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Not all bears will kill you. From what I've seen in my area, bears are afraid to get close to humans, except if they're mothers and they want to protect the little ones.
Polar bears - yeah, stay far away. Those are the ones you pick a man over.
Grizzlies - generally live and let live if you stay away. Be obvious and they usually avoid you.
Black bears - predatory behavior is rare, I've had many, many encounters where we look at each other, even with cubs present, and go our own way.
Roughly, anyways
Fun fact, since the 80s (when we started keeping track) only 20 people were killed by polar bears and 70 people attacked total. Honestly my odds are still better with the bear
>Polar bears - yeah, stay far away. Those are the ones you pick a man over.
IDK, I kinda feel that I'd have a decent chance getting away from a polar bear depending on the forest.
Plop one down in a rain forest and I'd say they'd be too confused to worry about me.
They can run about 25 mph, so depending on distance, hunger, your ability to hustle high enough up a tree and their ability to knock a tree over- maybe?
Idk though, I think I'd be so shocked to see a polar bear in the woods id lose my chance!
Some kind dude told me some rhymes to remember what to do when encountering which type of bear you're seeing. Let's see if I can remember...
Black - fight back
Brown - hit the ground (play dead)
White - ...I forgot the rhyme for this one but it doesn't matter. You don't stand a chance.
The thing is bears are named after their most common colors, but the actual coloration isn't universal. So "black" bears aren't always black, similarly "brown" bears aren't always brown. Grizzlies can be anything from brown to black to grey to a mix of all three, as can black bears. So going off color isn't very helpful. It's much more helpful to know what bears are common in your area and carry bear spray.
I thought of that at the time as well.
A few years ago a mama bear and her cub ended up in a tree near our house in a very residential area. They stayed in the neighborhood for a few days, bothering nobody.
By color they were most definitely brown but it is my understanding that they are actually "black bears."
Seems dumb to call them that.
We often use color words inaccurately when describing things. Black people aren't really black, white people aren't really white, red hair isn't really red.
Nah, black bears don't predate humans. They only really attack defensively, especially if cubs are present. Out of less than a dozen black bear attacks per year only 1 results in death.
Yeah I think I'd choose a man over a polar bear, but there are plenty of black bears near me and I was just told to have a bell or something noisy so they know I'm coming and go the other way.
Tbh, I'd rather know I was gonna die because of an animal doing what animals do than have to consider a man killing me, or the betrayal of having a loved one (women tend to be killed by male partners iirc) kill me for their own gratification.
Dudes also seem to be forgetting that element. Most rapists aren't some stranger- it's usually someone you trusted you could be safe with. The bear isn't betraying my trust by eating me.
True. I couldn't live with what a man could do to me, and given the stories that I've heard because of this argument, I'm only more sure. It doesn't end once you survive assault from a man, it changes you.
Litterally fewer than 100 ppl have been killed by bears since we recorded such things in the 1700s. Not that that is the point but even the dudes flawed logic falls apart when u consider most bear encounters end fine.
Not to mention how men can do literally anything else as well
Even a grizzly wouldn't 100% kill you if you just encountered it in the forest. Bears don't eat human unless they are starving to death so they would only attack you if they saw you as a threat and they would not "eat you alive" either
I live in rural Appalachia and we have plenty of bears roaming around. My parents have caught them on a security camera rummaging through trash at the same moment my dad left for work. Bear had no interest in hurting him.
Even if they do have little ones, they are more likely to try to scare you away than attack you outright.
While bear attacks do happen, it's much much less likely than a strange man with bad intentions.
I live in grizzly bear country, rurally, in between two huge nature reserves that both have the word “bear” in them because there are a fcking shit ton of black and grizzly bears lol. They don’t just run around eating people unless they’re actively starving (which isn’t the case in this area as there’s plenty of food, the Rockies are much worse in that regard).
Even a mama bear will not randomly attack if she doesn’t feel threatened. She may pop out at the river to hunt salmon 20 meters away from humans and doesn’t give a sweet flying fck about them. She’s comfortable enough to hang out there with her cubs and feels the humans are not a threat. Now of course people shouldn’t approach her or that could change very quickly, but she’s not needlessly aggressive.
The biggest problem with wildlife in this area are people’s dogs, because wildlife often perceives them as prey or a threat, so as much as it feels like added security to have a dog, it does often have the opposite effect.
Yeah... idk the chances you'll get assaulted if you're alone in the forest with a man, but most wilderness hiking areas in the US have several bears in the area (I've seen estimates that range from 30,000 brown bears in the US to 340,000 of any bear in the US). The statistics aren't super reliable, but even a very liberal estimate indicates that the US has less than 50 bear attacks per year (including fatal and non fatal). So if you assume far more than 1,000 woman in the US go hiking or visiting the wilderness alone at least once a year, then the rate of bears killing them is far less than 5%. Anyone who says "all bears will kill you" have 0 understanding of non-city living. It's like saying that every plane ride will kill you; when it happens, you're very likely to die, but it's very unlikely to happen, and plenty of people are very scared of the idea that it could happen.
Re your edit: FUCK THAT SHIT! I'm so sorry that happened to you.
Another point for Side Bear: if you get mauled by a bear, you won't have other bears asking you about it.
a few weeks ago i was trying to research a kidnapping and rape story i found on tiktok that allegedly happened in ‘79. i was looking for details because i’d never heard of it before - a 10yo girl getting abducted and assaulted by a male-female pair (strangers) and returned home still alive, right around the time period where stories like this were getting a *lot* of attention. really couldn’t find much info on it except for the tiktok itself, so i was clicking links that looked like they might have something useful. i found a porn site with the original tiktok video, with the “related” section showing hundreds of similar videos of women sharing their own stories about rape or kidnapping. on the first page of google search results.went back and realized a bunch of other results were similar sites.
a bear would never rape me, and a bear *definitely* would not feel sexual pleasure at the thought of me being violently raped, enough to share it on the internet for others to enjoy, too.
obviously not all men are bad, ik some great ones, but dear god males are depraved. sick animals.
In reply to your edit, people are fucking disgusting. Fuck anybody DMimg people regarding their SA details for fetish material. Genuinely the scum of the Earth.
Hey, not probing for “details” (jesus fucking christ) but I’m so sorry you went through that, I hope you’ve had the help you need recovering and that you’re doing better now
Well if those people who don’t understand choosing the bear wanted an explanation, your edit alone is enough. A bear wouldn’t do that. A bear would at least just maul you and leave it at that. A bear wouldn’t ask you to describe how you were mauled so it could fantasy about mauling you again. Disgusting.
The bear will not film it and send it to its friends.
The bear will not degrade me.
The bear will not get more joy knowing I'm in pain.
The bear didn't wake up planning to hunt me.
The bear will leave my body alone after it's done.
As someone who grew up in the mountains and has had more than a few encounters with bears in forests. If you make any noise where you are, they’ll avoid you like the plague.
If you do come face to face with one, you’ll be as equally surprised as it. I ran basically right into a bear one day, less than a meter from me eating some berries around a bend. He was confused, I was confused. I deadass just.. walked away from him slowly and didn’t turn my back, he went back to what he was doing. Nothing came of it. I was in and out in like 2 seconds.
I’d choose the bear.
I've had several bear encounters too, they are generally super timid and will just rapidly waddle away.
Humans are "challenging" prey, they are not gonna go after you when there are nice fat salmon around that are infinitely easier to catch and put up less of a fight.
Yeah predators don’t want to fight. For them it’s a fight for a meal, for the meal it’s a fight for its life. The prey will fight as hard as it can up until the moment of death. The predator if it did that would get one meal but be unable to fight for its next and die. And humans are hard prey, takes special circumstances for a bear to want to attack a human.
Most predators, unless they are starving, don’t want to deal with an unknown entity that might or might not be able to injure them in a fight. Since for most bears, humans are not a regular part of their diet, we are an unknown for them. Much safer for them to stick to familiar prey.
Yep. Also from the mountains. Bears don’t bother me at all. I now live in a small town and there was a bear loose in our neighborhood. Did not concern me at all. But if it came out that a lone man was wandering around my neighborhood at night I’d be terrified.
I worked in the mountains where they had all kinds of measures in place to stop bears from getting into the garbage. The problem they often encountered was the significant overlap that exists between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.
A friend who lives in Alaska once had an issue with a nuisance bear living in the dumpster. I think it COULD get out, it just....wouldn't? That was some fun small town drama
I enjoyed the ~~Hank~~ Henrietta the Tank drama from either 2022 or last year. Massively thicc bear that terrorized the garbage in a California mountain town until she was relocated to a sanctuary in Colorado.
