#content warnings

First of all, thank you for this, I'm glad someone else agreed about the phrasing of the poll. I didn't really think it was worth starting a big argument over, hence why I just said I disagreed with the phrasing and left it at that. Of course, I don't know if that person made the options deliberately leading or just phrased them that way without really thinking too hard about the implications, but really there's no reason the answers to that poll couldn't have just been 'yes' and 'no'.

Usually I'd just avoid polls with leading options like that altogether out of principle, but this particular subject I have strong but also kind of complicated feelings about (more complicated than 'I don't believe in warnings', I'd say) and it's something I'm usually really eager to see other people's thoughts on too.

Like you said, I don't have a problem with the concept of content warnings as a whole. In fact, I usually do use them here on tumblr if I'm posting random snippets of my writing that I think people might be upset by. The reason for this is that most of the time I share snippets through tag games, and I sometimes get worried that I'll inadvertently tag someone directly in something that they would be upset by. Although, often I'll just avoid sharing snippets like that altogether, because I'm not really sure how to best tag them....which relates to why I don't feel like content warnings would be appropriate for my stories as a whole.

My main reasoning is pretty similar to the one you gave here. I'm just not confident that I'd be able to adequately warn for every single thing that could upset someone, especially considering that my writing is usually on the darker side: I mainly write horror and even my stories that aren't horror tend to involve a lot of sensitive subjects that are upsetting in general, even to people who might not necessarily be triggered by them. Some things might only be slightly touched upon, while others are so heavily focused on that they end up essentially becoming one of the main themes of the story—at what point do the topics that are only slightly relevant become relevant enough to warn for? Some people might find the answer to that question obvious, but I personally don't.

Related to that, I also don't want to use them because I feel that it's hard to know how to appropriately use them in a story that might depict a subject in a deliberately vague/complicated/ambiguous way. This is a bit hard to properly explain and will likely get very long-winded but it's probably the main reason I don't personally want to put detailed content warnings on my work. I'll use the subject of rape as an example here, since while it's not the only subject that can be written about in the way I'm about to elaborate on, it's probably the clearest example of this, while also being a subject that a lot of people will say always needs to be warned for. Apologies if that's something you'd rather not read someone talking about (I'm not describing any scenes in depth or anything, but just talking about them generally), feel free to skip the rest of my answer if that's the case.

Now, across the stories I'm currently working on, I do have quite a few characters that could be considered to have been victims of rape and/or some other form of sexual assault. I use that 'could be considered' phrasing because in reality these tend to fall into one of the following categories:

A very straightforward depiction of rape; that is, it's explicitly called that and/or it's very clearly shown to be that through a scene of the event, in a way that leaves no doubt whatsoever as to what happened.

A scene of assault that does include some sexual element, but might not necessarily be rape or something that is easy to accurately categorise in a way that you could give a proper warning for (besides a general term like 'sexual assault', but the problem with that is that the term sexual assault encompasses a lot of different things and might not be an adequately descriptive warning for some people).

A character is implied to have experienced a traumatic event, the effects of which are shown but the actual event itself only alluded to, which could be interpreted as rape but is left intentionally vague, this could be because the character who experienced it might not personally consider it rape, or it could be that they're deliberately vague about it because they don't want to talk about it directly....it could be left ambiguous for any number of reasons, really.

A character experiences some sort of mistreatment which is definitionally not rape, however, it's treated narratively as being analogous to rape in some way, whether because the character in question makes the comparison themselves, or because more subtle comparisons are made through symbolism/imagery/etc.

So my problem here is that I'm not sure at which point it would be appropriate to include a content warning for rape, specifically. It seems obvious that the warning would apply to the first category at least, but after that is where it gets a bit murky. In the case of the second category, you could use a warning specific to the form of assault if a specific term for it exists, but what if it's a little harder to define? With the third category, the ambiguity is purposeful, so actually giving a concrete answer through a content warning would defeat the purpose of writing it in such a way to begin with. The more metaphorical events counted under the fourth category aren't rape or 'literal' sexual assault at all, so perhaps they don't require a warning of that nature, but even still the way in which these events are written about could still be distressing to someone who is upset by reading scenes of rape because they evoke similar feelings. I suppose you could just tag all of these as 'sexual assault' just to be safe, but this isn't very specific (and again, in the case of the third category, feels like 'telling' the audience how to interpret what's written rather than letting them come to their own conclusions). Again, this is just one example of something that could become difficult to accurately warn about depending on how it's presented.

I did see in the notes of the poll, and it's also a common sentiment I've seen elsewhere, that some people think that it's better to make an honest attempt of providing warnings for everything and not wholly succeed rather than not try at all. In a way, I understand this argument....but I also disagree, somewhat. In my position, I would actually feel that it would be more responsible for me to go, 'look, personally I don't feel that I can satisfactorily warn for every sensitive subject explored in this story, so proceed at your own discretion' and leave things there. (This is what I meant when I said that not providing specific warnings is kind of its own form of warning). At least in this scenario I don't have to worry about accidentally lulling people into a false sense of security by providing warnings about some subjects, therefore leading them to believe that surely I would put a warning if I had included a specific subject that might be upsetting to them, when in actuality I may have included that specific subject and simply not warned about it because it didn't occur to me to do so for whatever reason.

