I thought my one post on the “bear vs. man” debate last month would be enough, but there are plenty of men who still don’t get the point and are doubling down recently to show precisely why so many women choose the bear.
I’m not going to recap the meme/debate for those few who are unaware—you can click the link above for that—but I will say that men, as they so often do with regard to issues of the threat men pose to women, are great at digging themselves deeper and deeper holes.
And it’s interesting because of a recent news story about a woman who was killed by a black bear in California earlier this month. Now, I’m sure plenty of dudes jumped on this story to shout, “Told you so!” but one social media post by @stillgray on X/Twitter is notable. He quote-retweeted an article about the woman’s death and wrote, “Still prefer bears over men?” And, as @Whatapityonyou pointed out with her post of a screenshot of his tweet, “Well I don’t see the bears gloating over a woman dying, so...”
That’s precisely the problem. Men jump on a very uncommon story and occurrence—this is the first recorded time in California history that a black bear has killed a human, apparently—to make their point. It doesn’t make their misogynist point though; it refutes it. Again, this is a rare occurrence. The bears have a lot of catching up to do to match the number of times that men have killed or even assaulted (sexually or otherwise) women in or near the woods. A lot.
That was always the point. On the whole, men pose a bigger potential threat every single time. Sure, it’s not “all men” who are the bad guys but it’s “so many men” that it means every man has to be seen as a potential threat until he demonstrates otherwise. And to be honest, that proof or demonstration can be years in the making because many men are patient enough to act nice for months or even years before they become abusive.
It wasn’t only this story of the elderly woman getting killed by a bear that inspired me to pose a “part 2” here on the bear vs. man issue, though. I’ve also seen other, unrelated posts by men recently (before the story broke) who have continued to simmer about women choosing bears long after women pretty much were done with the meme. For example, men posting things like “Well, what if an angry bear was chasing you and a man was there with a gun to save you—who would you choose then?”
Again, not only does it utterly miss the point, because most bears don’t start aggressive in encounters with people, but the question was never “Would you rather be attacked by a bear in the woods or meet a strange man in the woods?” The fact that men have to concoct elaborate fantasy situations and hypotheticals to look better than the bear as a prospect pretty much prove the point of why the question ever took off as a meme and resonated so much with women. It’s far from the first time men have taken to social media in droves to create scenarios to convince women that they have nothing to fear from men when in fact they have plenty to fear from men.
It reminds me in particular of a period of time in which the “defund the police” issue was particularly hot, and so many men posed the question: “Well, if there are fewer police, who’s going to protect you from being raped?”
Well, certainly not the police, even if you doubled or tripled the size of the police force. Leaving aside the issue of so many stories of police sexually assaulting women themselves, police don’t stop rapes. How could they? They would hardly ever be there to witness a man trying to rape a woman. That’s an incredibly rare occurrence. Not to mention the fact that police routinely don’t even take charges of rape by women seriously. That’s a documented fact. They just don’t care.
It’s just like a lot of men—many men—possibly even most men, don’t really take women seriously when they talk about how almost all of them have been sexually assaulted to some degree at some point in their lives or at the very least sexually harassed on numerous occasions. Men tend to doubt this no matter how many studies or stats say it’s true, and often men don’t even take sexual assault, emotional abuse of women, and the like seriously when they are aware of it. They often brush it off or forgive their buddies for doing such stuff to woman after woman. Or they do it themselves because it’s “just what men do” or whatever. What traumatizes women ends up inspiring little more than shrugs from men overall.
So, I think this is the last time I need post on this issue of bears vs. men, but it’s still the bear most of us will choose. Do better and raise your boys better and maybe that will change.
Yes, most definitely, and it isn’t solely in the realm of sexual and/or other kinds of physical assault, it’s also the fact that males, and unfortunately some females, believe they have an innate right to dominate females in every way. The Judeo-Christian hierarchy of males at the head of the household ruling over all the others that for millennia has dominated both church and state has sanctified male dominance in every time and place throughout the ages. Very hard to turn that freighter around!!
I LOVE 💕 THIS