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sagevalleymusings · 4 months

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Man or Bear? Is a Stupid Dichotomy, but No One on Tumblr Will Believe Me

So there’s this meme that’s been going around… ‘which would you rather run into alone in the woods: a man, or a bear?’ I’ve heard a couple of variations on the answer (which of course is always ‘I choose the bear’) - at least someone would believe me about the bear attack, it depends on the bear… I’ve even heard the variant where a man will answer, well it depends on the man or the bear, but then if you ask the question, alone in the woods with a woman or a bear, well there’s no question!

Here’s the thing. I hate this thought experiment. For a lot of reasons, and I worry this essay will be nothing but me circling the point like a vulture if I try and write it without structure so as a spoiler, here’s the main three reasons: it treats violence from men against women as a personal threat and not a systemic issue, it continues to perpetuate the narrative of violence as heteropatriarchal, and it completely ignores race, even though race is highly prevalent when talking about gender and violence in America.

Are you ready to get into it?

The Violence is Unstated but it isn’t Subtext

Whether they mean to or not, when thinking about the man or bear prompt, people are primed by the language to come to a specific conclusion. People are thinking about men and bears as two things in a set and priming themselves for the belief that if it is a choice between the two, we are assessing the threat of two different apex predators. Everyone knows why you are asking this question, so everyone whether they realize it or not is answering as though what you meant is obviously, ‘would you rather be assaulted by a man or a bear?’ All of the responses hinge on the assumption that one of the two will assault you. We are less primed to think immediately of violence if the question is ‘would you rather be alone in the woods and run into a man or a blobfish’ for example.

But even that phrase, ‘alone in the woods’ evokes a long history of horror media and potentially even an evolutionary fear of predators. What about the question, ‘would you rather be alone in a tiger enclosure with a man, or with a tiger?’ ‘Would you rather be alone at a pet food store with a man or a coyote?’

Because if we’re being honest… I think I’d rather be assaulted by a bear too. And it has nothing to do with thinking that men are more physically dangerous. If my options are to be assaulted by a man or by a bear, at least a bear is alien and inhuman. It’s assaulting you for food, or for defense of her cubs, but a man would be deliberately causing another person harm, with the intent to terrorize. A bear is more likely to kill you accidentally, but there’s something about psychological violence that makes it more frightening even though it is less deadly.

And from what I’ve seen, the responses do seem to know this. Posts that actually get into the why talk about the fear of being followed home, the frustration with not being believed, the long-term psychological damage of the consequences of rape without Roe V Wade, the jeering catcalls and general lack of empathy… it’s never about the physical danger or threat of death that a man could bring, but all the things a man could bring that a bear literally could not, which are ultimately more frightening and insidious, precisely because they are not physical.

In previous iterations of this essay, I spent a long and arduous time proving why, when people cite that bears are more violent, it’s a faulty comparison. And I want to still get into that, but I don’t want to lose sight of this point. I agree that if my options were to be assaulted by a man or a bear, I would also prefer a bear. A bear can only kill you.

But the question isn’t ‘which would you be assaulted by’ it’s ‘run into alone.’ And because we are talking about one while meaning the other (foreshadowing) it absolutely encourages the assumption that running into a man alone is inherently a risk. I’ve seen people say this explicitly in response. I don’t like that this thought experiment leads to people talking about men as inherently violent, and I want to get into why I have a problem with that part.

But before I do, I want to be very clear that this is going to sound like me saying #notallmen, but I do take violence against women very seriously. I have never been more than casually groped by a man, which is relevant here when talking about lived experience, but I am still a woman and so I do understand the psychology that goes into having to take active precautions against violence from your fellow humans in a way that men just do not have to think about. But in the socioeconomic climate we find ourselves in, I think it bears considering that some women are thinking about male violence… a little too much.

Crime Statistics and White Hegemony

I’ve talked about this before, but there is a difference between ‘men commit more violent crimes’ and ‘men get convicted of more violent crimes.’ But when it comes to talking about rates of violence, we talk like we are speaking about the former while using the rates of the latter. And it cannot be left unsaid when talking about rates of conviction that black men get convicted of violent crimes at much higher rates than white men.

At the same time… there has been a real and genuine shift in our conversations about consent in the last forty years. Some of the numbers have not caught up yet but it’s important to bear in mind that violent crime of all kinds has been steadily going down for a long time. Part of the reason we don’t talk about this is because the American hegemony is reliant on prison as a form of capital and population control, and so politicians have a vested interest in keeping you specifically afraid of the dangers of violent outsiders.

It can still be propaganda even if it isn’t Mexicans specifically you are calling rapists and murderers.

This can be really hard for people who have been subject to violent crime to hear. And the numbers are pretty disappointing, even still. Patriarchal violence is real and present in America. But I will stand firm in my conviction that although violence from humans does represent a danger in the world, the way in which we talk about violence as an act men specifically do against women specifically is unhelpful for combating both systemic violence and personal violence. And even though we don’t think we’re doing ‘white women’s tears’ we absolutely are, because our statistics about violent crime in America come from conviction rates, which means we are basing our fear of all men on black men in specific.

