University students in the U.K. are given trigger warnings before reading the novel Dracula.
The University of Greenwich wants to help prepare its students for "the supernatural" elements in Bram Stoker's 1897 classic Gothic horror about a Transylvanian vampire.
I've never read the book, but even I know it's going to get creepy...
And I figured that out all on my own – without a trigger warning!
Academics are most worried about the book's descriptions of "spiders and other insects" and "misogyny" in Stoker's text.
Entomophics and woke feminists, beware!
The Dracula novel has been read and studied at universities worldwide for decades, but starting only in 2023 do 18-year-olds need a trigger warning for it.
The university also warns of "animal abuse," which most likely refers to the character of Renfield, an asylum inmate who eats spiders, insects, and birds.
From The Daily Mail:
Documents from Greenwich's English department advise readers that a Gothic literature module 'by its nature… contains elements that students might find disturbing'.
The content warning specific to Dracula states: 'Violence, death, murder, child abduction and death, depictions of mental illness, misogyny, the supernatural, imprisonment, references to suicide, animal abuse, descriptions of spiders and other insects.'
We've seen these types of trigger warnings popping up all over university campuses over the past few years, and they usually come from students complaining.
They are such sensitive creatures, after all.
Professor Dennis Hayes, an education expert at the University of Derby, told The Daily Telegraph that it is "time to stop this nonsense and recognize that students are adults and can actually enjoy horror stories."
Will nursery rhymes need trigger warnings next - students studying early childhood at the university might have to be warned about the horrors of Little Miss Muffet and Incy Wincy Spider?
Trigger warnings seem innocuous but they create a climate in universities in which quite normal things are seen as anxiety-making.
According to the professor, using trigger warnings frequently can actually create an atmosphere of fear and anxiety among students, making them feel like they're walking into a haunted house that is a "threatening and stressful experience" instead of a university.
But universities with their exaggerated concern with wellbeing, mental health and being safe, over-protect and mollycoddle students. This mollycoddling is there at every level.
Trigger warnings don't work? And they're just making us into bigger wimps?
Who knew... 🙄
