12/15/2025
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Margaret Atwood first wrote those seventeen words in 1982, in an essay collected in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960â1982. The sentence names a simple, brutal difference in everyday risk: one fear is social humiliation, the other is literal bodily danger. For millions of women it did not reveal anything new â it only put language to the constant, low-level calculations they have learned to make.
Those calculations show up as habits: keys between knuckles while walking to a car, sharing a location before a first date, smiling to diffuse a catcall, choosing safer excuses rather than a blunt âno.â These are not signs of irrational anxiety; they are practical safety strategies learned from experience and from stories women pass to one another.
The sentence moved quickly beyond literary pages into classrooms, conversations and the broader public. Once people could quote it, women found an easy way to explain why they take precautions; others found a clear entry point to understand how daily life can be shaped by threat. Naming the fear made private survival practices visible and turned them into a shared social fact that could be discussed, challenged and measured.
The stakes Atwood captured are not hypothetical. High-profile cases underline how rejection can trigger lethal violence: in April 2014, 16-year-old Maren Sanchez was fatally stabbed in a Connecticut high school hallway the day of prom after a classmate reacted violently to being turned down; in May 2014, Elliot Rodger carried out a misogynistic killing spree in Isla Vista, California, expressing in manifesto and video that he wanted to punish women who had rejected him; and in October 2014 Mary âUniqueâ Spears, a 27-year-old mother in Detroit, was shot and killed after refusing a manâs advances. These tragedies are extreme but they reflect a wider pattern.
Research and international data confirm the pattern: a large share of women killed worldwide are killed by intimate partners or men they know, and many homicides of women occur in contexts linked to partner violence, rejection or control. Understanding that context helps explain why womenâs everyday precautions are often rational responses to real, measurable danger.
Atwoodâs sentence did something literary language often struggles to do: it translated a lived, private calculus into a public phrase people could repeat and rally around. For women it validated survival tactics; for many men it offered a simple, hard-to-ignore window into experiences they had not needed to confront. Naming the fear has not ended the violence, but it has changed the conversation â and public conversation is one necessary ingredient for prevention, policy change and cultural accountability.
Sources (plain bibliographic entries):
Atwood, Margaret. (1982). âWriting the Male Character.â In Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960â1982. House of Anansi Press.
ABC News. (2014). âConn. High School Student Stabbed to Death Over Apparent Prom Rejection.â April 25, 2014.
CBS News / AP. (2016). âNo contest plea in Conn. high school student's prom day stabbing.â March 7, 2016.
Time. (2014). âStudents Honor Classmate Slain on Prom Day at Beach Gathering.â April 2014.
Los Angeles Times / national reporting. (2014). Coverage of the Elliot Rodger / Isla Vista killings.
Detroit Free Press. (2014). âWoman fatally shot had rejected man's advances.â October 2014.
UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). (2022). Gender-related killings of women and girls (brief).
World Health Organization (WHO). (2024). Violence against women: key facts.
Our World in Data. (ongoing). Data and analysis on partner homicide and gendered lethal violence.
Image:Chronogram Magazine
