How the hell am I going to find all the sensitivity readers I need? Gritty cyberpunk story? I mean where I am going to find a traumatized ex mercenary who is more metal than man? There are not a lot of those to go around. Turn of the first millennium historical drama about a survivor of a Viking raid? Stabbed and had your village plundered is not exactly a common occurrence these days. How about a fantasy epic? I just need to find some wizard who isn’t from Washington wearing a basketball jersey. I know what about…

Surely someone who’s experienced real life trauma won’t want to replicate the experience by reading a fictional account of something similar, so will avoid the genre? Or might they be reading it as a form of therapy?

In the first instance, authors don’t need to concern themselves about being offensive. In the second instance, again, authors needn’t concern themselves about being offensive.

Someone who’s written lots of very, very graphic descriptions of some of the worst acts that one human being can perpetrate upon another, such as Val MacDiarmid, might struggle to find a publisher if she were just starting out, yet she’s one of the best-selling writers of crime fiction of this or any other generation. Her books sell for a reason, and those reasons are buried deep within the human psyche. They need to be brought to the surface occasionally, to be inspected. The current misunderstanding of our humanity is, in my opinion, not just a brainless abomination but dangerous.

Reverse it. How bad is violence which is cartoon-like and without consequence? A-Team shooting that never hits anyone. The kapow pounding of a Marvel hero because violence saves the day. Women in physical fights with men, ignoring the difference in weight and strength and the principle of never hit a woman, that makes fighting women a game, not something that is always wrong.
If there is violence then it should be gritty, and real, and life-changing with consequences, because only then does it become something to be avoided and discouraged – a bad answer that reflects failure, not success.

What I hate about the term “virtue signallers” is virtue signallers who say they are proud to be virtual signallers, and therefore by virtue signalling their signalled virtue miss the point that virtue signalling is a signal signal to their lack of virtue.

It’s interesting that writers who live in a virtually violence free world have to jump through all these moral hoops whilst young black rappers who live in a violence saturated world are allowed to threaten murder totally unhindered. Indeed any attempt to dial back the violence in their work is decried as racist censorship of their art. I recently watched a video on YouTube about the Chicago drill rap scene and all of the rappers mentioned in it (bar two) were either serving life for murder or had been shot dead. Yet this style subsequently spread around the world with predictable results. No sensitivity readers there

Unrealistic danger i.e. simulated danger/fear/horror while in an obviously safe environment, does provide that frisson of excitement that many of us enjoy. Witness the popularity of theme park rides which induce screaming. However, there is a limit to the depiction of the very realistic which induces revulsion rather than enjoyment and I think most people are averse to the realistic consequences of violence.
For example, dissecting a frog in a school biology class shows how squeamish people are with real injuries. Even realistic depictions of violence have most people turning away in disgust. I recall a UK TV series called, I think “Eye on Research” which occasionally had sequences of actual surgical operations which I couldn’t watch as a teenager.
I also recall being in a cinema watching the Salvador Dali surrealist film “Un Chien Andalou” which has a scene where an open razor is apparently used to slash open a women’s eye (in close up!). The whole cinema reacted by turning away, hands over eyes, grunts of disgust, etc. Cinematographers are often very clever at implying without showing and thus avoiding these negative reactions.
Even some published written work can occasionally induce these feelings of revulsion. I am thinking in particular of a work called “The Room” by Hubert Selby Jr. , the author of “Last Exit to Brooklyn”. He described The Room as “the most disturbing book ever written.” and said he could not read it for decades after writing it. Having read it many years ago (from our local public library), I also found it deeply disturbing and concur with his opinion.

The article is long, reasonnably interesting. But not as interesting as its illustration photography.

Sieg Larsson’s work is pure violence pornography, where he treats his liberal readers with a guilt free exploration of committing various acts of abuse against conservative figures. That’s exactly all what his book are about, some hate filled gore porn against old white men under the guise of “a thrilling investigation”.

So yes, there might be questions worth asking about the depiction of violence. But wether the facts are emotion-inducing seems for me less relevant than wether the author is apologetic (99% of the time he/she’s not).

The real question is “Why are we all, writers and readers, so interested in brutality?” We live in a time that is far less violent than any previously; the odds of being the victim of brutal violence were far greater for our grand-parents and even more so for their’s. Yet our entertainments have become almost indistinguishable from a Roman circus.
Are we so completely hard-wired to enjoy this cruelty or is it just another decadent self-indulgence?

The Left will blame literally anyone but criminals for crime. It’s canon for them.

