Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Unless you spend much time sitting in a college classroom or browsing through certain precincts of the Internet, it’s possible that you had not heard of trigger warnings until a few weeks ago, when they made an appearance in the Times. The newspaper explained that the term refers to preëmptive alerts, issued by a professor or an institution at the request of students, indicating that material presented in class might be sufficiently graphic to spark symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder.

The term seems to have originated in online feminist forums, where trigger warnings have for some years been used to flag discussions of rape or other sexual violence. The Times piece, which was skeptically titled “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,” suggested that trigger warnings are moving from the online fringes to the classroom, and might be more broadly applied to highlight in advance the distress or offense that a work of literature might cause. “Huckleberry Finn” would come with a warning for those who have experienced racism; “The Merchant of Venice” would have an anti-Semitism warning attached. The call from students for trigger warnings was spreading on campuses such as Oberlin, where a proposal was drafted that would advise professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression” in devising their syllabi; and Rutgers, where a student argued in the campus newspaper that trigger warnings would contribute to preserving the classroom as a “safe space” for students.

Online discussion of trigger warnings has sometimes been guardedly sympathetic, sometimes critical. Jessica Valenti has noted on The Nation’s Web site that potential triggers for trauma are so manifold as to be beyond the possibility of cataloguing: “There is no trigger warning for living your life.” Some have suggested that a professor’s ability to teach would be compromised should it become commonplace for “The Great Gatsby” to bear a trigger warning alerting readers to misogyny and gore within its pages. Others have worried that trigger-warning advocates, in seeking to protect the vulnerable, run the risk of disempowering them instead. “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them,” Jenny Jarvie wrote on The New Republic’s online site.

Jarvie’s piece, like many others on the subject, cited the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a campus where champions of trigger warnings have made significant progress. Earlier this year, students at U.C.S.B. agreed upon a resolution recommending that such warnings be issued in instances where classroom materials might touch upon “rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, graphic violence, pornography, kidnapping, and graphic descriptions of gore.” The resolution was brought by a literature student who said that, as a past victim of sexual violence, she had been shocked when a teacher showed a movie in class which depicted rape, without giving advance notice of the content. The student hoped to spare others the possibility of experiencing a post-traumatic-stress reaction.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the University of California, Santa Barbara, was back in the headlines, in an unfolding story that grotesquely echoed the language of that resolution. Six members of its undergraduate body—two women and four men—were slaughtered by Elliot Rodger, aged twenty-two, who then reportedly turned one of his weapons, a semi-automatic handgun, on himself. He had warned of his impending rampage in a video, which he posted on YouTube. In it, he coolly announced his motives for what he termed a “Day of Retribution.” He wanted to exact revenge upon every “spoiled, stuck up, blonde slut” who had rejected him, and the men they had embraced instead. He had also written what he referred to as a manifesto, more than a hundred thousand words long, which outlined an intention to commit atrocities far beyond those he actually accomplished.

Rodger’s free-floating loathing was not limited to women—racist hatred also runs through the manifesto—and his utterances make it clear that he had lost all grip on reality. Nonetheless, it quickly emerged that many women recognized his words as only more extreme versions of everyday violations. On Twitter, the hashtag #YesAllWomen was embraced as a vehicle for drawing attention to the pervasiveness of sexualized violence against women, through rape, harassment, or other forms of misogyny. “Why do I have to alter the way I dress, when you can alter the way you behave?” one wrote. Another added, “Because what men fear most about going to prison is what women fear most about walking down the sidewalk.” A third offered, “Because my little sister is no longer allowed to wear tank tops to school. It’s hot outside. Stop sexualizing 11 year old girls.” Within days of the killings, there were more than a million such contributions.

If U.C.S.B. found itself, a few weeks ago, cast in the popular consciousness as a center of dubious cultural progress—a convenient representative of the latest frontier in sociopolitical activism, just as Antioch College, with its sexual-consent code, was twenty years ago—the university, in the aftermath of its own violent trauma, now holds the unsought honor of being the origin site of what is indubitably a powerful act of consciousness-raising. It is hard to read through a fraction of the #YesAllWomen posts without feeling shaken, whether by the relief of recognition or by the shock of ignorance dispelled. (If one is old enough to have participated in student-led Take Back the Night marches three decades ago, it is also impossible to read the posts without drawing the demoralizing conclusion that the night remains in hostile possession.)

The trigger-warning debate may, by comparison, seem esoteric; but both it and #YesAllWomen express a larger cultural preoccupation with achieving safety, and a fear of living in its absence. The hope that safety might be found, as in a therapist’s office, in a classroom where literature is being taught is in direct contradiction to one purpose of literature, which is to give expression through art to difficult and discomfiting ideas, and thereby to enlarge the reader’s experience and comprehension. The classroom can never be an entirely safe space, nor, probably, should it be. But it’s difficult to fault those who hope that it might be, when the outside world constantly proves itself pervasively hostile, as well as, on occasion, horrifically violent. ♦