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Margaret Atwood never intended to write a sentence that would outlive her novels.
She was simply assembling essays for a collection called Second Words—literary reflections, cultural commentary, the kind of book that usually lives quietly on academic shelves.
But buried in those pages was a line that detonated like truth finally spoken aloud:
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Atwood wrote it casually, like it was obvious.
And for women, it was.
Every woman reading those words recognized them.
She had walked to her car with her keys threaded between her fingers.
She had smiled at a man she wished would leave her alone, because ignoring him felt dangerous.
She had shared her location with a friend before a date—just in case.
She had done the silent math men rarely have to do:
Is this man safe?
Can I reject him directly?
Do I need an exit plan?
Atwood hadn’t uncovered a hidden truth.
She had simply written down the fear women whispered to each other in bathrooms and late-night calls—fear they navigated alone, constantly, invisibly.
But once the words existed, they couldn’t be dismissed.
The quote began quietly.
In feminist texts.
In college discussions.
In conversations between mothers and daughters trying to explain why the world felt different for them.
Then the internet arrived.
Suddenly Atwood’s seventeen words were everywhere—on protest signs, in comment sections, in stories women told about being followed, stalked, threatened, or harmed for saying no.
And men began to read it.
Really read it.
Some felt attacked. “Not all men,” they insisted.
But that was never the point.
The point is that women can’t know which men.
And so they have to assume any man could be dangerous.
It’s not paranoia.
It’s survival.
When footsteps close in behind a woman at night, her brain doesn’t think, He’s probably harmless.
Her brain thinks, Get somewhere safe.
When a man won’t take “no” for an answer, she doesn’t think, He’s persistent.
She thinks, How far will this go?
When a coworker’s comments cross a line, she doesn’t think, It’s harmless.
She thinks, What happens if I report him—and what happens if I don’t?
Because women learn early that rejection can be fatal.
Maren Sanchez declined a prom invitation.
She was stabbed to death at school.
Elliot Rodger blamed women for rejecting him.
Six people died.
Mary Spears told a man she wasn’t interested.
She was shot outside a club.
These aren’t rare stories.
They happen so often they barely make front-page news.
Statistics confirm what Atwood wrote:
Women are most likely to be killed by men they know—partners, ex-partners, or men whose advances they rejected.
The threat isn’t lurking in the shadows.
It’s often standing right in front of them.
Atwood recognized this long before hashtags made it impossible to ignore.
She saw the reality because women had always lived it:
Being told to “let him down easy.”
Pretending to have a boyfriend because another man’s claim is more respected than her “no.”
Smiling at catcallers to avoid making them angry.
Planning escape routes from dates before the dinner even begins.
Her sentence didn’t create fear—it revealed it.
It made visible the mental calculus women perform daily, automatically, silently.
It turned private terror into public truth.
And once spoken, it reshaped the conversation.
The quote became a litmus test.
If you understood it instantly, you “got it.”
If you dismissed it as exaggeration, you didn’t.
And that difference—between understanding and denial—is part of the reason the words still matter.
Margaret Atwood has written more than twenty books, won countless awards, and created The Handmaid’s Tale.
But this seventeen-word sentence may be her most enduring work.
Not because it’s poetic.
Because it’s real.
It’s the line women carry when they walk alone at night.
The line that explains why they share their location before dates.
The line that justifies caution men often misunderstand.
It isn’t about fear.
It’s about reality.
Forty-two years after she wrote it, the quote remains true.
Women are still being harmed for saying no.
But there is one difference now:
The world is finally talking about it.
Atwood’s words gave women a shared language for something they had long carried alone.
They gave men a starting point to understand something they never had to consider.
They pulled fear out of the shadows and forced it into the spotlight—where change, however slow, can begin.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Seventeen words.
Four decades later.
Still true.
Still necessary.
Still echoing.— in New York, NY.