The bear is honest, either it eats you or it fucks off. The bear would never pretend to be friendly to gain your trust, or pretend to fuck off and instead stalk you for days. I can more accurately surmise a bears intentions than i can for any random man because all the bear could possibly want out of me is a meager amount of food.
Men getting angry about this are being upset by the possibility that they could potentially be considered threatening, by a completely uninformed third party nonetheless. And their chosen recourse is to demonstrate threatening behavior.
One thing about being a man is other men drop their guards around you and say the things they believe about their roles regarding women and masculinity. In my experience, most men are fine. Many are confused about who they are and their place in the world but do their best to be good people. Other men are just rotten, selfish, and/or broken people for many reasons. They’re often victims of abuse who perpetuate that abuse.
Some, though, are also confused and do their best, but what their best looks like is informed by people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. They believe women are somehow subhuman and that treating them as such is natural, right, and good. They believe in a social hierarchy and that might makes right. These are the men to worry about. The bad men I mentioned before generally know they’re bad or are broken enough that one can notice. These guys, though, appear normal but will absolutely fuck you over to get what they believe they deserve, all the while patting themselves on the back for being such an upstanding person who is “just enforcing the natural order”.
Ugh. I hate it when some misogynistic asshole assumes I agree with his views on women because I have the same downstairs anatomy as he does. Fuck you and stop “🙄 women…” around me. You’d be the first one to whine about a woman doing the same thing about men.
Men need to be better about calling out the shitty misogynists. Because the thing is, misogynists inherently don’t care about women calling them out. When another man tells them to check themselves and shut the fuck up, they take notice.
I too would prefer the bear, and I say that as a man. My masculinity isn’t threatened by acknowledging there’s creepy men out there.
Yeah you can see that in action in this very thread. Anybody who mentions they’re a woman tends to get downvoted regardless of the actual content of their comment.
That is one thing I am trying to teach to my nephew and especially other adults. Best part is the teenager didn’t need to be taught. I am always caught a little off guard when I bring something up and he immediately says the obvious. I don’t have to fruitlessly explain why something is wrong. Silly quirks of Gen Z/alpha aside, I finally have some hope.
Everyone needs to call out shitty behavior. I get frustrated with people, even those I love, who don’t want to “get involved” and just ignore it. I don’t care if you think they are set in their ways, like that makes it ok. I don’t care if they get upset. Fuck that. There are always exceptional situations where doing so will get you beaten, killed, disowned, or worse, but even then I wonder if it is worth the cost sometimes.
All I ask is for people to try and be better. It takes time and a lot of it is confronting yourself. First step is to stop doing X bad behavior. Next is to take ownership of every time you think that way and question why. Getting in the mindset of “I can’t do X around “those” people or they get mad” is the wrong place to be in.
I do understand when people don’t want to put themselves in harms way or risk their life, but that’s a minority of the situations. Most of the time you can speak up and say it’s fucked up.
And the impact of outreach is really understated, and quite safe. I still remember how my perception of “well how was she dressed?” was totally shattered – some college students, men, were talking to us in high school, and they told us to think it through. No one goes “oh she’s showing a lot of her skin, I think I’ll rape her”. It’s so obvious in retrospect, but those guys really opened my eyes.
All I ask is for people to try and be better. It takes time and a lot of it is confronting yourself.
Exactly. I haven’t been perfect on this. I didn’t understand the #yesallwomen thing several years ago, and was hung up on “yeah but it’s not like all guys are bad”, until my sister really broke it down for me and explained her own experiences.
I’ve said terrible things out of insecurity and jealousy before, and my friends made it clear that yeah it was fucked for me to say, but it was important to recognize it and move past it. I didn’t have to feel guilty forever, but the important part was understanding that what I did was not okay. And that really helped me learn from my mistakes without feeling burdened by them. It’s a learning process, but you have to surround yourself with good people who’ll call you out and guide you if you screw up.
Remember all the women getting angry about the Pence Rule (never be alone with a woman who isn’t your wife) and some men saying they follow it because it’s a good idea because while most interactions aren’t going to result in false accusations any of them potentially could and the stakes are too high to leave it to chance? Remember all the claims that that is wildly misogynistic?
This bear thing is essentially the same.thing with the genders flipped.
the possibility that they could potentially be considered threatening, by a completely uninformed third party nonetheless.
The statement is actually that the possiblity of men potentially doing something is so high or so severe that the average bear is preferable.
The rest of your post is opinion though, and if you genuinely believe that the average man is more likely to be dangerous than the average bear, I don’t think it’s possible to change your mind
If you genuinely believe that the average man is more likely to be dangerous than then average bear… that’s just statistics.
