I used to get triggered to where you couldn’t take me anywhere, diving under tables in restaurants and staying frozen under desks til the office cleared out, talking in a little baby voice or becoming violent and fighting with store clerks or some innocent who bumped me in passing. That’s PTSD. You lose the in between space that separates stimulus and response. Normally it’s stimulus>>thought>>response but when PTSD exists there’s nothing between the two, and there really needs to be; the ability to recognize and accurately perceive a stimulus is basic and that’s what PTSD ruins. When the stimulus/response is instantaneous, it’s impaired. People living with unresolved major trauma put current experience into the past and act as if a horrible thing is happening now and they don’t realize they’re doing this. They don’t know where they are. To be unable to tell when sounds/behaviors/facial expressions/ and yes, words are a threat or benign is hell to live with, it needs to be repaired and there are ways of doing that.

Everyone I know who has sincerely worked on healing from trauma would laugh at the very fucking idea of a “safe space”, because number one we are beyond safe spaces, and second, trying to create a womblike social milieu promotes the continuing psychosis we’re trying to get over.

Recovery is about learning to discern the difference between a benign and threatening stimuli, and how to respond to each accordingly. This is broken in PTSD where everything is coming at you and all of it potentially threatening. Reactions to sounds, words, facial expressions, ringing phones and knocks on the door are often unpredictable, bizarre, disproportionate, hysterical, confusing, scary to experience and scary to witness, and come out of nowhere with a life of their own. The triggers are real, and the material being activated is meaningful, but it’s all happening inside, and that’s where the responsibility lies. Why is that so hard to grasp? I read those blogs and their trigger warnings and PTSD admonishments to everyone as if their speech is a factor in keeping the self-identified PTSD sufferer stable. Maybe the sufferer should be disturbed; PTSD is a serious mental illness.

Good therapy would have you re-engaging with life in all its noisome messiness and ambiguity, none of which carries a trigger warning. Being upset and staying with it. Building tolerance, getting stronger. But you have to pass through so much catastrophe without externalizing it, and that’s hard. Easier to say it’s you, Mencken, you’ve put me back in that horrible place I need to forget and you had better not ever do that again. But now I’ve abandoned me and made you the thing that needs attention. This is why I think what they do is so anti-therapeutic. Plus it’s lazy, no need for commitment to learning how to handle it, and the craziness is very difficult to overcome. The first step has to be in identifying who it belongs to, and I’ve yet to see an inkling of self-responsibility at those safe space blogs. It infuriates me that they’re so silly and superficial about what PTSD takes from people, and how they will ameliorate the damage with clever, wordy, linear debates about insensitive speech. I don’t see it. PTSD is a disorder, it creates disordered personalities, jumbled discourse, irrational paragraphs, regular meltdowns, if you have PTSD issues and you post regularly at a blog it’s going to show. They insult people who really do struggle with chronic re-traumatization by presenting themselves as what that looks like. And by arguing that recovery is about suppressing particular stimuli rather than confronting what it is that particular stimuli activates within. The triggers start something inside. We can ignore the words that started the process. It’s my mind at issue, not what goes on in yours. If we’re talking about PTSD, which is totalizing. I don’t know what to make of it, certain female-oriented bloggers exploit a faddish disorder to legitimize garden variety irritants and use it to prop up their absolute moralism? Shocking.

That’s how I read it as well: “Don’t go looking to be offended”. I read Panagon a lot; used to read a lot of Shakesville. I almost *never* make a comment at those places, and even then not without a lot of trying to make sure any comment cannot be reasonably construed to be a dig at somebody. I do my best to respect their space. That being said, I am grateful there are places where I can make tacky jokes, and I say that as someone who has been banned on Wonkette of all places (I have since be reinstated).

People can choose to be offended at anything – and it is just that, a choice. I find it particularly galling because Conservatives have taken “political correctness”, originally a product of liberal “good” (albeit naive) intentions, and turned it against us (e.g. “The War On Christmas”). That may be why it gets HTML’s goat so badly; I know with certainty it annoys the hell out of me, much more so than the straight up racism of Redstate or Free Republic. The latter is obvious and much more easily combatted than the more insidious “hurting of feelings”.

I’m having a hard time imagining a scenario in which that statement would be incorrect, so…yes. If by “caring about people’s feelings” you mean perpetually walking on eggshells and apologizing even when you don’t feel like an apology is in order.

Jennifer and HTML want a safe space where they can randomly ridicule Shakesville et al even (especially?) when it’s off topic. And caring about people’s feelings is less important than the US’s killing of people and the VA’s shitty health care. And HTML loves baseball.

But let’s go back to your initial comment – you know, the one where you said: “Right on! If you have PTSD, no internet for you! Because people who have been traumatized to the point that some words and images cause flashbacks and panic attacks… those folks don’t deserve any consideration, anywhere, ever.”

Your implication in that statement is that unless we all agree to mind our Ps & Qs, on every site, people with PTSD can’t use the internet. And I quite rightly called bullshit on that. While I have no doubt that there are some fragile souls out there that cannot handle the rough-and-tumble of certain internet sites, the solution is for them to avoid going to those sites, not for the rest of us to walk around on eggshells.

But let’s go back to your last comment: “You appear to be claiming that if a person has suffered a trauma like rape, and due to that, reacts with panic attacks to words graphically describing rape, there should be nowhere at all on the Internet where that person can go to connect with other human beings… apparently just because the creation of safe spaces annoys HTML Mencken. No one should even try to make a forum with some rules so that traumatized people can find social connection and safety online – because it offends your principles that someone, somewhere, is moderately restricting speech.”

