content warnings Archives - Heinous Dealings

person with dark curly hair, tan skin, and fading henna on their hands sleeping on a black and white patterned bedspread with three small tabby kittens nestled on and against them — Clockwise: Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Jubilee. Southern Californians, please note that they are as sweet as can be and will be up for adoption in about a month.

A few nights ago, I gave the felines I am fostering (The X-Kittens) baths to relieve them of their smelliness and flea-related itching. They’re too big for their mom to force them into tongue-baths yet too little to clean themselves adequately, plus they’re too young for the safe administration of flea medicine. That one bath won’t stop the fleas or the stank forever, but it will stop the poor things from itching their neck fur ragged and from being embarrassingly stinky when we take them to the vet tomorrow. Plus, sweet-smelling, fluffy, soft kittens make for excellent napping buddies.

Would you argue that I ought not to have bathed them because that option isn’t quite nuclear? Unlikely. So why hold trigger warnings up to such an impossible standard? Continue reading “Fostering Felines, Trigger Warnings, & Impossible Standards” →

There is a trend afoot that threatens the free discourse that is integral to honest and truthful exchanges of ideas both online and off. From columnists at The Wall Street Journal to self-described liberal professors writing anonymously on Vox to reposts of well-known atheosphere luminaries on The New Republic to writers on feminism at the New York Times to fiction writers who speak against it yet use it to publicize their work, there is a growing swell of voices speaking up and out regarding freedom of speech. These voices clamor against trigger warnings, which they point out protect students from things that they have personally found to help them grow as people. They worry that students will never learn about anything unpleasant (or anything at all) if they are warned about it beforehand.

It seems that their problem is that they think that a warning is a firm deterrent, if not a total block, against anyone reading anything ever, rather than a method by which to include even more readers. Such confusion is understandable; once upon a time, I briefly shared in it. As a much more experienced writer than I was back then, however, I now personally refuse to submit to their assaults on free speech that rely so heavily on their confusion as a cudgel. However much they insist that their outrage should affect me, I will continue to add content notices to my writings as is my right under the First Amendment. Continue reading “Trigger Warnings: An Plea for Freedom of Speech” →