"The chances of being injured by a bear are approximately 1 in 2.1 million, according to the National Park Service. You are more likely to be killed by a bee than a bear, and way more likely to be killed by another human than by either bear or bee.
And when bear encounters do happen, they are most often nonviolent. Bears are as afraid of you as you are of them, and bears want to avoid humans at all costs. The most common outcome of a bear encounter is that the bear flees." https://www.idausa.org/campaign/wild-animals-and-habitats/bear-attack/
Your entire post is inaccurate because it takes into account the frequency of being near a bear. Your chance of being injured by a bear greatly increases as you get near a bear.
The article is just about being in a forest. Not like you’re locked in a room with the bear. As my source says, the bear is likely to avoid you if they see you, so proximity doesn’t really matter.
Thank you for the response. It’s calm and well reasoned.
I did some math, and it doesn’t support my position without assumptions, but I’m keeping it because it was effort and I think it’s helpful.
My main argument is that those stats have massive amount of bias due to the amount of men the average woman encounters vs the amount of bears a woman encounters. I think the actual likelihood of being attacked by a man in an encounter vs a bear is still a lot higher on the bear’s side, but I can’t find stats for that.
Assuming a woman encounters 1000 different men a year and 1 bear (which I think is fair), changes my math to 0.008% for the bear vs 0.00014% for the man.
You don’t know anything. There’s a reason that the real name of “bears” is taboo in many cultures. Just the act of saying its true name made the ancients shit their pants in fear of accidently summoning one. Bears are no joke. They kill on a whim. You can’t reason with bears. You can’t plead with bears. Bears are equal opportunity killers. They kill men, women, children, trans, straight, queer, ponybros, attack helicopters all the same. Your only chance is to make yourself appear too much a hassle that they rather go eat something else. Let all these women and men who approve of the OP’s post be tested irl. See if they will sing the same tune.
You are so whacky a person that this took genuine effort to determine whether or not it’s satire. I know when you typed that up it probably seemed hard hitting and effective, but I’m just imagining someone earnestly saying “You don’t know anything.” as an OPENER and I cannot stop laughing about it.
I’ve been in the woods, alone, with bears in the same woods, countless times, and I clearly haven’t been eaten.
I mean, you even say in your post that being too much of a hassle to eat is all you need to do. Can’t say that any men I’ve ever talked to wanted to have less sex with me when I indicated I’m a hassle to eat.
anyone who even for a moment considers ‘bear’ is just showing they have absolutely no real experience in any sort of wild situation. Never choose an encounter with a bear, it is a predator and the apex predator of wherever you are to boot, its a ridiculous exercise meant to rile people up.
with this same argument id 100% take a dinosaur over any woman, because hell, she might knife me when I least expect it, but the allosaurus has a clear motive.
Anyone who is afraid of bears has absolutely no experience in the wild. It might do you some good to actually get that experience in the wild. A hike is much better for your brain than writing a post about how outraged you are that someone “made a ridiculous exercise meant to rile people up”
The fact that you don’t understand why women think the bear is safer is exactly why we’re picking it.
Let me spell it out for you - the bear will either kill me and eat me or leave me alone.
The man may try to rape me. And leave me alive with the suffering that results from that rape. And there’s a chance he may impregnate me and in many states in this country, I will not be able to abort it and will have to give birth to it, which is another assault on my body.
I would rather just be eaten. At least in that case the pain ends.
Heres a fun fact for you, Bears are known to eat their prey alive, so no. he wont kill you and eat you, it will be the other way around. so you will live the rest of your very, very short life being eaten alive by an apex predator.
i mean, if the baseline here is death, we should be including suicide. Nothing stops you from just killing yourself if you consider the end game to be death. Not that it’s any better. But it’s probably a lot less worse than it previously was.
The bear is honest, either it eats you or it fucks off. The bear would never pretend to be friendly to gain your trust, or pretend to fuck off and instead stalk you for days. I can more accurately surmise a bears intentions than i can for any random man because all the bear could possibly want out of me is a meager amount of food.
Men getting angry about this are being upset by the possibility that they could potentially be considered threatening, by a completely uninformed third party nonetheless. And their chosen recourse is to demonstrate threatening behavior.
Some men are real snowflakes tbh
I’m a man and I endorse this message.
One thing about being a man is other men drop their guards around you and say the things they believe about their roles regarding women and masculinity. In my experience, most men are fine. Many are confused about who they are and their place in the world but do their best to be good people. Other men are just rotten, selfish, and/or broken people for many reasons. They’re often victims of abuse who perpetuate that abuse.