I suppose that a lecturer with, say, six literature students, might just be able to put separate trigger-warnings on each copy of the next novel to be studies: always assuming that each of the six students has completed a full personality inventory, honestly. Thus, happily matched between book and individual personality, the students could all end up untroubled, and with little more knowledge than when they were handed the book.

Anyone who has witnessed an act of violence in real life will tell you that there is zero sensitivity involved. Indeed, it hits you like a spiked bat to the back of the head, splattering bone and brain across the room and into the shocked onlookers faces.
Wait, was that too much? Do we need sensitivity readers for blog comments?
Although, I am reminded of the actor Christopher Lee, who, while in the LOTR movies went up to Peter Jackson and told him, after reading that Gandalf would scream after being stabbed, that it wasn’t what really happens. Jackson started to dismiss him and what he said, but later found out that Lee had served in WWII as an LRDG commando, and while he couldn’t talk about specifics at even that late date, he had some experience with the sounds that people make when being stabbed. Now, would that qualify as a sensitivity reader? In my eyes, yes.

I tried to insert this earlier today, but it hasn’t shown up anywhere. So I’ll try again.
Louise Perry links (a) crime shows, movies or novels, (b) female viewers or readers, and (c) female directors or writers. She mentions that women enjoy these violent productions no less than men do. I have no reason to doubt that. In fact, I can think of several factors that could account for it. I suggest here one factor that has taken on particular importance since the 1980s, at least in the United States.
This was the rise of victim-oriented feminism, what I usually call the ideological branch of feminism (as distinct from its earlier egalitarian one). It sustains a profoundly dualistic worldview according to which all of history amounts to a titanic conspiracy of men to oppress women. In some fictional worlds, the emphasis is on men as oppressors, sometimes on women as victims of men but almost always on both. In fictional terms, this means that major male characters in these stories are evil victimizers. The antagonist, or villain, enjoys terrorizing and murdering female characters. Major female characters, by contrast, are innocent victims. The protagonist is not only victimized, however, but also, eventually, heroic (sometimes with help from a male character, often black or gay). Katherine K. Young and I tracked this pattern in popular culture throughout the 1980s and 1990s (and later in other segments of culture). Misandry was not a universal pattern in popular culture, of course, and co-existed with misogyny (although the former was ignored and the latter carefully monitored by both private and government agencies). But this new pattern was common enough to qualify as a distinct genre (known in the entertainment industry as the “woman in jeopardy” genre). And we were hardly the only ones to notice it.
That narrative and symbolic pattern was an early manifestation of identity politics. This emerged after the switch from Marxist class theory and then “critical theory” to the critical gender theory of feminist ideology (which has by now morphed into the critical race theory of woke ideology).
Why would people tolerate, let alone support, such a cynical worldview in the guise of entertainment? More than a few men eventually realized the ideological and moral implications about themselves and began to protest. Now, some men monitor the phenomenon on their own websites. More than a few women, however, found the new genre “empowering.” I suspect that it made sense to them both psychologically and politically. Ideological feminism relies heavily on the idea that women are the perpetual victims of men. Women who disagree, therefore, present a threat to that ideology. What wins many women over, though, is the characteristic ending of each story: a female character who fights back and prevails. This allows women to have their cake and eat it, too, vicariously. They can identify themselves as both victims and heroes.
Dr. Young and I don’t argue that all or even most of these productions were intended as agitprop. And conscious personal motivations were in any case not at the heart of our research. Rather, we argue that leaders of the entertainment industry correctly intuited (as they often do) the cultural climate—that is, what people already wanted to see. Some of those leaders were women (who might or might not have had ideological axes to grind), but most of them were still men (who probably wanted nothing more than to make big bucks). 

I’m remind of the story about Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: Two prim ladies congratulated him for not including any rude word. He replied “So you looked them all up then”

Dealing with violent literature/videos/movies etc is as complicated as dealing with pornography. Actually the two subjects are related. Personally I believe that violent movies,as some pornography, should be limited to specific shops where people pay to have DVDs or books. It will not solve the matter, because violence is a human trait, but it will be an attempt to reduce it. After trying for a certain period of time conlusions can be drawn, if any. Ready to listen to better ideas.

This seems right, but this paragraph “And then, there’s the question of the role of women in all this” doesn’t really make any sense. You imply that it’s some sort of a myth that true crime and crime fiction are overwhelmingly read by women, but you don’t really argue that it isn’t true (as it is true) and in fact you end your paragraph by telling us to celebrate it. Go girl!