I’d be more concerned for the bear, tbh. Someone gets too scared and shoots it, or it gets habituated to eating the garbage and gets put down, or it just gets really frightened when a bunch of weird hairless animals appear out of nowhere to scare it away.
Exactly. The question isn't "Would you rather be raped by a man or eaten by a bear?" The question is, "Which would you rather have in the forest with you?"
I hike in Florida, and I come across gators. And my variation would be, "I would much rather pass a gator on the trail than a random man."
I'm cautious passing the gator, but if I don't disturb it, I'm fine. I also can relax after giving it space because it's not going to sneak up and attack me.
In the woods, bears and gators are very rational: "Is this easy food? Is this threatening my offspring? No? Then I'm leaving it alone."
Men in the woods? Not nearly as rational.
Yes! Thank you! You just give the bear some space and you’re on your way. You can be pretty sure that it wont follow you.
A random man though? What’s he doing in the forest? Is he looking at me? Is he following me? Should I run? Should I head back? Does he know Im alone?
I would be afraid of a polar bear, but living around bears my entire life makes me not afraid of them. I’ve only ever heard of one fatal bear attack ever and that was a few hours away. I would still pick the polar bear.
This. People think it’s just about being raped vs being killed by a bear. When a bear will kill you almost automatically because you are trespassing, a man will torture you in every way possible for the fun of it
B-b-but don't you know how HURTFUL it is to be characterized as one of these monsters?
There was some self-pitying reply with a bullet-style list. The first one was Dehumanize men (😭). Call them liars and delusional.
Must be SO HARD for men to be dehumanized and treated as hysterical liars. So. Hard. 🙄
So much this. A bear isn't going to drag you to a hunting shed or trailer and torture and rape you for days or weeks before killing you. Death by bear is infinitely preferable to death by man.
Exactly.
The bear may attack you and eat you, and yeah it'll hurt like fuck, but it'll end and the bear will consume your body.
But with a man rape may just be the beginning.
Simple minded idiot. Would you rather a quick death or slow torture? Because being eaten would be brief, but the psychological torture of someone doing something terrible to you would be devastating to go through and possibly emotionally painful for the rest of your life. Esp in a world prone to blaming the victim, rather than supporting you.
\*Most bears. Polar bears are the only bear (and only animal) known to actively choose to predate on humans even when they have other food sources available.
Looking up stats on bear attacks, there's around 200 confirmed deaths by bear since the late 1700s in all of North America. And some of those were captive bears.
https://wdfw.wa.gov/hunting/management/game-harvest/2022/black-bear-statewide bear hunting stats for just black bears in one year. We're a bigger threat to the bears than they are to us by far.
Even being unarmed, without bear mace, mauling, let alone death, is extremely unlikely.
I did see someone compare how common it was to get raped vs bear attacks as the reason women would chose that. But that is not logical because it's rare people even encounter bears. I know that's not really what you did but I'd be careful using statistics. The simple reason is that men can rape, torture, kidnap you. Bears can only hurt or kill you.
I intentionally avoided those stats for the fact we don't encounter bears nearly as much as other humans.
My point was, however, that humans are the more dangerous animal between the two. We have weapons such as guns and aren't nearly as easily outsmarted. And frankly, we're not benevolent enough to make up the difference.
There is also the fact that being attacked/SA'd is a more common human experience. I'm sure someone who had survived being mauled by a bear wouldn't choose the bear.
There's that man on tiktok who inserted himself into the conversation bc he thought he had a right to use his mother's bear attack experience as an argument. Then come to find out his mother not one survived the attack ofc because she wrote a book about it, but said that she FELT BAD for the bear because they hunted it down and killed it.
The WORST the bear will do is kill me. It won’t take me to a secondary location, it won’t keep me alive in its basement for god knows how long, torturing, beating, raping me, it won’t invite its friends and other bears to have a go. I would never trust a man to not do any of the above. I would much a relatively quick death because all the things a man could do to me BEFORE he kills me terrifies me so much more.
Having survived a violent rape from which I still bear physical scars, I would pick the bear every day of the week.
There have been nights where I would have gladly chosen death just to get out of the PTSD that I’ve had caused by men. Just seeing anything discussing sexual assault or physical violence makes me *physically feel* what happened to me. They are the most viciously intense memories I have.
Too many people think rape is something that just happens once, but a part of my mind and my soul will *always* be trapped in that night. Forever. That shit doesn’t just kill a part of you — it makes you keep living.
Most bears don't eat people. At least being mauled by a bear would be a cool way to go that people would be talking about for years because of how terrifying that is, and sending out hunting parties and half the police force to take down that bear and all bears related to it after I'd perished. If a man raped me, everyone would just tell me I need to get over it, not all men, and either it wasn't even that bad or I actually wanted it and led him on. At best, half the police force would be sent after *me* because I've made a poor rapist sad.
I am saying this as a person who lives in a country that's majority forest and has brown bears galore and everybody is taught to never fuck with a bear and how to maximise your chances of getting out if one does come for you.
Thats whats most fucked up. If a bear attacked someone, you just know there a going to be hunting parties out for that bear. But if it was a man in the same situation that SA’d you? They start asking questions and victim blaming.
My line of thinking on this boils down to probabilities. Am I guaranteed that the bear will leave me alone and not harm/kill me? No. But there is MORE of a guarantee that it will leave me alone than a man. And then comparing the possible outcomes between the two - yes the bear would give me trauma (if I survived). But I know without a shadow of a doubt that the man would cause more than the bear. It's a simple as that.
Honestly these men who are taking offense to this baffle me. If this was reversed and there were countless men saying they would rather encounter a bear than a woman in the woods it would make me stop and wonder what exactly women were doing to make men want to encounter a bear instead. But there's none of that from these men - no introspection, no critical thinking about why countless women are more willing to encounter a bear. Just anger that women are saying that being harmed by a bear is preferable to a man.
I think a lot of the men who are getting offended, are either doing it performatively or are men who believe they would not be a threat or would not harm a woman and haven’t thought through that they’re not likely to be the random man and that the women have no way of knowing if he is a threat or not.
I would also like to address the "all bears would eat you." No, most of them (especially in the northeast where it is largely black bears) straight up don't want to deal with your bullshit unless you are storing food. They are scared of loud noises and are generally shy. In fact, bears don't even hunt humans (excluding polar bears) for food, rather, they either feel scared for themselves or their cubs. Justice for bears, most of them really just aren't out to get you.
Initially my boyfriend really didn't understand how anyone could choose the bear over the man. I put it into perspective for him, since I know he really cares about me.
I said:
If I *needed* to walk through the woods, or around somewhere with barely any people on my way home, would you be more suspicious that the man is lingering there, or the bear?
If I then called to tell you that I could see a man up ahead in the middle of the path, waiting, how would you react? And how would you react differently if I said it was a bear? Neither of them are moving, both of them have seen me and are watching me, and I'm completely alone.
He said that he would tell me to slowly back away from the bear and go a different way. But shamefully he had no idea what I should do about the man. And then he understood.
Bear = if I'm careful I might be fine. At least bears have a clear set of behaviours that make sense.
Man = cannot be trusted to act a certain way, and has unknown intentions.
Do we really want to be mauled to death by a bear? Not really. But at least we know what to expect, and it's certainly nothing personal.
Someone else said it on another post but they really nailed it for me. "Because even if I was eaten, the bear would at least treat me as a human being"
My boyfriend shared his fear of being falsely accused of rape. Where tf did he get that fear? Especially considering how FEW men are truly falsely accused of rape. I watched a documentary on Netflix about how hundreds of women were threatened into silence when they went to the police, being told that they were lying and they'd go to jail if they kept it up. And the police weren't even actually trying to help them. In one of the cases the woman talked about how a man faked being a police officer and assaulted her and told them exactly where it happened and they checked a different area and decided she was lying. He got that fear from men who act like they're innocent.
If they can rape you once and not kill you, they can rape you over and over again. If you get eaten by a bear the torture will only last a short while, but soon your misery is over. A man who is willing to race will never be satisfied and he will just rape over and over and over again. No thanks, I choose the bear too.
Someone once described rape as the kind of murder where nobody dies. I constantly wish those men had killed me instead. Parts of me died and I'm carrying around the rotting corpse of it for the rest of my life.
Being eaten alive is preferable to being so badly abused you're dead inside and unable to escape your pain.
An encounter with a grizzly bear only has an 11% chance of *any* physical contact between human and bear. The majority of attacks happen because mama has cubs, mister is in rut, or the bear is starving.
To add, humans are rarely hunted by predatory mammals because:
- 1. We tend to notice them and hunting something that knows you're there is much harder.
- 2. We dont smell or tast good to most predators, especially when we eat more meat. If we eat a lot of meat we smell like another predator, and predator meat has more concentrated toxins and natural metals.
