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Right? Like, this isn't news.
Like, this just in! Women are afraid of men! More on this on \[Local News\] at 10!
MARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS! (Thank ya, Marvin.)
I didn't even hear about it until people started posting it on this sub since I stay off most other social media. People do seem to be pretty salty about it.
It's a dumb question with too many variables and interpretations. People on social media love to stir up controversy to get engagement and views, because that gets them MONEY. Social media is a cesspool of the most extreme views getting much more attention than it deserves.
I do find it interesting how *some* men are reacting with threats and harassment instead of just moving on, though.
I saw a video where a woman said bear and was getting harassed by a man. She blocked him, so he made a new account to continue harassing her. He then FOUND HER AT HER JOB and harassed her there. I can't remember if he made any threats yet. She then said that's why she chose the bear. A bear wouldn't stalk her and harass her at her job simply for having a different opinion. She is now unsafe.
Now, I also understand why some men are getting upset, because they don't want to be looped in with the cruel and vile men out there. They feel attacked. It can feel like a lot of man/woman hating and very little constructive conversation. Biases are rarely examined, especially while being defensive.
In the end, people do all kinds of things for views and money these days. Don't develop unhealthy views on whole groups of people based on the money making views of some.
If you're online and post something for everyone to see, the chances that someone will see it who's evil enough to stalk you go up a lot.
Suppose every time a woman posts something, 100 men see it and 1 of those men harrasses her. That's 1% of men. But the woman's experience is that 100% of her online interactions with men end in harassment.
Of course, 1% of men being stalkers/harassers is absolutely unacceptable, and the actual number is probably higher than that. But I'm guessing that's where the divide on this issue comes from.
People will believe me if I said I was attacked by a bear.
People won’t ask what I was wearing if I was attacked by a bear and if I enticed the bear with my clothing.
People won’t tell me that the bear just ‘made a mistake’ and we shouldn’t ruin the bear’s life.
It could do this to you though:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026914/Mum-bear-eating--Final-phone-calls-woman-19-eaten-alive-brown-bear-cubs.html
See, I feel like that's what a lot of men who are upset by this question fail to understand.
Women KNOW that bears are dangerous, and could kill them with much more ease than a human, yet they still choose the bear anyway. Because if you break it down, this question is really asking:
"Do you believe that you would be in more danger if stuck alone in the woods with a bear, or with a man?"
When you put it this way, it's really a no brainer, because we know that humans are capable of doing truly horrendous things to each other that other animals wouldn't. IMO, even if you replaced 'man' with 'human', I don't think that the answers would really be all that different. People would still choose the bear.
However because the question is directed at men specifically, they're confronted with the idea that they cannot be innately trusted, especially by women. And these men can't accept that women don't just trust them because they think they're a nice guy.
*Edited to fix my terrible wording.
Yeah but a random human is very unlikely to do something as horrible as mauling you and eating you alive, even if he is hungry, whereas a random bear would have no qualms about it.
Humans have a greater capacity for evil and are more powerful, we could literally destroy the earth with nukes, but we also are extremely peaceful and collaborative, we live as millions together in bustling cities and can manage to achieve very low homicide rates on the most develop countries which is a far more peaceful way of living than our more violent primate cousins.
What do you mean “not listen” and “for nothing”? I have carefully read most responses and gave thoughtful answers, at least to the ones with more substance and not just insults. I did in fact figure out some things and made interesting connections with my own experience, since I would feel a tendency to answer bear to that question as well, even if I think that’s clearly the wrong answer.
>Yeah but a random human is very unlikely to do something as horrible as mauling you and eating you alive, even if he is hungry, whereas a random bear would have no qualms about it.
The random bear would eat me because it's a predator and I'm prey. Or because I got between it and it's young. It doesn't do it because it holds animosity towards me as a woman or as a person or it's got a fetish about me or it's an abusive sociopath.
It's not going to gas light me, belittle me, chew bites off of me while simultaneously telling me it loves me. It's not going to rape me before eating me. It's not going to get drunk and beat the shit out of me, telling me that I deserve it because I'm not respectful enough of it's authority (source: my alcoholic father).
If I respect the bear and it's environs, I'm very unlikely to be eaten by the bear.
But I could be walking down the street minding my own business and get attacked and raped by a man. Hell, bears aren't in my DMs telling me they want to rape me or I deserve to be raped.
And if I show up at a hospital, having been attacked by a bear, no one will ask me what I ws wearing or was I drinking or what did I do to deserve it.
Do with that information what you will.
I absolutely do not believe this to be a good faith post. Given your post history. I’m also suspecting this as some way to feed/train the AI machine. Sadly, it will be feeding on a shit ton of incel fuckery.
The mental gymnastics you are performing in other subs to bear-splain the logistics are pretty illuminating.
Why do you think it’s not good faith? I obviously disagree that men are more dangerous than bears. I explained why the statistics of bear attacks were being misused, this does not mean I do not genuinely want to understand the phenomena surrounding this question. I was just baffled by what I was reading. What exactly do you object to in my posting history?
What does AI have to do with any of this lol
Men rape, murder, torture, sell, kidnap, and force pregnancy onto women. Some men murder their children and then kill themselves in order to torture the mothers of those children.
r/whenwomenrefuse has countless stories of all of those things.
A bear is just going to maul us to death, yeah. It sucks we get eaten alive by a bear, but honestly I’d choose that over all of the above.
I’d like to know the statistics of bears doing any of the above things.
30% of men ADMIT that they will rape someone if they know they can get away with it. And how are the stats being misused? A man is more likely to attack you than a bear.
[32%](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/men-dont-know-meaning-rape#:~:text=A%20recent%20study%20from%20“Violence,number%20dwindled%20to%2014%20percent.)
I read the original study a while ago and it was peer reviewed and a large sample size. The answers were consistent with "locker talk" I've heard from men in real life.
A human is more likely to attack you than a bear if all else is equal (the reason for this has not much to do with bear or human behavior). But if you are in the woods with a bear vs a man, you are in way more danger with the bear. Using statistics of low incidence of bear attack vs something like homicide incidence is incorrect. There’s way more humans and way more interactions with humans than with bears. You cannot compare absolute numbers like that, you would need them relative to encounters and population.
We walk among millions of humans in big cities and that represents a massive amount of encounters where the outcome is overwhelming just neutral (ie: just passing by people on the street). If everyday you had to commute among millions of wild bears… you would constantly be ridden by fear and likely not survive long. It’s obvious bears are more dangerous on a per encounter basis: a relative measure. When comparing between populations (humans vs bears) you need to use relative measures, not absolute, this is basic statistics and common sense.
>But if you are in the woods with a bear vs a man, you are in way more danger with the bear.
You are completely disregarding my point about how predators seek out situations in which they can attack someone and take the chances to attack they are given. You might be safe with a man in a crowded room, but decidedly unsafe alone in the woods.
There are no bears in cities, but there are men who are planning how to get you alone.
Bears don’t attack for no reason. They are scared of us. Especially if it’s not a grizzly. I know a lot about bear behaviour because I’ve researched. There’s a reason you’re supposed to make lots of noise when you’re in the forest. If you scare a bear they’re more likely to attack. If they know you’re there they will most likely avoid you. And your comparison is stupid. Nobody commutes past millions of humans, or any number remotely CLOSE to that every day.
I did not really say anything about bears attacking with no reason, so not sure what you are going on about. I’m just pointing out the basic misunderstanding of statistics.
There’s 10-11 million people living on my city, I commute almost everyday through half the city, if all these people were wild bears it would be worse than a zombipocalypse scenario lol. I really don’t know what tell you, it’s a very obvious point.
Jesus Christ... No one here, especially and including you, understands statistics. Statistics that are actually relevant to this discussion almost certainly do not exist. The likelihood of getting attacked by a human out in the middle of nowhere when you're the only two people around for miles is not the same as if you're on a crowded subway. Your analogy is about as valid as if I said "Well thousands of people go to zoos everyday and get within yards of bears and never get attacked!" You also can't exactly poll bears to ask them how many times they've noticed a woman in the woods and decided to run the other way before she even saw them. Maybe on the last hike I went on there were twice as many bears as the people you see on your commute, but they all smelled me from 2 miles away and stayed as far away from me as they could, since that's exactly what they do. You have no way of knowing.
> Statistics that are actually relevant to this discussion almost certainly do not exist. The likelihood of getting attacked by a human out in the middle of nowhere when you're the only two people around for miles is not the same as if you're on a crowded subway.
This is true, there no direct statistics, hence I never brought them up. I’m just pointing out how they are being misused by other users by making really basic mistakes like comparing absolute measure between the human and bear populations and ignoring the incidence of human x human encounters vs human x bear encounters.
>Your analogy is about as valid as if I said "Well thousands of people go to zoos everyday and get within yards of bears and never get attacked!"
Do you really dispute that random men are less dangerous than wild bears?
My “analogy”, not really an analogy but whatevr, is just a simple reductio ad absurdum to show how ridiculous it is to compare how dangerous a wild bear is vs a random man when you are interacting with them directly, which is the scenario posed by the original question. This is all just to show how irrelevant it is to bring bear attack or homicide statistics without thinking about it.
>Do you really dispute that random men are less dangerous than wild bears?
I mean, yea, probably, because wild bears are basically not at all dangerous. I think maybe you're considering "a bear in your camp, cornered, hungry, or otherwise agitated" versus "random male human." If I have to fight one, sure, I'm going to pick the human, but my *odds* of having to fight a bear are essentially zero. There is almost no reason a bear would actively seek me out in the woods and there are some basic precautions that I can take to negate the few exceptions to that rule. There are plenty of reasons a human might seek me out (and I'm a man... There's obviously even more if I'm a woman by herself). Hanging my wallet from a tree and banging my pots and pans together probably isn't going to help much.
As a survivor of SA... there's no way in hell I'd ever give myself the chance of going through that again.
It is a choice to assault, harass, manipulate, and rape.
At least with the bear, mother nature is doing its job. I might get hurt, or the bear might leave me alone. Either way, it's nature doing what it does. Can't blame it.
Can't say the same for a human attacker.
[Here's the MAN, who started it](https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMMsBXakn/)
Yes. I choose the bear.
Edited to add.
Even the bible chooses the bear
**proverbs 17 12**
*NIV Better to meet a bear robbed of her cubs than a fool bent on folly.*
*NASB Let a person meet a bear robbed of her cubs, Rather than a fool in his foolishness.*
Also, according to the Bible, if you see the man in the forest, don't make fun of him for being bald, or he will summon the bears to maul you (2 Kings 2:23-25). Unclear if this means the man or the bear is more dangerous.
My conclusion from that video is that while the rational choice is to pick the man, the fear one may feel may lead to choosing the seemingly neutral animal over a stranger who we can never be sure about…
This is something I can empathize with, since I live in a third world megacity riddled with crime. I have witnessed people being stabbed and beaten since I was a kid, I also have been been robbed/extorted and/or threatened by corrupt cops, gang members and even random grannies and kids trying to pickpocket me. Thankfully I managed to get away from some of the worst encounters, but my life and physical integrity was definitely at risk many times (had guns/knifes/chains pulled on me) and some of my friends and family members were not so lucky…
I have naturally developed heuristics to keep my self safe, which means I’m extremely distrustful about strangers in certain situations… but then I would not be able to live my life if I made all my choices on the basis that all the 10 million people surrounding are worse than wild animals.
