Michigan State University student Gage Guswiler questions Professor Kate Manne on the topic of trigger warnings. ZACH TAYLOR / THE DEPAUW
On Thursday evening at the Undergraduate Ethics Symposium, Professor Kate Manne began her speech with a warning: “I wanted to start today by giving you a quick heads up that there will be some discussion of sexual assault in my talk.”
Manne was standing in front of the 25 hand-selected students opening her lecture on the topic of trigger warnings. After waiting a moment for her statement to set in, she added, “What is a trigger warning? Well, that was one.”
The DePauw Undergraduate Ethics Symposium began in 2007 and has been reoccurring every year since. Students from across the country are asked to submit work discussing any ethical issue that he or she may see as pressing for this generation. Only 25 to 28 students are selected to attend a series of ethics workshops and lectures.
A trigger warning refers to the public announcement that what one is about to say may cause stress, anxiety, emotional trauma, etc., to a listener. While it may seem impossible to know exactly what can set off an internal alarm for a listener, Professor Manne believes that, through the use of rational thinking, people can predict these triggers without fully knowing another person. If something sounds as if it may be a sensitive topic, Manne encouraged announcing a warning first.
However, the discussion goes much deeper than simply asking people to think rationally before speaking. Manne believes social norms have pushed this generation to discredit people who are triggered by the words of others.
The idea of a “survivor mentality” implies that what one has experienced in the past is now over. It can no longer affect the victim who survived the trauma.
In turn, the idea of an “anti-victim” sentiment moves society to view victims as being, “an infant, but also an aggressive infant,” as put by Manne. Calling oneself a victim in contemporary American society is viewed with a negative, almost pathetic connotation, rather than an accepting one.
Sophomore Lindsey Jones found the lecture to be both thought provoking and educational.
“I had thought about trigger warnings at DePauw before, but thinking about it on a philosophical level and the discourse surrounding it was something that was different for me,” she said. "She made me think about aspects of trigger warnings I had never thought of before, such as victim culture.”
Jones said she would have liked to hear more real-life examples of when and how to use trigger warnings, but in the end, understood the complexity of giving specific situations.
When asked if she was prepared for the sensitive talk, Jones responded, “yes, but luckily it wasn’t triggering for me.”
Whether or not one agrees with Manne, or the use of trigger warnings in general, her argument and research is an overlooked topic of ethics, perhaps one that is so simple for people to perform it is often ignored completely.