1. Make up a ragebait scenario comparing half the population to lethal predators

2. Act surprised that half the population does not like being compared to wild animals

3. Write posts about how people being insulted by your insulting ragebait are clearly the problem

4. Book deals for the article authors

5. Lose support for your causes from the half the population you insulted and use this as further proof that you are righteous

In the worst case scenario of such an encounter, and I mean worst case scenario: As a woman I would rather be mauled to death and eaten by a bear than be raped, killed, raped again, shared with his mates and ultimately possibly eaten by a man.

Do we need this here also? It’s so tiring on TikTok.

Right I’m out of the loop. What is a bear?

Does this new bear fit in with the Brown - Lie down, black - fight back, and white - good night?

Thank you for a link explaining it, I keep seeing it referenced but didn’t understand til now.

Honestly if I was a girl I’d choose a bear too

This is the best one I’ve seen so far

Lots of people have mental health issues, and somehow, women prefer to let it out on men.

Like, I get that women feel unsafe. That has a lot of environmental, work related, stress related reasons. Somehow, women think that men are the problem.

Realized how gay I was when I said I would choose the bear until I realized they meant the animal

I mean, it’s an obvious bait question, right, and the question is so good at being obvious bait that it’s kind of become like this meme which typifies this cultural quirk, right, so now I expect to see it like, at least for the next month or two, right. At least the half-life of memes on the internet is super short now so I can probably just ignore it and see it rapidly replaced with another shitty obvious bait meme.

In any uhhh, in any case, they’re both pretty unpredictable, right, but a bear can kill you pretty quick, and a man seems easier to deal with if we’re talking like, both are going to come at you and kill you in sort of a worst case scenario, right. I dunno about the relative statistics of bear attacks vs like, random attacks from men, or you know bear encounters resulting in attacks vs encounters with men resulting in like, random attacks or SA or like even just creepy comments or behavior, and maybe the tradeoff of, saw a bear, vs, saw a weird dude, is worth it if the dudes are making comments at such an outsized rate and bears are not attacking that frequently. Probably depends on the bear, too, like a black bear, probably fine, grizzly, you’re probably fucked.

I’m pretty sure that the highest rates of SA and murder and shit like that tend to be from people that are in your immediate vicinity, though, people you know, either in immediate friendships or one step removed from that, right, rather than just from random dudes walking in the woods. I’m a random dude in the woods a lot of the time, I do my best to avoid other people as much as possible, not because of the possibility of assault, but because I don’t want to be met with awkwardness or like, someone who’s afraid of my dog or has a dog of their own which is aggressive or whatever. So you should probably be more worried about the dude taking you on the hike, rather than the random dude you’re seeing on the hike, I’d say.

A lot of this also comes down to dudes not understanding like, the institutional power that they wield over women, which is what I see as the main problem, rather than this like. Idea that all men are evil, or whatever, Which is partially fair looking at the stats, but is also kind of prejudice, and definitely is a way that some women feel either based on past experiences or based on like, propagated stereotypes. Men can oftentimes just SA someone and then basically get away without, either because they have power over finances, living situation, employment situation, because they’re more adequately able to leverage a social network against whoever they’ve SA’d with the same mechanisms, because they’re able to psychologically manipulate people via the same mechanisms. That’s more what patriarchy refers to, rather than like. Unga bunga men big and strong, men could take advantage of me, men all crazy, kind of mentality, which I think is what a lot of men would assume it to be.

In any case, I think bear spray would probably help both situations. Maybe jiu jitsu? I dunno, I will say, I fear the cougar, the puma, the mountain lion. I live in the PNW and definitely you hear stories about hikers or joggers occasionally who just disappear for like a week or two with no explanation, and then the missing persons case comes up that they got killed by a mountain lion, which, uhh, sucks, and probably we should stop building human settlements in ways which encroach on the potentially mobile territories of large roaming predator species which are important to curbing the spread of shit like deer which can completely destabilize an ecosystem.

There’s literally no contest.

A couple minutes of searching the web and you’ll find some variance in the stats, but the common theme is that bears don’t cause a lot of fatalities, the data aggregated here suggests that there were 46 fatalities in North America, in the span of 17 years.

Meanwhile you look at 2019 murder statistics in the US alone: 10,335 murders perpetrated by men in a single year; and that’s strictly murder. Other violent crimes like rape are also tracked, albeit without offender sex, there were 122,822 of those in the same year.

Now obviously, people don’t go traipsing into bear country every day, and we’re constantly around other humans, so those stats are inherently skewed and not a direct comparison.

Nevertheless, what those stats do demonstrate, to me at least, is that people are some selfish, violent, motherfuckers. And unfortunately, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of that violence. If you take offense to that fact, and aren’t an awful person yourself, then you need to wake the fuck up and take a look around. No one’s accusing you specifically of being a rapist or a murderer, but there’s a non-negligible trend here, and an uncomfortable truth that has yet to be sufficiently addressed; and that’s the whole fucking point of this thought experiment in the first place.

I’m a dude and an avid hiker in the PNW, I’ve also had encounters with over a dozen bears over the last 5 years.

I’d prefer to encounter a bear when by myself in the woods.

Bears are predictable.

G uaranteed we are dangerous. Can easily rip toilet paper no sweat

This article may be clickbait, and it may or may not be a true representation of which is actually more risky, but I want to say that I am sorry for my role that we, as men, have played to let it get to the point where this isn’t considered a stupid comparison and I am both saddened and deeply sorry that women are made to feel this way.

I just want to say that I feel like most people in this this thread have never been alone in the forest with a bear. I have and even as a guy that shit will get your pulse racing. I feel that if you were in the forest alone with a bear and THEN you got to decide if you were rather the bear was a man, 90% of people would switch to a man once they realized what that felt like. Don’t believe me? Watch the show “Alone” and see how badly these PROFESSIONAL survival experts are shaken by bear encounters.