Horror Twitter exploded into another
debate about trigger/content warnings last week. My wife and I were visiting
friends in South Carolina when it all went down, so I’m sure I only saw a small
part of the discussion, some of which was, shall we say, less than civil? However,
what I did see got me thinking again about the issue of content warnings (my
preferred term) and whether I should apply them to my own work. As of now, I
haven’t used content warnings for my horror fiction, and I’m still considering
how I feel about them. So I hope you’ll view this post more as me thinking out
loud about the matter rather than specific advice on whether you should include
content warnings and how best to do it.
Just in case you’re unaware of what
content warnings are, here are a few good articles about content warnings in
horror – pro, con, and in between (with advice on how to use them):
https://jamigold.com/2019/08/content-warnings-how-and-what-to-include/
https://divinationhollow.com/reviews-and-articles/this-books-about-what-an-essay-by-tabatha-wood
https://litreactor.com/columns/lets-talk-about-trigger-warnings
https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-we-shouldnt-be-fighting-over-trigger-warnings/
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/02/02/on-the-subject-of-trigger-warnings/comment-page-2/
Alan Baxter has created a content warning
section for his work on his website. You can view it here: https://www.alanbaxteronline.com/content-warnings/
As I talk about my thoughts and feelings
regarding content warnings, know this: I have no problem with any readers who
prefer content warnings in horror fiction or with writers who wish to provide
them. I do not think that readers who prefer content warnings are psychologically
weak. I also have no problem with readers and writers who dislike content
warnings and prefer not to use them. And when I talk about a cultural shift
that’s occurred in America over the last few decades, I do not view that shift
as a negative one. I also do not support denigrating or harassing anyone for
any reason, including during debates about contentious issues such as content
warnings. It’s one thing to discuss an issue online. It’s another to call
people names, send them hateful DM’s, or resort to comparing content warnings
to Nazi Germany (which happened).
I also don’t want to give the impression
that I only saw vitriolic posts during the debate about content warnings. I saw
many posts that were polite, reasonable, and respectful of different points of
views.
I debated whether to write this post,
partly because my thoughts on content warnings aren’t fully formed yet, partly
because I wasn’t sure what I had to contribute to the conversation about them,
and partly because who needs people attacking you online for your views on a
controversial topic? But I find myself continually thinking about content
warnings, so I decided to go ahead and write this post, if for no other reason
than so I can get all this stuff out of my head and get back to writing the
book I have due at the end of the month.
I see the debate over content warnings as
part of a cultural shift in America that’s been taking place for a while now.
As an English professor in a community college, I often teach young people –
mid teens to early twenties – and I’ve done so for the last thirty years. This
by no means makes me some kind of expert on how our culture has changed over
the decades, but it’s given me a viewpoint that people who don’t work with
young people may not have. The shift is a move toward viewing one’s self as a
member of a group and thinking in terms of one’s duty to the group and what’s
best for the group. One of the greatest – if not THE greatest – sin one can
commit is not to consider someone else’s feelings and to intentionally or
unintentionally cause them emotional harm of any sort. A big part of avoiding
causing this sort of harm is knowing specific labels/terms/words to use or
avoid when discussing emotional issues.
This duty to others, like so many beliefs
in a culture, is absolute. If you do not do your utmost to avoid doing harm,
you’re a self-centered jerk at best, and at worst you are evil. Some of the
group will ignore you, some will ostracize you, some will try to educate you,
and some will come down upon you like the wrath of God, and they will see
whatever actions they take against you as justified because you have shown
yourself to be Evil with a capital E. You are an Intentional Emotional-Harmer
of Others and you deserve whatever happens to you. There is no room for nuance
or opposing points of views regarding these matters. The thinking is very
binary: Either you care about others or you don’t.
I’m 57. I started writing seriously with the
goal of making it my life’s work when I was eighteen. When I began my career,
the cultural attitude was that an adult should be respected as such. Adults
were responsible for themselves and their choices, as well as how they dealt
with the problems they faced, whether those problems were expected or
unexpected. To treat them any other way was highly disrespectful. It was like
treating them as a child and saying they didn’t have what it took to function
in the adult world.
The
older viewpoint didn’t view emotional harm as seriously as physical, economic,
or professional harm. Emotional harm was still an important aspect to deal
with, but it was more important to try to fix the main problem first: recover
from the accident, bounce back from bankruptcy, find a better job. The
emotional aspect would be taken care of when the practical aspect was.
In the older view, when a creator makes
something, they do so to satisfy themselves first, and they then hope others
are satisfied by their efforts. Individuals adapt to the work as they
experience it.
The newer viewpoint – emotional harm is
potentially devastating and must be avoided at all costs – may have arisen from
a culture that primarily interacts online. Thoughts and feelings are what their
world is made of. It’s a completely psychological landscape. You must learn to
communicate within this environment with absolute precision in order to avoid
causing harm, and if you still cause harm anyway, you must apologize as fast as
possible, attempt to rectify the situation, and pledge to do better.
In addition, their technology quickly adapts
to an individual’s needs, creating a similar cultural expectation, that content
should be adapted to an individual. Therefore, a creator exists to provide work
that will adapt to the individual as needed.