I like your point about a warning potentially deterring someone from a story that might actually end up being empowering or otherwise helpful to them. I'll come back to that in a bit. Bigotry is actually another good example of a subject which can be a bit complicated/difficult to write accurate warnings for. For example, you might have a story wherein a character experiences some sort of racist mistreatment from another character, but said racist character ends up facing some sort of comeuppance for this later and it ultimately ends up being an empowering moment for the character who was victimised in the first place. You could have another story wherein a character is the victim of a race-based hate crime and the perpetrator never ends up being brought to justice. It would be accurate to say both stories contain racism, but one would probably be considered significantly more upsetting, and there isn't really a satisfactory way to distinguish the two in the context of providing a content warning.

Similarly, it can be hard to know at what point you would provide a warning. I have one story wherein a male character calls another man a 'bitch' and uses some similar misogynistic terms in order to demean him, but the story doesn't contain any scenes wherein any of the female characters experience misogynistic abuse, would a warning for misogyny apply here? If a story features a character who is a straight man, but this character is subject to homophobic and/or transphobic taunts from another character because he happens to be effeminate/girly in some way, would I warn for homophobia/transphobia even if it isn't otherwise depicted/the character in question isn't LGBT? (And could this also be argued to be something that should be tagged for sexism/misogyny?)

And bigotry is also something that can be depicted in a deliberately ambiguous way. Say you have a story wherein a woman is constantly underestimated and belittled by her male peers, or a story where a disabled character is constantly infantilised or coddled against their will, but it isn't outwardly stated that these characters are being treated this way because of misogyny or ableism, the audience is supposed to infer that themselves. Much like the above example of implied sexual assault, outwardly stating what's going on here through a content warning could be seen as detracting from the deliberate subtlety of the story.

Some people might read all of my above rambling about what actually 'counts' as requiring a warning and argue that all of the above examples should be tagged 'just in case'. I don't personally agree, because—at the risk of being accused of having some sort of toxic macho attitude or something like that—I think encountering topics that you personally find upsetting/confronting can actually be a lot more helpful than avoiding absolutely anything related to it, even the vaguest mentions of it. I'm not saying people should deliberately try and make themselves to have panic attacks by forcing themselves to read things that are immensely distressing to them, just that if you go out of your comfort zone you may find it actually helps you more than hurts you. Like the example you gave, wherein someone who has faced bigotry might actually find it helpful to read stories about it.

I'll admit I could be a little biased here. I have OCD (which could certainly explain my over-thinking in regards to this whole subject but never mind) and at one point in my life I did have a very weird/specific topic which you could say triggered me, it reminded me of a very stressful period of my life, which would then send me into a bit of a spiral and would exacerbate my obsessions/compulsions in a way that would often basically ruin my whole day. I say 'had' because it no longer has this effect on me (usually, if I come across it unexpectedly now it's, at most, mildly discomforting).

Now, this particular thing is something that I basically never came across any warnings for. To be clear, I'm not upset or angry that no one ever warned for it—most people would probably not think of this thing as being 'traumatic' to experience or distressing to read about. In most cases, I'd say it would be considered a mildly uncomfortable/unpleasant subject. The fact that my brain became so fixated on and distressed by it is entirely the result of my own strange brain and no one is really to blame for it. My reaction was entirely illogical and to be blunt, pretty stupid. Unfortunately with OCD (and I imagine people with different mental illnesses can probably relate to this too), understanding that something is a stupid thing to be distressed by isn't really enough to lessen the amount that it distresses you.

In my case, what ended up sort of 're-wiring' my brain in this instance was writing about it. I didn't actually write about the specific thing that triggered me because that was a little much at the time (also it's....a little hard to actually write an interesting story revolving around this specific topic. Nowadays I'm open to the idea that I could include it in some story if it could reasonably become relevant but I don't know if it could really be the focus of a story, lol. Maybe I need to think outside the box....?), but instead I focused on all of the negative ways that that thing made me feel and wrote about situations that elicited similar reactions from my characters. I found that actually exploring and trying to understand my own distress rather than trying to stop myself from ever experiencing it made it easier for me to respond more productively when I actually did come across this subject without warning.

Obviously, depending on what the actual trigger in question is, you would use a slightly different approach. In my case most of the time that I came across this subject in fiction it wasn't really explored in depth (because it's really not very interesting lmao) so it was more helpful to approach it in a more 'abstract' way. That said, I did have other subjects that triggered my OCD that would be considered a lot more 'obvious' (that is, they're subjects that are often warned for) and I ended up writing/reading a lot of stories that included these elements and found that helped me a lot as well. These subjects are still not exactly pleasant to come across because by nature they're upsetting subjects, but I can think about them now without it ruining my entire day. My point is, I think some people underestimate how helpful it can be to explore negative emotions or upsetting topics in a safe environment (in this case, through a fictional story) and that avoiding all mentions of a subject in any context could end up doing more harm than good. (Once again, this can depend on how severely someone is distressed by a subject.)

A bit of a less convoluted reason as to why I don't want to use content warnings is that in the case of most of my stories, I feel the genre/setting alone will probably convey enough of a warning about what the story might entail. I mean, if I pick up a horror novel or play a horror game, I tend to go in with the expectation that I should be prepared for basically any horrifying subject to come up, because that's the nature of the genre: to be horrifying. (I do understand that there are some sub-genres of horror wherein you might not necessarily expect to come across anything too extreme, but usually you can tell whether something is going to be a 'milder' or more 'extreme' horror story based on the description. I guess it depends though.). If I'm engaging with a work of crime fiction, a similar concept applies.

That said, I do have one particular story to which this doesn't apply. It does include some pretty sensitive subjects that might not be considered a 'given' for the genre it's in, and I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what the best approach is here....that said, this story won't be ready to be actually published for ages so I've got plenty of time to think it over.