There was a discussion on Twitter about content warnings (CWs) recently, and while I’ve talked about content warnings before (spoiler: I think you should use them), I figured I’d take this opportunity to go a bit deeper into them here and explore the parts of CWs that aren’t always so easy to figure out.
(Content warnings are usually found at the front of the book and are written by the author to give the reader a heads-up about situations in the story that could cause the reader distress. The reader can then opt out of reading the book, or continue reading it, more prepared to deal with the situation.)
Specifically, the question on Twitter was: should you give a content warning for consensual sex on page?
I’ve actually been wondering this for a while, if an author should warn for sex or not. Initially, my feeling was no warning because sex is a natural expression of love/desire/attraction. But then, I’m someone who likes to read sex in romance, but not everyone does, AND not every romance has to have sex in it, because of course it doesn’t.
And I’m coming at it from my own cishet POV, which is much too limited. For people on the asexual spectrum, a warning for sex might be appreciated. A warning might also be useful for people who’ve had sexual trauma in their past or people who have other reasons for not wanting to read sex on the page. The main reason why I advocate for CWs is simply to be kind and respectful to people who need the warnings, and because it doesn’t hurt to have them included, but it might hurt someone if they’re not included. So then we should CW for sex, right?
But are there instances where it might not be totally necessary? With a clinch cover or shirtless dude cover or other elements on the cover that indicate sexiness or sensuality (a bed, a fainting couch, luxe items like pearls or silk—think Fifty Shades or Sylvia Day), I can pretty much guess that there will be sex on the page. With the ubiquity of cartoon covers for romance, it’s making it more difficult to “read” a cover to determine what’s inside and the expectations that the cover sets up. While illustrated or cartoon covers are amazing for giving authors so many more options to represent their characters rather than the limited selection of stock photos out there (the majority of which are of thin white m/f couples, lbh), it’s much more difficult to tell what you’re getting inside the book just by the cover with them. They often suggest lightness and fun, so you think rom-com, but they can be more serious than that in content, and there’s no easy way to tell the heat level either just with a glance at the cover. So if you have a cover that clearly indicates that sex on page could be expected, maybe you don’t have to CW for it?
Another question is how much do we warn for? If there are things in your book that you could reasonably expect a number of readers might find harmful, definitely CW those. But if the whole point of CWs is to not cause harm to readers, where does it end? You can’t be expected to warn for any possible thing that a reader might find upsetting because there are so many things could affect a tiny handful of readers.
On Twitter, the discussion about CWs went to “well, there’s a different between trigger warnings and content warnings and heat level and content notes.” To me, this is mostly semantics. Trigger warning and content warnings are virtually interchangeable terms (though I personally don’t like the term “trigger warning” because I think it encourages people who don’t want to bother with warnings to start shouting “snowflake” and undercutting/undervaluing the true need for warnings). The difference between content warnings and content notes (CN) seems very negligible and really is just trying to diminish the negative connotation of “warning”—but they essentially perform the same function in alerting the reader what’s inside the book. Heat level is somehow separate, but could easily be folded into content warnings/notes, and actually might be a better way to indicate if sex will be on the page or not so that it might not require a direct warning for sex—but then, heat level is also very subjective, and absolute fire to one person is just smoldering embers to another.
There are no real easy answers for how to do CWs. Do your best to do as little harm as possible to your readers and respect their boundaries so they’ll come back to you for your next book that doesn’t contain something that doesn’t work for them. (If you want examples of writers who do content warnings/notes really well, Talia Hibbert and Rebekah Weatherspoon are both excellent at them.)
If you’re self-published, you get to do content warnings/notes however you like, which gives you a ton of flexibility. If you’re trad published, encourage your publisher to let you include CWs or CNs. I would love to see all publishing companies and self-publishers making CWs or CNs a standard practice across all books, but we're not there yet. Right now, it’s not easy to find CWs if they’re not already indicated by the author in the book—readers need to seek them out by tracking down reviews or social media about them. And there are too many ways to manipulate them, removing their usefulness. Storygraph (an alternative to GoodReads) currently includes author-approved CWs in the book info and also allows users to add CWs—but there’s been a number of people deliberately CWing erroneously for books by POC and queer writers. That’s in flux now as Storygraph figures out how to best inform people what’s in the books to protect readers from upsetting content and protecting writers from racist and homophobic attacks. But you can make sure the author-approved ones are there by making CWs/CNs part of the paratext of your books and something readers don't have to scramble to find.
This post maybe raised more questions than it answered, but tell me what you think: are you doing CWs/CNs in your books now? Has this made you rethink how you’re doing them? If you have sex on the page in your books, do you warn for sex or no? Comment below—I’d love to hear from you.