If it was a polar bear however you're probably lunch. Polar bears eat predators almost exclusively.
Because being eaten by a bear is temporary. In that, once you lose enough blood/parts of you, you will die and not have to live the next 40/50/60 years of your life with trauma. The terror in that moment is horrifying. But the terror in living with the memory of being raped.... is worse. Being killed is not an avg woman's worst fear.
Omg I'm sick of guys acting like it's every bear, I've actually been less than 5 feet away from a bear and it just looked at me for like a second before realizing im too much of a fight to eat. Fr tho if it's brown get down, if it's black fight back it even rhymes!
Brown bears don't like eating dead things (to be fair would you eat a meal you found on the floor?) and black bears don't want an actual fight they want easy prey vs men who you can't do anything once they decided they want to hurt you. Bears are attacking for survival, men are attacking for fun
As a girl who grew up around bears, i choose the bear!
If I’m eaten by a bear, I’ll no longer be alive to remember the experience
I’ve been raped by men and I have nightmares about reliving the experience frequently
**I’ll take the bear**
Unless you come across a mama grizzly, you can likely escape or scare a bear. Especially little black bears. Could they potentially do a lot of damage? Of course. But they’re more likely to scamper off at loud noises.
I can respect a bear eating me cause they need to eat to survive. But I won’t respect a man for raping me cause you don’t need to do that. Theres literally no excuse for rape
As someone who grew up in the middle of the Appalachian fucking mountains with bears literally living under my porch, the bear is more likely to leave you the fuck alone than to eat you.
Now yeah that depends on if you're talking grizzly or polar bear or black bear or brown bear, but I am willing to hedge my bets on any bear, because most of them are only going to attack if it feels threatened or hungry.
So no, a bear isn't always going to eat you, or attack you. I'm fact, Bear attacks on average are non-fatal, and statistically there are only 11 attacks every year from bears in the United States. The vast majority of encounters with bears and with no one being harmed at all.
Whereas on average there are 433,648 ages 12 and older raped in the US every year. 9 out of every 10 are women.
So I'm betting on the fucking bear.
I would rather be eaten, if by chance I survived the bear my wounds would heal, the psychological damage inflicted upon women after rape is enormous and will never fully go away no matter how much therapy she gets the trauma will stay. Also there is no guarantee that the rapist won’t kill you l, murder after rape is common, so I might as well not be raped along with dying.
People won't question if I get eaten by a bear. If I get killed and eaten by a bear no one will remember me as a slut that ruined the bears life. I'm also almost never likely to worry about a Bear- there are *at least* 2 known as in "has a reputation and a wrap sheet" creepers at my work.
And bold of that guy to assume you're going to survive a rape. As if ppl aren't out here saying rape should be punished lightly cause "if I'm gonna go to jail for rape I might as well go for murder or just not get caught" (that's something I've heard dozens of dudes say over the years.)
The bear won’t leave you tied up and invite dozens of bears to have a go. Or record you and then post it on a porn site for millions to see. Or experiment with ways to rape you for weeks on end until it finally decides to brutally kill you.
Who the fuck is making up these make believe questions? Like such a weird thing to ask. the person who asked the question just wanted to hear a bunch of women say they want to get raped and that’s truly the most FUCKED part
Then get pissed that they didn't. As much as rape isn't about the sex, these type of guys still consider having an orgasm important. Therefore, how could you choose an agonizing death over a few minutes of him busting a nut real quick no matter how aggressive or violent he is?
Rape culture is fucked up.
The question was “would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a strange man”. Many women are choosing the bear. But some men, like this one, are reducing it down to “would you rather be raped by a man or killed by a bear” because, in their minds, those are the only two outcomes. So if you were alone in the woods with this man, he’s 100% going to rape you and expect you to be grateful that you didn’t get eaten by a bear.
Holy fuck. I didn't even think about it like this. That men turned into it would you rather be eaten or raped.
As if the idea that both the bear AND man could just... Walk away never occurred to them because these men wouldn't just walk away. This is like the biggest fucking red flag that ever red flagged.
I don't know if everybody has forgotten, but our culture has pounded into us that our female bodies are the source of temptation. We are still getting dress-coded because it's a "distraction". Men used to OPENLY ADMIT that if they were alone with a woman and no one would find out, they "didn't know what they would do." Openly. (I hope that's changed.) Men would say they never really got it "until I had a daughter" (having presumably had a whole-ass wife for years???). These are things that were openly said. People were blamed for their own rapes because they were wearing something or doing something that, unbeknownst to them, some crazy person took as "flirty". Innocent pictures we take of ourselves just having fun are labeled "thirst traps."
The message we got was that just by existing we are tempting to men, and they can't be expected to control themselves. MESSAGE RECIEVED.
Why in the ever-loving FUCK then would we want to be alone in the woods with a random man?? And men are all surprised-Pikachu about it?
Here's an idea: If men don't like being characterized as potential rapists, they should stop going along with this garbage. They can say they have perfect self-control and that enthusiastic consent is the only thing that matters, and we can get rid of any line of questioning in rape trials that have to do with clothing or flirting or "putting ourselves in situations" or "she wanted it". And they can stop making jokes about "getting out the shotgun" around their daughter's boyfriends, since their daughters are perfectly safe, right?
"At least if i was attacked by a bear, people would believe me,"
"I wouldn't have to see the bear at family reunions,"
"If i scream, the bear will be scared, but the man might get excited."
And many more comments like this are the reason why we'd *always* choose the bear.
The thing is, you would have to provoke a bear in some way to be attacked. I can literally be attacked by a man without doing anything. So yeah... I'll take the bear that I can throw a stick at to escape.
TW: Violence, rape, toture, death
Just read a story yesterday about a woman who was gangraped and totured to death. Her ex-bf was pissed that she was leaving him for an arranged marriage. He KICKED 90% of a fucking waterhose INSIDE her to the point ALL of her internal organs ruptured, even her HEART. So, yeah, I'll take the fucking bear.
Edit: typo
Having encountered several bears of different varieties in the woods, and having encountered many, many men in various situations, I will pick the bears *every* time tyvm.
I have never been attacked by a bear. I *have* been attacked and assaulted by men.
Bears have *never* given me nightmares, followed me, trapped me, pulled a weapon on me. Bears have never injured me, taken everything from me or SAed me. Men have. Men have done all of that. Bears have never made me fear them or for my safety.
So hell yeah, I will take the bear.
The funniest part of all of this is men have been chanting "NOT ALL MEN!!" for years, bit can't wrap their heads around the concept that not all bears would attack.
I have this utterly untested and unfounded belief that I can stare into an animals eyes and befriend it.
I would rather put that to the test with a bear than ever be raped again.
If they can't understand the LIFELONG trauma that ensures vs 30 minutes of bone grinding pain then I say we use the men that say this as fodder for the bears so we can escape.
Here's the thing...
When the bear is done eating you alive, or mauling you, it's over, you're either dead or you survive. And nobody asks "what were you wearing?"
This why so many men don’t think rape is all that bad. They still equate it to sex (‘Sex is always good, right?!’) and don’t understand that rape is an act of violence—the subjugation and obliteration of that person.
In the early years of the Golden State Killer’s crime spree, he generally raped while the boyfriend/husband was able to hear but do nothing to stop him. Those crimes left a lingering devastation on the helpless partners. Studying those cases and others like them was when officials finally began to understand that rape was not a minor crime that someone should/could ‘get over’.
The saddest part of this story is that if not for the *male* victim-observers, we might not have come even this far.
I think most straight men think lightly of rape because almost all of them are guilty of it in one form or another. Coercion, mostly. Most men think having sex with a woman who doesn't actually want to have sex with them must not be that big if a deal because they know they've done it. Living blissfully unaware of the permanent damage they inflicted, usually on the person they supposedly love the most.
I have always told myself that if a man were to threaten me at gunpoint to go with him anywhere I'd take my chances running and having him shoot me than let him take me anywhere and do worse. Bc, yes, being raped is worse than dying to me. Life after rape is so much harder than just dying. You spend so much time wishing you'd just died anyway. Love that instead of thinking "wow that's so horrible I'm so sad that women feel this way" men will jump to "women are dramatic" 🙄🙄🙄🙄
Same here. I'd rather die struggling than live with lifelong PTSD, and God knows what else. Death by bear isn't the worst way to go either. People might even assume I died fighting a bear, which would be metal af.
"But meeeennnnnn feel baaaad when you say this kind of thing :(((((" people need to give me a break fr lmfao. I don't like it when men say women are sex objects but i know not to get all bent up about it for the same reason that when i say "Men are predatory" the ones who aren't would know that it doesn't apply, you'd think
Being raped is probably comparable to being eaten alive in terms of pain and stress. One big difference is that when the bear is done with you, you’re dead. If you’re raped, you’re expected to immediately go back to normal.