Some, though, are also confused and do their best, but what their best looks like is informed by people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. They believe women are somehow subhuman and that treating them as such is natural, right, and good. They believe in a social hierarchy and that might makes right. These are the men to worry about. The bad men I mentioned before generally know they’re bad or are broken enough that one can notice. These guys, though, appear normal but will absolutely fuck you over to get what they believe they deserve, all the while patting themselves on the back for being such an upstanding person who is “just enforcing the natural order”.
That’s why I’d also choose the bear.
Ugh. I hate it when some misogynistic asshole assumes I agree with his views on women because I have the same downstairs anatomy as he does. Fuck you and stop “🙄 women…” around me. You’d be the first one to whine about a woman doing the same thing about men.
Men need to be better about calling out the shitty misogynists. Because the thing is, misogynists inherently don’t care about women calling them out. When another man tells them to check themselves and shut the fuck up, they take notice.
I too would prefer the bear, and I say that as a man. My masculinity isn’t threatened by acknowledging there’s creepy men out there.
Yeah you can see that in action in this very thread. Anybody who mentions they’re a woman tends to get downvoted regardless of the actual content of their comment.
Like, homeboy you’re just doing a sexism.
This comment section has been extremely disappointing.
That is one thing I am trying to teach to my nephew and especially other adults. Best part is the teenager didn’t need to be taught. I am always caught a little off guard when I bring something up and he immediately says the obvious. I don’t have to fruitlessly explain why something is wrong. Silly quirks of Gen Z/alpha aside, I finally have some hope.
Everyone needs to call out shitty behavior. I get frustrated with people, even those I love, who don’t want to “get involved” and just ignore it. I don’t care if you think they are set in their ways, like that makes it ok. I don’t care if they get upset. Fuck that. There are always exceptional situations where doing so will get you beaten, killed, disowned, or worse, but even then I wonder if it is worth the cost sometimes.
All I ask is for people to try and be better. It takes time and a lot of it is confronting yourself. First step is to stop doing X bad behavior. Next is to take ownership of every time you think that way and question why. Getting in the mindset of “I can’t do X around “those” people or they get mad” is the wrong place to be in.
I do understand when people don’t want to put themselves in harms way or risk their life, but that’s a minority of the situations. Most of the time you can speak up and say it’s fucked up.
And the impact of outreach is really understated, and quite safe. I still remember how my perception of “well how was she dressed?” was totally shattered – some college students, men, were talking to us in high school, and they told us to think it through. No one goes “oh she’s showing a lot of her skin, I think I’ll rape her”. It’s so obvious in retrospect, but those guys really opened my eyes.
Exactly. I haven’t been perfect on this. I didn’t understand the #yesallwomen thing several years ago, and was hung up on “yeah but it’s not like all guys are bad”, until my sister really broke it down for me and explained her own experiences.
I’ve said terrible things out of insecurity and jealousy before, and my friends made it clear that yeah it was fucked for me to say, but it was important to recognize it and move past it. I didn’t have to feel guilty forever, but the important part was understanding that what I did was not okay. And that really helped me learn from my mistakes without feeling burdened by them. It’s a learning process, but you have to surround yourself with good people who’ll call you out and guide you if you screw up.
Remember all the women getting angry about the Pence Rule (never be alone with a woman who isn’t your wife) and some men saying they follow it because it’s a good idea because while most interactions aren’t going to result in false accusations any of them potentially could and the stakes are too high to leave it to chance? Remember all the claims that that is wildly misogynistic?
This bear thing is essentially the same.thing with the genders flipped.
This seems like a slight mischaracterisation:
The statement is actually that the possiblity of men potentially doing something is so high or so severe that the average bear is preferable.
The rest of your post is opinion though, and if you genuinely believe that the average man is more likely to be dangerous than the average bear, I don’t think it’s possible to change your mind
If you genuinely believe that the average man is more likely to be dangerous than then average bear… that’s just statistics.
"The chances of being injured by a bear are approximately 1 in 2.1 million, according to the National Park Service. You are more likely to be killed by a bee than a bear, and way more likely to be killed by another human than by either bear or bee.
And when bear encounters do happen, they are most often nonviolent. Bears are as afraid of you as you are of them, and bears want to avoid humans at all costs. The most common outcome of a bear encounter is that the bear flees." https://www.idausa.org/campaign/wild-animals-and-habitats/bear-attack/
“One in five women in the United States experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetime.” https://www.nsvrc.org/resource/2500/national-intimate-partner-and-sexual-violence-survey-2015-data-brief-updated-release And that’s not counting all sexual assault, and it’s not counting regular violence, just rape.
If that doesn’t change your mind, I don’t think it’s possible to change your mind because you’re not interested in facts.
Your entire post is inaccurate because it takes into account the frequency of being near a bear. Your chance of being injured by a bear greatly increases as you get near a bear.