So what does all this have to do with
content warnings?
If it’s a current cultural value that
individuals must be protected from emotional harm in any communication, then
the communicator must do everything possible to ensure that happens. One way is
to provide a warning before a communication so that a reader/listener/viewer is
prepared as they go ahead or can choose to opt out if they deem it more
mentally healthy for them to do so. Hence, the application of content warnings.
Viewed through the older cultural lens,
you give the individual the respect of not treating them as if they need extra
protection. They are an adult, not a child, and they are fully capable of
handling whatever they read/listen to/watch. If it’s too emotionally difficult
for them, they will avoid certain content to begin with. If they start to
engage with content and then find it too emotionally difficult for them, they
will opt out at that point. And if they did experience negative emotions or had
a traumatic reaction to certain content, they are an adult and know how to best
to take care of themselves afterward. Hence, the addition of content warnings
is viewed as disrespectful or as an insult to an adult audience member. So
content warnings should not be used.
Both of these attitudes focus on
respecting other humans, but both of them try to do so in very different ways,
and proponents of either viewpoint seem incapable of understanding where the
other is coming from. (Probably because social media is a lousy tool for
effective communication on complex topics.)
To sum up: The older view is that you
should take care of yourself, and I should respect you enough to let you do so.
The newer view is that you should take care of me (or we all should take care
of each other).
Other attitudes/statements regarding
content warnings I’ve seen posted on Twitter recently:
·
I
don’t want to include content warnings because artists should have no
restraints placed on them or their work, whether by others or by themselves.
·
I
don’t want to include content warnings because they could work as spoilers.
·
I
don’t want to include content warnings because they’re pandering to the
audience.
·
Content
warnings allow consumers to make effective choices.
·
Content
warnings are like a list of ingredients on a product.
·
Content
warnings are a form of censorship.
·
Content
warnings are nothing like censorship.
·
If
you value empathy, you’ll use content warnings.
·
If
you don’t use content warnings, you don’t care about anyone but yourself.
·
If
you read/watch/listen to something, you are knowingly taking a risk that it
might hurt you, and that’s your choice.
·
If
you don’t provide content warnings, you are choosing to (potentially) hurt me.
·
I
want to feel safe and protected when I read/watch/listen, and if a writer
doesn’t provide content warnings, they don’t want me to feel safe and
protected.
·
Art
– especially horror – isn’t about making people feel safe.
·
Not
providing content warnings is ableist.
·
How
do you decide what content any or all audience members will find emotionally
harmful? Anyone can potentially have a negative emotional reaction to anything
in a story, movie, etc. How could you possibly list them all?
·
It
doesn’t matter how long your list is: list every potential emotionally harmful
element.
·
List
only the most traumatic of elements, such as sexual assault, child abuse, etc.
·
Put
content warnings at the front of a work.
·
Put
content warnings at the end of a work, with a note in the front saying where
the audience can find them if they want.
·
Horror is already a content warning in and of
itself.
·
Horror
is about entertainment, not purposely traumatizing people.
·
Content
warnings could be used negatively against writers of color and LGBTQ+ authors.
(The thinking is that since so many white cishet readers are already reluctant
to try work by writers from other backgrounds, seeing content warnings could
give them an additional excuse to pass on those works, an excuse that allows
them to feel that they aren’t being racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.)
·
Content
warnings privilege white cishet triggers.
·
No
one is talking about mandating content warnings. (Although I did see a couple
publishers state that all their books would have content warnings from now on,
which sounds mandated to me.)
·
There’s
fear that the conflict over content warnings will lead to cyberbullying and
canceling of writers who don’t use content warnings.
·
Rating
labels for movies, music, and TV have not worked for those media’s benefit, and
something similar may happen with content warnings for books.
·
If
you don’t use content warnings, some readers may take their business elsewhere.
One of the most contentious issues I’ve
seen regarding content warnings is the idea of whether they are or aren’t
censorship. These arguments drive me crazy because people split hairs about the
definition of censorship. Some say only governments can engage in censorship,
while others use a broader definition. Some use the denotation of the word to
bolster their arguments while others use the connotation. The American Civil
Liberties Union defines censorship thusly: “Censorship, the suppression of
words, images, or ideas that are ‘offensive,’ happens whenever some people
succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others.
Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure
groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.” Note that this definition
is broader than what many people consider censorship to be.
Are content warnings in and of themselves
censorship, regardless of your specific definition? No. Could they lead to
censorship, including self-censorship on the part of artists? Sure. During the
recent Twitter debate on trigger warnings, I read a post from a person who was
a proponent of content warnings. After praising content warnings, he went on to
say that writers should ask themselves why they include material that needs content
warnings in the first place, and that they should reconsider including that
content at all. There’s a logical progression when it comes to trying to
protect people from potentially emotionally harmful content: This content
hurts people. I should warn people about this content. I shouldn’t create such content.
No one should create such content. We must stop people from creating this sort
of content. Will content warnings lead to content policing and then to censorship?
Who knows? But are people idiots or evil because they wonder if it will? Nope.