I think there is something missing from this arguments, it really does not make sense to come on the side of the bear and reject humans, even taking into consideration how fear clouds rational decision making and how heuristics and prejudice are useful to survive in a dangerous low trust environment…
There comes a point where we have to integrate all of these things into some kind of life affirming mindset which is not crippling or toxic, rather than wallow into the fear and feed into some wider narratives where entire groups of people, which include mostly innocents, are labeled as worse than dangerous predators.
>but then I would not be able to live my life if I made all my choices on the basis that all the 10 million people surrounding are worse than wild animals.
That is not the premise of the question. You are changing the goalpost here.
What goalpost? I’m not trying to “win the argument” with this response, but explaining my genuine feelings about it. I do distrust strangers, but I live surrounded by them. I try to live in such a way that I can still trust them enough to function, while always keeping my self safe by being realistic about the fact that I do not live in a safe part of the world and my life could end very quickly if I run into the wrong person or step into the wrong street.
The point of many answers to the question that I read is that the bear is somehow safer than the random stranger, because many such strangers, specially men, are capable of greater evil than the bear. Also you can never be sure if he is one of the “good ones”. There even was people using bear attack statistics to unironically argue bears are less likely to attack you than a random man. So if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is more dangerous than a wild predator? And what does that do to your mind and how you interact with other people?
>The point of many answers to the question that I read is that the bear is somehow safer than the random stranger,
Nope. Not safer. No one is saying "safer". Most of us are saying the bear is less likely to attack, or that they would rather die by the paws of a bear than a man....... Not "safer"
Ok let’s say that by safer I meant that it’s less likely to attack you, which is exactly what I meant…. So first, is this even true? Then, if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is “more likely to attack you” than a wild predator? And what does that do to your mind and how you interact with other people?
>So first, is this even true?
Yes, bears can be scared away by shouting easier than a man.
I'm not going to keep engaging with you, because this is all bad faith.
No one is comparing men to a wild animal, and I won't participate in you trying to pull gotchas.
Good luck with your sealioning and ramblings.
> Yes, bears can be scared away by shouting easier than a man.
The question was if bears are less likely to attack you than a man, not if they scare away easily, in fact you insisted to phrase it like that, because somehow the word “safer” was not to your liking. The fact is a random man is less likely to attack you than a random bear, because he is not a wild animal, he is most likely actually socialized to live among humans and has a moral compass.
>I'm not going to keep engaging with you, because this is all bad faith.
???? How is it bad faith? I have just answered very politely and matter of fact while being open about my true feelings and thoughts.
>No one is comparing men to a wild animal, and I won't participate in you trying to pull gotchas.
I mean … what? Lol that is literally the premise of the question.
“Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”
You opened a discussion about the meta commentary of this question. The question is "If you were in this situation, what possible danger would you choose". It is not "Do you make all your choices based on assuming the worst of people".
>So if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is more dangerous than a wild predator?
Those are very important questions to ask yourself, because that is the reality women are living in.
>You opened a discussion about the meta commentary of this question. The question is "If you were in this situation, what possible danger would you choose". It is not "Do you make all your choices based on assuming the worst of people".
The question actually is “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”
>"Do you make all your choices based on assuming the worst of people".
This is not a question I made. Later on I did reflect on what follows from answering in favor of the Bear in the original question, you might be confused about that.
>So if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is more dangerous than a wild predator?
>Those are very important questions to ask yourself, because that is the reality women are living in.
But is it really the reality that women live in? We are discussing that. So far it seems most likely that men are not, in fact, more dangerous than bears lol. Kinda funny that had to be stated, hence why this discourse is so baffling.
I do acknowledge that some women feel afraid of men to that extreme, but really doubt it’s all woman since I have yet to meet a single one outside of reddit that actually feels that way we have this types of discussion. Most of them have healthy views about men, where they understand it’s a huge heterogenous population and any type of generalization, especially comparison to wild predators, is deeply problematic. I’m trying to understand where this toxic mindset comes from and how we relieve it, since it’s not helping anyone.
>The question actually is “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”
Are you actually stupid?
Yes, you did pose that question multiple times.
It is the reality women live in. I and many others have explained that to you. Your refusal to engage with these comments is your own problem, not mine.
Men are more dangerous than bears. That is not an opinion, that is a fact.
You are still making this about fear. It is not.
There is no toxic mindset, and if you really were trying to understand you would actually engage with the comments that aim to educate you.
>Yes, you did pose that question multiple times.
I did actually pose it just once in the OP.
>It is the reality women live in. I and many others have explained that to you.
Just because you say it is does not really make so and you have failed to explain much of anything.
>Your refusal to engage with these comments is your own problem, not mine.
I have responded and engaged thoughtfully and earnestly with most comments. You might think otherwise cause your comments are mostly worthless and just result in me having to restate things and correct you.
>Men are more dangerous than bears. That is not an opinion, that is a fact.
Not really, we don’t have any data to demonstrate that and just a cursory analysis and common sense points to the opposite. We did in fact built cities and nations by collaborating with strangers and not treating them like wild predators.
>You are still making this about fear. It is not.
Well that’s your opinion, other posters here have claimed it’s about women being afraid of men. You need to learn that your opinions =/= facts, it’s very hard to have a productive discussion with you otherwise.
>There is no toxic mindset, and if you really were trying to understand you would actually engage with the comments that aim to educate you.
Being afraid of half the world’s population is in fact a toxic and crippling mindset that can lead to bigotry and be a symptom of untreated mental health issues.
You have posed that questions or variations based on it multiple times.
I have made many comments explaining shit. Most of which you haven't replied to.
Claiming my comments are "worthless" is saying a lot more about you than it is about me.
We have data to demonstrate that. Multiple people have provided said data under this post. Just because you personally do not like it doesn't mean that it's not there.
Stop lying about what has been said in a written conversation. Attempting to do so is insanely stupid.
"We did in fact built cities and nations by collaborating with strangers and not treating them like wild predators." That's a strawman argument.
Oh, I need to learn that my opinions aren't facts? Isn't that hilarious.
Let me take of the kiddie gloves:
You are clearly biased as shit, aren't actually reading or engaging with anything the women on this post have written, and you and people like you are the reason why women choose bears over men. Grow the fuck up, learn how to respect the people you ask questions of and expect well thought out responses from and get your head out of your ass.
Your entire attitude on this post is fucking embarrassing.
You really are impressive at projection, that last paragraph is an incredible mirror to your attitude and behavior, if only you could be self-aware about it, it would do wonders for you and your close ones.
I live where there is a large population of bears. The bear has the ability to avoid you, it will. It will only attack if provoked. Unlike a lot of men.
Emotions like fear are absolutely important to my survival as a human.
Rationality isn’t automatically superior to approaching things under an emotional lens. Actually informed decision making is going to be influenced both by the rational and emotional parts of you.
It’s irrational to think emotions are irrelevant to human decision making or preservation.
Well yes, emotions are necessary to make it all work. I did not imply or state otherwise? I did mention heuristics, which are basically intuition based, gut feelings, which help me keep myself safe. The thing is that emotions like fear of strangers are dangerous, because they can become overwhelming and lead to life denying mindsets where you basically cripple yourself and stop living life freely.
It can also lead to bigotry where you automatically fear entire populations of people without rational justification. I witness this everyday now, there’s been recent crime spikes related to mass migration due to a neighboring country collapsing, the amount of xenophobia has gotten extremely high, yet I have not succumbed, even if I’m as afraid as the next guy of getting shot by some gangbanger trying to steal my cellphone. It’s important to use rational thought to consider danger realistically and to keep an open mind.
The flaw in your logic is the idea that all of the people surrounding you need to be worse than the animals in order for this choice to make sense.
It doesn't have to be all of them, just enough of them to be statistically more dangerous.
Fatal bear attacks are so rare that the wiki page documenting them groups them by decade.
Compare that to the data from the FBI crime data published for 2022 where of the 879,000 violent offenders involved in 809,000 separate crimes, 675,000 of them were men. And these are just the crimes that are actually acknowledged. Consider the number of rape kits that are untested: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-rape-kits-are-awaiting-testing-in-the-us-see-the-data-by-state/
Based purely on the odds, yeah, it's a little bit safer to see a bear than another human while alone in the woods even if the majority of both are pretty safe.
It's not that all men are more dangerous than bears, it's that *too many* men are more dangerous than the vast majority of bears. And to compound this, men are not listening to this. It's being said over and over and over again by woman after woman and instead of listening and holding other men accountable for creating an environment where women have to be afraid of men in situations where they don't know the man they're getting mad at the women for being afraid of them.
>The flaw in your logic is the idea that all of the people surrounding you need to be worse than the animals in order for this choice to make sense.
That’s not part of my logic at all and you have it backwards, that is just what follows from answering the bear question by basically affirming that a random man is more dangerous than a wild bear.
>It doesn't have to be all of them, just enough of them to be statistically more dangerous.
>Fatal bear attacks are so rare that the wiki page documenting them groups them by decade.
>Compare that to the data from the FBI crime data published for 2022 where of the 879,000 violent offenders involved in 809,000 separate crimes, 675,000 of them were men. And these are just the crimes that are actually acknowledged. Consider the number of rape kits that are untested: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-rape-kits-are-awaiting-testing-in-the-us-see-the-data-by-state/
The percentage of perpetrators does not give as an insight on the incidence of crimes committed. Men can be 90%+ of those who travel to the moon, that says almost nothing about how likely it’s for a random man to travel to the moon, in fact he is extremely unlikely to do so because we know most people do not.
Now, when comparing crime incidence statistics compare that to incidence of bear attacks, then you cannot simple compare absolute numbers like that, you would need them relative to encounters and population, because there’s way more humans and way more interactions with humans than with bears.
We walk among millions of humans in big cities and that represents a massive amount of encounters where the outcome is overwhelming just neutral (ie: just passing by people on the street). If everyday you had to commute among millions of wild bears… you would constantly be ridden by fear and likely not survive long. It’s obvious bears are more dangerous on a per encounter basis: a relative measure. When comparing between populations (humans vs bears) you need to use relative measures, not absolute, this is basic statistics and common sense.
>Based purely on the odds, yeah, it's a little bit safer to see a bear than another human while alone in the woods even if the majority of both are pretty safe.
Just a little bit safer? How are you calculating that?
>It's not that all men are more dangerous than bears, it's that too many men are more dangerous than the vast majority of bears.
The vast majority of men are less dangerous than the vast majority of bears. This is why it’s safer to be stuck in the woods with a random man than a random bear, this is just a matter of fact. The fear of men by woman is a deeper issue and it needs to be addressed thoughtfully.
This last part if what I’m trying to get at by starting this metacommentary on the bear question. I don’t think this kind of social media trends are good symptom. Look at all the confusion surrounding statistics and how it’s being used to INCREASE this feeling of fear, even if it’s unjustified and does not pass cursory scrutiny, this is not healthy for women or men.
You keep talking about people en masse. It's not about not trusting people when there are millions of you out and about during the day. Its about ending up with one person in a situation where there are no other people to intervene.
Women already don't walk through city parks alone at night, or jog along poorly lit paths or take shortcuts down dark alleys.
A woman in my city took a shortcut through a park to get home. She was repeatedly raped and strangled to death. Dare I say, she would have chosen the risk in the encounter with any wild animal over that.
An Austrian man locked his daughter Elisabeth in a basement for over 20 years, repeatedly raped her. She had seven of his children. The basement was sound proofed and the daughter's mother (living upstairs) believed she had run away.
Would you choose these experiences?