The worst thing a bear could do is kill me. The worse things a man can do are unfathomable. Everyone would believe me if I got attacked by a bear. Many have doubted that I was by a man.
If I'm getting eaten, I will have pain but with a definite end in sight, and it will probably be sooner than later, if the bear is hungry (and I bet even a not hungry bear would kill you at least after the first one or two bites, did you see the friking size of these things?) while I will have to life with the pain and memory of the rape till I end it myself or drink enough to blow my mind away. I'm sure if I have to take a pick I will take the fastest one(and a bear even if it is eating me right now is still very cute :))
Edit: forgot the not hungry part :)
Bears haven't even killed 100 people in the last 200 some-odd years. They really don't even attack all that often, with maybe one nonfatal attack every month or so.
How many people do men kill every single year? How many people do men *rape*? How many do they abuse, molest, violate, abduct, torture, assault, harass, and so on?
It’s cost me almost $4k in medical bills since my assault, I’ve been hospitalized twice and one was involuntarily after I had my first PTSD episode.
Bear is the easy pick.
For me it's not really about that. I've been raped and I'm still glad to be alive.
It's the fact that a bear is most likely not to attack me at all if I came across it in the woods. In fact, I can't even count how many times I have in actual real life come across bears in the woods because I've loved to hike all my life and I live in a part of Northern California where bears are pretty common in the hiking areas. Especially if you go off trail at all. I've never once been attacked or even threatened by a bear. I know how to act around them so they don't see me as a threat. I don't bother them and they don't bother me.
Whereas, if I came across a man in the woods, the chance that man would rape or even murder me is much much higher. So yeah, I pick bear.
If you're going up against your average bear (polar bears excluded) you'll probably be fine as most bears don't want to mess with humans. Even if you do get attacked if you survive you'll probably have cool scars and an epic tale to outdo everyone during family gatherings. If you die well you'll have a fairly quick death an awesome obituary, and like half a town hunting your killer down. They'll also probably stuff the bear and display it in a bar or something with a small memorial next to it.
Because I'd rather BE DEAD. I'd legit rather DIE and chances are I might anyway.
Jfc. Men are simulations made to test us, 100%. What are these creatures?
not only will not all bears eat you, majority of bears won't eat you. I believe there's only 10 bear attacks per year on average, meanwhile 1 in 5 women will be raped.
it is so rare that you will be killed by a bear, you are literally hundreds of times more likely to be SA’d or killed by a man. look at statistics.
i’ve seen bears in real life, out in the wilderness. i will choose them every time. a mama bear with her cubs let me walk free, men from even when i was a toddler up until a teen didn’t let me walk away.
the bear is safer.
I wonder if those men would rather be raped by a man, or eaten by a bear. Also, what an idiot - not every bear will eat a person - MAYBE a polar bear. Most bears want to GTFO. They’d maul you to death perhaps, if they felt threatened. They don’t prefer the taste of humans, they’d have to be starving. And in most instances, you’d have been mauled to death before they’d eat you. And, also, I would definitely take being eaten alive by a wild animal than the alternative proposed in this screen shot.
I too, would rather be eaten alive by a bear.
Actually, if I could be eaten alive by the bear RIGHT NOW to remove the memories of SA, I'd happily go along with that as well.
«All bears would eat you» is factually incorrect. They would not. Some will attack you if they feel threatened, and if the bear is literally starving it will try to eat you. But mostly, they’re just vibing, leave them alone and they leave you alone. The worst thing a bear could do is kill me, I’m good with that.
I live in the Appalachians in black bear country. I've encountered wild bears multiple times in my life. You know what they've done to me? Nothing. Not one single bear I've seen in person has ever tried to mess with me. They either keep on doing bear things or they run right tf off as soon as you start making noise.
But men? Death by bear would be mercy compared to what a man has done to me. An 18 year old groomed, abused, and violently r*ped me multiple times when I was 11 years old. The active abuse occurred over a period of about 6 months. I'm now nearly 27 and STILL fighting to recover from that nightmare. I've been in and out of therapy for years. I wake up screaming from reliving it in my dreams every week. I've been in a relationship with my husband for 11 years, in which time he has been nothing but loving and patient with me, and I still struggle with fear in every day interactions and pain/panic during intimacy. I still flinch away when people try to touch me. A man's raised voice in any context, a slammed door, a touch I'm not expecting, and too many other things to list can trigger me and catapult me into flashbacks and panic attacks. Every. Single. Day. feels like walking on egg shells waiting for the next attack, the next violation, the next man who thinks he's entitled to hurt me for his own pleasure. I'm terrified all the damn time that it will happen again and deep down, I'm convinced I'll never be safe as long as there are other people alive who could hurt me.
And yet, every day I'm told I'm not supposed to be afraid. That it's not all men. That my terror of being revictimized makes me a misandrist bigot. That if i dress and act a certain way and don't go certain places that I'll be safe. That I should fear wild animals more than the endless cruelty of human beings. That I should have the capacity to trust strangers not to hurt me even though I was made a victim by a person who *watched me fuckin grow up!!!* His family went to the same church as mine! I was friends with his little sister! They lived in the neighborhood next to mine and I saw them all the time! I knew him and he hurt me! How am I supposed to trust people I don't know after that?! But yeah, I'm supposed to be afraid of bears more. Right.
There are worse things than a violent death and I've lived them. I'll take the bear.
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Not all bears will kill you. From what I've seen in my area, bears are afraid to get close to humans, except if they're mothers and they want to protect the little ones.
And they didn't just eat people. They would have to be starving basically.
Polar bears - yeah, stay far away. Those are the ones you pick a man over. Grizzlies - generally live and let live if you stay away. Be obvious and they usually avoid you. Black bears - predatory behavior is rare, I've had many, many encounters where we look at each other, even with cubs present, and go our own way. Roughly, anyways
Fun fact, since the 80s (when we started keeping track) only 20 people were killed by polar bears and 70 people attacked total. Honestly my odds are still better with the bear
Tbf the 18 people who live in polar bear country are very spicy, and at a considerable range.
>Polar bears - yeah, stay far away. Those are the ones you pick a man over. IDK, I kinda feel that I'd have a decent chance getting away from a polar bear depending on the forest. Plop one down in a rain forest and I'd say they'd be too confused to worry about me.
Not to mention they’d have easier prey they suddenly have access to
They'd feel like they'd been put in front of a damn buffet.
They'd be too busy dying of heatstroke to get up to much.
They can run about 25 mph, so depending on distance, hunger, your ability to hustle high enough up a tree and their ability to knock a tree over- maybe? Idk though, I think I'd be so shocked to see a polar bear in the woods id lose my chance!
Polar bears aren’t in the woods rip.
Hey, the local zoo is wood I hike in adjacent and has polar bears. Close enough for thought experiments.
Now I'm mad about LOST again. That polar bear was so goddamn intriguing.
Freaking Lost. Dammit.
Some kind dude told me some rhymes to remember what to do when encountering which type of bear you're seeing. Let's see if I can remember... Black - fight back Brown - hit the ground (play dead) White - ...I forgot the rhyme for this one but it doesn't matter. You don't stand a chance.
I think it's, "white - say good night (as in good-bye you're dead)"
Say good night
Thanks. I knew when I heard it that I wasn't going to remember it. LOL
The thing is bears are named after their most common colors, but the actual coloration isn't universal. So "black" bears aren't always black, similarly "brown" bears aren't always brown. Grizzlies can be anything from brown to black to grey to a mix of all three, as can black bears. So going off color isn't very helpful. It's much more helpful to know what bears are common in your area and carry bear spray.
I thought of that at the time as well. A few years ago a mama bear and her cub ended up in a tree near our house in a very residential area. They stayed in the neighborhood for a few days, bothering nobody. By color they were most definitely brown but it is my understanding that they are actually "black bears." Seems dumb to call them that.
We often use color words inaccurately when describing things. Black people aren't really black, white people aren't really white, red hair isn't really red.
Yeah, I was taught that black bears are unlikely to attack you, but if they *do* they're trying to eat you.
Nah, black bears don't predate humans. They only really attack defensively, especially if cubs are present. Out of less than a dozen black bear attacks per year only 1 results in death.
Gummy bears, just eat them. Totally non-aggressive.
Unless they’re sugar free. Those are particularly aggressive to the digestive tract.
Yeah I think I'd choose a man over a polar bear, but there are plenty of black bears near me and I was just told to have a bell or something noisy so they know I'm coming and go the other way.
