@elialeth @Sandra

it is definitely person-to-person different. i, a rape survivor, am not jarred by the word rape but i do know people are v sensitive to it

i read their suggestion of using CW when the post is worse than what you would put in the CW is a way to gauge it if someones unsure if to use it or not

@elialeth That's fine!

So my feeling is that seeing a timeline full of Rape, Racism, Ableism, Homophobia, Climate Doom, Sexism etc can be both jarring in the short term and exhausting in the long term, even if we don't expand / "show more" the posts. Just being surrounded by a constant reminder of how hostile the world can be. And, I don't know about others but I still flinch at the word "rape".

And I think this idea that even a single world can be pretty heavy is somewhat widely known—I was scared of blood and guts and gore when I was a li'l girl, and people (probably better known as bullies) would run up to me and say "bloooood" or "gutttts" and they kept doing it for years even after I got over it, they got a kick out of being cruel.

(I've written more about the power of words here: https://idiomdrottning.org/filter-kindness )

So that was my li'l caveat on what @gingerrroot was saying; it seemed to me that she was emphasizing that the word "rape" is a far cry from a detailed description of it.

And she's very right about that, of course—that's the flip side to what I'm saying. These CWs are definitively a lot less hurtful than a more detailed description, so using them as a warning before a detailed description is a good thing.

The analogy I used is that these single-word-usages can sting like a "beesting", and the detailed descriptions are way worse, like being cut by a sword (in the metaphor).

And if the warning sign in front of a room where you might get cut by a sword, if that warning sign is a beesting, that's super worth it because it prevents a much bigger injury. So please keep using CWs.

But if that beestinging warning sign is in front of a room that just contains a similar-sized bee, it's not worth it. (It's also not worth it if the room is empty, but that goes without saying.) So please use CWs responsibly.

I'm saying that it's a tightrope between making CWs specific enough to be actually useful, but not detailed enough to be triggering in and of themselves. Most posts I see on here do a good job of walking that tighrope, and I find it personally difficult to do it right and I mess up all the time.