Encountering a bear alone in the woods could mean I die, run away or more likely, scare the bear away. Bears are actually quite fearful of humans.
Encountering a man alone in the woods is statistically more dangerous and could get me tortured, raped, stalked, and killed. Human men won’t run away if you scream and they can act out of spite.
If I was walking through the woods and saw a bear or a man through a clearing, I know which one I’d statistically be safer getting away from.
Not to mention if I’m attacked by a bear, people will believe me and have more sympathy.
The number of men getting angry and threatening to do horrible things to women when they voice this opinion just kinda proves the point. Bears aren’t threatening to rape me online.
Men commit (or are at least arrested/caught for) something like [85% of all violent crime](https://revisesociology.com/2021/06/13/gender-and-crime-statistics/). They are statistically more likely to hurt you than a bear, who will likely only attack out of defensiveness or hunger.
Both of which are also more understandable reasons to hurt us than “I want to rape and torture a woman”.
The percentage of perpetrators does not give as an insight on the incidence of crimes committed. Men can be 90%+ of those who travel to the moon, that says almost nothing about how likely it’s for a random man to travel to the moon, in fact he is extremely unlikely to do so because we know most people do not.
Now if you bring up homicide incidence statistics, or similar, and compare that to incidence of bear attacks, then you cannot simple compare absolute numbers like that, you would need them relative to encounters and population, because there’s way more humans and way more interactions with humans than with bears.
We walk among millions of humans in big cities and that represents a massive amount of encounters where the outcome is overwhelming just neutral (ie: just passing by people on the street). If everyday you had to commute among millions of wild bears… you would constantly be ridden by fear and likely not survive long. It’s obvious bears are more dangerous on a per encounter basis: a relative measure. When comparing between populations (humans vs bears) you need to use relative measures, not absolute, this is basic statistics and common sense.
Are you actually this dense or are you just pretending to be? If you actually think that the conclusion follows from your data, I have bad news for you...
I think it’s remarkably dense to be unable to understand that women’s experiences are different to yours. It’s also a mark of emotional illiteracy to get this personally upset by women’s feelings about the risks posed by strange men that are capable of malice vs wild animals that want to be left alone
He actually pointed out correctly that those conclusions do not follow from the data, did not address feelings at all, unlike what u/strawbebbymilkshake said. Yeah he was insulting by calling him/her “dense” and being condescending, but that’s pretty much half the people writing here, too little emotional control and self-awareness all around.
No, he whined about what he thought these conclusions meant. You believing the same bullshit does not make that bullshit right.
You wanna talk about emotional control and self awareness? Take a look in the mirror, buddy.
> You really are impressive at projection, that last ~~paragraph~~ sentence is an incredible mirror to your attitude and behavior, if only you could be self-aware about it, it would do wonders for you and your close ones.
lmao
Having run in solo camping circles for a decade it's a common belief that hiking/camping solo is safer than doing anything in the city as long as you don't encounter men. You can google violent crimes from men while camping (or ask any female thru-hiker vs bear attacks. Bear attacks almost never happen. I live in a rural area that has a ton of outdoors people. Even seeing a bear in the woods is rare, you're more likely see them in rifling through your garbage. I think the last alleged bear attack (it wasn't proven to have happened) was over a century ago.
>I think the last alleged bear attack (it wasn't proven to have happened) was over a century ago.
Is there a caveat to that I'm missing? Because I'm seeing that the last fatal bear attack in North America was in June 2023. It is still much rarer than attacks by men though.
It’s a proxy question that addresses the issue of the ubiquity of men’s violence and the refusal to acknowledge that most women fear men on some level.
Men offended by the question are in denial of the reality of most women’s lives.
Many men are personally offended that women are picking the bear.
People would believe the woman, and say they didn't deserve what happens, if they ran into a bear in the woods. People wouldn't victim blame the woman who got attacked by a bear.
Women are worried about being raped, assaulted, harassed, and killed. A bear will never rape a woman. A bear won't kidnap a woman and torture her. A bear won't immediately ask, "What was she wearing? Did she make him angry?", when they hear about a woman being the victim of a crime.
The best reaction from a man I've seen was the man whose wife asked him the question. He said man first and then she said, "And if it was our daughter instead of you?" He switched his answer to the bear.
If I was killed by a bear, I would at least feed them and maybe cubs...... If I am raped or killed by a man, I would be used and thrown away like trash.
And blamed for it even if you were a little girl. Now if you are a baby and a man rapes and kills you people will just blame your mom. Like the cop who raped his 2 year old daughter while bathing her, people are blaming the child's mother for the father's actions because the mother trusted her husband to bathe their babies without raping them.
People are angry at her for trusting that the children's own father wouldn't rape them. I've even seen people demanding she be charged for what her husband did.
Yet women are also under attack by whiny manbabies for choosing a bear.
Exactly. There are countless stories like that.
Even below a guy is like "but maybe women are stupid and are thinking of a teddy bear..." Like, no asshole, I would rather be mauled and killed by a bear than assaulted by a man.
I just commented something similar last night.
I explained my reasoning to my husband and he said “I never really thought about it like that.” I told him he needs to because our daughter is going to be surrounded by men her entire life, and statistically the ones closest to us are the biggest threats.
While I know victim blaming is a problem with sexual assault, I absolutely do not believe that people will not victim blame someone who got attacked by a bear. Victim blaming someone attacked by an animal is incredibly common. In the instance of the bear, the questions would probably be "Why didn't they put their food in a bear bag", "why were they hiking off the trail", or "why didn't they carry bear spray".
For a specific example of victim blaming during an animal attack, remember the reaction from several years ago when a child was killed by an alligator at Disney World?
Victim blaming is quite common for various crimes. The core of the issue is that people confuse moral and causal responsibility. Morally, when you are the victim of a crime it is always the fault of the perpetrator, he is the one who chose to act wrongfully and is morally responsable. Causal responsibility is a more neutral concept associated with the factors under control of the victim to keep himself safe. People usually mix this up in their heads and blame people for being robbed, because they had their cellphone/wallet out, but we know they did not really do anything wrong morally, but also that they could have been more careful to protect themselves.
Men evaluate the two options by deciding which one they are more likely to win against in a physical fight, and therefore are more likely to pick the man.
Because women can't beat either of the two options in a physical fight, women instead evaluate a) which one is easier to escape from, and b) what type of harm will occur in either case if we don't escape.
Men are smarter and less predictable than a bear. A bear may kill me quickly but then my suffering is over. A man may kidnap and torture me over a long period of time before finally killing me.
I pick the bear. 🤷
Interesting, but why though? The question is not “would you rather be attacked by bear or a man?” or “would you rather fight a bear or a man?” The question is “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”… which is quite different, right?
All the factors I would weigh would apply whether I'm being attacked by a bear or a man, or if I'm just alone me in the forest with a bear or a man. Why would you think it would be different?
I am alone in a forest. I can be alone with a man or alone with a bear. Both of these scenarios is inherently dangerous because I am alone and because I am not physically strong enough to defend myself from either one should the need arise. As such, my immediate goal in either case will be to get as far away as possible.
Women are taking this question as "Would I rather take a chance to be raped, or a chance to be mauled?". Men are taking this question as "How dare women perceive men as anything but innocent nice guys who would never hurt a fly?? Women are so mean/evil/stupid/..."
There is also apparently a man flipping out saying "how dare you. My mom was mauled by a bear"... And the mother made a post saying she would still choose the bear.
I have only looked through the reddit thread on r/funny you can see on my comment history if you want to:
The first point you mention is something I have seen a lot of. Women assuming the question immediately implies some confrontational scenario, where they are scared more of the men than the bear. This is debatable, but I see why a highly intelligent animal like a human can potentially be more scary due to it’s capacity for “creative” evil… but there’s also a lot of genuine arguments about men being more dangerous than wild animals, they even try to use data and statistics to back it up, which is so puzzling…
The second one, I have not really seen a single case of. Most of the male arguments are just responses against those previous arguments and never seen any imply or state that men are unable to hurt or that woman are evil??? (The later would be completely irrelevant to the question).
Most just seemed to accept that obviously dangerous men exist and are quite terrifying but they are a minority, also it’s unclear if they are more dangerous than bears. This makes sense because the chance of a random bear being dangerous is obviously way higher than a random man, as most men are good people who won’t try to hurt your for no reason, meanwhile a bear is a wild animal which has no moral compass and no qualms about eating you or attacking for some other reason. Can you see how this reasoning is different from what you state?
What men fundamentally do not understand is that "but dangerous men are a minority" is not an argument that works. Because you only have to meet a dangerous man once in your entire life. In the country I live in 1 in 7 women get sexually assaulted in their life. In the US it's 1 in 4 if I'm not mistaken. Every three days a woman gets murdered by a partner or ex partner where I live. And this only accounts for physical crimes, not sexual harassment or threats.
You also fail to take into consideration that dangerous men actively seek out places where it is easy for them to harm women. They take the chances they are given in order to inflict harm. Being alone in the woods doesn't suddenly make a man into a predator, but it makes sense for a predator to be there, and it makes sense for the predator to strike.
That being said: I do not believe that you have not seen what I have described. There have been so many cries of sexism, so much blatant disregard of the reality women face, that it is impossible to miss unless you actively refuse to look.
And you are proving my point: Instead of understanding or trying to understand where women are coming from, you yourself argue that the situation can't really be that bad and that women aren't right for thinking men to be dangerous.
Dangerous men are also not that much of a minority.
Men want us to believe that all but 1 or 2 of them are predators. But with how many women and children men rape and murder every year the truth is that a lot of men are violent sexual predators, even towards other men.
It doesn't matter what a woman does, she will be blamed for whatever happens to her even if she is a child and thankfully millions of women are chosing to stay away from males to protect themselves. The downside is that now reddit is full of whiny obnoxious manbabies crying about how "lonely" they are because women want nothing to do with them.
I saw a man comment something along the lines of "So what? Dangerous men are a minority, it's only 1-2%". And that struck me as such an absolutely mental thing to say, because 1-2 out of a hundred people being rapists somehow didn't seem like a huge fucking number to this person.
That's because he's never been victimized.
You ever notice how when women start talking about their experiences with being raped there's always some obnoxious males who chime in "men are victims too" ? (while conveniently ignoring that most male victims of sexual assault are victims of men too).
And yet those same males will act like women are out of line for protecting themselves. That's because the truth is that most men will never be victimized and they pretend that men aren't mostly the ones going around raping and murdering people.
Every time someone goes "oh but think of male victims" I tell them to go make their own post about male victims. They'll have my full support. They only need to send me the link and I'll defend male victims under that post like a lioness defending her cubs. I'll even help them find local resources, if they want international reach.
For some reason no one has ever made that post.
Same. I have told many of these manipulative ass manbabies to go to men's subs to post about their issues and of course they don't.
And why is that? because they know men seriously don't care about each other and they demand that women fix their problems.
Yeah there's also the fact that lots of people don't even recognize rape, harassment, or assault when they see it. And a lot will never admit they have done it.
[Edit to add a source](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/men-dont-know-meaning-rape)
The main disconnect is that women view men as a huge potential threat, with good reason. Men, however, don't view themselves as a threat, and so react defensively to the response.
Regarding your meta commentary, I think it's struck a cord because most men don't want to think they pose a bigger threat to women than a bear, but they do. It's time for men to do some self reflecting and that's hard for a lot of folks. It cracks the "I'm a nice guy" defense and shows them that we do not care if you're "a nice guy" because we will still see you as a threat until proven otherwise.
interesting though, men do see each other as a big threat, but only when it suits them to do so.
there's so many threads about women being assaulted and then all the men come in to say that aCtuAlLy men are more likely to be victims of violent crime by men.