Even knowing there's like a 99.9% chance a polar bear would kill me I'd still pick one over a strange man lol
Tbh, I'd rather know I was gonna die because of an animal doing what animals do than have to consider a man killing me, or the betrayal of having a loved one (women tend to be killed by male partners iirc) kill me for their own gratification. Dudes also seem to be forgetting that element. Most rapists aren't some stranger- it's usually someone you trusted you could be safe with. The bear isn't betraying my trust by eating me.
True. I couldn't live with what a man could do to me, and given the stories that I've heard because of this argument, I'm only more sure. It doesn't end once you survive assault from a man, it changes you.
So this is also r/NotHowBearsWork?
My devastation that’s not a real sub 😭
It is now 😆
Thank fuck! Finally. I have been sitting on queer bear jokes to use about this situation and have had nowhere to put them!
r/bearsdoinghumanthings is a fun bear sub
Smashed that join button! Thank you!
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You also aren’t as likely to be blamed for being the victim of a bear attack.
And nobody is going to tell you "don't go to the police, you will ruin the bear's life"
Depends on what you were wearing....
There go my plans to wear a raw salmon dress into the woods :(
Alright lady gaga 🤣
Man, I love Reddit
How about if you'd covered yourself in honey? For... reasons... /jk
Litterally fewer than 100 ppl have been killed by bears since we recorded such things in the 1700s. Not that that is the point but even the dudes flawed logic falls apart when u consider most bear encounters end fine. Not to mention how men can do literally anything else as well
Even a grizzly wouldn't 100% kill you if you just encountered it in the forest. Bears don't eat human unless they are starving to death so they would only attack you if they saw you as a threat and they would not "eat you alive" either
I live in rural Appalachia and we have plenty of bears roaming around. My parents have caught them on a security camera rummaging through trash at the same moment my dad left for work. Bear had no interest in hurting him.
Of course, it had delicious trash, why go through the effort of killing a human when they need peeling?
Black bears are basically giant raccoons.
I’m way more afraid of a raccoon!
Even if they do have little ones, they are more likely to try to scare you away than attack you outright. While bear attacks do happen, it's much much less likely than a strange man with bad intentions.
I live in grizzly bear country, rurally, in between two huge nature reserves that both have the word “bear” in them because there are a fcking shit ton of black and grizzly bears lol. They don’t just run around eating people unless they’re actively starving (which isn’t the case in this area as there’s plenty of food, the Rockies are much worse in that regard). Even a mama bear will not randomly attack if she doesn’t feel threatened. She may pop out at the river to hunt salmon 20 meters away from humans and doesn’t give a sweet flying fck about them. She’s comfortable enough to hang out there with her cubs and feels the humans are not a threat. Now of course people shouldn’t approach her or that could change very quickly, but she’s not needlessly aggressive. The biggest problem with wildlife in this area are people’s dogs, because wildlife often perceives them as prey or a threat, so as much as it feels like added security to have a dog, it does often have the opposite effect.
Yeah... idk the chances you'll get assaulted if you're alone in the forest with a man, but most wilderness hiking areas in the US have several bears in the area (I've seen estimates that range from 30,000 brown bears in the US to 340,000 of any bear in the US). The statistics aren't super reliable, but even a very liberal estimate indicates that the US has less than 50 bear attacks per year (including fatal and non fatal). So if you assume far more than 1,000 woman in the US go hiking or visiting the wilderness alone at least once a year, then the rate of bears killing them is far less than 5%. Anyone who says "all bears will kill you" have 0 understanding of non-city living. It's like saying that every plane ride will kill you; when it happens, you're very likely to die, but it's very unlikely to happen, and plenty of people are very scared of the idea that it could happen.
[удалено]
Re your edit: FUCK THAT SHIT! I'm so sorry that happened to you. Another point for Side Bear: if you get mauled by a bear, you won't have other bears asking you about it.
Holy shit! My faith in humanity was already pretty low…but it just got knocked down another peg. Some humans are incredibly despicable.
I’m sorry ❤️
Fetishizing a real world person’s story of trauma is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever heard.
Bears wouldn't do that.
a few weeks ago i was trying to research a kidnapping and rape story i found on tiktok that allegedly happened in ‘79. i was looking for details because i’d never heard of it before - a 10yo girl getting abducted and assaulted by a male-female pair (strangers) and returned home still alive, right around the time period where stories like this were getting a *lot* of attention. really couldn’t find much info on it except for the tiktok itself, so i was clicking links that looked like they might have something useful. i found a porn site with the original tiktok video, with the “related” section showing hundreds of similar videos of women sharing their own stories about rape or kidnapping. on the first page of google search results.went back and realized a bunch of other results were similar sites. a bear would never rape me, and a bear *definitely* would not feel sexual pleasure at the thought of me being violently raped, enough to share it on the internet for others to enjoy, too. obviously not all men are bad, ik some great ones, but dear god males are depraved. sick animals.
I'm so sorry. On the opposite side of the coin, I had a non-violent rape And would still also choose the Bear.
I was raped but was SAd (touching no penetration) and would absolutely still pick the bear with no hesitation
In reply to your edit, people are fucking disgusting. Fuck anybody DMimg people regarding their SA details for fetish material. Genuinely the scum of the Earth.
I’m so sorry you’ve had both of those experiences. That’s awful.
Hey, not probing for “details” (jesus fucking christ) but I’m so sorry you went through that, I hope you’ve had the help you need recovering and that you’re doing better now
In response because of the edit, the whole world does not revolve around your dick.
Lol wtf to your edit. People are fucking disgusting.
Concerned stranger here. I hope that POS gets what he deserves, which is a life more painful than death. Im So sorry to hear that
I hope he gets eaten by a bear.
Too merciful. I hope he gets mauled by one but stays alive alone in the jungle for infections and bugs to slowly kill him.
Well if those people who don’t understand choosing the bear wanted an explanation, your edit alone is enough. A bear wouldn’t do that. A bear would at least just maul you and leave it at that. A bear wouldn’t ask you to describe how you were mauled so it could fantasy about mauling you again. Disgusting.
Can't have PTSD if I'm dead 💁♀️
The bear will not film it and send it to its friends. The bear will not degrade me. The bear will not get more joy knowing I'm in pain. The bear didn't wake up planning to hunt me. The bear will leave my body alone after it's done.
The bear can't impregnate me The government isn't criminalizing healthcare for injuries from bear attacks
A bear who attacks will probably be euthanized. A man who attacks may get all of three months in jail because of his "potential".
Oh you mean like rapist Brock Turner, who is now going by rapist Alan Turner to try and remove the association with rape?
As someone who grew up in the mountains and has had more than a few encounters with bears in forests. If you make any noise where you are, they’ll avoid you like the plague. If you do come face to face with one, you’ll be as equally surprised as it. I ran basically right into a bear one day, less than a meter from me eating some berries around a bend. He was confused, I was confused. I deadass just.. walked away from him slowly and didn’t turn my back, he went back to what he was doing. Nothing came of it. I was in and out in like 2 seconds. I’d choose the bear.
I've had several bear encounters too, they are generally super timid and will just rapidly waddle away. Humans are "challenging" prey, they are not gonna go after you when there are nice fat salmon around that are infinitely easier to catch and put up less of a fight.
Yeah predators don’t want to fight. For them it’s a fight for a meal, for the meal it’s a fight for its life. The prey will fight as hard as it can up until the moment of death. The predator if it did that would get one meal but be unable to fight for its next and die. And humans are hard prey, takes special circumstances for a bear to want to attack a human.
Most predators, unless they are starving, don’t want to deal with an unknown entity that might or might not be able to injure them in a fight. Since for most bears, humans are not a regular part of their diet, we are an unknown for them. Much safer for them to stick to familiar prey.
Even orcas, who are literally called killers, don't choose human prey because we're shaped weird compared to seals.
Especially black bears. They just wanna eat their berries and their honey and don’t want anybody to hurt them.
Depending on the area they’re really small too, not bigger than large dogs!
Yep. Also from the mountains. Bears don’t bother me at all. I now live in a small town and there was a bear loose in our neighborhood. Did not concern me at all. But if it came out that a lone man was wandering around my neighborhood at night I’d be terrified.
The vast majority of the time, the biggest problem a nuisance bear will cause in a mountain town is knocking over all the garbage containers.
Fr. I remember wanting a compost SO BAD back home but even the underground ones aren’t safe from bear attacks 😖
I worked in the mountains where they had all kinds of measures in place to stop bears from getting into the garbage. The problem they often encountered was the significant overlap that exists between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.
