The Calculations Women Make

Why a Woman’s Right to Say No Must Never Come at the Expense of Her Safety

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them is a concept commonly attributed to Margaret Atwood, who first expressed the underlying idea in her 1982 essay “Writing the Male Character.” It later was stated in Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, yet its exact origin and precise phrasing matters less than the reality it continues to describe. More than four decades after Atwood’s lecture, that distinction remains painfully relevant.

The “Worst First Date Fears” illustration captures this clearly. Two people are getting ready for a first date. He is thinking, “What if she doesn’t look like her photos?” She is thinking, “What if he murders me?” It describes something women understand without anyone having to explain it. Both of them are nervous, but only one of them is considering the possibility and severity of survival.

There are many genuinely wonderful men in the world, and I have been fortunate to know and work alongside so many of them. Although I lead a women’s organization, men have played meaningful roles in our success by supporting our mission, creating opportunities, sharing their expertise, advocating for our members, and treating women’s leadership with respect. Their friendship and professional support have earned my lasting gratitude, and nothing in this article is written at their expense.

Acknowledging violence against women does not diminish those men or accuse every man of being dangerous. Women simply cannot know in advance which man will accept a boundary with dignity and which one will interpret it as an insult, a challenge, or a loss of control. Honorable men understand that this conversation is not an attack on them; it is an appeal to recognize the uncertainty women navigate and a call to reject the behaviors, excuses, and silences that allow dangerous men to operate without consequence.

The Calculations Behind a Woman’s No

Even among men I trusted, I have experienced moments in my own industry when expressing an honest opinion felt physically unsafe, which went well beyond being uncomfortable or professionally risky. I had to calculate whether disagreeing with a man, challenging his opinions, or bruising his ego might provoke retaliation that extended beyond an argument or a damaged business relationship. That is a difficult truth to admit publicly, but it is also a calculation countless women make every day.

Women learn to soften their refusals. They offer explanations they do not owe, smile when they are uncomfortable, and try to leave situations without causing embarrassment. They consider where they parked, who knows their whereabouts, whether the same car has appeared twice, and how quickly a pleasant conversation could become threatening. They share their locations with friends before dates, arrange check-in calls, guard their drinks, and withhold enough personal information that a stranger cannot locate their home or workplace.

These precautions are frequently described as common sense, and their very ordinariness is the point. Women are expected to conduct a continuous risk assessment while making it look like nothing more than good manners. Beneath a gracious refusal often sits a far more urgent question: How do I say no without making him angry?

Yesterday I learned that Mandy Fackler, one of our club participants in Florida, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend before he took his own life. The news brought back the grief of losing our member Jennifer Smith, whose husband killed her before taking his own life in Texas. Today I saw a viral video from Kentucky that showed a woman being physically assaulted on a bar patio. According to the friend who posted it, the woman had gone on two dates with the man and had asked to meet in public so she could end things.

These were different women in different relationships and circumstances, but each case reflected the same terrible assertion of entitlement: when the woman made a decision the man refused to accept, he believed he had the right to override her autonomy through violence.

These are individual tragedies, and they also reflect a broader, measurable pattern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than one in three women and more than one in six men in the United States have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetimes. Men are harmed by partners as well, which any honest treatment of this subject should acknowledge plainly, but the asymmetry appears most starkly in the outcomes. National violent-death data show that among female homicide victims whose relationship to the suspect was known, approximately half were killed by a current or former intimate partner.

Research has also found that separation becomes especially dangerous when an abusive partner is highly controlling. Threats involving weapons, stalking, nonfatal strangulation, forced sex, and explicit threats to kill indicate further elevated risk. Leaving may be the moment when a woman most clearly asserts her autonomy, yet for women in abusive relationships, it can also be among the most dangerous periods of their lives.

Violence of this kind is often described through the language of heartbreak. “He was devastated.” “He could not accept the end of the relationship.” “He lost control.” “He loved her too much.” Although such phrasing may sound compassionate toward the offender, it quietly obscures the choices he made. Love makes no claim of ownership, and heartbreak confers no authority to harm. Violence of this kind often develops through patterns of jealousy, control, monitoring, threats, or intimidation that may have been visible before the final attack.

The same distortion can appear in the way violence is reported. In 2018, FOX13 Memphis published the headline, “Teen stabbed with scissors after pulling student’s dress up at Memphis school, police say.” Police issued the boy a juvenile summons for sexual battery and the girl a juvenile summons for aggravated assault. The police report described a boy lifting a girl’s dress in her classroom. He said he was only playing. A woman who shared the story supplied a better caption: “Sexual assault victim uses self-defense to escape her attacker.” Grammar carries moral weight because the structure of a sentence tells readers whose conduct deserves their attention.