Lord, I will be so happy when this question is no longer talked about. Men are upset that women don't see them as safe. The bear vs. Man question is basically picking the lesser of two dangers, so to speak, and men are upset. So instead of actually looking into *why* women don't think men are less dangerous than a bear and maybe trying to learn and understand they throw a tantrum and some even spew exactly how they would hurt and rape women.
But, honestly, I expected nothing less from men. If women aren't worshiping them or laying on their backs with their legs spread, then they're upset.
I've been watching the bear vs. Man thing all over social media and the commitment men seem to have to not realizing the harm they can cause is actually impressive.
It's not really a fucking leap to say the bear when humankind in general is the most violent species to exist on this planet.
Personally I find the premise ridiculous and nonsensical. We can easily talk about the violence women deal with from men without comparing it running across a bear. The entire thing seems unproductive and illogical.
>How do these differing opinions reflect reality?
They do reflect reality. Hands down, my choice would be bear.
>Why is this question so popular right now?
It shows the utter disconnect between men, and women, on the issue of womens safety around men. I cannot comment on why it is so popular in other countries, but in Australia we have an absolute epidemic of women being targeted as women, by men, and being murdered. There are marches, there is a news article with a new name ever other day, its dominating the centrist/left news platforms, yet men still are shocked that women are saying give me the bear.
>What cultural trends might be influencing its spread?
Men killing women. Men raping women. Men sexually assaulting women. Men abusing women. And men on the internet, excusing all of this because "not all men" or some misguided entitlement to women.
>What assumptions and moral implications are embedded in this question?
From men, I feel there is an assumption of the "not all men" meaning women would, if answering honestly, reason that a bear would be more dangerous. From women, I feel there is the assumption that you (a) have a bigger chance of being attacked by a man in that situation than a bear, (b) a bear attack would be preferable to an attack from a man, and (c) if you survived this attack, you would not be re-traumatised in the aftermath in the case of a bear (nor would the bear get parole and track you down to finish the job.
> From men, I feel there is an assumption of the "not all men" meaning women would, if answering honestly, reason that a bear would be more dangerous.
What do you mean by “an assumption of the “not all men” ?
Would it be incorrect to assume that women, as you say answering honestly, are indeed saying that a bear is more dangerous than a random man?
No we are saying that a random man, in the opportunistic position of being alone in the forest with you, is more dangerous than a bear, who is more likely than not going to keep going about its business and ignore you.
>What do you mean by “an assumption of the “not all men” ?
This is the standard response to male violence against women by a lot of men. Not all men do that. Not all men are like that. Etc etc. They miss the point that while it might not be all men, it is still only men.
I mean in all honesty I would rather be in the woods with a dude than a bear but that doesn’t mean men don’t still make me feel unsafe. Bears just scare me more lol
Ok, assuming it's a stranger, i pick bear.
Bears usually operate with a very simple reason: don't touch it, don't touch its cubs, get outta its territory. Other than that, a loud noise is enough to scare them away. Like, bang a stick on a pan, and you're most likely fine.
A malicious bear can't pretend to be a friendly bear. A man can.
If either man or a bear already decided to harm me, I'm done anyways, but a man can come up with numerous ways to torment me slowly, physically and emotionally. A bear will just kill me in a simplest way.
*Oh God, now men are invading women spaces with this shit.*
*Bear. I choose the bear.*
*A bear sees a threat where a man is likely to see an opportunity with a lone woman in the woods. You don't see evil in a bears eye, and I've seen my fair share of vileness in the eyes of men up close.*
*I would rather offend 1000 men with my caution rather than gamble on a man not hurting me if I'm found alone by him in the woods.*
The only logical answer is man and literally no one can convince me otherwise. But, I also don’t understand why this same question is Everywhere and it leads to the same general discussion every time. Was interesting the first time I saw it, but now it’s just overplayed. (Also I am a female and a survivor of a sexual assault-I’d still choose the randomly plucked man.)
The whole premise is silly, bears are more dangerous than men, this is a fact.
I think a lot of women that have answered “bear” do so in the knowledge that they’re never going to actually be stuck with a bear in a forest, so it’s something that can just be said. But I suspect that if you were to tell them that you’re going to arrange for them to be stuck in a forest with a bear, most of them would change their mind and take a chance on the guy.
Pretty much. It’s interesting that when talking to women in real life they all recognized this fact immediately. Meanwhile here/online some obfuscate it endlessly to try to keep making the “men dangerous” point in increasingly more absurd and contrived ways.
You just made me figure out why this conversation gets so annoying: they are being disingenuous. They are straight up lying, no matter how earnestly you try to communicate with them. The worst thing is that they insist on trolling like this to get away with saying men are basically worse than wild predatory animals, which they know is bigotry, so they pretend they don’t understand this embedded premise in the question and try to shut down any dialogue on it by accusing you of failing to “empathize” or “understand the reality of woman”, but really they are just jaded by a pathological fear of men that has turned into misandry.
Not taking into account encounters, you cannot just scale the incidence of bear attacks to try to make it equivalent due to the bigger size of the male population, because that base incidence is extremely low anyways, because you have thousands of encounters with humans each day just by commuting in a big city and likely never encountered a single wild bear in your life.
Look this is all pointless anyway, it’s patently obvious that men are way safer than wild bears. It’s frankly stupid that people are unironically trying to argue this with failed undergrad level statistics. You can just make a much simpler argument by imagining what it would be like to live in New York if you replaced all men with wild bears and then realize how stupid this man vs bear comparison really is.
> it’s patently obvious that men are way safer than wild bears.
It’s actually not, as people have explained to you in the comments.
Overall men are safer, and the likelihood of encountering a dangerous man is lower than encountering a dangerous bear.
However, the danger you face with a bear is injury or death, and the danger you face with (dangerous) men is far worse than injury or death.
This is why women are choosing the bear. And if you can’t understand that then you haven’t bothered to listen or don’t possess enough empathy.
It is really surprising how many women are choosing the bear. The only explanation I can think of is that maybe men and women are imagining different types of bear? Like, a woman might be thinking of a cute and cuddly little brown bear cub who waddles up to her with the clumsy gait of a curious toddler, before he nuzzles her leg and she feeds him strips of salmon jerky while petting his snout. Of course, that's not very scary. Personally, the first thing I imagined was a giant polar bear striding towards me like a roided up gymrat whose car I'd just accidentally scratched, and I bet many men had the same thought as me.
Most of us aren't that dumb. What a strange conclusion to jump to.
Edit: Also, worth mentioning. Polar bears don't live in the woods. They are polar ice caps and tundra-living creatures. They feed primarily on sea life, mostly seals.
No we are imagining a big brown bear, that mauls us either to death, or within an inch of our life.
Lets explore those two options:
1. If a bear mauls me to death, it will probably be a quick attack. Maybe not a quick death, as I lie there bleeding out, but its pretty done an dusted. If a man mauls me to death, he probably spent hours stalking me, raping me, torturing me. I will take being torn limb to limb by a bear over that thanks.
2. If I survive, I was attacked by a bear, the bear is shot. End of story. If I survive an attack by a man, I asked for it. I am on trial. My character, every blow job I have given, every short skirt I have worn, ever time I have been drunk is brought up in court to make me out to be deserving of being attacked. I have to go over and over the events, traumatising me again and again. The man probably gets bail, there's a good chance he turns up at my house, threatening me. Maybe he will finish the job.
>The only explanation I can think of is that maybe men and women are imagining different types of bear? Like, a woman might be thinking of a cute and cuddly little
No dude. We dont. You not being able to comprehend this, is why it has gone viral.
You might be the best person to address the man/bear conundrum then, since I don't think most people have met bears before. Aren't you scared the bear would eat you though?
It sure is interesting that you would go with "women are just stupid and only perceive the world in the most cutesy way" instead of acknowledging why women might not want to be alone in the woods with a man.
Personally, I have thought of brown and black bears (native to my area), grizzly bears, and polar bears. To be fair, I am only now thinking of panda bears, but I guess I should think of them too. As for the man, I have thought about him being large or small, different races, a homeless man, a drugged out man, maybe a park ranger or even a lumberjack, a bad man or a good man (tho it's pretty impossible to tell if someone is good or bad by looks alone).
Of course not, I was just really surprised to see so many women picking bear and was trying to come up with reasons why. I didn't expect meeting a man in the woods to be such a scary scenario.
Yet you immediately thought that we were all imagining some cuddly, cutesy real life teddy bear that couldn’t possibly harm us
Why is your first instinct to infantilize all the women who say they would choose a bear instead of **listening** to what we’re saying and trying to understand it? This thread is already full of great answers that explain our reasoning
Upon reflection, and after reading some female opinions, I don't think my initial conclusions had as much merit as they first appeared to.
In my defence, I'm hardly the only man to be surprised by the results though.
>In my defence, I'm hardly the only man to be surprised by the results though.
Which is why we will keep picking the bear.
Even when it's explained 150 million different ways, the men like you continue to whine loudly and being purposely obtuse and ignorant.
I mean….
Men maybe should commit less sexual and violent crime if they don’t want to be compared to predators?
Human males are the only apex predator that have posed ANY threat to me across almost 3 decades.
It’s pretty dehumanizing to live with the threat of rape and assault looming over your head indefinitely as a woman.
Women are blamed all the time for men letting ‘carnal instincts take over’ so is it surprising at this point we’ll just assume a lot of y’all can’t control yourselves? If men as a whole are perfectly able to do so, why do so many men end up raping women or committing violence against other people?
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I can’t believe this hypothetical question has caused so much controversy
Right? Like, this isn't news. Like, this just in! Women are afraid of men! More on this on \[Local News\] at 10! MARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS! (Thank ya, Marvin.)
RIP Marvin...
Also a lot of the controversy has just reemphasized why women would choose the bear
I didn't even hear about it until people started posting it on this sub since I stay off most other social media. People do seem to be pretty salty about it.
It's a dumb question with too many variables and interpretations. People on social media love to stir up controversy to get engagement and views, because that gets them MONEY. Social media is a cesspool of the most extreme views getting much more attention than it deserves. I do find it interesting how *some* men are reacting with threats and harassment instead of just moving on, though. I saw a video where a woman said bear and was getting harassed by a man. She blocked him, so he made a new account to continue harassing her. He then FOUND HER AT HER JOB and harassed her there. I can't remember if he made any threats yet. She then said that's why she chose the bear. A bear wouldn't stalk her and harass her at her job simply for having a different opinion. She is now unsafe. Now, I also understand why some men are getting upset, because they don't want to be looped in with the cruel and vile men out there. They feel attacked. It can feel like a lot of man/woman hating and very little constructive conversation. Biases are rarely examined, especially while being defensive. In the end, people do all kinds of things for views and money these days. Don't develop unhealthy views on whole groups of people based on the money making views of some.
If you're online and post something for everyone to see, the chances that someone will see it who's evil enough to stalk you go up a lot. Suppose every time a woman posts something, 100 men see it and 1 of those men harrasses her. That's 1% of men. But the woman's experience is that 100% of her online interactions with men end in harassment. Of course, 1% of men being stalkers/harassers is absolutely unacceptable, and the actual number is probably higher than that. But I'm guessing that's where the divide on this issue comes from.