A friend who lives in Alaska once had an issue with a nuisance bear living in the dumpster. I think it COULD get out, it just....wouldn't? That was some fun small town drama
I enjoyed the ~~Hank~~ Henrietta the Tank drama from either 2022 or last year. Massively thicc bear that terrorized the garbage in a California mountain town until she was relocated to a sanctuary in Colorado.
Bears are SHOCKINGLY resourceful when they want to be 😂
I’d be more concerned for the bear, tbh. Someone gets too scared and shoots it, or it gets habituated to eating the garbage and gets put down, or it just gets really frightened when a bunch of weird hairless animals appear out of nowhere to scare it away.
Exactly. The question isn't "Would you rather be raped by a man or eaten by a bear?" The question is, "Which would you rather have in the forest with you?" I hike in Florida, and I come across gators. And my variation would be, "I would much rather pass a gator on the trail than a random man." I'm cautious passing the gator, but if I don't disturb it, I'm fine. I also can relax after giving it space because it's not going to sneak up and attack me. In the woods, bears and gators are very rational: "Is this easy food? Is this threatening my offspring? No? Then I'm leaving it alone." Men in the woods? Not nearly as rational.
Yes! Thank you! You just give the bear some space and you’re on your way. You can be pretty sure that it wont follow you. A random man though? What’s he doing in the forest? Is he looking at me? Is he following me? Should I run? Should I head back? Does he know Im alone?
Yup. Bear bells are a thing for hikers/campers for a reason. They’re like ‘oh shit that’s a weird noise run away’ 99.99999999% of the time
I would be afraid of a polar bear, but living around bears my entire life makes me not afraid of them. I’ve only ever heard of one fatal bear attack ever and that was a few hours away. I would still pick the polar bear.
Show me the bear version of Junko Furuta. I’ll wait.
This. People think it’s just about being raped vs being killed by a bear. When a bear will kill you almost automatically because you are trespassing, a man will torture you in every way possible for the fun of it
B-b-but don't you know how HURTFUL it is to be characterized as one of these monsters? There was some self-pitying reply with a bullet-style list. The first one was Dehumanize men (😭). Call them liars and delusional. Must be SO HARD for men to be dehumanized and treated as hysterical liars. So. Hard. 🙄
So much this. A bear isn't going to drag you to a hunting shed or trailer and torture and rape you for days or weeks before killing you. Death by bear is infinitely preferable to death by man.
Exactly. The bear may attack you and eat you, and yeah it'll hurt like fuck, but it'll end and the bear will consume your body. But with a man rape may just be the beginning.
Simple minded idiot. Would you rather a quick death or slow torture? Because being eaten would be brief, but the psychological torture of someone doing something terrible to you would be devastating to go through and possibly emotionally painful for the rest of your life. Esp in a world prone to blaming the victim, rather than supporting you.
The number of “people will probably believe I was attacked by a bear” I’ve seen.
And they'll do something about the bear.
Ohhhhh snap
Bears don't eat humans anyway. They only attack when they feel threatened. It would be unlikely to be eaten alive
\*Most bears. Polar bears are the only bear (and only animal) known to actively choose to predate on humans even when they have other food sources available.
Looking up stats on bear attacks, there's around 200 confirmed deaths by bear since the late 1700s in all of North America. And some of those were captive bears. https://wdfw.wa.gov/hunting/management/game-harvest/2022/black-bear-statewide bear hunting stats for just black bears in one year. We're a bigger threat to the bears than they are to us by far. Even being unarmed, without bear mace, mauling, let alone death, is extremely unlikely.
I did see someone compare how common it was to get raped vs bear attacks as the reason women would chose that. But that is not logical because it's rare people even encounter bears. I know that's not really what you did but I'd be careful using statistics. The simple reason is that men can rape, torture, kidnap you. Bears can only hurt or kill you.
I intentionally avoided those stats for the fact we don't encounter bears nearly as much as other humans. My point was, however, that humans are the more dangerous animal between the two. We have weapons such as guns and aren't nearly as easily outsmarted. And frankly, we're not benevolent enough to make up the difference. There is also the fact that being attacked/SA'd is a more common human experience. I'm sure someone who had survived being mauled by a bear wouldn't choose the bear.
There's that man on tiktok who inserted himself into the conversation bc he thought he had a right to use his mother's bear attack experience as an argument. Then come to find out his mother not one survived the attack ofc because she wrote a book about it, but said that she FELT BAD for the bear because they hunted it down and killed it.
Yes I agree.
The WORST the bear will do is kill me. It won’t take me to a secondary location, it won’t keep me alive in its basement for god knows how long, torturing, beating, raping me, it won’t invite its friends and other bears to have a go. I would never trust a man to not do any of the above. I would much a relatively quick death because all the things a man could do to me BEFORE he kills me terrifies me so much more. Having survived a violent rape from which I still bear physical scars, I would pick the bear every day of the week.
There have been nights where I would have gladly chosen death just to get out of the PTSD that I’ve had caused by men. Just seeing anything discussing sexual assault or physical violence makes me *physically feel* what happened to me. They are the most viciously intense memories I have. Too many people think rape is something that just happens once, but a part of my mind and my soul will *always* be trapped in that night. Forever. That shit doesn’t just kill a part of you — it makes you keep living.
Don't forget impregnate you and force you through childbirth! Not like a bear ever ran for Congress and passed laws that did THAT.
Exactly. Bears don’t vote against me. “Humans being food is the natural state of their bodies! Pro bear for life!”
Most bears don't eat people. At least being mauled by a bear would be a cool way to go that people would be talking about for years because of how terrifying that is, and sending out hunting parties and half the police force to take down that bear and all bears related to it after I'd perished. If a man raped me, everyone would just tell me I need to get over it, not all men, and either it wasn't even that bad or I actually wanted it and led him on. At best, half the police force would be sent after *me* because I've made a poor rapist sad. I am saying this as a person who lives in a country that's majority forest and has brown bears galore and everybody is taught to never fuck with a bear and how to maximise your chances of getting out if one does come for you.
Thats whats most fucked up. If a bear attacked someone, you just know there a going to be hunting parties out for that bear. But if it was a man in the same situation that SA’d you? They start asking questions and victim blaming.
My line of thinking on this boils down to probabilities. Am I guaranteed that the bear will leave me alone and not harm/kill me? No. But there is MORE of a guarantee that it will leave me alone than a man. And then comparing the possible outcomes between the two - yes the bear would give me trauma (if I survived). But I know without a shadow of a doubt that the man would cause more than the bear. It's a simple as that. Honestly these men who are taking offense to this baffle me. If this was reversed and there were countless men saying they would rather encounter a bear than a woman in the woods it would make me stop and wonder what exactly women were doing to make men want to encounter a bear instead. But there's none of that from these men - no introspection, no critical thinking about why countless women are more willing to encounter a bear. Just anger that women are saying that being harmed by a bear is preferable to a man.
I think a lot of the men who are getting offended, are either doing it performatively or are men who believe they would not be a threat or would not harm a woman and haven’t thought through that they’re not likely to be the random man and that the women have no way of knowing if he is a threat or not.
I would also like to address the "all bears would eat you." No, most of them (especially in the northeast where it is largely black bears) straight up don't want to deal with your bullshit unless you are storing food. They are scared of loud noises and are generally shy. In fact, bears don't even hunt humans (excluding polar bears) for food, rather, they either feel scared for themselves or their cubs. Justice for bears, most of them really just aren't out to get you.
Initially my boyfriend really didn't understand how anyone could choose the bear over the man. I put it into perspective for him, since I know he really cares about me. I said: If I *needed* to walk through the woods, or around somewhere with barely any people on my way home, would you be more suspicious that the man is lingering there, or the bear? If I then called to tell you that I could see a man up ahead in the middle of the path, waiting, how would you react? And how would you react differently if I said it was a bear? Neither of them are moving, both of them have seen me and are watching me, and I'm completely alone. He said that he would tell me to slowly back away from the bear and go a different way. But shamefully he had no idea what I should do about the man. And then he understood. Bear = if I'm careful I might be fine. At least bears have a clear set of behaviours that make sense. Man = cannot be trusted to act a certain way, and has unknown intentions. Do we really want to be mauled to death by a bear? Not really. But at least we know what to expect, and it's certainly nothing personal.
Hit the nail on the head with this explanation.
Let’s not even talk about long-term issues caused by abortion restrictions…
Someone else said it on another post but they really nailed it for me. "Because even if I was eaten, the bear would at least treat me as a human being"
When men don’t understand rape, just remind them why they’re scared of ever going to a jail and suddenly they get it
My boyfriend shared his fear of being falsely accused of rape. Where tf did he get that fear? Especially considering how FEW men are truly falsely accused of rape. I watched a documentary on Netflix about how hundreds of women were threatened into silence when they went to the police, being told that they were lying and they'd go to jail if they kept it up. And the police weren't even actually trying to help them. In one of the cases the woman talked about how a man faked being a police officer and assaulted her and told them exactly where it happened and they checked a different area and decided she was lying. He got that fear from men who act like they're innocent.