As was already pointed out, that’s not what Mencken said. He expressed the idea that he finds “safe places” to be bullshit. That’s what’s known as an opinion. You may not agree with it, but it’s not the same thing as him prohibiting those types of sites from existing – it’s just the expression of a personal preference, something that we all have. To his credit, he expresses that opinion here on his own blog – while also allowing you to disagree with it – something you would not be allowed to do on many of those “safe spaces.” It would be different if he went to those “safe spaces” on a regular basis to tell them their standards are full of shit. He doesn’t do that.

Last of all, I’d just like to point out that while you bring up issues of PTSD, rape trauma & etc., the “trigger” that caused this entire discussion was the use of two words together that on certain websites are never allowed to be used together: “humorless” and “feminists”. You may disagree that the construction was accurate, and that’s fine. But I challenge you to provide even one example in which that phrase would “trigger” a “flashback” for a victim of PTSD or a rape survivor. I’m sorry, but that, again, is BULLSHIT. What it “triggers” is opprobrium at using a phrase considered in some circles to be “politically incorrect” because it’s been used by people we don’t like in the past – therefore, it’s “bad” and should never be uttered by anyone on “our side” – even if it happens to be accurate.

There’s a big damn difference between using a word construction that offends someone’s sense of political correctness and one that causes a PTSD flashback. And sorry, but MY opinion is that to make such a big fucking deal over the use of the former – up to equating it with the latter – is just more bullshit. I said something that some people didn’t like. I didn’t retract it, and I’m not going to because in the context it was used I considered it (and still do consider it) to be accurate. If certain other people have a problem with that, well then, that’s their problem. They can’t expect that our opinions will be 100% in alignment on all matters, and if that’s their standard for judging who is a good, or reasonable, or acceptable person, they need to grow the fuck up.

Mostly because that’s not what he said.

Once upon a time I answered the phones for the office, back when people answered phones. And I got a call from the local post office (Note that this took place after Sept 2001).

“We have a package for one of your people [a male person who was out of town at the time] and it’s buzzing,” the postal person said. “WHAT?? What do you want me to do?” I asked, alarmed. “Come pick it up,” the postman suggested airily.

Well, I did go pick it up. I opened it up on the spot and in it was a chrome vibrator, vibrating. And a pair of really immense red & black patent platform shoes. I turned off the vibrator, I taped the box back up, I took it to the office and left it on the person’s chair…and I never said a word about it.

I regret that to this day.

Why the big emotional reaction? It’s just words. As you keep insisting, no one can possibly ever need protection from any combination of words. The way you talk, you’d think that words represent ideas, and that some of those ideas can cause emotional reactions. Next you might realize that for some traumatized people, words can (oh no, not this word!) trigger reactions like panic attacks. And then you might reconsider your opinion.

HTML: “Put your offended energy into bashing the VA, etc, for not taking better care of these people”

Yes, we should take better care of veterans and trauma survivors. But I find it puzzling that you claim to believe it’s wrong for those people to try to find or make safe places on the internet to connect with other survivors while they’re in the process of recovering.

HTML: “I think it’s stupid, impractical, and morally retarded to seriously attempt to create places on the freaking internet where such people need to be protected from stray *words*.”

Morally retarded? Is that really what you believe? Because the lack of compassion here is unreal. If someone told your friend with PTSD that he should just suck it up and quit acting like he has a mental health issue, because shut up is why… I can’t imagine you’d be okay with that. But that’s basically the attitude that you’re displaying toward survivors who have the misfortune to be triggered sometimes by words.

You appear to be claiming that if a person has suffered a trauma like rape, and due to that, reacts with panic attacks to words graphically describing rape, there should be nowhere at all on the Internet where that person can go to connect with other human beings… apparently just because the creation of safe spaces annoys HTML Mencken. No one should even try to make a forum with some rules so that traumatized people can find social connection and safety online – because it offends your principles that someone, somewhere, is moderately restricting speech.

I just don’t see how you could really believe that.

Jennifer, it’s central to my point that you would find the idea of a young girl being battered with PENIS amusing, and may god save you, &c.

Well done!

OK, look. I was trying to riff off of what I perceived as Cindy Yockey’s perhaps overly-eager co-option of Brand Lesbian by writing the most over-the-top Dyketty Dyke Dyke McDykeperson response that I could. It’s possible that I may have offended (or, as the kids seem to be saying these days, “triggered”) someone. Apologies if and as necessary.

Speaking of Dyketty &c., check out her latest, which not only includes a title nod to us truly, but also this gem (after yet another heroic C&P of an old rant from some frothing anti-Obama preacher):

I can’t say I’m crazy about Pastor Manning’s denunciation of homosexuality. But I very much admire his courage…

Somewhere, Hothead Paisan sharpens her axe.

It’s a different kind of humour. Doesn’t mean I like it. I used to post there pretty regularly, but then they had the DNS attacks and Melissa got her hat handed to her by Edwards and after that, they lost a bit off the fastball.

I could have shared my story about saying something tacky about libertarians on HighClearing. Ouch!

Jean Luc Picard!

I kept my promise, though. Shut up faster than a Mexican at a … whoopsie, don’t mean to offend.

For the record, I no longer visit Shakesville, not because of their viewpoints, but because they are incredibly fucking boring. Humorless, if you will. And the stuff that is meant as humor, is incredibly unfunny.

The above is not meant as an attack against any particular member of the Shakesville Community, but rather as my own observation and experience.

Don’t get me started on the undead, though…

No you didn’t

You were expecting maybe Sora Aoi?