Objectify This

Trigger warning: This post contains references to rape.

Anyone who reads feminist blogs has come across “trigger warnings” before graphic images or descriptions of rape or violence to women.

The intent of a trigger warning is to advertise the potentially emotionally triggering content of a piece, which might revive memories of rape or sexual assault for survivors.

Survivors of sexual assault are especially sensitive to such images because they are traumatized, and like other traumatized people, this may affect their whole world-view. Some survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder.

My work and acquaintance with survivors of sexual assault has taught me that the world can be a fairly triggering place — and for good reason: rape is more frequent than most of us would like to think. Although figures are difficult to pin down, the less disputed number is 13% of American women. While men are also raped, this appears to happen less frequently, although by some reports, men are raped about as frequently as women in the U.S. Military. While a trigger warning protects survivors from running into the graphic details farther on, such articles usually refer to specific cases of rape, and the idea of a brutal world is not comforting.

The trigger warning also implicitly validates survivors of sexual assault, by recognizing their existence and their potential needs and offering them control over some of what they process. The Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, as Title IX is now officially called, requires

immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again regardless of whether the student who has been harassed complains of the harassment or asks the college to act.

Of course, Title IX applies only to colleges and universities, and it can’t fix rape culture (see Nirvana album cover above) alone. But it is a legal precedent, and an acknowledgment that a “hostile environment” can impede or delay full healing from trauma. My goal here, with ObjectifyThis, is to work towards a less hostile environment for almost everyone, in the Sarah Haskins school of non-polarizing feminism. In that vein, I will be using trigger warnings from now on.