Okay can yall reblog this to share something that’s actually helpful? There are two websites that can assist people with triggers to know whether or not a movie is going to be something they should avoid. The first one is:
Originally created to list whether or not the animals in movies were harmed, it has expanded to list a number of triggering things like people being cut, jumpscares, strobe effects, vomit, deaths of children, and many more. For some categories it links to:
which has a similar format to Does the Dog Die but deals with a variety of sexual themes. It even elaborates on some of the checked categories just to let you know how serious or in what way the category is expressed in the movie.
I don’t like the environment of tumblr scaring people into thinking they don’t have the help or resources they need to live happy and without anxiety unless the right PSA floats across their dash. If there are any other databases anyone knows of that provide more info about media or elaborate upon MPAA ratings, please comment. Let 2018 be a year of empowerment.
some other sources:
common sense media is a generalized and well updated site that gives content warning as a guide to parents, but is also relevant and very helpful if youre looking for your own uses
also all IMDB movie pages have a ‘parents guide’ section that is extremely thorough and gives a description of all potentially disturbing scenes grouped by sex, violence, drugs/alcohol, etc
and wheres the jump is great for horror movies, it gives an exact timestamp and description of any jumpscares in the movie
I’m watching an older season of Hell’s Kitchen and there’s a bit with a guy who had a shitty abusive childhood getting triggered (and like, nobody uses the word “trigger” but it’s pretty obvious: his eyes glaze over, he becomes spacey and disoriented, he bursts into tears at inopportune moments) by Gordon Ramsey calling him by a nickname he associates with his abusive father, and like, he explains this to Ramsey, and Ramsey is like “I totally understand and I’m sorry, I only wish you had told me about this sooner so we could have avoided this issue compromising your performance in the kitchen” and it’s like… there’s all these ridiculous anti-sj types who are like “TRIGGERS R DUM, NO TRIGGER WARNINGS IN REAL LIFE!!!!!!!!” and meanwhile Gordon fucking Ramsey, the guy whose JOB it is to berate people until they break down on television, understands the validity of trauma-based triggers and is willing to work around them? like come on
i swear to god if i see one more academic oppose trigger warnings on the grounds of being anti-censorship…
like did you think about that at all? the point of the trigger warning is to warn people of potentially triggering content. if the intent were truly to “censor” content, trigger warnings would serve no purpose. the very existence of the trigger warning suggests that the content will remain part of the curriculum, and literally all trigger warning advocates want is the ability to prepare for it.
one of my friends, for example, knew the subject of lolita prior to reading it, and because she’s a csa survivor she took measures to protect her mental health while still engaging the material. she moved her therapy sessions from before class to after, did her reading in comforting environments, saved her free absences so she could take a day off if need be, and explained her situation to the professor so she could step into the hall periodically if the conversation became too draining. she still contributed to class discussion, did all the assignments, and read the book, but because she knew what was coming, she was able to do those things without compromising her mental health.*
don’t want trigger warnings to dictate how your students read/interpret the work? well students with triggers will probably focus on that shit anyway, but as for the rest, it’s so easy to put a note on your syllabus directing students to a back page with trigger warnings so they can choose whether or not to check.
tl;dr: trigger warnings don’t restrict academic freedom, they empower students who struggle with trauma and mental illness, and conflating trigger warnings with “censorship” suggests a serious misunderstanding of how trigger warnings work.
*ftr, my friend is very open about this subject, so i’m not spilling secrets
It always amazes me how many people seem not to understand the definition of “censorship”. A trigger warning is the opposite of censorship. Censorship is “you can’t include that content because someone objects.” A trigger warning is “you can include potentially sensitive or objectionable content because you warned everyone about it ahead of time.”