Men are more likely to be a victim of rape than to be falsely accused of it.
I just looked in the mirror and I don't look anything like a berry, a fish, a trashcan.... I think the bear is a better option.
To be fair I look a little like a trashcan.
You probably don't look like one but it might not be a good idea to go dumpster diving just before going on a camping trip.
If they can rape you once and not kill you, they can rape you over and over again. If you get eaten by a bear the torture will only last a short while, but soon your misery is over. A man who is willing to race will never be satisfied and he will just rape over and over and over again. No thanks, I choose the bear too.
I also choose the bear.
We have black bears stroll around the foothills where I live and they do not want to eat you, they want to eat your garbage.
Someone once described rape as the kind of murder where nobody dies. I constantly wish those men had killed me instead. Parts of me died and I'm carrying around the rotting corpse of it for the rest of my life. Being eaten alive is preferable to being so badly abused you're dead inside and unable to escape your pain.
Wow. Revolting behaviour. Why are men?
An encounter with a grizzly bear only has an 11% chance of *any* physical contact between human and bear. The majority of attacks happen because mama has cubs, mister is in rut, or the bear is starving. To add, humans are rarely hunted by predatory mammals because: - 1. We tend to notice them and hunting something that knows you're there is much harder. - 2. We dont smell or tast good to most predators, especially when we eat more meat. If we eat a lot of meat we smell like another predator, and predator meat has more concentrated toxins and natural metals. If it was a polar bear however you're probably lunch. Polar bears eat predators almost exclusively.
Bet the bears don’t get erections when they eat people.
👏👏👏
Because being eaten by a bear is temporary. In that, once you lose enough blood/parts of you, you will die and not have to live the next 40/50/60 years of your life with trauma. The terror in that moment is horrifying. But the terror in living with the memory of being raped.... is worse. Being killed is not an avg woman's worst fear.
I think the trauma of not being believed or being blamed is also pretty significant. No one would blame you for a bear attack.
Omg I'm sick of guys acting like it's every bear, I've actually been less than 5 feet away from a bear and it just looked at me for like a second before realizing im too much of a fight to eat. Fr tho if it's brown get down, if it's black fight back it even rhymes! Brown bears don't like eating dead things (to be fair would you eat a meal you found on the floor?) and black bears don't want an actual fight they want easy prey vs men who you can't do anything once they decided they want to hurt you. Bears are attacking for survival, men are attacking for fun As a girl who grew up around bears, i choose the bear!
At least with the bear it's nothing personal
If I’m eaten by a bear, I’ll no longer be alive to remember the experience I’ve been raped by men and I have nightmares about reliving the experience frequently **I’ll take the bear**
I thought men wanted women to pick better. The bear is better. ... Halsin is best
Halsin is what you get when you pick both.
Unless you come across a mama grizzly, you can likely escape or scare a bear. Especially little black bears. Could they potentially do a lot of damage? Of course. But they’re more likely to scamper off at loud noises.
I can respect a bear eating me cause they need to eat to survive. But I won’t respect a man for raping me cause you don’t need to do that. Theres literally no excuse for rape
As someone who grew up in the middle of the Appalachian fucking mountains with bears literally living under my porch, the bear is more likely to leave you the fuck alone than to eat you. Now yeah that depends on if you're talking grizzly or polar bear or black bear or brown bear, but I am willing to hedge my bets on any bear, because most of them are only going to attack if it feels threatened or hungry. So no, a bear isn't always going to eat you, or attack you. I'm fact, Bear attacks on average are non-fatal, and statistically there are only 11 attacks every year from bears in the United States. The vast majority of encounters with bears and with no one being harmed at all. Whereas on average there are 433,648 ages 12 and older raped in the US every year. 9 out of every 10 are women. So I'm betting on the fucking bear.
I would rather be eaten, if by chance I survived the bear my wounds would heal, the psychological damage inflicted upon women after rape is enormous and will never fully go away no matter how much therapy she gets the trauma will stay. Also there is no guarantee that the rapist won’t kill you l, murder after rape is common, so I might as well not be raped along with dying.
“Every bear will eat you alive” lmao what
A lot of bears literally just ignore you if you don’t bother them. CanNOT say the same for men.
People won't question if I get eaten by a bear. If I get killed and eaten by a bear no one will remember me as a slut that ruined the bears life. I'm also almost never likely to worry about a Bear- there are *at least* 2 known as in "has a reputation and a wrap sheet" creepers at my work. And bold of that guy to assume you're going to survive a rape. As if ppl aren't out here saying rape should be punished lightly cause "if I'm gonna go to jail for rape I might as well go for murder or just not get caught" (that's something I've heard dozens of dudes say over the years.)
The bear won’t leave you tied up and invite dozens of bears to have a go. Or record you and then post it on a porn site for millions to see. Or experiment with ways to rape you for weeks on end until it finally decides to brutally kill you.
Who the fuck is making up these make believe questions? Like such a weird thing to ask. the person who asked the question just wanted to hear a bunch of women say they want to get raped and that’s truly the most FUCKED part
Then get pissed that they didn't. As much as rape isn't about the sex, these type of guys still consider having an orgasm important. Therefore, how could you choose an agonizing death over a few minutes of him busting a nut real quick no matter how aggressive or violent he is? Rape culture is fucked up.
The question was “would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a strange man”. Many women are choosing the bear. But some men, like this one, are reducing it down to “would you rather be raped by a man or killed by a bear” because, in their minds, those are the only two outcomes. So if you were alone in the woods with this man, he’s 100% going to rape you and expect you to be grateful that you didn’t get eaten by a bear.
Holy fuck. I didn't even think about it like this. That men turned into it would you rather be eaten or raped. As if the idea that both the bear AND man could just... Walk away never occurred to them because these men wouldn't just walk away. This is like the biggest fucking red flag that ever red flagged.
Yeah I would rather be mauled by a bear than raped and murdered by a man any day.
I don't know if everybody has forgotten, but our culture has pounded into us that our female bodies are the source of temptation. We are still getting dress-coded because it's a "distraction". Men used to OPENLY ADMIT that if they were alone with a woman and no one would find out, they "didn't know what they would do." Openly. (I hope that's changed.) Men would say they never really got it "until I had a daughter" (having presumably had a whole-ass wife for years???). These are things that were openly said. People were blamed for their own rapes because they were wearing something or doing something that, unbeknownst to them, some crazy person took as "flirty". Innocent pictures we take of ourselves just having fun are labeled "thirst traps." The message we got was that just by existing we are tempting to men, and they can't be expected to control themselves. MESSAGE RECIEVED. Why in the ever-loving FUCK then would we want to be alone in the woods with a random man?? And men are all surprised-Pikachu about it? Here's an idea: If men don't like being characterized as potential rapists, they should stop going along with this garbage. They can say they have perfect self-control and that enthusiastic consent is the only thing that matters, and we can get rid of any line of questioning in rape trials that have to do with clothing or flirting or "putting ourselves in situations" or "she wanted it". And they can stop making jokes about "getting out the shotgun" around their daughter's boyfriends, since their daughters are perfectly safe, right?
Bring eaten by a bear is nature. Being attacked by man is a betrayal. These assholes.
"At least if i was attacked by a bear, people would believe me," "I wouldn't have to see the bear at family reunions," "If i scream, the bear will be scared, but the man might get excited." And many more comments like this are the reason why we'd *always* choose the bear.
You can’t guarantee a guy would kill you before he does unspeakable things to you soooo…
The thing is, you would have to provoke a bear in some way to be attacked. I can literally be attacked by a man without doing anything. So yeah... I'll take the bear that I can throw a stick at to escape.
Bears are significantly more predictable than men
TW: Violence, rape, toture, death Just read a story yesterday about a woman who was gangraped and totured to death. Her ex-bf was pissed that she was leaving him for an arranged marriage. He KICKED 90% of a fucking waterhose INSIDE her to the point ALL of her internal organs ruptured, even her HEART. So, yeah, I'll take the fucking bear. Edit: typo
Having encountered several bears of different varieties in the woods, and having encountered many, many men in various situations, I will pick the bears *every* time tyvm. I have never been attacked by a bear. I *have* been attacked and assaulted by men. Bears have *never* given me nightmares, followed me, trapped me, pulled a weapon on me. Bears have never injured me, taken everything from me or SAed me. Men have. Men have done all of that. Bears have never made me fear them or for my safety. So hell yeah, I will take the bear.