When is Personal Violence Systemic?

I’m going to circle back to this point about violent crime, statistics, and racism, but I want to tangent briefly to talk about statistics normalization.

I saw one post early on which cited some actual numbers, and claimed that bears killed 8 women in North America between 2020-2022, while men killed 12,000 women in that time.

So about that population density…

There are approximately 800,000 brown and black bears in North America, the populations responsible for those 8 deaths. Meanwhile, there are approximately 225,407,000 legally adult males in the United States and Canada. That means that the ratio of deaths per bear in North America is 0.001% per bear. And the number of murders per adult man in North America is 0.005%. That does still mean that you are five times more likely to be murdered by a man than a bear, but… that is absolutely a zero percent chance of being murdered no matter what. Does that mean I think personal protection against that slim chance is pointless? Not really, they mostly never get used but do help when they are. But it’s important to bring up how rare it is already because there is another factor here that we’re not taking into consideration. It’s called negativity bias.

Have you ever seen a bear in the wild? Probably not, right? There’s not that many and they’re mostly in the forest. I would guess that a majority of people who actually do see a bear in the woods do get attacked by that bear. You’ve been in the woods with a bear, you just didn’t see them. The majority of the time, bears don’t care about you. You are a predator, and they’re an enormous mammal that just doesn’t have the energy for that fight. Bears get a reputation as violent animals much for the same reason that sharks do - because they are a dangerous predator, and if you do see one, that’s already a step too far.

So… Have you ever seen a man? Sounds like a dumb question, you presumably have a father. But go on this journey with me. There’s a likelihood that if you are inside of the North America demographics we’ve been talking about this whole time, you do not live in a female-exclusive commune that kicks little boys out of their den the second they stop breastfeeding, yes that is a real thing.

In which case, there are probably men you interact with. Dare I say it on a daily basis. Rural towns look safer on the surface but in fact when you adjust for population they are not, they just have less people and therefore less opportunity for disruption. This is why we have to adjust for population when we do demographics in general, but the fact that bears and people do not share the same social sphere means that adjusting for demographics does not truly normalize these two numbers. We are literally comparing apples and oranges. Are you more likely to be assaulted by the guy ringing up your groceries, or the lynx that just gave you a warning growl?

You are far more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash, even after normalizing the data for per vehicle, per passenger, per mile, or per trip. But we don’t act like that’s true because for most people most of the time, cars are incredibly safe - millions of people drive millions of cars safely every single day. The risk is negligible not because the number of automobile accidents are low - they aren’t. It’s negligible because when accounting for daily risk, cars occur in our daily life so frequently that we stop thinking about it as dangerous.

The risk of being attacked by a random man is, genuinely, also negligible. Choosing literally any adult man on earth to find yourself alone in the woods with versus any bear, you are physically safer choosing the man, statistically, not that you needed me to point that out because it’s the one thing the MRAs have figured out about this thought experiment and they won’t shut up about it.

But none of that matters emotionally, because of the negativity bias. Men are more likely to be the perpetrators of violent crime. Not by as much as you would think, and more on that later, but what this means is that if something dangerous has happened to you, it was probably done by a man. This is why the response to #notallmen was #yesallwomen. We become primed to believe men are threats not because they are, but because if we’ve experienced harm, it’s been by men. And that negativity bias is a bias. The hundreds of normal interactions you have in your day to day are normal.

But just because most men are fine doesn’t really change how people feel about it, does it? All of this stuff is subject to context, and if your context is negative, your conclusions will be negative. It depends on the man, it depends on the bear. If you see a polar bear at even twenty miles, you’re dead. Radio the base to warn them and pray to your god kind of dead. Polar bears are extremely territorial and more importantly they’re so much larger than us that they think we’re prey, which is not true of any other species of bear. I would rather be stuck in the woods with Ted Bundy than a polar bear, at least I have a chance of taking Ted Bundy in a fight. But if I have to choose between a sun bear and Matt Walsh, I’m definitely okay chilling with the sun bear. Hell, there is a long list of men no longer in my life right now that I wouldn’t choose before a sun bear. So believe me, I do get it.

Heteropatriarchal Assumptions

But the thing is, I would absolutely say it depends on the woman and it depends on the bear. I was living with four people, and the cops showed up because the two women got into a fist fight. My ex girlfriend was abusive. I moved three hundred miles because a woman was stalking me.

Women can also be violent. To quote from me: Women are less likely to be reported as perpetrators of violent crime, more likely to receive smaller sentences or warnings for the same crimes, and more likely to use methods which aren't considered assault (like emotional abuse). And when you look at self reports instead of crime statistics, the gender gap is much lower.

I had this complaint about #metoo when it first came around and people started posting the corresponding hashtag #believewomen. For starters, it doesn’t take almost any kind of queer domestic experiences into consideration. It’s hard to talk about for example partner violence in lesbian separatist circles where they firmly believe that violence is a male only behavior. The few times I tried mentioning people I knew who weren’t women who’d been raped or assaulted by women, I was told to sit down and shut up, because this conversation was about male violence against women and nothing else. And yeah, sure, it is… but it shouldn’t be.