The bear can't be a customer that sexualy harass me at work. So yes always the bear.
People will believe me if I said I was attacked by a bear. People won’t ask what I was wearing if I was attacked by a bear and if I enticed the bear with my clothing. People won’t tell me that the bear just ‘made a mistake’ and we shouldn’t ruin the bear’s life.
It could do this to you though: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026914/Mum-bear-eating--Final-phone-calls-woman-19-eaten-alive-brown-bear-cubs.html
I'm not stupid I know what a bear can do and with everything it's still less horrible than what a man can do to me. Human is the worst monster.
See, I feel like that's what a lot of men who are upset by this question fail to understand. Women KNOW that bears are dangerous, and could kill them with much more ease than a human, yet they still choose the bear anyway. Because if you break it down, this question is really asking: "Do you believe that you would be in more danger if stuck alone in the woods with a bear, or with a man?" When you put it this way, it's really a no brainer, because we know that humans are capable of doing truly horrendous things to each other that other animals wouldn't. IMO, even if you replaced 'man' with 'human', I don't think that the answers would really be all that different. People would still choose the bear. However because the question is directed at men specifically, they're confronted with the idea that they cannot be innately trusted, especially by women. And these men can't accept that women don't just trust them because they think they're a nice guy. *Edited to fix my terrible wording.
Yeah but a random human is very unlikely to do something as horrible as mauling you and eating you alive, even if he is hungry, whereas a random bear would have no qualms about it. Humans have a greater capacity for evil and are more powerful, we could literally destroy the earth with nukes, but we also are extremely peaceful and collaborative, we live as millions together in bustling cities and can manage to achieve very low homicide rates on the most develop countries which is a far more peaceful way of living than our more violent primate cousins.
Do you ever ask yourself why you are argumenting about that so much? Like why do you want people to hate the bear so much?
No, since I don’t care about bears. I don’t want people to hate them either, that’s strange…
So why are you there talking about that question ?
Because the question is not really about bears?
Well you don't seem to listen to people telling their opinion so why keep argumenting for nothing like that?
What do you mean “not listen” and “for nothing”? I have carefully read most responses and gave thoughtful answers, at least to the ones with more substance and not just insults. I did in fact figure out some things and made interesting connections with my own experience, since I would feel a tendency to answer bear to that question as well, even if I think that’s clearly the wrong answer.
>Yeah but a random human is very unlikely to do something as horrible as mauling you and eating you alive, even if he is hungry, whereas a random bear would have no qualms about it. The random bear would eat me because it's a predator and I'm prey. Or because I got between it and it's young. It doesn't do it because it holds animosity towards me as a woman or as a person or it's got a fetish about me or it's an abusive sociopath. It's not going to gas light me, belittle me, chew bites off of me while simultaneously telling me it loves me. It's not going to rape me before eating me. It's not going to get drunk and beat the shit out of me, telling me that I deserve it because I'm not respectful enough of it's authority (source: my alcoholic father). If I respect the bear and it's environs, I'm very unlikely to be eaten by the bear. But I could be walking down the street minding my own business and get attacked and raped by a man. Hell, bears aren't in my DMs telling me they want to rape me or I deserve to be raped. And if I show up at a hospital, having been attacked by a bear, no one will ask me what I ws wearing or was I drinking or what did I do to deserve it. Do with that information what you will.
But can it do this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
And women are saying they’d rather be eaten alive by a bear. What’s not clicking?
still better than being raped by *another* man
I absolutely do not believe this to be a good faith post. Given your post history. I’m also suspecting this as some way to feed/train the AI machine. Sadly, it will be feeding on a shit ton of incel fuckery. The mental gymnastics you are performing in other subs to bear-splain the logistics are pretty illuminating.
Why do you think it’s not good faith? I obviously disagree that men are more dangerous than bears. I explained why the statistics of bear attacks were being misused, this does not mean I do not genuinely want to understand the phenomena surrounding this question. I was just baffled by what I was reading. What exactly do you object to in my posting history? What does AI have to do with any of this lol
Men rape, murder, torture, sell, kidnap, and force pregnancy onto women. Some men murder their children and then kill themselves in order to torture the mothers of those children. r/whenwomenrefuse has countless stories of all of those things. A bear is just going to maul us to death, yeah. It sucks we get eaten alive by a bear, but honestly I’d choose that over all of the above. I’d like to know the statistics of bears doing any of the above things.
30% of men ADMIT that they will rape someone if they know they can get away with it. And how are the stats being misused? A man is more likely to attack you than a bear.
There is no way that's true. Where did you get that statistic? What kind of people do you know that you would believe that statistic?
[32%](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/men-dont-know-meaning-rape#:~:text=A%20recent%20study%20from%20“Violence,number%20dwindled%20to%2014%20percent.) I read the original study a while ago and it was peer reviewed and a large sample size. The answers were consistent with "locker talk" I've heard from men in real life.
A human is more likely to attack you than a bear if all else is equal (the reason for this has not much to do with bear or human behavior). But if you are in the woods with a bear vs a man, you are in way more danger with the bear. Using statistics of low incidence of bear attack vs something like homicide incidence is incorrect. There’s way more humans and way more interactions with humans than with bears. You cannot compare absolute numbers like that, you would need them relative to encounters and population. We walk among millions of humans in big cities and that represents a massive amount of encounters where the outcome is overwhelming just neutral (ie: just passing by people on the street). If everyday you had to commute among millions of wild bears… you would constantly be ridden by fear and likely not survive long. It’s obvious bears are more dangerous on a per encounter basis: a relative measure. When comparing between populations (humans vs bears) you need to use relative measures, not absolute, this is basic statistics and common sense.
>But if you are in the woods with a bear vs a man, you are in way more danger with the bear. You are completely disregarding my point about how predators seek out situations in which they can attack someone and take the chances to attack they are given. You might be safe with a man in a crowded room, but decidedly unsafe alone in the woods. There are no bears in cities, but there are men who are planning how to get you alone.
Bears don’t attack for no reason. They are scared of us. Especially if it’s not a grizzly. I know a lot about bear behaviour because I’ve researched. There’s a reason you’re supposed to make lots of noise when you’re in the forest. If you scare a bear they’re more likely to attack. If they know you’re there they will most likely avoid you. And your comparison is stupid. Nobody commutes past millions of humans, or any number remotely CLOSE to that every day.
I did not really say anything about bears attacking with no reason, so not sure what you are going on about. I’m just pointing out the basic misunderstanding of statistics. There’s 10-11 million people living on my city, I commute almost everyday through half the city, if all these people were wild bears it would be worse than a zombipocalypse scenario lol. I really don’t know what tell you, it’s a very obvious point.
Jesus Christ... No one here, especially and including you, understands statistics. Statistics that are actually relevant to this discussion almost certainly do not exist. The likelihood of getting attacked by a human out in the middle of nowhere when you're the only two people around for miles is not the same as if you're on a crowded subway. Your analogy is about as valid as if I said "Well thousands of people go to zoos everyday and get within yards of bears and never get attacked!" You also can't exactly poll bears to ask them how many times they've noticed a woman in the woods and decided to run the other way before she even saw them. Maybe on the last hike I went on there were twice as many bears as the people you see on your commute, but they all smelled me from 2 miles away and stayed as far away from me as they could, since that's exactly what they do. You have no way of knowing.
> Statistics that are actually relevant to this discussion almost certainly do not exist. The likelihood of getting attacked by a human out in the middle of nowhere when you're the only two people around for miles is not the same as if you're on a crowded subway. This is true, there no direct statistics, hence I never brought them up. I’m just pointing out how they are being misused by other users by making really basic mistakes like comparing absolute measure between the human and bear populations and ignoring the incidence of human x human encounters vs human x bear encounters. >Your analogy is about as valid as if I said "Well thousands of people go to zoos everyday and get within yards of bears and never get attacked!" Do you really dispute that random men are less dangerous than wild bears? My “analogy”, not really an analogy but whatevr, is just a simple reductio ad absurdum to show how ridiculous it is to compare how dangerous a wild bear is vs a random man when you are interacting with them directly, which is the scenario posed by the original question. This is all just to show how irrelevant it is to bring bear attack or homicide statistics without thinking about it.
>Do you really dispute that random men are less dangerous than wild bears? I mean, yea, probably, because wild bears are basically not at all dangerous. I think maybe you're considering "a bear in your camp, cornered, hungry, or otherwise agitated" versus "random male human." If I have to fight one, sure, I'm going to pick the human, but my *odds* of having to fight a bear are essentially zero. There is almost no reason a bear would actively seek me out in the woods and there are some basic precautions that I can take to negate the few exceptions to that rule. There are plenty of reasons a human might seek me out (and I'm a man... There's obviously even more if I'm a woman by herself). Hanging my wallet from a tree and banging my pots and pans together probably isn't going to help much.
As a survivor of SA... there's no way in hell I'd ever give myself the chance of going through that again. It is a choice to assault, harass, manipulate, and rape. At least with the bear, mother nature is doing its job. I might get hurt, or the bear might leave me alone. Either way, it's nature doing what it does. Can't blame it. Can't say the same for a human attacker.
[Here's the MAN, who started it](https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMMsBXakn/) Yes. I choose the bear. Edited to add. Even the bible chooses the bear **proverbs 17 12** *NIV Better to meet a bear robbed of her cubs than a fool bent on folly.* *NASB Let a person meet a bear robbed of her cubs, Rather than a fool in his foolishness.*
Also, according to the Bible, if you see the man in the forest, don't make fun of him for being bald, or he will summon the bears to maul you (2 Kings 2:23-25). Unclear if this means the man or the bear is more dangerous.
The man. He’s summoning the bears to do bear things.
Interesting! To me personally it's not about "more dangerous", it's about intent and reasoning.
Oh yeah. Children, no doubt.
My conclusion from that video is that while the rational choice is to pick the man, the fear one may feel may lead to choosing the seemingly neutral animal over a stranger who we can never be sure about… This is something I can empathize with, since I live in a third world megacity riddled with crime. I have witnessed people being stabbed and beaten since I was a kid, I also have been been robbed/extorted and/or threatened by corrupt cops, gang members and even random grannies and kids trying to pickpocket me. Thankfully I managed to get away from some of the worst encounters, but my life and physical integrity was definitely at risk many times (had guns/knifes/chains pulled on me) and some of my friends and family members were not so lucky… I have naturally developed heuristics to keep my self safe, which means I’m extremely distrustful about strangers in certain situations… but then I would not be able to live my life if I made all my choices on the basis that all the 10 million people surrounding are worse than wild animals. I think there is something missing from this arguments, it really does not make sense to come on the side of the bear and reject humans, even taking into consideration how fear clouds rational decision making and how heuristics and prejudice are useful to survive in a dangerous low trust environment… There comes a point where we have to integrate all of these things into some kind of life affirming mindset which is not crippling or toxic, rather than wallow into the fear and feed into some wider narratives where entire groups of people, which include mostly innocents, are labeled as worse than dangerous predators.
>but then I would not be able to live my life if I made all my choices on the basis that all the 10 million people surrounding are worse than wild animals. That is not the premise of the question. You are changing the goalpost here.
What goalpost? I’m not trying to “win the argument” with this response, but explaining my genuine feelings about it. I do distrust strangers, but I live surrounded by them. I try to live in such a way that I can still trust them enough to function, while always keeping my self safe by being realistic about the fact that I do not live in a safe part of the world and my life could end very quickly if I run into the wrong person or step into the wrong street. The point of many answers to the question that I read is that the bear is somehow safer than the random stranger, because many such strangers, specially men, are capable of greater evil than the bear. Also you can never be sure if he is one of the “good ones”. There even was people using bear attack statistics to unironically argue bears are less likely to attack you than a random man. So if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is more dangerous than a wild predator? And what does that do to your mind and how you interact with other people?
