The Atlantic
piece cited Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as two classic texts that have
stirred calls for trigger warnings due to
their racially motivated violence
and domestic abuse, respectively.
— Katy Waldman "The
Trapdoor of Trigger Words"
Slate on Line 5 Sept. 2016
Before "trigger warnings"
became widely known (and conditioning their meaning), there were — still
running and more widely seen than trigger warnings there are: MPAA ratings on films,
and less formal cautions for parents and others on games and music. And these
ratings and cautions and warnings make judgments about what may harm kids and
disturb some adults, and most of them, like literal trigger
warnings, concern violence and sex, with taboo words and drug use a close
third and other potential triggers in line to join the list, if the more fastidious posters
on the Internet will set the standard for sensitivity.
In the early 1980s, putting together
a "List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in
SF," Thomas P. Dunn and I anticipated the current crop of the fastidious
and decided that sex and violence and "dirty words" were far from the
only potential dangers in works we annotated; so we began adding additional
CAUTIONs and a few WARNINGs, with the desire to provide useful information and
perhaps chide those overly concerned with sex, violence, and dirty words.
Thom and I did this for the "Lists
of Works Useful" accompanying the essay anthologies The
Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (1982) and Clockwork
Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, and also for Clockworks:
A Multimedia Bibliography [sic]
of Works Useful for the Study of the
Human/Machine Interface in SF (1993).
To start with an example of an
innocuous, there's this one with Dan Simmon's The
Fall of Hyperion: "TEXTUAL WARNING: If using the 1990 Doubleday
edition, be sure there's an errata sheet giving p. 305." This alert we
thought would be useful, but it might also reflect a bit my own mild annoyance
that the folks at Doubleday had managed to misplace a whole goddamn page.
Arguably less innocuous examples can
be found among the whole range of CAUTIONs
we used in Clockworks. For
example:
For Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon (1913) we note failed
attempts at ethnic humor, including attempts to render non-WASP dialects that
might be offensive to contemporary ears, or, on esthetic grounds, the ears of those
who grew up reading Mark Twain, who had some talent at reproducing on paper
different varieties of English.
We
found Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis
(1926) silly in its conclusion (though we didn't mention that), but still great
visually and of profound importance for an early female robot; but we thought
Thea von Harbou's novel version (1926/27) should bear the "Caution: The
owner of the Metropolitan exotic-drug and whore house is negatively
characterized in terms of the nations contributing to his genealogy."
Hint: They're not Aryan, and "The politics of the novel generally
(definitely including its gender politics) differ from the film's somewhat, but
may be even more simplistic."
Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan (1990) was more
bellicose than we had expected from her The
Ship Who ____ series, outside of The
City Who Fought, and also strongly pronatalist, a political
position of great importance but one insufficiently recognized by heterosexual
readers as political,
and one that should be highly controversial.
For the re-issues of
Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon — 2419" and "The Airlords of
Han" (1929), we added the "CAUTION: As [Alan]
Kalish et al. demonstrate, the revised versions remove the 'Yellow Peril'
language of the original but are still racist (sexism in the revised stories is
more complex)." These seminal Buck Rogers stories are significant in
prefiguring atomic warfare, but also genocide, and to have genocide
"normalized" and even celebrated for young readers is, we thought, a
more serious matter than some scenes of fornication or repetitions of the word
"f*ck" or even some racial slurs.
Dealing with an
insightful but definitely post-structuralist reading of Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (2001), I felt a need to
add, "CAUTION: Some proofreading problems aside, this is an excellent essay
in the late-20th-c. style of cyberpunk critique, quite useful for studying
fictional characters and real people as social-cultural creatures living in
postmodern, late-capitalist, sophisticated urban areas of the planet Earth. For
such postmodern people, nature is safely inside of human culture and identity
is problematic; however," I thought I should remind our readers, "there
is a good deal of natural world beyond our small planet, and even in
advanced-capitalist countries it is arguable that most people are barely
modern, let alone pomo. And it is possible that human beings are spiritual as
well as social-cultural animals, and as certain as anything can be that we are
animal animals, with an evolved genome and a range of basic behaviors that
preceded specifically human culture." Like, a lot of theorists of
postmodernism really do need to get out of The City more and deal with a nature
that has existence, validity, and power outside of and without humans and which
can deconstruct humans quite quickly. And readers into postmodern theory
should, on occasion, be cautioned about that. (Such readers — and more so
authors — need stronger and more specific cautions before, say ocean sailing or
backpacking on glaciers.)
Most useful, I think, was
our suggesting the need to note the cop stories, movies, and TV
shows — even in science fiction — for which people should exercise, "Caution:
Contains material offensive to the 4th Amendment and other parts of the
American Bill of Rights." If Americans and others have been too
acquiescent in the chipping away of our rights in the interest of safety and
police power, part of the reason is watching all those television cop shows and
shoot-'em-up movies in which police respect for the Bill of Rights, due
process, and simple courtesy — is for wussies. Consider the case of a
sympathetic White cop with racial prejudices but who follows rules and has the
courage to take a bullet rather than shoot an unarmed suspect; and consider a
sympathetic cop of impeccable attitudes and sentiments on race and is militantly equal-opportunity in "Taking out the trash" by manfully shooting first
and asking questions … pretty much never. Other scholars and teacher issues
warnings about racial attitudes; I thought we should say something about the
Bill of Rights and US Civil War
Amendments.
And we should note
racism, sexism, xenophobia, jingoism, religious hatred, natalism, teen-bashing,
homophobia, authoritarianism, macho assholery, and other nastiness with
assiduous militancy equal to those who spot sex and violence. And we should
note them where they appear, e.g., I'll remind people that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958),
mentioned in the headnote, can do probably without a trigger warning for racial
violence necessary for the story, but should have a mild caution that it is
certainly open to a charge of casual acceptance of traditional sexism.
