We are living in exceptionally stupid times. I don't do trigger warnings. They do not work. Surprise. (See "The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work" and Jeannie Suk Gersen, "What if Trigger Warnings Don’t Work?" September 28, 2021) Triggers warnings are based on a very stupid misunderstanding of human psychology known as behaviorism, aka "monkey see, monkey do." See B.F. Skinner and Pavlov's dog. There is no evidence that Title IX Training or Diversity Training work either. They were concocted by expensive lawyers paid by consulting firms who charge millions of dollars. The only person in a college classroom who isn't in a "safe space" is the person teaching the class.

If you feel unsafe in a classroom because something you don't like a film or text that has full frontal nudity or explicit sex scenes or graphic violence in it, if you are offended by content that has been assigned and will be discussed-- if you tend to be "triggered" or if you think it is your duty to protect others from "offensive," "harmful" and "damaging" content--you should not take a course on literature or film. You should certainly not take this course. imo. No judgment. You are responsible for going through the schedule page the first day of class to determine if any of the content is objectionable to you. If it is, then drop the class. Learning a catechism of offenses and harms is the opposite of learning how to literary criticism. This course is an elective, not a requirement. If you elect to take it, I expect you to do all the ssigned reading and viewing.

I considered myself an adult when I went to college at age 18. Professors and graduate student T.A.s felt the same way about their students. I would have been insulted by any professor or T.A. told me I might feel a certain way about a film or a book before I'd had a chance to see it or read it myself. I was sometimes emotionlly upset by a a scene in a film I saw or a passage in a book I read (that usally took the form of me crying). I occasionally had nightmares. Like the night after I saw Jaws. I still am upet sometimes by a film or a book. I felt and still feel that being emotionlly disturbed by literature or film is part of learning. Being emotionally joyous is a much great part. And I didn't think--and still don't--that talking about something disturbing necessarily makes it any less emotionally disturbing.

P.S. The notion that a self-appointed moral-expert can decide for everyone else that a word, a text, or a speech is "dangerous" and that it must be banned or the speaker de-platformed because some people supposedly need to be protected in advance from "harm" is so stupid I won't waste your time commenting on it. I will say that these guardians of morality are, in my experience, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, vindictive, punitive, conceited, prudish, and ignorant. They have not the slightest idea about what literature, film, music, theater, dance, and art are are about, namely, the imaginative freedom to say or do anything the people creating them or performing them want to say or do the way they want to say it or do it. And in the name of protecting people from potential harm have done actual harm. See what happened to Professor Bright Sheng. And "class reductionist" Adolpe Reed, Jr. Instead of talking to the "offender" in order to have a "teachable moment," these guardians snitch on the offender to the "manager" in order to get them removed from a class or even fired. The notion that "representation" is somehow politically progressive is delusional. It is at odds with artistic creation. Women writers, for example, do not read only other women writers. Nor does a woman writer necessarily like another another woman writer just because that writer is a woman. In A Room of Her Own, Virginia Woolf is deeply critical of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Great writers learn from other great writers. They have huge vocabularies. They love Big Words. They have read deeply and widely. They are not censors.

P.P.S. A favorite talking point of establishment, so-called progressives who support de-platforming and social media censorship by Silicon Valley tech giants is "free speech doesn't mean speech free from consequences." That is a typically vague, but also threatening neoliberal content free statement. What consequences follow from exercising your First Amendment right to free speech other than more speech? Getting doxxed? Getting fired from your job? If you are against free speech, that is your right. But the consequence is that I will think you are really dumb. And ignorant. And morally under-developed. And figure that you are probably white. Ditto if you are against due process. The First Amendment protects minorities and those with minority opinions from being de-platformed and censored. "Hate speech," otherwise known as "speech I don't like," is constitutionally protected speech. Guess what happens to Palestinian student activists if they organize a boycott of Israel. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process, meaning someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Guess how many black men have been falsely accused and convicted of raping a white woman only to be exonerated decades later because DNA evidence proved their innocence. Have you ever seen To Kill a Mockingbird? Guess how many people convicted of murder and then executed were posthumously exonerated. Guess how many black people in the U.S. have been lynched by white mobs. Google it. Educate yourself. Know your civil liberties. Don't be dumb, be a smartie. Universal Rights protect racial and sexual minorities. "Representation," perhaps the most cynical notion of politics ever to emerge from the elites in the history of the United States, does not. The National Security State wants your identification papers. Authoritarianism, censorship, Big Tech demonitization and deplatforming of social media, policing who can say what where, the pre-school politics of twitter are antithetical to the thought and imaginative freedom which creating literature involves and requires.