A woman’s right to say no means something only when she can exercise it without fear of punishment, retaliation, professional destruction, or physical harm. She is entitled to decline a date, end a relationship, leave a marriage, refuse an advance, disagree with a colleague, or remove herself from any situation that unsettles her. Each of those decisions belongs to her alone and requires no one else’s permission.

Women should also be encouraged to trust discomfort they cannot yet articulate. Intuition is frequently the mind registering details before it has assembled them into a conscious conclusion, and waiting for definitive proof can cost a woman the window in which leaving is still simple. She may end a conversation, leave a restaurant, ask someone to walk her to her car, or tell a trusted person that she is afraid without first assembling a case that would satisfy a skeptic. She is permitted to disappoint someone, appear impolite, or change her mind because her safety outweighs another person’s comfort.

Preparedness Without Blame

As President & CEO of A Girl & A Gun, I have watched what happens when women stop treating fear as the unavoidable price of moving through the world. Good training teaches women to recognize pre-attack indicators, sharpen situational awareness, build durable personal security habits, and respond decisively when a situation begins to shift. Access to competent self-defense instruction and, when appropriate to a woman’s circumstances, the responsible use of a firearm or another personal protection tool can expand her options and help narrow a significant physical disparity.

A woman’s decisions about her safety require no one else’s permission, and the capacity to defend her own body expresses that same principle in physical terms. A woman who is able to protect herself has a wider range of options than a woman who must depend entirely on another person’s restraint or on a first responder arriving in time. Preparedness replaces some uncertainty with knowledge, skill, and a plan, giving a woman more options before a crisis rather than forcing her to discover them in the middle of one.

Our membership data reflects this. Seventy-three percent of A Girl & A Gun members tell us that national statistics on violence against women influenced their decision to seek training, and 75 percent say the confidence they built carried over into the rest of their lives. Women come to our ranges because something convinced them that ordinary precautions might not be enough, and what they leave with is bigger than marksmanship. As her skills grow, a woman gets better at trusting her own judgment, setting boundaries, and acting when a situation starts to change. Fear stops making every decision for her.

Personal preparedness must never become another mechanism for assigning women responsibility for violence committed against them. No degree of awareness, training, planning, or equipment offers a guarantee. When a woman is assaulted or killed, responsibility rests entirely with the person who chose to harm her, not with the woman who trusted him, loved him, married him, met him for dinner, missed a warning sign, or was simply unable to get away. Teaching women to protect themselves addresses one half of the problem, while the other half belongs to men.

Purpose, Restraint, and Honorable Strength

Every peaceful society ultimately depends on people who are capable of using force when necessary. Law and order cannot survive on goodwill alone, and there are moments when protecting society requires courage, physical strength, and a willingness to stand for what is right.

That capacity alone does not make someone a protector because protection is defined by purpose and restraint. A protector uses strength to defend another person’s freedom, while a dangerous man uses strength to override it. Women cannot safely assume that every man shares an honorable moral compass. Respecting a woman’s precautions recognizes that her safety may depend on acting before another man’s intentions become unmistakable.

Men can help change the culture around rejection through everyday choices that carry real influence. They can accept a no without demanding a debate or an explanation. They can speak up when a friend talks about a woman like she belongs to him. They can notice controlling behavior early, back when it still looks like devotion. They can stop treating threats as words spoken in the heat of the moment. They can believe a woman who says a man frightened her, even when that man has always been charming and generous and well liked. And they can support real consequences when the accused is a colleague, a friend, a brother, or someone the whole community respects. Wolves in sheep’s clothing survive because too many people are willing to testify to the quality of the disguise.

This is where the protective instinct does its best work, long before anyone has to step between two people. Protection can look like refusing to make excuses for a friend, standing beside a woman who has decided to leave, helping her get somewhere safe, taking stalking seriously, and raising boys who understand that real strength includes emotional discipline and respect for someone else’s autonomy.

A man’s character is revealed in how he responds when a woman withdraws her attention, affection, or consent. Rejection can hurt, and the end of a relationship can bring grief, anger, confusion, and embarrassment, but retaliation remains a choice.

I have made a career of giving women the knowledge, the skills, and the tools to protect themselves. Our entire community has work to do, too. A man who kills the woman who left him rarely arrives there without a history, and the people around him almost always saw pieces of it. They called his jealousy proof that he cared. They called his monitoring concern. They called his threats venting. We are fluent in a language that makes control sound like devotion, and we teach it to our daughters as romance and to our sons as persistence. Changing that vocabulary will not stop every man who has already decided. It will stop us from handing him cover while he decides.

A woman’s “no” may disappoint someone. It may wound his feelings, upend his expectations, or close a door he hoped would stay open. What it must never do is put her life at risk.

Every woman deserves the freedom to speak honestly, leave safely, and live fully. For men of character, protecting a woman’s freedom to step away is among the clearest expressions of honorable strength.