He Laughed, and the Blade Dropped

I spent years asking why a boy would terrorize a girl for fun. History had been answering all along

When I was fifteen I lived in a rural area where there were no streetlights. Unless the moon was full, darkness engulfed my mountaintop as soon as the sun set. On this particular night, the closest house was a couple of hundred feet away; not close enough to cast light on the group I was with. We were walking down the road on our way to a friend’s house. I had plans to stay the night and was looking forward to some girly teenage time. 

Without warning, an arm flew around my neck and yanked me away from the group I was with. This force dragged me off the road and into the surrounding darkness. My back was pressed to his chest and his arm encircled my shoulders and throat, pinning me to him. In the dim light cast by the paltry moon, I focused in on the large blade of a knife positioned just above my throat.

Terrified, I couldn’t take my eyes off that knife. 

I knew I was going to die. 

Then he laughed, the blade dropped, and the arm released. He sauntered back to the group

I stayed in the darkness, trembling, mustering whatever small bit of my wits I had left until I managed to find my feet and my way back to my friends. 

Nobody had seen the attack. Nobody knew what happened. 

I kept my composure until I got to my friend’s house, where I called my mom and asked her to please take me home. I ditched my friend that night. She had no idea why I left; she still doesn’t know. 

I cried on my parents and told them what he’d done. There were no witnesses, just me alone in the dark with a teenage boy who thought cruelty and fear made for a good laugh. 

Young woman in the mountains with mysterious onlooker in fog and shadow

It took me years to find the language for what had happened: I had been physically assaulted. I didn’t know there were words for what it was, nor did I know that it was, by definition, a crime. 

One thing I’ve always questioned, and never gotten an answer to, is why he would do it. Why would anybody attack somebody else in such a way, even if it was, somehow, an incredibly sick joke?

While I’ve accepted that I’ll never get an answer directly from him, I think I may be starting to understand a piece of what drives violence, particularly that against women.

When you look at the structure of society, there is a clear hierarchy whether we like to admit it or not. This hierarchy exists in every society, with the very rare exception of one or two indigenous cultures who have somehow managed to remain outside the influence of the surrounding world. 

Let me paint you a brief picture of why a young man in the early 2000’s might be willing to drag a young woman to the side of the road and threaten her life. Believe it or not, this moment began in ancient history, literally.

In our most well-known ancient record, we have the myth of Eve, a woman who defied God and fell into temptation then brought about the curse of all mankind. As punishment, Eve’s feminine gifts are cursed. She is set beneath Adam as his ‘helpmeet’ and she is doomed to have pain in childbirth. 

Nobody thought to question whether this ancient retelling was truth or whether it was a myth constructed to bring about a specific end.

As you dive into the recorded history of feminine life after the fall of Eve, you find society orienting itself around the masculine and demonizing the feminine along the way. Justifying the suppression of women because of Eve’s actions, it became simple to turn women into chattel and men into Masters. 

Woman’s Goddesses were destroyed, as were her rites and rituals. Her sacred wisdom was called heretical, witchcraft, dark magic, and of the devil. Her body was a curse and her beauty a temptation. Her sexuality was feared and hated, yet also desired and necessary. What was once sacred became carnal. Life became death. The woman’s very existence was an affront to the societal powers that demanded submission and abused those who sought pleasure. The once sacred, now carnal, act of sex became a power play over her body. In short, woman’s power was stripped bit by bit until she had none left. 

How is this relevant to the experience I had on a dark night at the side of a mountain road? 

I’ll tell you. 

In order to achieve the complete dismissal of one half of humanity as human, you have to destroy all that makes them human. We’ve seen this over and over and over throughout history. Every genocide began with a propaganda campaign that dehumanized the targeted group.

The dehumanizing of women took place over millennia and still continues to this day. All that is good and beautiful about women has been demonized and mangled, left to bleed out on the side of many roads. Women became objects of both sexual pleasure and sexual torment. Her body became the source of life, but also the source of death as sexuality itself was deemed to be satanic. The gifts that were deemed heretical and witchcraft were the gifts of intuition, curiosity, love, and healing.  Her empathy and the magic of being able to connect with and understand the world around her was called weakness and shameful.

Men portraying any of these feminine traits were shamed and abused along with the women. We’ve all heard the classic phrase, “boys don’t cry.” Well what do you think we create when we tell boys that every aspect of the feminine inside them is weak and wrong? They will see every aspect of the feminine outside of themselves as weak and wrong as well.

And where does the feminine show up outside of these boys? In women, of course. In the very creatures the boy desperately needs but is also supposed to hate. 

After millennia of women being abused, it’s no surprise when one boy on a dark night drags some girl off and terrorizes her. I’m lucky it wasn’t worse. For millions of girls, it has been worse. Much worse. 

I shouldn’t be saying I got lucky. It should be horrifying to everybody alive that it even happened. 

I got lucky I only thought I was going to die, instead of actually being slaughtered. I got lucky he didn’t walk away with me half naked and bleeding because he was just ‘being a boy.’ 

I’ve heard the argument many times that women are just complaining and life isn’t really the way we say it is, or we’re just being victims and need to quit whining about the feminine experience; it’s all in our head, you know? 

To counter this, let me enlighten you. 

In 2024 the Federal government issued new guidelines stating that practicing medical students need to have consent from a woman going under anesthesia if they want to perform a pelvic exam. What does this mean? It means that until 2023 at least it was legal to perform a pelvic exam on a woman who was going under anesthesia, without her consent and without her knowledge. In 2023 the practice was entirely legal in multiple American states. For clear context: penetration of a female sexual organ without her consent with any object is rape. So it was perfectly legal to rape a woman while she was under anesthesia. It just had to be called ‘medical training.’

In today’s hospitals, there are doctors still performing the ‘husband stitch’ on women after they give birth. While many doctors refuse, there are those who wink at the husband and ask if he’d like it. When the husband consents - not the wife - he stitches her up ‘nice and tight.’ The husband stitch is an additional stitch they use to sew up a woman after she tears during labor. It tightens up the vaginal opening by sewing together parts of her body that are supposed to remain open. Sex for women who have received this barbaric practice is very painful. But it’s ’better for her husband’ because she’s tighter. So she suffers for his pleasure. It’s sick. 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

In 1993 the last American state finally made it illegal for a man to rape his wife. Prior to this, it was perfectly legal as long as they were married. The process of criminalizing marital rape began in 1974. That wasn’t all that long ago. 

In 1989, according to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, more women were victims of rape than the combined total of marines wounded in world war II. In addition to this, in 1990 the U.S. Surgeon General reported that the largest cause of injury to American women was domestic violence. Women are at greater risk of being harmed by their partner than anything else.* 

Plus, we can’t forget the horrifying statistic that today 1 in 6 American women have experienced attempted or completed rape. This statistic isn’t counting those who have been sexually assaulted or molested without being ‘penetrated’ by a foreign object. 

And let’s also not forget the fact that rape is really legal by degrees. Violent rape with a weapon is illegal, but coercion and manipulation is perfectly fine. Good luck to any woman trying to prove in court that she was a victim in a situation like that. Even if it was violent, too many women have been accused of wanting it because they didn’t fight back or run. 

So is it really all in our heads, or is it time to face the harsh reality that we have a society built on the backs of women while simultaneously demonizing them? Is it really so far-fetched to accept the reality that the life of a woman is incredibly dangerous because the propaganda levied against us has been so incredibly effective? 

Why was a young boy willing to terrorize a young girl? Because we live in a society that told him that was his right, that he did not need to control himself nor could he control himself, and the girl he terrorized was just an object anyway.