I read Lolita - and I didn’t even read it for a class! I just read it because I heard it was a good book.
It is. As a reader, you both loathe and feel sympathy for, the narrator who is - well, who manipulates and sexually abuses a young teen girl, and does so for for a few YEARS.
It is beautifully written, it really is, and I think it’s a worthwhile read.
http://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/
The above essay is about reading Lolita and I thought it was pretty good. I am a huge Nabkov fan. * Lolita *is not my favorite book of his.
http://lithub.com/80-books-no-woman-should-read/
Way off topic, but I want to have coffee/lunch/cocktails with this woman.
ETA: and she has some thoughts on empathy as well.
That is an excellent link, alh!
Actually, the link by alh that I meant is the one in #93, although the one in #92 is quite interesting as well. On the one hand, I could see reading Lolita in a college class and discussing broader connections, in terms of the treatment of women by men. On the other hand, the situation in Lolita is so overt that it seems unlikely to be eye-opening in the least. A book where the silencing or objectification of women is still present, but is more subtle, would be a better vehicle for that discussion, in my opinion.
Now I wonder just how she knows this…?
So many to choose from… so little time 
I think * Lolita* is well worth reading, just because it is (at least at this point in time, in my opinion) still part of a sort of literary canon. So many works reference it. But I’m not sure I would give up classroom time to it. And I believe it will become more and more irrelevant as time goes by.
Seems like most on this thread would be expelled from the contemporary enlightened college. All this sensitivity is a bunch of crap. Just the lexicon of sensitivity is ludicrous. You micro-aggression is trumped (oops “trump” is a trigger) only by my nano-aggression. Another race to the bottom among progressives.
Oh for the love of all that’s good, show me evidence that people are being expelled.
Why do people so desperately cling to this myth?