It’s a TikTok thing. Hypothetically, would the woman being asked rather cross paths with a man she doesn’t know in the woods, or a bear? Lots of women pick bear, because as an animal its behavior is more predictable and arguably less dangerous to a woman than some random dude who for all she knows is a serial murdering rapist or some shit. And think of it this way: you see a bear in the distance and calmly walk the other way, most of the time you’ll be fine. It won’t follow you back to the parking lot, and then get into a car of its own and follow you back to your apartment.

Some men are upset by this reasoning and instead try to mansplain how dangerous bears are. (Bears will also not send you aggressive messages on social media berating you for some stupid TikTok meme bullshit)

There was a guy who responded to this.

His mom was attacked by a bear and wrote a book about it. He said that she felt safer around men than around bears in response to this trend.

Thing is though, she did an AMA on Reddit a few years back and someone trawled through the answers and found a question where she was basically asked her this exact thing. She said that she feels safer around bears than men and that she carries a gun when she goes hiking but not because of the risk of running into a bear again.

There have been some really good responses from women defending choosing a bear. Here’s a few that stuck out to me that I remember:

[CW: assault/SA]

“At least a bear sees me as human”

“Nobody would ask me what I was wearing if I got attacked by a bear”

“The worst that a bear can do is kill me”

“If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me”

“When I got attacked by a bear I screamed at it and it ran away, when I got attacked by a man he smiled, covered my mouth, and said that he was just going to enjoy it more”

“A bear would only take 5 minutes”

“A bear wouldn’t kill me for pleasure”

A lot of “defensive” men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it’s a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they’d rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust.

The question is very specifically worded to ask women if they would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man.

I saw one really good response from a man who clearly wasn’t quite over the line with regards to women’s liberation and feminist values - think a middle of the road kinda guy - and his partner asked him if his daughter was in the woods alone would he rather there be a bear or a woman in the woods. He immediately said “With a woman” almost reflexively.

When he got posed the same question except with a bear or a man you could see him really wrestling with the question as he considered the implications and the risks. I think he settled on the bear but the point wasn’t about getting him to agree with women, it was getting him to understand some of the risks that women, trans people, and femme people weigh up on a near constant basis due to the risk that men pose.

In a similar vein, on a wild tangent, because I’m amab/masc presenting when the opportunity is right (either when there aren’t women around or when a guy has escalated a discussion) I will often drop the question on them and ask what their rape plan is. Generally they squirm and have to, for the first time, think through what they would do to mitigate their risk of being raped and what they would do if they were in that situation.

Often the answers are really poorly thought through, such as “I’d fight back” or “I wouldn’t get myself into that situation” 🙄

Sometimes it cuts through though and you can get a man to reflect on how pretty much any woman/trans person/femme person is going to have a very well developed rape plan with all sorts of strategies for mitigating the risk and how they carry these plans with them and enact them all of the time.

Which leads into my next tangent. An autistic femme presenting person talked about their experience trying to mask to fit in due to growing up undiagnosed and how it’s a response to a constant pattern of being ostracised, judged, and harassed for not fitting in but the moment that you drop the mask, people tend to respond really poorly to that so it’s a real double-bind where you either compromise your needs (and often your health) to get treated badly fairly often or you don’t make that compromise and you get treated badly for it.

I jumped in the comments and said “Y’know there’s a parallel here - women often report a similar double-bind where when a guy hits on them they either have to very gently and politely try to decline without coming off as being coy or they can be blunt and straight-up refuse but a blunt rejection very often gets an abusive response whereas a polite rejection gets ignored and compromises her own needs.”

That wasn’t anything widly political to say. I was just trying to invite allistic women to be like “Hey yeah! I understand that kind of experience where you are confronted with the choice of being treated like shit for just expressing yourself directly or you have to placate someone else’s needs and expend all of this energy just trying to get them to not treat you badly (and often they end up treating you badly after all that effort anyway). That sucks. I didn’t realise that’s what it was like for autistic people for most of their social interactions.”

