Should Books Have Content Warnings?

Personally, I am all for it and I’ll get to that in a little bit. I was talking with a friend and while she used to be a big reader, life got in the way and she has more responsibilities than any one person should and cannot read as much. We were talking about media and mostly movies and tv. Both of us started watching k-dramas in high school (over a decade ago, ugh I’m old) and we had particular reasons. One said reason was that (at the time) they weren’t overly sexual or graphic. If you’re reading this and in the US, you may notice how gratuitous sex scenes or violence is the norm, just thrown into plots even when they don’t add anything and seem altogether random.

This led to us talking about books and how while when we were younger erotica was it’s own genre, how now most newer romances would fit in that category instead of in what used to be romance. There’s no PG-13 romance books anymore, even some YA books are what readers call “spicy” nowadays. But for folks who don’t want to read that, should they stop seeking out romance? I don’t think so and neither did my friend. I am not a big romance reader, but I find this occurs even in genres I do read like thriller and horror and I usually just skip a few pages or until the next chapter because I don’t want to read it.

With movies and tv shows, there is always a warning before they come on telling you the rating and why the show is rated that way, but it’s not the same with books. True, a lot of indie authors are beginning to put content warnings at the beginning of their books, but I feel that it would be good for this to become a standard practice. After all, if you can’t tell that there’s something graphic by the book jacket or even by reviews, you may be in for a surprise. And for survivors of violence, it can do more damage than you might think. And we shouldn’t be re-traumatizing people.

Also, if it doesn’t even serve the plot, why is it there? Because it’s trendy? What’s the point?

I personally feel as though people should know what they’re getting into when they read a book. If there’s abuse or other harrowing subjects that can’t be gleaned from the book jacket, what damage does it do to add them to a content warning on the copyright page of the book? But that could just be me, I don’t know.

And then if it does become a more standard practice across publishing, wouldn’t it be easier to know if a book was for you or not? I mean, there are tons of books that people have had to DNF over things that could have been solved with a content warning, aren’t there? If I’m reading about a murder on a train, I shouldn’t have to be prepared for a few throwaway paragraphs about graphic practices against enslaved people that never actually pops up again or has any relevance…but that may just be a personal preference.

Overall though, I do think it would do authors a favor because it would make it easier to navigate and narrow down their target audience. If I’m writing a high-fantasy adventure novel with a large cast of characters and a smidge of romance, I shouldn’t have to worry about people getting upset over it not being spicy. And I see that a lot on reviews left on books. They come in with an expectation that the author didn’t even set and then leave a two-star review.

More on the trauma side of things, if an author writes in a genre that can have touchy subjects such as graphic gore or violence on the page, I think it would be a kindness to let readers know. Once again, we don’t want to re-traumatize people, am I right? And it isn’t as though adding content warnings would be altogether difficult. Authors and editors know exactly what subjects and areas may be triggering and so it’s just a matter of having the typesetter add that little bit of information somewhere in the front matter of the book. I don’t think it would be a hard change and readers are also free to skip it, I doubt most pay attention to the copyright page in the first place.

As I was talking with my friend, she also brought up that because tv and movies have them, there were a lot of things her parents didn’t allow her to watch, but she was free to pick up just any old book from the library. And some of those books were far too graphic. I was the same. My local library didn’t have too many books for my age group with characters that looked like me and so I would go to the teen section or the adult section and pick from there. (It also took usually about a month for interlibrary loan on books by Black authors.) And some of those books I know my parents would be shocked to know I read. Like no 8 year old should be reading Sister Souljah and Eric Jerome Dickey. However, I didn’t know too much better. I was focused on the fact that it was a book by Black authors about Black characters and that’s what I was craving. I had already read all the usual suspects (Walter Dean Myers, the Bluford High series, Sharon Flake, Sharon Draper, etc.). I still wanted more. So, I went to where I could find them and they weren’t age-appropriate. I feel like content warnings could help concerned parents…then maybe they would be less ready to ban books and just be more mindful of what books they bring into their homes. But I’m curious, what are your thoughts on this? Should books have content warnings?

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