MASTER MUSINGS: Triggered - you may be!
MASTER MUSINGS: Triggered - you may be!
Youth and old age. I’ll say that again. Youth and old age. Are you upset by those terms? Has hearing them reduced you to a quivering wreck in need of a safe space, a cup of sweet tea and a Jammie Dodger?
Well, according to a past report in The Telegraph, the University of Exeter has drawn up a list of 34 topics of a ‘sensitive’ nature that may require an advance ‘content notice’. And youth and old age have joined other potentially triggering subjects, such as political belief, sex and unemployment.
Deary me. Call me old-fashioned (I won’t be offended) but I thought the point of university was to build up your intellectual muscle by exploring a breadth of concepts with an open mind.
To sharpen your intellect on the anvil of knowledge and expect a few sparks to fly in the heat of debate. Not hide in the stationery cupboard at the drop of a hat. (I know, I know, silly thing to say - they don’t have stationery cupboards anymore.)
Content notices in the arts have also made headlines with the latest hails from the folks running the Chichester Festival Theatre. In a bid to guide those patrons wondering whether the Sound of Music was for them, instead of issuing a warning that you’ll have to sit through a fair few schmaltzy old numbers before you get your mitts on an interval G&T, it flags up the musical includes a distressing theme, namely the threat from Nazi Germany.
Surely, if you’re booking for the Sound of Music, you’re aware of the Von Trapp story. And if it turns out you weren’t or couldn’t cope, it begs the question would the Chichester Festival Theatre feel comfortable encouraging you to sing ‘raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens’ on the basis that then you won’t feel so bad?
The TV hills are alive with the sound of trigger warnings. Recently, I was watching a re-run of Downton Abbey and there was an onscreen message warning of, among other things, scenes of alcohol use. What, pray, were we talking? A couple of pre-dinner sherries in the drawing room before someone dropped a napkin in the Vichyssoise.
The problem with all of this hyper-vigilance re upset and offence is that now we’ve started down this road, where will it end? If you take the argument to its logical (yet inevitably batty) conclusion, every single book, film, painting, song, building, sport, dance, invention, product, foodstuff, could possess some element that could be traced to something that could pose a problem for someone.
I mean what about the fact I’m triggered by the idiocy of some trigger warnings - shouldn’t it follow that such trigger warnings be preceded by a trigger warning?
Another thought. Do those judging the past purely by present-day standards not realise the same might happen to them? After all, what will future generations make of the world we’ve constructed today? For all we know, they might conclude there were incontrovertible signs we were losing our collective mind, then slap a trigger warning on us.