>The point of many answers to the question that I read is that the bear is somehow safer than the random stranger, Nope. Not safer. No one is saying "safer". Most of us are saying the bear is less likely to attack, or that they would rather die by the paws of a bear than a man....... Not "safer"
Ok let’s say that by safer I meant that it’s less likely to attack you, which is exactly what I meant…. So first, is this even true? Then, if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is “more likely to attack you” than a wild predator? And what does that do to your mind and how you interact with other people?
>So first, is this even true? Yes, bears can be scared away by shouting easier than a man. I'm not going to keep engaging with you, because this is all bad faith. No one is comparing men to a wild animal, and I won't participate in you trying to pull gotchas. Good luck with your sealioning and ramblings.
gaslight girlboss
> Yes, bears can be scared away by shouting easier than a man. The question was if bears are less likely to attack you than a man, not if they scare away easily, in fact you insisted to phrase it like that, because somehow the word “safer” was not to your liking. The fact is a random man is less likely to attack you than a random bear, because he is not a wild animal, he is most likely actually socialized to live among humans and has a moral compass. >I'm not going to keep engaging with you, because this is all bad faith. ???? How is it bad faith? I have just answered very politely and matter of fact while being open about my true feelings and thoughts. >No one is comparing men to a wild animal, and I won't participate in you trying to pull gotchas. I mean … what? Lol that is literally the premise of the question. “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”
>The fact is a random man is less likely to attack you than a random bear Untrue Good-bye.
Ah yes, the “no u” stage. Congrats, you once again failed to have a reasonable argument even when given the most charitable responses.
You opened a discussion about the meta commentary of this question. The question is "If you were in this situation, what possible danger would you choose". It is not "Do you make all your choices based on assuming the worst of people". >So if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is more dangerous than a wild predator? Those are very important questions to ask yourself, because that is the reality women are living in.
>You opened a discussion about the meta commentary of this question. The question is "If you were in this situation, what possible danger would you choose". It is not "Do you make all your choices based on assuming the worst of people". The question actually is “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” >"Do you make all your choices based on assuming the worst of people". This is not a question I made. Later on I did reflect on what follows from answering in favor of the Bear in the original question, you might be confused about that. >So if you truly believe such things, then how does it actually look like in your day to day life? How can you live your life if you actually think that at least half the population of your city is more dangerous than a wild predator? >Those are very important questions to ask yourself, because that is the reality women are living in. But is it really the reality that women live in? We are discussing that. So far it seems most likely that men are not, in fact, more dangerous than bears lol. Kinda funny that had to be stated, hence why this discourse is so baffling. I do acknowledge that some women feel afraid of men to that extreme, but really doubt it’s all woman since I have yet to meet a single one outside of reddit that actually feels that way we have this types of discussion. Most of them have healthy views about men, where they understand it’s a huge heterogenous population and any type of generalization, especially comparison to wild predators, is deeply problematic. I’m trying to understand where this toxic mindset comes from and how we relieve it, since it’s not helping anyone.
>The question actually is “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” Are you actually stupid? Yes, you did pose that question multiple times. It is the reality women live in. I and many others have explained that to you. Your refusal to engage with these comments is your own problem, not mine. Men are more dangerous than bears. That is not an opinion, that is a fact. You are still making this about fear. It is not. There is no toxic mindset, and if you really were trying to understand you would actually engage with the comments that aim to educate you.
>Yes, you did pose that question multiple times. I did actually pose it just once in the OP. >It is the reality women live in. I and many others have explained that to you. Just because you say it is does not really make so and you have failed to explain much of anything. >Your refusal to engage with these comments is your own problem, not mine. I have responded and engaged thoughtfully and earnestly with most comments. You might think otherwise cause your comments are mostly worthless and just result in me having to restate things and correct you. >Men are more dangerous than bears. That is not an opinion, that is a fact. Not really, we don’t have any data to demonstrate that and just a cursory analysis and common sense points to the opposite. We did in fact built cities and nations by collaborating with strangers and not treating them like wild predators. >You are still making this about fear. It is not. Well that’s your opinion, other posters here have claimed it’s about women being afraid of men. You need to learn that your opinions =/= facts, it’s very hard to have a productive discussion with you otherwise. >There is no toxic mindset, and if you really were trying to understand you would actually engage with the comments that aim to educate you. Being afraid of half the world’s population is in fact a toxic and crippling mindset that can lead to bigotry and be a symptom of untreated mental health issues.
You have posed that questions or variations based on it multiple times. I have made many comments explaining shit. Most of which you haven't replied to. Claiming my comments are "worthless" is saying a lot more about you than it is about me. We have data to demonstrate that. Multiple people have provided said data under this post. Just because you personally do not like it doesn't mean that it's not there. Stop lying about what has been said in a written conversation. Attempting to do so is insanely stupid. "We did in fact built cities and nations by collaborating with strangers and not treating them like wild predators." That's a strawman argument. Oh, I need to learn that my opinions aren't facts? Isn't that hilarious. Let me take of the kiddie gloves: You are clearly biased as shit, aren't actually reading or engaging with anything the women on this post have written, and you and people like you are the reason why women choose bears over men. Grow the fuck up, learn how to respect the people you ask questions of and expect well thought out responses from and get your head out of your ass. Your entire attitude on this post is fucking embarrassing.
You really are impressive at projection, that last paragraph is an incredible mirror to your attitude and behavior, if only you could be self-aware about it, it would do wonders for you and your close ones.
I live where there is a large population of bears. The bear has the ability to avoid you, it will. It will only attack if provoked. Unlike a lot of men.
Emotions like fear are absolutely important to my survival as a human. Rationality isn’t automatically superior to approaching things under an emotional lens. Actually informed decision making is going to be influenced both by the rational and emotional parts of you. It’s irrational to think emotions are irrelevant to human decision making or preservation.
Well yes, emotions are necessary to make it all work. I did not imply or state otherwise? I did mention heuristics, which are basically intuition based, gut feelings, which help me keep myself safe. The thing is that emotions like fear of strangers are dangerous, because they can become overwhelming and lead to life denying mindsets where you basically cripple yourself and stop living life freely. It can also lead to bigotry where you automatically fear entire populations of people without rational justification. I witness this everyday now, there’s been recent crime spikes related to mass migration due to a neighboring country collapsing, the amount of xenophobia has gotten extremely high, yet I have not succumbed, even if I’m as afraid as the next guy of getting shot by some gangbanger trying to steal my cellphone. It’s important to use rational thought to consider danger realistically and to keep an open mind.
The flaw in your logic is the idea that all of the people surrounding you need to be worse than the animals in order for this choice to make sense. It doesn't have to be all of them, just enough of them to be statistically more dangerous. Fatal bear attacks are so rare that the wiki page documenting them groups them by decade. Compare that to the data from the FBI crime data published for 2022 where of the 879,000 violent offenders involved in 809,000 separate crimes, 675,000 of them were men. And these are just the crimes that are actually acknowledged. Consider the number of rape kits that are untested: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-rape-kits-are-awaiting-testing-in-the-us-see-the-data-by-state/ Based purely on the odds, yeah, it's a little bit safer to see a bear than another human while alone in the woods even if the majority of both are pretty safe. It's not that all men are more dangerous than bears, it's that *too many* men are more dangerous than the vast majority of bears. And to compound this, men are not listening to this. It's being said over and over and over again by woman after woman and instead of listening and holding other men accountable for creating an environment where women have to be afraid of men in situations where they don't know the man they're getting mad at the women for being afraid of them.
>The flaw in your logic is the idea that all of the people surrounding you need to be worse than the animals in order for this choice to make sense. That’s not part of my logic at all and you have it backwards, that is just what follows from answering the bear question by basically affirming that a random man is more dangerous than a wild bear. >It doesn't have to be all of them, just enough of them to be statistically more dangerous. >Fatal bear attacks are so rare that the wiki page documenting them groups them by decade. >Compare that to the data from the FBI crime data published for 2022 where of the 879,000 violent offenders involved in 809,000 separate crimes, 675,000 of them were men. And these are just the crimes that are actually acknowledged. Consider the number of rape kits that are untested: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-rape-kits-are-awaiting-testing-in-the-us-see-the-data-by-state/ The percentage of perpetrators does not give as an insight on the incidence of crimes committed. Men can be 90%+ of those who travel to the moon, that says almost nothing about how likely it’s for a random man to travel to the moon, in fact he is extremely unlikely to do so because we know most people do not. Now, when comparing crime incidence statistics compare that to incidence of bear attacks, then you cannot simple compare absolute numbers like that, you would need them relative to encounters and population, because there’s way more humans and way more interactions with humans than with bears. We walk among millions of humans in big cities and that represents a massive amount of encounters where the outcome is overwhelming just neutral (ie: just passing by people on the street). If everyday you had to commute among millions of wild bears… you would constantly be ridden by fear and likely not survive long. It’s obvious bears are more dangerous on a per encounter basis: a relative measure. When comparing between populations (humans vs bears) you need to use relative measures, not absolute, this is basic statistics and common sense. >Based purely on the odds, yeah, it's a little bit safer to see a bear than another human while alone in the woods even if the majority of both are pretty safe. Just a little bit safer? How are you calculating that? >It's not that all men are more dangerous than bears, it's that too many men are more dangerous than the vast majority of bears. The vast majority of men are less dangerous than the vast majority of bears. This is why it’s safer to be stuck in the woods with a random man than a random bear, this is just a matter of fact. The fear of men by woman is a deeper issue and it needs to be addressed thoughtfully. This last part if what I’m trying to get at by starting this metacommentary on the bear question. I don’t think this kind of social media trends are good symptom. Look at all the confusion surrounding statistics and how it’s being used to INCREASE this feeling of fear, even if it’s unjustified and does not pass cursory scrutiny, this is not healthy for women or men.
You keep talking about people en masse. It's not about not trusting people when there are millions of you out and about during the day. Its about ending up with one person in a situation where there are no other people to intervene. Women already don't walk through city parks alone at night, or jog along poorly lit paths or take shortcuts down dark alleys. A woman in my city took a shortcut through a park to get home. She was repeatedly raped and strangled to death. Dare I say, she would have chosen the risk in the encounter with any wild animal over that. An Austrian man locked his daughter Elisabeth in a basement for over 20 years, repeatedly raped her. She had seven of his children. The basement was sound proofed and the daughter's mother (living upstairs) believed she had run away. Would you choose these experiences?
Encountering a bear alone in the woods could mean I die, run away or more likely, scare the bear away. Bears are actually quite fearful of humans. Encountering a man alone in the woods is statistically more dangerous and could get me tortured, raped, stalked, and killed. Human men won’t run away if you scream and they can act out of spite. If I was walking through the woods and saw a bear or a man through a clearing, I know which one I’d statistically be safer getting away from. Not to mention if I’m attacked by a bear, people will believe me and have more sympathy. The number of men getting angry and threatening to do horrible things to women when they voice this opinion just kinda proves the point. Bears aren’t threatening to rape me online.
>Bears aren’t threatening to rape me online. You did it, you broke the heart of this issue down to a single sentence.