The article is just about being in a forest. Not like you’re locked in a room with the bear. As my source says, the bear is likely to avoid you if they see you, so proximity doesn’t really matter.
Thank you for the response. It’s calm and well reasoned. I did some math, and it doesn’t support my position without assumptions, but I’m keeping it because it was effort and I think it’s helpful.
My main argument is that those stats have massive amount of bias due to the amount of men the average woman encounters vs the amount of bears a woman encounters. I think the actual likelihood of being attacked by a man in an encounter vs a bear is still a lot higher on the bear’s side, but I can’t find stats for that. Assuming a woman encounters 1000 different men a year and 1 bear (which I think is fair), changes my math to 0.008% for the bear vs 0.00014% for the man.
Taking UK stats. As I’m most familiar with them. 41 homicides were perpetrated by a strangers in 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2023#the-relationship-between-victims-and-suspects
Male population is 29.2 million as of the latest UK census. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/male-and-female-populations/latest/
Do the math assuming all homicides were committed by men. Is a 0.00014% chance of a male killing a stranger.
The US has approx 900,000 wild bears plus maybe another 100,000 brown bears (cannot find a clear source for this). So lets call it an even 1 million. https://wildlifeinformer.com/black-bear-population-by-state/
According to your article on bears, there have been 4 deaths in the last 50 years. So averaging 0.08 deaths a year.
Which is 0.000008% chance of a bear having killed a person that year.
You don’t know anything. There’s a reason that the real name of “bears” is taboo in many cultures. Just the act of saying its true name made the ancients shit their pants in fear of accidently summoning one. Bears are no joke. They kill on a whim. You can’t reason with bears. You can’t plead with bears. Bears are equal opportunity killers. They kill men, women, children, trans, straight, queer, ponybros, attack helicopters all the same. Your only chance is to make yourself appear too much a hassle that they rather go eat something else. Let all these women and men who approve of the OP’s post be tested irl. See if they will sing the same tune.
You are so whacky a person that this took genuine effort to determine whether or not it’s satire. I know when you typed that up it probably seemed hard hitting and effective, but I’m just imagining someone earnestly saying “You don’t know anything.” as an OPENER and I cannot stop laughing about it.
I’ve been in the woods, alone, with bears in the same woods, countless times, and I clearly haven’t been eaten.
I mean, you even say in your post that being too much of a hassle to eat is all you need to do. Can’t say that any men I’ve ever talked to wanted to have less sex with me when I indicated I’m a hassle to eat.
anyone who even for a moment considers ‘bear’ is just showing they have absolutely no real experience in any sort of wild situation. Never choose an encounter with a bear, it is a predator and the apex predator of wherever you are to boot, its a ridiculous exercise meant to rile people up.
with this same argument id 100% take a dinosaur over any woman, because hell, she might knife me when I least expect it, but the allosaurus has a clear motive.
Anyone who is afraid of bears has absolutely no experience in the wild. It might do you some good to actually get that experience in the wild. A hike is much better for your brain than writing a post about how outraged you are that someone “made a ridiculous exercise meant to rile people up”
Being afraid is not the same as being aware of the dangers, I never once said anything about fear.
you definitely are… how did it go?
maybe you need a hike.
The fact that you don’t understand why women think the bear is safer is exactly why we’re picking it.
Let me spell it out for you - the bear will either kill me and eat me or leave me alone.
The man may try to rape me. And leave me alive with the suffering that results from that rape. And there’s a chance he may impregnate me and in many states in this country, I will not be able to abort it and will have to give birth to it, which is another assault on my body.
I would rather just be eaten. At least in that case the pain ends.
Heres a fun fact for you, Bears are known to eat their prey alive, so no. he wont kill you and eat you, it will be the other way around. so you will live the rest of your very, very short life being eaten alive by an apex predator.
It will still eventually end.
And the fact that you don’t understand this shows me you’re one of those people i never want to meet alone in the woods.
i mean, if the baseline here is death, we should be including suicide. Nothing stops you from just killing yourself if you consider the end game to be death. Not that it’s any better. But it’s probably a lot less worse than it previously was.
Women here. I too would choose bear. Everytime. I’d rather get ripped apart than take a chance on a strange man.
This is the same thing I said but it’s downvoted. The only difference I can tell is that you mentioned you’re a woman.
There’s even other replies saying the same thing, but also specifically mentioning they’re written by a man. They’re not being downvoted en masse.
That’s pretty fucken stupid, huh?
quick edit: except for other guy replying to this, but he’s obviously being too much of an ally to get the upvote treatment, y’all are inconsistent.
I take this as a sincere compliment, thank you!
Oh I knew what I was setting myself up for, but I wanted to contribute anyway.