I’ve always felt that trigger warnings on stories are unhelpful, maybe intended to be sensitive by people who don’t really know how to be sensitive or who might need it. Trigger warnings in general just seem a little . . . unnecessary.
I’m a woman. I’ve been sexually assaulted several times. To be clear, not raped; harassed, trapped, forcibly touched, coerced into doing touching that I did not want to do. All of it when I was under 15 years old. This is a common experience for women. It’s terrible, and it shouldn’t happen, but it does, and it likely will continue.
I’ve read plenty of stories about women characters being assaulted or harassed. It can get a little uncomfortable. Sometimes I skim those bits. Sometimes they cause uncomfortable memory flashes. But here’s the thing. I don’t want that to be left out. I don’t want to be warned that something awful is about to happen to the character in the story I’m reading. The story wouldn’t be interesting if the characters all had nice lives with nothing going wrong. Sexual assault is real. 3 out of 4 women will experience it in their lifetimes. I think leaving it out of stories about women is disingenuous.
I do NOT like it when rape scenes are drawn out, or exaggerated, or repeated to no good purpose. But in any story, the story is king (or queen, if you’d rather). Everything that happens needs to develop the characters or move the story forward. I don’t like it when ANY unnecessary scenes are drawn out, over-explained, or repeated to no good purpose. Rape scenes being dragged out make me a little disgusted with the author, like clearly they’re living out some sort of sick fantasy (I’m looking at YOU Game of Thrones HBO!), but any dragged-out scene annoys me.
And here’s the other thing. I wouldn’t call some brief, unpleasant memory flashes “triggering.” I really wouldn’t. Stories similar to my own experiences simply don’t have the power to trigger me. If they did, I could never share my story with other people who’ve been assaulted and listen to theirs with empathy.
What DOES trigger me is being thrown into situations similar to abuses I’ve suffered.
And let me tell you, life doesn’t warn you when someone’s about to do something that reminds you all too clearly of something bad that happened years ago.
For example, a friend who was learning to read auras told me I had a big black blob of negative energy on my shoulder. Then he smacked his hand down on my shoulder and said, “Right here.”
That was precisely where one of my assailants grabbed me and dragged me into a bathroom. My friend was unaware, and he was sorry when I started shaking and told him why I had negative energy in my aura right there. But it had never come up before, and he couldn’t have warned me or known to ask before he touched me in just that way. It was just a hand on my shoulder, he couldn’t have know it would be upsetting to me.
The other thing that triggers me is when people SAY things to me that my abusers have said. Hearing it said on TV or in movies or reading it in books doesn’t do anything other than alert me that the character speaking is not be trusted, but it doesn’t trigger me. People have to SAY these things to me. But most of the things that set me off are things that healthy, respectful people do not say to other healthy people, so they are not just triggering, they’re an instant red flag.
For example, someone I know — not too well — recently said something to me that I found deeply offending. When I responded by being offended, she called me childish. It enraged me. I got angry all out of proportion with the brief exchange. I had trouble sleeping. And I wasn’t hurt or scared, I was furious. I wanted to rip this person a new asshole. I walked away and cut contact with them, but it wasn’t until I realized that the pedophile who harassed me all through my teens said the SAME THING to me, repeatedly, that I realized why I was so angry. And when I told the pedophile he was offending me, he called me childish (rich bullshit coming from a fucking pedophile, let me tell you). The narcissist in my life had also said the same shit to me, and also called me childish when I tried to get them to back off.
Once I realized WHY I was so mad, I was able to calm down a bit. I was also able to recognize that this person clearly had narcissistic tendencies, and that remaining in contact with them is not in my own best interest.
Did life warn me that someone was about to repeat abusive language to me? Did I get a trigger warning that some random person was about to make me feel really, really bad? Was I given the option to just skip this particular interaction?
Hell no.
And that’s why trigger warnings bother me. And frankly, you’ll never see them on my work.
Your warning is that it’s urban fantasy, which tends to be gritty. I presume that if you don’t like gritty fiction, you’ll avoid urban fantasy. If we meet in person, I’ll be respectful of topics you find disconcerting. I’m not a monster. But if you read my books, the genre is your warning.
Done.