Which I think is a good opportunity to circle back to negativity bias, because I did check those murder rate statistics by the way.

The number of women murdered in the United States and Canada between 2020-2022 was nearly exactly 12,000 - it was 12,075. This isn’t women murdered by men by the way - it’s all women murdered, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator. I can’t say for certain how many women were murdered by men specifically (most crimes are more frequently in-group violence), but I can say specifically that only about 78% of the perpetrators were men.

And also 77% of the victims. The number of men murdered in the same time frame was 44,715. Over three times higher. The numbers from our ‘man or bear’ folks deliberately remove the 6 men killed by bears and over forty-thousand men murdered in the same time frame. 12,000 looks pretty scary if the number you are comparing it to is 8. But it doesn’t look very large at all if the number you’re comparing it to is 44,000.

‘Men are murdered at disproportionately high rates compared to women’ is a thing which at this point would feel true if I said it, but again we’re looking at conviction rates. I got these US numbers straight from the FBI. Both the US and Canada notoriously have a high number of missing and murdered women.

Wait, I think I’m missing a word in there… oh right. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Oops All Racism

That’s right I’m talking about race again. I find it almost offensive as a white woman when I hear other white women talking about the threat of violence as an epidemic. The demographic info everyone is sharing about murders disproportionately represents people of color in the perpetrator column and the victim column. That 12,000 number just isn’t about me. We cannot have this conversation unless we are willing to look at intersectionality. I will 100% always and without reservation believe a black or brown woman when she says that she feels threatened. But I extend less grace to my fellow white women. We have been tools of white hegemony for a long, long, long time. America’s system of oppression, including patriarchal oppression, relies on our fear of male violence to maintain control.

I cannot help but have a conspiratorial voice in my head whispering that it serves white hegemony to keep me, a white woman, afraid of men in general while pretending that it’s not black men we’re talking about. From a practical standpoint, a fear and distrust of all men has not and does not lead to white men being convicted at the same rate. Even if you use the language of feminism to justify that fear. What it does lead to is continued reliance on a criminal justice system which fails to arrest for crimes committed, fails to convict for crimes arrested, and disproportionately punishes people of color and black men in specific as an extension of slavery.

If I find myself alone in the woods with a black man, let’s be real here… the threat in that space is not the man. It’s me.

So What Now?

In conclusion, I think that painting men as the target of our ire in a conversation about patriarchal violence is the wrong tactic, because it teaches a fear of personal violence that from a sociological perspective bears out in increased policing of black and brown men only. I believe that the conversation we should be having about male violence is about politics and systems and not about personal interactions.

Brock Turner served half his sentence. Bill Cosby’s conviction was overturned only three years after the court case. Harvey Weinstein’s case is going to retrial right now. All of these people are household names - deeply vilified by most of the country. But it doesn’t matter. They are still free from consequences.

People are not the problem here. Systems are. Systems which privilege the rich and powerful, which give the benefit of the doubt to the perpetrator, and which discourage restorative justice. Post #metoo, we’ve genuinely made enormous strides on interpersonal relationships. It simply is not the case that the average person will refuse to believe you if you tell them you are the victim of a crime, even sexual assault. But in the court of law, a jury is legally required not to believe you unless the evidence is overwhelmingly otherwise.

I hate the thought exercise ‘man or bear’ because it highlights that there is a real problem but does nothing to attempt to solve it. And at this point in the conversation I am done underlining believe women in bright bold sharpie. I know where people stand by now, they’ve had plenty of time to figure this out. But I don’t need Mitch McConnell to get it in his bones why I’d cuddle with a black bear than spend five minutes in a room alone with him in order to get some fucking laws passed around here. And I think that while we focus on the fear of personal violence broadly, we lose some ability to control what laws exactly we’re talking about. Are ankle bracelets a safe and effective means of reintegration? How do we divest funds from overpolicing and into community care? Has increased security in secluded parks (where the question ‘man or bear’ is relevant) actually increased safety, or has it merely increased state violence toward vulnerable populations such as racial minorities, unhoused people, and persons with mental health issues?

Yes we need to fix patriarchal violence in our country. And we have been. We’ve literally been watching this happen for years. And it’s for that reason for me that I think the man or bear thought experiment feels like a second wave argument in a fourth wave era. Feminism cannot continue to be about protecting women from men without taking into account the ways in which intersections of privilege affect those relationships, including the ways in which white women have power in this society and ‘man or bear’ completely flattens a lot of the conversation and work we’ve already been doing.

I believe in our ability to have nuanced conversations about violence, and ‘I’d choose the bear’ isn’t it.

#well #time to turn off my notifications forever #it was nice knowing you that one scholomance essay everyone liked #white feminism #man or bear #crime statistics #violent crime #team nuance #i really put off posting this #I know you possums are gonna tear me apart for this #but watching white hippies sell 'i choose the bear' stickers at the farmers market was the final straw

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