Trigger Warning!

This post is the best!

"Trigger Warnings Don’t Work. Here’s Why":

Yesterday, I wrote a post about trigger warnings, “Trigger Warning: This Blog Post May Freak You the F*** Out” ....

Not long after my post went live, counterattacks were launched by Feministing, which proclaimed me a “certifiable asshole,” Feministe, Shakespeare’s Sister, and elsewhere. As I wrote on my personal blog:

Since, I’ve been proclaimed a certifiable asshole, willfully ignorant, an invalidator, a non-friendly in the “cold, uncaring place” that is cyberspace, cruel, mocking, Glenn Beck-esque, an “Internet tough guy,” “Teabaggerian,” basely ignorant and lacking in empathy, simple, “a fucking tool,” “an unsophisticated thinker,” worse than moronic, “dangerous,” a crappy journalist, a poor googler, lacking in analytical skills, someone who can use my “melon as a hat rack,” a troll, “disgusting,” a “supercilious asshole,” “warped,” incapable of empathy, intellectually dishonest, a “Sister F***er,” “purposely obtuse and beyond help,” and “the kind of person who’d take [my] Vietnam-veteran granddad to see The Deer Hunter without warning him that it’s not actually about hunting deer.”

These responses were culled from the comments section at True/Slant. They don’t include the comment sections on the feminist blogs, where, among other things, I was declared a “cunt.” Then there was the hate mail.

I had included a trigger warning in the title of my post, yet feminist readers noted it and read on anyway, which, I believe, is primarily how trigger warnings function: by heightening the shock factor of the content, thereby increasing the likelihood the post will be read ....

Trigger warnings are a falsehood, a contrivance that pretends if triggers can be controlled, the trauma never happened, a National Enquirer-esque headline that screams in all-caps and big red block letters, but, in the end, signifies nothing but a preoccupation with its own salaciousness.

Perhaps most significantly, trigger warnings crystallize everything that is wrong with the current state of the feminist movement, if it can be called that. These days, feminism isn’t a movement at all, really, but a collection of blogs obsessed with the pop culture it claims to be victimized by, a forum for women who promote themselves as victims of a patriarchy that no longer exists, a pretend movement that contains within it no forward movement at all, only a fetal-like desire to curl up on itself, muttering Women’s Studies jargon, and handing out trigger warnings like party favors at a girl’s-only slumber party.

God, I gotta send this one to my post-colonial feminist friends!

BONUS: Don't miss Darleen Click's "TRIGGER WARNING!!1!!1!"