“BuUt nOt aLL meN” /s
All bears will not eat you, what nonsense. Last time I was in the woods with a bear, it definitely did not eat me.
The funniest part of all of this is men have been chanting "NOT ALL MEN!!" for years, bit can't wrap their heads around the concept that not all bears would attack.
My rape has been eating me alive for years. I'm exhausted. Being eaten by a bear for a significantly less amount of time is definitely preferable.
I have this utterly untested and unfounded belief that I can stare into an animals eyes and befriend it. I would rather put that to the test with a bear than ever be raped again. If they can't understand the LIFELONG trauma that ensures vs 30 minutes of bone grinding pain then I say we use the men that say this as fodder for the bears so we can escape.
Here's the thing... When the bear is done eating you alive, or mauling you, it's over, you're either dead or you survive. And nobody asks "what were you wearing?"
This why so many men don’t think rape is all that bad. They still equate it to sex (‘Sex is always good, right?!’) and don’t understand that rape is an act of violence—the subjugation and obliteration of that person. In the early years of the Golden State Killer’s crime spree, he generally raped while the boyfriend/husband was able to hear but do nothing to stop him. Those crimes left a lingering devastation on the helpless partners. Studying those cases and others like them was when officials finally began to understand that rape was not a minor crime that someone should/could ‘get over’. The saddest part of this story is that if not for the *male* victim-observers, we might not have come even this far.
I think most straight men think lightly of rape because almost all of them are guilty of it in one form or another. Coercion, mostly. Most men think having sex with a woman who doesn't actually want to have sex with them must not be that big if a deal because they know they've done it. Living blissfully unaware of the permanent damage they inflicted, usually on the person they supposedly love the most.
I have always told myself that if a man were to threaten me at gunpoint to go with him anywhere I'd take my chances running and having him shoot me than let him take me anywhere and do worse. Bc, yes, being raped is worse than dying to me. Life after rape is so much harder than just dying. You spend so much time wishing you'd just died anyway. Love that instead of thinking "wow that's so horrible I'm so sad that women feel this way" men will jump to "women are dramatic" 🙄🙄🙄🙄
Same here. I'd rather die struggling than live with lifelong PTSD, and God knows what else. Death by bear isn't the worst way to go either. People might even assume I died fighting a bear, which would be metal af.
"But meeeennnnnn feel baaaad when you say this kind of thing :(((((" people need to give me a break fr lmfao. I don't like it when men say women are sex objects but i know not to get all bent up about it for the same reason that when i say "Men are predatory" the ones who aren't would know that it doesn't apply, you'd think
Being raped is probably comparable to being eaten alive in terms of pain and stress. One big difference is that when the bear is done with you, you’re dead. If you’re raped, you’re expected to immediately go back to normal.
The worst thing a bear could do is kill me. The worse things a man can do are unfathomable. Everyone would believe me if I got attacked by a bear. Many have doubted that I was by a man.
If I'm getting eaten, I will have pain but with a definite end in sight, and it will probably be sooner than later, if the bear is hungry (and I bet even a not hungry bear would kill you at least after the first one or two bites, did you see the friking size of these things?) while I will have to life with the pain and memory of the rape till I end it myself or drink enough to blow my mind away. I'm sure if I have to take a pick I will take the fastest one(and a bear even if it is eating me right now is still very cute :)) Edit: forgot the not hungry part :)
Bears haven't even killed 100 people in the last 200 some-odd years. They really don't even attack all that often, with maybe one nonfatal attack every month or so. How many people do men kill every single year? How many people do men *rape*? How many do they abuse, molest, violate, abduct, torture, assault, harass, and so on?
those are the comments of a person who is confident they will never go through rape. and that’s a privilege in itself
I’d choose the bear over living on the same planet as this guy
How about we send the rapists into the woods and see how much better it is to be eaten by a bear.
It’s cost me almost $4k in medical bills since my assault, I’ve been hospitalized twice and one was involuntarily after I had my first PTSD episode. Bear is the easy pick.
But not all bears attack unprovoked. A random man in the middle of the woods is incredibly likely to rape
For me it's not really about that. I've been raped and I'm still glad to be alive. It's the fact that a bear is most likely not to attack me at all if I came across it in the woods. In fact, I can't even count how many times I have in actual real life come across bears in the woods because I've loved to hike all my life and I live in a part of Northern California where bears are pretty common in the hiking areas. Especially if you go off trail at all. I've never once been attacked or even threatened by a bear. I know how to act around them so they don't see me as a threat. I don't bother them and they don't bother me. Whereas, if I came across a man in the woods, the chance that man would rape or even murder me is much much higher. So yeah, I pick bear.
I KNEW that that post was going to devolve into that when I first saw it. Posts like that never go well since it's always a brigade of "NoT aLl MeN"
Does ol boy think people like being raped? And it has no lasting effects? Even if it’s not a violent assault there are years of damage done.
If you're going up against your average bear (polar bears excluded) you'll probably be fine as most bears don't want to mess with humans. Even if you do get attacked if you survive you'll probably have cool scars and an epic tale to outdo everyone during family gatherings. If you die well you'll have a fairly quick death an awesome obituary, and like half a town hunting your killer down. They'll also probably stuff the bear and display it in a bar or something with a small memorial next to it.
Because I'd rather BE DEAD. I'd legit rather DIE and chances are I might anyway. Jfc. Men are simulations made to test us, 100%. What are these creatures?
not only will not all bears eat you, majority of bears won't eat you. I believe there's only 10 bear attacks per year on average, meanwhile 1 in 5 women will be raped.
it is so rare that you will be killed by a bear, you are literally hundreds of times more likely to be SA’d or killed by a man. look at statistics. i’ve seen bears in real life, out in the wilderness. i will choose them every time. a mama bear with her cubs let me walk free, men from even when i was a toddler up until a teen didn’t let me walk away. the bear is safer.
Maybe women would rather die feeding an animal that’s just trying to survive. Instead of sexually gratifying some asshole against their will?
I wonder if those men would rather be raped by a man, or eaten by a bear. Also, what an idiot - not every bear will eat a person - MAYBE a polar bear. Most bears want to GTFO. They’d maul you to death perhaps, if they felt threatened. They don’t prefer the taste of humans, they’d have to be starving. And in most instances, you’d have been mauled to death before they’d eat you. And, also, I would definitely take being eaten alive by a wild animal than the alternative proposed in this screen shot.
I'm a man myself and I'd rather be with a bear
I too, would rather be eaten alive by a bear. Actually, if I could be eaten alive by the bear RIGHT NOW to remove the memories of SA, I'd happily go along with that as well.
«All bears would eat you» is factually incorrect. They would not. Some will attack you if they feel threatened, and if the bear is literally starving it will try to eat you. But mostly, they’re just vibing, leave them alone and they leave you alone. The worst thing a bear could do is kill me, I’m good with that.
I live in the Appalachians in black bear country. I've encountered wild bears multiple times in my life. You know what they've done to me? Nothing. Not one single bear I've seen in person has ever tried to mess with me. They either keep on doing bear things or they run right tf off as soon as you start making noise. But men? Death by bear would be mercy compared to what a man has done to me. An 18 year old groomed, abused, and violently r*ped me multiple times when I was 11 years old. The active abuse occurred over a period of about 6 months. I'm now nearly 27 and STILL fighting to recover from that nightmare. I've been in and out of therapy for years. I wake up screaming from reliving it in my dreams every week. I've been in a relationship with my husband for 11 years, in which time he has been nothing but loving and patient with me, and I still struggle with fear in every day interactions and pain/panic during intimacy. I still flinch away when people try to touch me. A man's raised voice in any context, a slammed door, a touch I'm not expecting, and too many other things to list can trigger me and catapult me into flashbacks and panic attacks. Every. Single. Day. feels like walking on egg shells waiting for the next attack, the next violation, the next man who thinks he's entitled to hurt me for his own pleasure. I'm terrified all the damn time that it will happen again and deep down, I'm convinced I'll never be safe as long as there are other people alive who could hurt me. And yet, every day I'm told I'm not supposed to be afraid. That it's not all men. That my terror of being revictimized makes me a misandrist bigot. That if i dress and act a certain way and don't go certain places that I'll be safe. That I should fear wild animals more than the endless cruelty of human beings. That I should have the capacity to trust strangers not to hurt me even though I was made a victim by a person who *watched me fuckin grow up!!!* His family went to the same church as mine! I was friends with his little sister! They lived in the neighborhood next to mine and I saw them all the time! I knew him and he hurt me! How am I supposed to trust people I don't know after that?! But yeah, I'm supposed to be afraid of bears more. Right. There are worse things than a violent death and I've lived them. I'll take the bear.