Rant

Sorry in advance - it's 2AM and I'm pretty tired, but I just want to rant for a brief second. So for Spanish class, we're currently studying feminicide in Cuidad Juárez, Mexico. Our homework this weekend was to watch a movie on reserve in the library - it's fiction, but it's centered on this issue of young women, often workers in the maquilas (factories) being kidnapped and brutally attacked and killed. I won't go into detail about what was actually shown in the movie, but it was horribly, horribly graphic and involved rape and brutal murder and a lot of awful things that they just straight-up showed on screen. Now I'm already stressed out and in a really shitty mood, and I'm sitting alone on the 4th tier of Magill at 10:30pm, watching what I thought was going to be just another Spanish movie, and freaking out because I feel like I have to finish it, or at least keep watching enough to know the ending.

Like, can I get a trigger warning? ANY kind of warning? I don't remember her ever saying in class that the movie we were going to be watching would be graphic or violent, or anything like that. And I don't know if I'm overreacting or not, so I want to know what other people think. I was just so upset that I ended up basically fast-forwarding through a lot of the second half of the movie because I just couldn't watch it. And I saw plenty to be able to figure out what was going on in the movie, and even though I know it wasn't real, those images are haunting. Should we have been warned? Should watching that kind of thing be optional, even if it's for class or some other intellectual purpose? Or should people just be able to deal with it because it's fiction, like a horror movie?