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.
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.