I’m sure we’ve all seen variants of the following legally paranoid type of food labelling on store shelves down the years:
Perhaps oversensitive copywriters might one day choose to append similarly unnecessary Health and Safety warnings to the front cover of the following popular bestselling piece of choc-lit, lest any particularly confectionary-allergic readers spontaneously break out into hives at the very sight of the printed word, even when rendered in a foreign tongue:
Such a measure would not entirely surprise me, as the 1999 bestseller’s highly woke author, Joanne Harris – she’s particularly into transgender stuff, something perhaps not entirely unrelated to the fact she has a trans child named Fred – has just had trigger warnings added to the latest editions of all her novels. Chocolat itself, new printings alert readers before they begin, contains “spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community, and religious intolerance”. Harris’s fable The Little Mermaid, meanwhile, contains “ableist and transphobic slurs”; not one for poor little Fred’s eyes, then.
Wrong, Said Fred
Well, they’re her books, and Ms Harris can mandate whatever she likes to be written at the beginning of them if she really wants. Some may argue they already came with pre-appended trigger warnings on them anyway, reading “by Joanne Harris”; such helpful labels certainly always aided me to avoid their wholly unappealing and unwanted content, anyway.
Unfortunately, however, Harris’s argument goes much further than this. Pre-announcing the forthcoming inclusion of her
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Trigger warnings exist because people like Joanne Harris need them, although I don’t understand what they need them for. But maybe, the preposterous wheelchair ramp comparison could be of use here: People using wheelchairs need these because they cannot use stairs. Likewise, some people are able-minded and can thus stand printed words. And some read Joanne Harris novels and can’t. Letterophobia makes them lethally afraid of print. Which yields the universal trigger warning:
WARNING. THIS TEXT CONTAINS LETTERS.
This obviously recurses until the universe has crashed.
Harris’s solution to this severe moral conundrum is as follows: “And obviously people can be triggered by different things, so we might have to decide which are the most likely ones [to have to highlight].”
FFS, hasn’t this nonsense died out yet.
Warning:
This product may include nuts
Or be processed in a facility that uses nuts
Or processed on the same road as a facility that uses nuts
Or processed in the same country as a facility that uses nuts
Or processed on the same planet as a facility that uses nuts
And may cause pleasure in the minds of people who like nuts
Warning: This planet contains people who are nuts.
Should be clearly printed somewhere on the surface of the earth to warn prospective alien visitors.
🙂
Trigger warnings should be put on EVERY book to make readers feel “safe”,
This is code for the infantilisation – one of the devices which the neo-barbarians use to enforce the New Dark Age. Fascinating.
Is it really students wanting to be mollycoddled? Or is it that if you are offended and consider yourself a victim it gives you an excuse for failure. In other words, a licence to be lazy and not bother trying.
In 2021, the University of Aberdeen advised Literature lecturers of undergraduates’ “strong preference” to be shielded from the ideas and words of dangerous authors
And how precisely did Aberdeen university administation come to know this “strong preference” of future undergraduates? Is it really the students who want to be mollycoddled? Or could this perhaps be a roughly inverse but much less cute desire located elsewhere, say, in the university administration itself?
Tintin? Shakespeare? Orwell?
Fairly mild compared to some of the Old Testament stories. Book of Judges, for example.
Not to mention the gospel. A totally innocent man is put through a politically and religiously motivated show trial, abandoned by his friends and tortured to death, in front of his mother.
Still, it’s good to know that wherever cultural and political Marxism took hold, an era of social justice and general well-being followed. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, oh yes, let’s not forget Pol-Pot.
No need for trigger warnings when you live in the perfect society.
I think we’re allowed to burn the Bible
Can I ask for a new trigger warning please. “Contains scenes of a woke/DEI nature which some readers/viewers may find distressing”.
I would find it saves me a heck of alot if time in starting to watch a programme/film and having to switch off within 10 mins.
I assume that is the case for most things produced in recent decades and mainly consume old stuff. Actually even if you go back that far you can see that there was a strong “progressive” streak in the arts- especially Hollywood.
Everything broadcast by the BBC or written in the Guardian? Although to certain people such trigger warnings would engender a feeling of righteousness and virtue.
It would be good to encourage Joanne Harris to helpfully supply us with a list of “trigger warnings” that should preface all printings of The Koran.
We could encourage some of our excitable Imams on the one hand and perhaps Tommy, on the other, to mark her work.
yes why doesn’t it contain such warnings I wonder
Excellent idea.
Don’t hold your breath!
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats (1795 – 1821)
I am old enough to remember the same nonsense over Enid Blyton books, where her rivals tried to have her cancelled as her book sales were huge in comparison to their own.
My wonderful mother just ordered more Enid Blyton books instead!
Just ignore these people and realise the important thing is to have your child reading and enjoying what they read.