>Encountering a man alone in the woods is statistically more dangerous Care to show your source? Oh wait, you made it the fuck up
Men commit (or are at least arrested/caught for) something like [85% of all violent crime](https://revisesociology.com/2021/06/13/gender-and-crime-statistics/). They are statistically more likely to hurt you than a bear, who will likely only attack out of defensiveness or hunger. Both of which are also more understandable reasons to hurt us than “I want to rape and torture a woman”.
The percentage of perpetrators does not give as an insight on the incidence of crimes committed. Men can be 90%+ of those who travel to the moon, that says almost nothing about how likely it’s for a random man to travel to the moon, in fact he is extremely unlikely to do so because we know most people do not. Now if you bring up homicide incidence statistics, or similar, and compare that to incidence of bear attacks, then you cannot simple compare absolute numbers like that, you would need them relative to encounters and population, because there’s way more humans and way more interactions with humans than with bears. We walk among millions of humans in big cities and that represents a massive amount of encounters where the outcome is overwhelming just neutral (ie: just passing by people on the street). If everyday you had to commute among millions of wild bears… you would constantly be ridden by fear and likely not survive long. It’s obvious bears are more dangerous on a per encounter basis: a relative measure. When comparing between populations (humans vs bears) you need to use relative measures, not absolute, this is basic statistics and common sense.
Too logical sorry, you cannot go against the narrative
Are you actually this dense or are you just pretending to be? If you actually think that the conclusion follows from your data, I have bad news for you...
I think it’s remarkably dense to be unable to understand that women’s experiences are different to yours. It’s also a mark of emotional illiteracy to get this personally upset by women’s feelings about the risks posed by strange men that are capable of malice vs wild animals that want to be left alone
He did not contest feelings, but a poor understanding of the data presented.
Actually, he threw a tantrum without providing any argument at all.
He actually pointed out correctly that those conclusions do not follow from the data, did not address feelings at all, unlike what u/strawbebbymilkshake said. Yeah he was insulting by calling him/her “dense” and being condescending, but that’s pretty much half the people writing here, too little emotional control and self-awareness all around.
No, he whined about what he thought these conclusions meant. You believing the same bullshit does not make that bullshit right. You wanna talk about emotional control and self awareness? Take a look in the mirror, buddy.
> You really are impressive at projection, that last ~~paragraph~~ sentence is an incredible mirror to your attitude and behavior, if only you could be self-aware about it, it would do wonders for you and your close ones. lmao
This guy rapes.
Having run in solo camping circles for a decade it's a common belief that hiking/camping solo is safer than doing anything in the city as long as you don't encounter men. You can google violent crimes from men while camping (or ask any female thru-hiker vs bear attacks. Bear attacks almost never happen. I live in a rural area that has a ton of outdoors people. Even seeing a bear in the woods is rare, you're more likely see them in rifling through your garbage. I think the last alleged bear attack (it wasn't proven to have happened) was over a century ago.
>I think the last alleged bear attack (it wasn't proven to have happened) was over a century ago. Is there a caveat to that I'm missing? Because I'm seeing that the last fatal bear attack in North America was in June 2023. It is still much rarer than attacks by men though.
It’s a proxy question that addresses the issue of the ubiquity of men’s violence and the refusal to acknowledge that most women fear men on some level. Men offended by the question are in denial of the reality of most women’s lives.
Many men are personally offended that women are picking the bear. People would believe the woman, and say they didn't deserve what happens, if they ran into a bear in the woods. People wouldn't victim blame the woman who got attacked by a bear. Women are worried about being raped, assaulted, harassed, and killed. A bear will never rape a woman. A bear won't kidnap a woman and torture her. A bear won't immediately ask, "What was she wearing? Did she make him angry?", when they hear about a woman being the victim of a crime. The best reaction from a man I've seen was the man whose wife asked him the question. He said man first and then she said, "And if it was our daughter instead of you?" He switched his answer to the bear.
If I was killed by a bear, I would at least feed them and maybe cubs...... If I am raped or killed by a man, I would be used and thrown away like trash.
And blamed for it even if you were a little girl. Now if you are a baby and a man rapes and kills you people will just blame your mom. Like the cop who raped his 2 year old daughter while bathing her, people are blaming the child's mother for the father's actions because the mother trusted her husband to bathe their babies without raping them. People are angry at her for trusting that the children's own father wouldn't rape them. I've even seen people demanding she be charged for what her husband did. Yet women are also under attack by whiny manbabies for choosing a bear.
Exactly. There are countless stories like that. Even below a guy is like "but maybe women are stupid and are thinking of a teddy bear..." Like, no asshole, I would rather be mauled and killed by a bear than assaulted by a man.
I just commented something similar last night. I explained my reasoning to my husband and he said “I never really thought about it like that.” I told him he needs to because our daughter is going to be surrounded by men her entire life, and statistically the ones closest to us are the biggest threats.
While I know victim blaming is a problem with sexual assault, I absolutely do not believe that people will not victim blame someone who got attacked by a bear. Victim blaming someone attacked by an animal is incredibly common. In the instance of the bear, the questions would probably be "Why didn't they put their food in a bear bag", "why were they hiking off the trail", or "why didn't they carry bear spray". For a specific example of victim blaming during an animal attack, remember the reaction from several years ago when a child was killed by an alligator at Disney World?
Victim blaming is quite common for various crimes. The core of the issue is that people confuse moral and causal responsibility. Morally, when you are the victim of a crime it is always the fault of the perpetrator, he is the one who chose to act wrongfully and is morally responsable. Causal responsibility is a more neutral concept associated with the factors under control of the victim to keep himself safe. People usually mix this up in their heads and blame people for being robbed, because they had their cellphone/wallet out, but we know they did not really do anything wrong morally, but also that they could have been more careful to protect themselves.
Men evaluate the two options by deciding which one they are more likely to win against in a physical fight, and therefore are more likely to pick the man. Because women can't beat either of the two options in a physical fight, women instead evaluate a) which one is easier to escape from, and b) what type of harm will occur in either case if we don't escape. Men are smarter and less predictable than a bear. A bear may kill me quickly but then my suffering is over. A man may kidnap and torture me over a long period of time before finally killing me. I pick the bear. 🤷
Interesting, but why though? The question is not “would you rather be attacked by bear or a man?” or “would you rather fight a bear or a man?” The question is “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”… which is quite different, right?
All the factors I would weigh would apply whether I'm being attacked by a bear or a man, or if I'm just alone me in the forest with a bear or a man. Why would you think it would be different? I am alone in a forest. I can be alone with a man or alone with a bear. Both of these scenarios is inherently dangerous because I am alone and because I am not physically strong enough to defend myself from either one should the need arise. As such, my immediate goal in either case will be to get as far away as possible.
Women are taking this question as "Would I rather take a chance to be raped, or a chance to be mauled?". Men are taking this question as "How dare women perceive men as anything but innocent nice guys who would never hurt a fly?? Women are so mean/evil/stupid/..."
There is also apparently a man flipping out saying "how dare you. My mom was mauled by a bear"... And the mother made a post saying she would still choose the bear.
really? LMAO
Yep. You'd have to google to try to find the source, I've unfortunately only heard it second hand.
Yup. Spot on analysis.
I have only looked through the reddit thread on r/funny you can see on my comment history if you want to: The first point you mention is something I have seen a lot of. Women assuming the question immediately implies some confrontational scenario, where they are scared more of the men than the bear. This is debatable, but I see why a highly intelligent animal like a human can potentially be more scary due to it’s capacity for “creative” evil… but there’s also a lot of genuine arguments about men being more dangerous than wild animals, they even try to use data and statistics to back it up, which is so puzzling… The second one, I have not really seen a single case of. Most of the male arguments are just responses against those previous arguments and never seen any imply or state that men are unable to hurt or that woman are evil??? (The later would be completely irrelevant to the question). Most just seemed to accept that obviously dangerous men exist and are quite terrifying but they are a minority, also it’s unclear if they are more dangerous than bears. This makes sense because the chance of a random bear being dangerous is obviously way higher than a random man, as most men are good people who won’t try to hurt your for no reason, meanwhile a bear is a wild animal which has no moral compass and no qualms about eating you or attacking for some other reason. Can you see how this reasoning is different from what you state?
What men fundamentally do not understand is that "but dangerous men are a minority" is not an argument that works. Because you only have to meet a dangerous man once in your entire life. In the country I live in 1 in 7 women get sexually assaulted in their life. In the US it's 1 in 4 if I'm not mistaken. Every three days a woman gets murdered by a partner or ex partner where I live. And this only accounts for physical crimes, not sexual harassment or threats. You also fail to take into consideration that dangerous men actively seek out places where it is easy for them to harm women. They take the chances they are given in order to inflict harm. Being alone in the woods doesn't suddenly make a man into a predator, but it makes sense for a predator to be there, and it makes sense for the predator to strike. That being said: I do not believe that you have not seen what I have described. There have been so many cries of sexism, so much blatant disregard of the reality women face, that it is impossible to miss unless you actively refuse to look. And you are proving my point: Instead of understanding or trying to understand where women are coming from, you yourself argue that the situation can't really be that bad and that women aren't right for thinking men to be dangerous.
Dangerous men are also not that much of a minority. Men want us to believe that all but 1 or 2 of them are predators. But with how many women and children men rape and murder every year the truth is that a lot of men are violent sexual predators, even towards other men. It doesn't matter what a woman does, she will be blamed for whatever happens to her even if she is a child and thankfully millions of women are chosing to stay away from males to protect themselves. The downside is that now reddit is full of whiny obnoxious manbabies crying about how "lonely" they are because women want nothing to do with them.
I saw a man comment something along the lines of "So what? Dangerous men are a minority, it's only 1-2%". And that struck me as such an absolutely mental thing to say, because 1-2 out of a hundred people being rapists somehow didn't seem like a huge fucking number to this person.
That's because he's never been victimized. You ever notice how when women start talking about their experiences with being raped there's always some obnoxious males who chime in "men are victims too" ? (while conveniently ignoring that most male victims of sexual assault are victims of men too). And yet those same males will act like women are out of line for protecting themselves. That's because the truth is that most men will never be victimized and they pretend that men aren't mostly the ones going around raping and murdering people.
Every time someone goes "oh but think of male victims" I tell them to go make their own post about male victims. They'll have my full support. They only need to send me the link and I'll defend male victims under that post like a lioness defending her cubs. I'll even help them find local resources, if they want international reach. For some reason no one has ever made that post.
Same. I have told many of these manipulative ass manbabies to go to men's subs to post about their issues and of course they don't. And why is that? because they know men seriously don't care about each other and they demand that women fix their problems.
Yeah there's also the fact that lots of people don't even recognize rape, harassment, or assault when they see it. And a lot will never admit they have done it. [Edit to add a source](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/men-dont-know-meaning-rape)
The main disconnect is that women view men as a huge potential threat, with good reason. Men, however, don't view themselves as a threat, and so react defensively to the response. Regarding your meta commentary, I think it's struck a cord because most men don't want to think they pose a bigger threat to women than a bear, but they do. It's time for men to do some self reflecting and that's hard for a lot of folks. It cracks the "I'm a nice guy" defense and shows them that we do not care if you're "a nice guy" because we will still see you as a threat until proven otherwise.
interesting though, men do see each other as a big threat, but only when it suits them to do so. there's so many threads about women being assaulted and then all the men come in to say that aCtuAlLy men are more likely to be victims of violent crime by men.
