Watch With Me

Because look, adding a content warning to something is to a censor just like waving a red flag in front of a bull. It’s a great big sign that says “censor me first!!” Easily accessible content warnings mean it’s harder for closeted teens with homophobic parents to read books with queer content. Easily accessible content warnings means it’s harder for librarians to smuggle sex ed books to kids who only get abstinence-only education. Easily accessible content warnings means it’s easier for organizations who want to present themselves as “family-friendly” to exclude whole categories of information from their collections, the way Wal-Mart doesn’t sell music with “Explicit” labels (even though some of the albums they now won’t carry I bought from Wal-Mart before there were labels on albums).

In 1999, Congress tried to make it mandatory for schools and libraries to use Internet filters to protect the children from seeing porn on the internet, and we were able to fight it because the filters were terrible; if everything was appropriately labeled with content warning, that argument wouldn’t work any more, and they could mandate content filters, but I don’t believe for a second that those filters would be any better about not labeling queer content as inherently more adult than heterosexual content or deciding that information about birth control is inherently sexual in nature.