She whined at you and she tugged at your sleeve and sometimes she even begged you to leave it, to just go home deal with it all later. You thought that made her a wet blanket, or worse, a tease. As though that somehow mattered more than the sanctity of her life. Or yours.
But she was right. And you were wrong. And if you had just listened….
Every woman knows what this feels like, they know what it means. They know how hard the world works not to believe them. And this particular narrative device always feels like a pointed jab, a great big spotlight on that precise problem. It doesn’t even matter if it’s intentional—in fact, the idea that it might be unintentional makes it all the more poignant. Filmmakers and scriptwriters accidentally pointing out how women’s fears are never taken seriously, again and again.
Emily Asher-Perrin, “The Peril of Being Disbelieved,” Tor, https://www.tor.com/2017/10/03/the-peril-of-being-disbelieved-horror-fiction-and-womens-intuition/
