# Man, bear, woman,what's the meme I'm missing?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/man-bear-woman-whats-the-meme-im-missing/1001284>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [May 9, 2024, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/man-bear-woman-whats-the-meme-im-missing/1001284 "2024-05-09T03:33:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 92

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**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2024, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/man-bear-woman-whats-the-meme-im-missing/1001284/92 "2024-05-09T19:28:32Z")

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> [@puzzlegal](#):
>
> I often run into random men while hiking, and so far, none has attacked me, nor been harmful in any way. Sometimes i say, “hi”. Sometimes i ask for directions, or how much farther it is to the goal. Sometimes they ask me these things. So I picked the man.
> 
> If the question is about being attacked, i might change my answer to preferring the bear. There are a lot of ways it would be worse to be attacked by a man.

ISTM that a lot of the subtext in this discussion involves respondents’ making unspoken assumptions about why the man is out there in the woods.

Everybody knows that the bear is wandering around in the woods because that’s just where bears live. (And shit, natch, and do all the rest of their bear business.)

But there is a popular perception, stoked (and not just among women) by centuries of sensationalist crime reporting and fiction, that if a lone man is out in the woods then there’s a significantly heightened probability that he’s some kind of crazy predator. Of course you’d rather encounter a bear just going about his/her bear business than run that kind of risk.

I’m willing to bet that almost all of the women who responded that they’d rather encounter a bear than a man when alone in the woods would switch their answer if instead the context was, say, alone in an elevator in a busy office building during the workday.

That’s a situation in which a man is presumed by default to be going about normal man business rather than acts of crazy predation. A bear in an elevator, in the other hand, is far more likely to be distressed and aggressive rather than just doing normal bear business. (Although maybe the bear came into town to see her lawyer or something, I don’t know her bear life.)

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