(Trigger-Warnung) Feministin besorgt über ausufernde Trigger-Warnungen

Trigger warnings, and their cousin the "content note", are now included for a whole slew of potentially offensive or upsetting content, including but not limited to: misogyny, the death penalty, calories in a food item, terrorism, drunk driving, how much a person weighs, racism, gun violence, Stand Your Ground laws, drones, homophobia, PTSD, slavery, victim-blaming, abuse, swearing, child abuse, self-injury, suicide, talk of drug use, descriptions of medical procedures, corpses, skulls, skeletons, needles, discussion of "isms," neuroatypical shaming, slurs (including "stupid" or "dumb"), kidnapping, dental trauma, discussions of sex (even consensual), death or dying, spiders, insects, snakes, vomit, pregnancy, childbirth, blood, scarification, Nazi paraphernalia, slimy things, holes and "anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD".

Gut, daran hat man sich ja mittlerweile gewöhnt. Triggerwarnungen findet man nun mal vor allem auf feministischen Websites, wo man offenbar davon ausgeht, dass die Leserinnen schwach, emotional unstabil und schutzbedürftig sind. Problematisch allerdings findet Jill Filopvic es, dass inzwischen auch in College-Seminaren Triggerwarnungen verteilt werden, wenn die Studenten und Studentinnen Texte lesen sollen, die in irgendeiner Weise problembehaftet sind:

Oberlin College recommends that its faculty "remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals". When material is simply too important to take out entirely, the college recommends trigger warnings. (...) Students should be duly warned by the professor writing, for example, "Trigger warning: This book contains a scene of suicide."

(...) At Rutgers, a student urged professors to use trigger warnings as a sort of Solomonic baby-splitting between two apparently equally bad choices: banning certain texts or introducing works that may cause psychological distress. Works he mentioned as particularly triggering include F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The warnings would be passage-by-passage, and effectively reach "a compromise between protecting students and defending their civil liberties".

The Great Gatsby?! Studenten müssen vor einem Buch "geschützt" werden, das so gemächlich dahinplätschert wie ein Agatha-Christie-Roman? Du lieber Gott.

Jill Filopvic argumentiert weiter:

Trigger warnings don’t just warn students of potentially triggering material; they effectively shut down particular lines of discussion with "that’s triggering".

Was einer der Gründe dafür ist, dass gerade Feministinnen so gerne mit Trigger-Warnungen hantieren. Oh, das sieht Jill Filopvic ja auch selbst:

Trigger warnings of course don’t always shut down that kind of interrogation, but if feminist blogs are any example, they quickly become a way to short-circuit uncomfortable, unpopular or offensive arguments. That should concern those of us who love literature, but it should particularly trouble the feminist and anti-racist bookworms among us. Trigger warnings are largely perceived as protecting young women and, to a lesser extent, other marginalized groups – people of color, LGBT people, people with mental illnesses. That the warnings hinge on topics that are more likely to affect the lives of marginalized groups contributes to the general perception of members of those groups as weak, vulnerable and "other".

Ich hätte es nicht besser sagen können.