ABSTRACT
This essay explores the implications of calls for trigger warnings and safe rhetoric by students in the classroom and by social media users online. The essay argues that danger is not always where we expect it to be and safety is never guaranteed. Going back to a rarely discussed ‘girls on the run film,’ Times Square by Allan Moyle from 1980, I try to show how different notions of risk, danger, and offense were in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Noting that Times Square opens out onto a very different version of feminism and wholly other understandings of intimacy, violence, protest and security, I offer a historicized perspective on our own deep investments in security.
