I Get Letters

Whenever I get an email addressed to "Shakesville," I know it's going to be a doozy. This one was too enjoyable, ahem, to keep to myself, so now I share it with all of you. Enjoy!

Dear Shakesville,

I haven't been perusing your website for long, but recently I've been checking in on it. I would like to register my disapproval of one of your practices. Most of your articles and links are prefaced by a "content note," eg. "Content note: this link discusses misogyny." I believe this trend, on your site and others, stemmed out of the newly common "trigger warnings" which give advance notice of discussions of graphic violence. While trigger warnings seem courteous and promote a safe space for people who have suffered trauma, your content notes seem to have an effect contrary to what your website, and feminism in general, ought to be pursuing. You seem to be trying to protect your readers from coming across anything which might upset, bother, disturb, or worry them. You seem afraid to let someone accidentally stumble upon any reminder that the world is dark and imperfect, that there are unpleasant, backwards, or ignorant folks out there. Even when the discussion itself is presented in the most accepting possible language, you insist on pre-warning your readership about exactly what they will be facing.

These warnings have, to my mind, the effect of alienating the very people who ought to be reading the articles and would get the most out of them. A prefacing note which reads "Content note: article discusses racism, classism, homophobia, and trans-phobia" says to me (a straight, white, middle-class, cis woman) that the article does not apply to me. When of course, the reason we are interested in these problems is not because they need to relate directly to our own lives, but because we care about justice and freedom from hatred and discrimination for all people.

I believe that this trend of prefacing any discussion of the negative things in the world with an infantalizing warning needs to be discontinued. Trust your readers to boldly face the reality of human nature. The world won't get better by pretending that we can choose to hide from it.

Respectfully,

[Some Asshole]

Apparently, one of the things my correspondent hasn't "checked in on" is the Commenting Policy: "Content Notes are provided to give readers the option to assess whether they've got the spoons (pdf) to process material that is potentially triggering to them. The provision of Content Notes is an exchange in which readers must participate: We communicate the information, and readers must assess their own immediate capacity to process content in the noted categories, then proceed accordingly."

But I don't guess I ought to be surprised that someone who imagines an article about oppression of groups to which she doesn't belong is something that does not apply to her (!!!) has as much a problem with the concept of "agency" that she does with the concept of "privilege." Providing content notes is the opposite of infantilizing: It recognizes and respects individual agency, lived experience, and immediate capacity to process.

A content note does not promise to protect readers, but provides them with the opportunity to decide whether they need to protect themselves.

We provide content notes because they give survivors of various trauma and oppressive harm the option to assess whether they're in a state of mind to deal with potentially triggering material before they stumble across it. It's a politeness. I don't feel inclined to apologize for that.

[Related Reading: I Write Letters.]