It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to consider. (But it’s not reasonable to play
the “This is how Nazi Germany started!” card.)
So how do I feel about content warnings on
my own work? I haven’t used them so far. I’m part of the respect the individual
and allow them to make their own choices and deal with their own experiences
culture. That’s what I grew up with. To me, the label Horror is already
a content warning. When I read or watch a work of horror, I know there’s a
possibility that I might encounter any type of content, and I find that
exciting. Horror is about the unknown, right? But while certain kinds of
content might be too much for me to read, I don’t have any traumatic
experiences that have resulted in PTSD, so I don’t have to worry about that I
might encounter material that would result in my having a painful flashback. My
wife is 41 and experienced significant abuse when she was younger. I asked how
she felt about content warnings, if she would appreciate them, especially in
horror, and she laughed. She too felt that Horror is a warning in and of
itself, and she doesn’t expect any creator to warn her of content she might
find triggering. She believes in dealing with whatever reaction she has. And as
she has significant PTSD, she has some really strong reactions to certain
content.
For me, the presentation of a book or
movie (the cover/poster, the ad copy, etc.) and reviews provide all the information
I need to make a choice as a consumer, although I don’t think of myself as a consumer
as much as an experiencer of art, even if that art is entertainment-focused. I
also realized this weekend that when I see content warnings on a work, I’m less
likely to read it. I feel the warnings are spoilery to a certain extent, and I
also feel like the writer is someone who’s likely to pull their punches in
their fiction in order to avoid possibly hurting anyone. I had no idea I
thought these things, especially the latter, and I was surprised. But the
horror culture I grew up in believed that adults should confront the darkness
both in themselves and without, and while no one faulted you for avoiding
certain books or movies (I couldn’t bring myself to read Jack Ketchum’s
legendary The Girl Next Door for years because I thought it would so
emotionally devastating), there was an expectation of confrontation, not
avoidance. I think this is why some people react so strongly to the idea of
content warnings. In older horror cultural terms, such warnings are anti-confrontational,
and thus anti-horror.
On Twitter I mused about what sort of content
warning I could put on my horror novels. I came up with a summary-type one, the
kind of thing you see as a movie content warning on Netflix: “This book contains
scenes of violence and sexual content, as well as nightmarish imagery some
readers might find disturbing.” I’d be fine with that because it gives readers
a feeling for what they might encounter without providing specifics of the
story that might be spoilers. I suspect a statement like this doesn’t go far
enough for most proponents of content warnings, though.
I’d rather lose readers than provide a
long list of every possible element in one of my novels that could conceivably
cause someone emotional harm. I don’t want anyone to be traumatized by my
fiction. I’d prefer people who think they might be traumatized by my work to read
something else. But if someone chooses to take a chance on my work, I feel I
have to respect their choice. But it seems to me that providing a list of
content warnings, wherever it appears in the book drains some of the book’s energy,
undercutting its suspense and making the horror too known to a reader
before starting.
I also don’t see how any work of art can
be made all-inclusive. As soon as you write in a genre, you’re already
excluding people who prefer not to read in that genre. Some people don’t like
fiction at all, let alone don’t like horror fiction. Someone who readers only
romance could very well hate my horror novel, so they’re already excluded
because I’ve chosen to write horror. (Back in the early days of social
networks, a romance writer was invited into a private horror writers’ topic on
the old GEnie network. She could not understand why all horror novels didn’t
have happy endings like romance novels did. What was the point of a story if it
didn’t have a happy ending?) Plus, it’s
not like my books are the only horror books available. If you don’t feel
comfortable taking a chance on any of mine, there are zillions of others to choose
from.
I’m going to keep paying attention to
conversations about content warnings, and I hope to continue learning from
them. Maybe I’ll start using content warnings with my horror fiction, maybe I won’t.
I respect writers and readers who want to use content warnings, though, and I’ll
work on overcoming whatever prejudices I have toward such warnings as a reader,
some of which I’m probably unaware of yet.
What do I advise for you? Do what you
think is best for yourself and your readers, naturally. And if you think
content warnings are ridiculous, childish, or will bring about the downfall of civilization,
I hope you’ll reconsider your attitude toward them, whether you use them or not.
And if you think creators who don’t wish to provide content warnings are sociopathic
monsters, I hope you’ll consider the notion that they may not want to hurt
anyone and that they merely hold a different view about how their content
should be presented and perceived.
And as for this particular piece of
content, it’s over.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
My horror/fantasy novel Your Turn to
Suffer is still available! Should it come with content warnings? Read it
and decide for yourself. It’s available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and
other online vendors, but you can also find it – and my other Flame Tree horror
novels – on the Flame Tree Press site: https://www.flametreepress.com/authors/Tim-Waggoner.html
“Your Turn to Suffer is deliciously
creepy, at times rather gory, always entertaining.” – From Belgium with Book
Love
“It is a gory, wild, and unpredictable
ride from beginning to end.” – Horror Oasis on Your Turn to Suffer
“A lot of people get to suffer in Your
Turn to Suffer, and when it goes batshit off-the-rails crazy, that's where
the story finds its dark, bloody, shadowy heart.” – Beauty in Ruins
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