Bite the Bullet, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

May 24, 2014 Martha Thomases 8 Comments

This may be old news to you, but over the weekend, I first came across the term, “trigger warning.”  In this usage, a “trigger” is something that might upset a person who has endured trauma, such as a rape or PTSD.  According to the article I read, this is a huge issue in academia at the moment.

Which is exactly where this discussion should take place.

At issue is whether or not students should have to read books (or watch movies, or be involved with other media) that might cause them to relive a traumatic experience.  Should they be warned in advance?  Should they be excused?  Should the rest of the class be denied the literary or scholarly experience because of these more vulnerable students?

While I have a great deal of sympathy for trauma survivors, I don’t necessarily agree with them on this issue.  I mean, sure, the course catalog should be descriptive enough that anybody — even a college student — can tell what subjects will be covered in the class.  And responsible academics should be compassionate enough not to include material for shock value alone.

After that, I think it’s like a food allergy.  If I’m allergic to peanuts, I don’t have the right to prevent anyone from eating peanuts.  It’s my responsibility to avoid products that contain them, and to ask questions when it’s not clear, such as a restaurant meal or a dinner party at someone else’s house.

And I’m not sure that it’s healthy, in the long run, to protect these victims from all possibility of flashback.  Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that rape victims need to get over it.  I’m saying they should not let their victimhood define them.

Let me give you a more benign example, from my own life.  As one of the few Jews at my Episcopalian boarding school, I was painfully conscious of my differences from my friends.  Every single thing I experienced at the required chapel services was another pinprick.

And then, when I went to college, I was exposed to feminism.  Women were systematically oppressed, and had been throughout history!  Every social interaction demonstrated the power dynamics of patriarchal capitalism.  No one was more oppressed than we were.

And then I graduated, and went to work.  My life got more complicated, and so did my self-image.

See, it was really important for me to understand how I was different from other people, and what this meant from a cultural, historical and political perspective.  Because I felt those feelings, I could understand what other people meant when they described their own differences.  It wasn’t comfortable for me to be part of the oppressing group, whether that group was white people, straight people or middle class people.  I learned that sometimes the unacknowledged privilege is the most insidious.

Obviously, it’s more horrible to be raped than to be forced to sing a few hymns I don’t believe.  And I’m not saying that there should be times when a rape victim identifies with her rapist (or other kinds of violent people).  I’m trying to say that there will come a time in the victim’s life when he or she defines herself as something more complicated than a victim.

My husband died of lung cancer, although he hadn’t smoked a cigarette for more than 30 years.  It was horrible to watch him waste away as the cancer ate away at the body I loved.  Every time I pass someone smoking on the sidewalk, I get enraged.  I want to scream at those people, rip the cigarettes from their mouths and wave my finger in their faces.

I don’t.  It’s not effective.

College should be a place for the free exchange of ideas in the classroom.  It would be an extremely powerful experience for the class to listen to the experiences of a rape victim, or a veteran with PTSD, or some other person who might be triggered.  It might also be healing.

Certainly, it shouldn’t be graded.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases also gets teary-eyed at a Wonder Woman story about cancer that was published soon after her mother died.  Cancer sucks.