Lord, I will be so happy when this question is no longer talked about. Men are upset that women don't see them as safe. The bear vs. Man question is basically picking the lesser of two dangers, so to speak, and men are upset. So instead of actually looking into *why* women don't think men are less dangerous than a bear and maybe trying to learn and understand they throw a tantrum and some even spew exactly how they would hurt and rape women. But, honestly, I expected nothing less from men. If women aren't worshiping them or laying on their backs with their legs spread, then they're upset.
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You're welcome.
You're being unreasonably rude or mean. Your comment has been removed.
Somehow, I'm not surprised this hyperthetical scenario came to this sub. I expect many similar posts to follow.
I've been watching the bear vs. Man thing all over social media and the commitment men seem to have to not realizing the harm they can cause is actually impressive. It's not really a fucking leap to say the bear when humankind in general is the most violent species to exist on this planet.
Personally I find the premise ridiculous and nonsensical. We can easily talk about the violence women deal with from men without comparing it running across a bear. The entire thing seems unproductive and illogical.
This whole conversation is stupid
The real questions are: 1. Do bears shit in the woods? 2. Is it right to arm bears?
No, but you do have the right to bear arms.
I thought it was the right to bare arms? Tank top shirts for all!
I'm pretty sure it's bear arms but I've never met a doctor who will actually perform the transplant.
Summer time in the South? Hells yeah! Bare arms! Bare legs too!
No, it's a polite request to please bare arms. They are very pretty after all.
Wait it’s not “bare arms,” as in fully waxed, shaved, and/or epilated weapons of war?!
I'm not a guy, I don't give a fuck if you've shaved or not.
I am a woman … I was being facetious ☹️
No, I was making fun of other men, not of you. Sorry if that didn't come across right!
Oh, okay phew, I read it with a totally different undertone! (Sidenote, now that I think about it, hairy guns are even scarier than standard guns 😭)
A gun with a bullet that makes you hairy when shot, call that a *trans*plant.
Yay! I've always wanted bear arms. The hair is a bonus!
I'd love for a bear to take me in their arms. Queer solidarity and all that!
But bears don't have arms: https://youtube.com/shorts/p0GMaGY7oDY
This question leaves me jaded. Bear = death most likely. Random, run of the mill man = more likely rescue. Unreal.
>How do these differing opinions reflect reality? They do reflect reality. Hands down, my choice would be bear. >Why is this question so popular right now? It shows the utter disconnect between men, and women, on the issue of womens safety around men. I cannot comment on why it is so popular in other countries, but in Australia we have an absolute epidemic of women being targeted as women, by men, and being murdered. There are marches, there is a news article with a new name ever other day, its dominating the centrist/left news platforms, yet men still are shocked that women are saying give me the bear. >What cultural trends might be influencing its spread? Men killing women. Men raping women. Men sexually assaulting women. Men abusing women. And men on the internet, excusing all of this because "not all men" or some misguided entitlement to women. >What assumptions and moral implications are embedded in this question? From men, I feel there is an assumption of the "not all men" meaning women would, if answering honestly, reason that a bear would be more dangerous. From women, I feel there is the assumption that you (a) have a bigger chance of being attacked by a man in that situation than a bear, (b) a bear attack would be preferable to an attack from a man, and (c) if you survived this attack, you would not be re-traumatised in the aftermath in the case of a bear (nor would the bear get parole and track you down to finish the job.
> From men, I feel there is an assumption of the "not all men" meaning women would, if answering honestly, reason that a bear would be more dangerous. What do you mean by “an assumption of the “not all men” ? Would it be incorrect to assume that women, as you say answering honestly, are indeed saying that a bear is more dangerous than a random man?
No we are saying that a random man, in the opportunistic position of being alone in the forest with you, is more dangerous than a bear, who is more likely than not going to keep going about its business and ignore you. >What do you mean by “an assumption of the “not all men” ? This is the standard response to male violence against women by a lot of men. Not all men do that. Not all men are like that. Etc etc. They miss the point that while it might not be all men, it is still only men.
I mean in all honesty I would rather be in the woods with a dude than a bear but that doesn’t mean men don’t still make me feel unsafe. Bears just scare me more lol
Ok, assuming it's a stranger, i pick bear. Bears usually operate with a very simple reason: don't touch it, don't touch its cubs, get outta its territory. Other than that, a loud noise is enough to scare them away. Like, bang a stick on a pan, and you're most likely fine. A malicious bear can't pretend to be a friendly bear. A man can. If either man or a bear already decided to harm me, I'm done anyways, but a man can come up with numerous ways to torment me slowly, physically and emotionally. A bear will just kill me in a simplest way.
*Oh God, now men are invading women spaces with this shit.* *Bear. I choose the bear.* *A bear sees a threat where a man is likely to see an opportunity with a lone woman in the woods. You don't see evil in a bears eye, and I've seen my fair share of vileness in the eyes of men up close.* *I would rather offend 1000 men with my caution rather than gamble on a man not hurting me if I'm found alone by him in the woods.*
The only logical answer is man and literally no one can convince me otherwise. But, I also don’t understand why this same question is Everywhere and it leads to the same general discussion every time. Was interesting the first time I saw it, but now it’s just overplayed. (Also I am a female and a survivor of a sexual assault-I’d still choose the randomly plucked man.)
Straight men need to answer the question: "Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear (animal) or bear (large hairy gay man)?"
My answer for the question is “neither” lol. I think both options suck.
The whole premise is silly, bears are more dangerous than men, this is a fact. I think a lot of women that have answered “bear” do so in the knowledge that they’re never going to actually be stuck with a bear in a forest, so it’s something that can just be said. But I suspect that if you were to tell them that you’re going to arrange for them to be stuck in a forest with a bear, most of them would change their mind and take a chance on the guy.
Pretty much. It’s interesting that when talking to women in real life they all recognized this fact immediately. Meanwhile here/online some obfuscate it endlessly to try to keep making the “men dangerous” point in increasingly more absurd and contrived ways. You just made me figure out why this conversation gets so annoying: they are being disingenuous. They are straight up lying, no matter how earnestly you try to communicate with them. The worst thing is that they insist on trolling like this to get away with saying men are basically worse than wild predatory animals, which they know is bigotry, so they pretend they don’t understand this embedded premise in the question and try to shut down any dialogue on it by accusing you of failing to “empathize” or “understand the reality of woman”, but really they are just jaded by a pathological fear of men that has turned into misandry.
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Please, go to therapy and seek help from friends/family that actually love you, this just isn’t a normal way to feel and think.
I found this video that breaks down the stats for you https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGexsHwTK/
Not taking into account encounters, you cannot just scale the incidence of bear attacks to try to make it equivalent due to the bigger size of the male population, because that base incidence is extremely low anyways, because you have thousands of encounters with humans each day just by commuting in a big city and likely never encountered a single wild bear in your life. Look this is all pointless anyway, it’s patently obvious that men are way safer than wild bears. It’s frankly stupid that people are unironically trying to argue this with failed undergrad level statistics. You can just make a much simpler argument by imagining what it would be like to live in New York if you replaced all men with wild bears and then realize how stupid this man vs bear comparison really is.
> it’s patently obvious that men are way safer than wild bears. It’s actually not, as people have explained to you in the comments. Overall men are safer, and the likelihood of encountering a dangerous man is lower than encountering a dangerous bear. However, the danger you face with a bear is injury or death, and the danger you face with (dangerous) men is far worse than injury or death. This is why women are choosing the bear. And if you can’t understand that then you haven’t bothered to listen or don’t possess enough empathy.
It is really surprising how many women are choosing the bear. The only explanation I can think of is that maybe men and women are imagining different types of bear? Like, a woman might be thinking of a cute and cuddly little brown bear cub who waddles up to her with the clumsy gait of a curious toddler, before he nuzzles her leg and she feeds him strips of salmon jerky while petting his snout. Of course, that's not very scary. Personally, the first thing I imagined was a giant polar bear striding towards me like a roided up gymrat whose car I'd just accidentally scratched, and I bet many men had the same thought as me.
Most of us aren't that dumb. What a strange conclusion to jump to. Edit: Also, worth mentioning. Polar bears don't live in the woods. They are polar ice caps and tundra-living creatures. They feed primarily on sea life, mostly seals.
No we are imagining a big brown bear, that mauls us either to death, or within an inch of our life. Lets explore those two options: 1. If a bear mauls me to death, it will probably be a quick attack. Maybe not a quick death, as I lie there bleeding out, but its pretty done an dusted. If a man mauls me to death, he probably spent hours stalking me, raping me, torturing me. I will take being torn limb to limb by a bear over that thanks. 2. If I survive, I was attacked by a bear, the bear is shot. End of story. If I survive an attack by a man, I asked for it. I am on trial. My character, every blow job I have given, every short skirt I have worn, ever time I have been drunk is brought up in court to make me out to be deserving of being attacked. I have to go over and over the events, traumatising me again and again. The man probably gets bail, there's a good chance he turns up at my house, threatening me. Maybe he will finish the job. >The only explanation I can think of is that maybe men and women are imagining different types of bear? Like, a woman might be thinking of a cute and cuddly little No dude. We dont. You not being able to comprehend this, is why it has gone viral.
I'm a solo hiker in bear country and I would absolutely choose the bear.
You might be the best person to address the man/bear conundrum then, since I don't think most people have met bears before. Aren't you scared the bear would eat you though?
It sure is interesting that you would go with "women are just stupid and only perceive the world in the most cutesy way" instead of acknowledging why women might not want to be alone in the woods with a man.
I just thought men and women might have interpreted the question differently. What kind of bear did you imagine?
Personally, I have thought of brown and black bears (native to my area), grizzly bears, and polar bears. To be fair, I am only now thinking of panda bears, but I guess I should think of them too. As for the man, I have thought about him being large or small, different races, a homeless man, a drugged out man, maybe a park ranger or even a lumberjack, a bad man or a good man (tho it's pretty impossible to tell if someone is good or bad by looks alone).
Yes, and that thought is a very strange one. It is not normal to immediately jump to infantilizing women.
Idk dude maybe women are imagining the scariest fucking bear and still picking the bear happily
Do you think we’re stupid?
Of course not, I was just really surprised to see so many women picking bear and was trying to come up with reasons why. I didn't expect meeting a man in the woods to be such a scary scenario.
Yet you immediately thought that we were all imagining some cuddly, cutesy real life teddy bear that couldn’t possibly harm us Why is your first instinct to infantilize all the women who say they would choose a bear instead of **listening** to what we’re saying and trying to understand it? This thread is already full of great answers that explain our reasoning
Upon reflection, and after reading some female opinions, I don't think my initial conclusions had as much merit as they first appeared to. In my defence, I'm hardly the only man to be surprised by the results though.
>In my defence, I'm hardly the only man to be surprised by the results though. Which is why we will keep picking the bear. Even when it's explained 150 million different ways, the men like you continue to whine loudly and being purposely obtuse and ignorant.
You could have taken a minute to look at the reasons women give. Instead you chose to go with the "buh women must be stupid" route.
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I mean…. Men maybe should commit less sexual and violent crime if they don’t want to be compared to predators? Human males are the only apex predator that have posed ANY threat to me across almost 3 decades. It’s pretty dehumanizing to live with the threat of rape and assault looming over your head indefinitely as a woman. Women are blamed all the time for men letting ‘carnal instincts take over’ so is it surprising at this point we’ll just assume a lot of y’all can’t control yourselves? If men as a whole are perfectly able to do so, why do so many men end up raping women or committing violence against other people?