But of course some ex-military jerkwad guy who was late self-identifying as autistic had to charge headlong into the replies to turn it into being all about men, all about him, and all about his own experience (and ableist perception) of autism to the exclusion of others. It was a perfect example of male fragility and it was yet-another example of guys doing that thing where they think they’re defending men by arguing that they aren’t capable of determining whether someone consents and that they cannot help but sexually harass women. Imagine how monstrous I am to argue that men are very much capable of knowing better and they can do things like “controlling their impulses like a mature human” being rather than being like wild animals that need to be physically restrained in order to protect the people around them. These dorks think the absolute worst of men and my hunch is that this kind of reply is mostly a self-report.

Dudes rock /s

In short, a woman wrote a piece in which she asks several of her woman friends, if they were alone in the woods, whether they’d rather run into a man or a bear. The majority chose the bear.

Man upset that they are considered dangerous to women then proceed to prove the point by acting like homicidal violent maniacs. “I’m not dangerous, not all men” I plead while punching a hole in the wall and threatening violence.

Bears however

when women

i solely know of this from a vaush fan in my vague social circle talking about it and me having no clue what they were talking about so i went to r/vaushv and searched up bear to try and get what they meant bcs it was so obviously just some dumb shit they’d gotten from there and there’s like half a dozen threads of “”“progressive”“” men going full ranting about leftist misandry and comparing being afraid of sexual harrasment to systemic racism against black men

.

here’s the start of the current thread they’ve got going:

vaush fan

not some chud

Make it a “Alone with an African man or a bear” and these men will agree with the women instantly lmao.

edit: most of these men would prolly be against transwomen going into women bathrooms

My S.O. posited this question to me and I choose the bear also and am surprised people here are pushing back against it.

Granted: if I’m lost in the woods I might have a different answer but assuming I know where I am and I stumble on a bear it’s incredibly statistically likely the bear is just minding its own business and isn’t gonna get involved in my business and I can probably scare it off if it starts to approach me easily enough.

If I encounter a strange person I’m immediately wondering what their reasons for being there even are. Sure: they might be the same as mine…but maybe they aren’t. Impossible to say for sure. The bear is a known quantity. It’s supposed to be there. I and the other person in the woods, generally speaking, aren’t.

A bear buys a new motorcycle and he wants to show it off to his friend rabbit. They get on and slowly go up a big hill. Then on the way down they go 80, 90, 100, 110, 120 km/h! The bear then asks the rabbit:

”Are you scared?”

“Nope”, says the rabbit, so they finish the ride and get off the bike.

“May I try driving now?”, asks the rabbit.

“Sure, why not”.

So they slowly go up the hill again, this time with the rabbit driving. And then they go down 80, 90, 100, 110, 120km/h! and the rabbit asks the bear:

“Are you scared?”

“Nope!”

“Well you should be, cause I can’t reach the brakes.”

Idk how the choice is even controversial. Rather meet a bear in the woods than a man any day.

Any man who chooses to be out in the woods when video games exist is clearly mentally unwell and dangerous.

Bears simply don’t have access to video games.

Oh, and bears tend to not have guns, and are easier to outsmart or evade. That stuff too, but mostly never trust an “outdoorsy type”.

I’d just like to add that as a regular ol’ cis dude, I’d much rather encounter a black bear than a random guy in the woods. I know how to deal with a black bear 99% of the time, I know how to deal with the random guy 85% of the time. I’m not particularly afraid of either scenario but I’d definitely take the bear.

Make it a grizzly bear and idk, I’ve never been anywhere that has wild grizzlies so I don’t know the proper protocol for dealing with them. Also in the 1% of cases where I can’t defuse the situation I think a grizzly just wins that fight. I feel like I can make a black bear give up on killing me.

I still think I’d rather take the grizzly bear that inexplicably hates me than the random guy that inexplicably hates me though. At least the grizzly will tell me how it really feels in very unambiguous terms.

i honestly dont know how men are getting so mad about the bear thing tbh. like how is your first thought when confronted with women expressing how unsafe rape culture makes them feel ‘but what about men’s feelings though’?/??

I’m a guy and I’d prefer the bear, and think everyone should choose the bear.

I’ve seen several bears back when I lived in China, they’re docile as fuck. I don’t think they’d ever attack a person since, y’know, they’re herbivores. They just sit around eating bamboo all day. It’d be like asking “Oh would you rather encounter a man in the forest or a wombat?”

He was a bear of a man, 6’2" and uncut

-Ben Shapiro

There was a hypothetical about women’s safety, leading to women explaining why they would feel safer encountering a bear in the forest than a man they didn’t know.