Regarding the “not all men are violent killers” idea, though that is probably statistically accurate, we men don’t have metadata floating above us at all times telling women which of us are actually safe to be around. So they have to be careful.
And even setting aside violence I, as a 6’ 3" guy can go almost anywhere I want anytime without being threatened or even bothered. Poor women (and I’m not being facetious or sarcastic), however, probably can’t even go into a coffee shop or restaurant by themselves with a good book, without being bothered and hit on.
After the University of Montreal massacre in Dec 1989 there was a really interesting Globe and Mail opinion column about how men should feel or have an obligation to make women feel safe in day to day situations. One example given was, if a guy is walking down a sidewalk at night and he is approaching a lone woman, then he should cross the road so that she can feel less of a potential threat. I really don’t have a problem with that. I also think that it would suck if every time I went out I was constantly being bugged by people almost twice my weight and a foot taller than me.
As for the choice itself, I feel compelled to make the following points:
If the question is about which you would feel more threatened by, there is no right or wrong answer; how you feel is how you feel.
If the question is which you would objectively be in more danger from, then there is a “correct” answer, but I don’t know what it is, and it would depend on what parameters and assumptions are true about the situation.
Human beings are notoriously bad at objectively assessing risk and being afraid of things in proportion to the actual danger levels they pose.
Some discussions of this that I’ve seen (which compare the number of women who have been attacked by men against the number of women who have been attacked by bears) seem to me to be falling victim to the base rate fallacy (women encounter far fewer bears on the whole. What percentage of the men/bears that you have encountered have posed a danger to you?).
Millions of women are raped or beaten or killed by men every year. Every second of every day, women are being sexually assaulted by men. And most of these assaults are when a woman is alone with a man, or otherwise trapped (like in a crowded subway).
Bears, black bears anyway, almost always just run away when a person shows up.
The only possible reason for a women to choose a man over a bear is because they don’t know anything about bears.
Yeah, I think it’s useful to take “Women regularly feel threatened by random men” as the lesson but trying to objectively prove one answer or the other isn’t helpful. Millions of women are assaulted but many of them are assaulted by partners, family, etc and not random men. What kind of bear are we talking about? How many women are assaulted by a strange man in the woods? On the other hand, there’s possibly a disproportionate number of bad men loitering around remote but traveled areas (assaults on running trails and the like) versus a randomly selected man. Sort of like my assumptions about a guy in a dark alleyway at 2am are different than a guy on a suburban sidewalk at noon.
Point being there’s a million different ways to frame the question but none are especially useful versus just recognizing the top level answer of “women regularly feel threatened by men” and doing whatever with that knowledge.
I’m curious why they chose a bear for the poll and not a lion or some other animal. Is it because both men and bears are large, furry and (generally) walk on two legs?
To cross the meme stream a bit, if it was Paddington Bear I’d be very afraid. He seems to have become some kind of angel of death / grim reaper figure. Constantly taking celebrities by the hand and leading them to the great beyond.
I have a wife and two daughters. Their consensus, which I agree with, is:
Y’all all really need to spend more time outdoors.
Given the choice between encountering a bear alone in the woods, and encountering nobody in the woods, choose the bear! Bears are cool, and it’s super fun to see one in the wild!
We live in black bear territory, and they’re not really scary.
My wife walks alone in the woods a lot, and said she feels little concern about seeing a strange man on her walks. But she walks on pretty popular trails, and acknowledges she might feel different if it were on a remote stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Similarly, it might be different if the trail were in the Yukon, and the bear were polar.
The underlying point–that women have good reason to be wary of men they encounter in isolated situations–is of course an interesting point. Most of the conversation I’ve read around it, though, has been garbage.
A friend of mine lives in rural black bear country and describes them as “Giant dumb dogs”.
Black bear feels like a coin flip to me. Probably not dangerous but gonna mess me up if it is. I’d be willing to meet a random panda bear though, I think. Or a koala bear.
Yes, men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women, but men are usually victims of violence from other men, not from women. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, men commit violent crimes three times more often than women.
But if you look at domestic violence statistics, women are more likely to have experienced violence than men. 1 in 3 women have experiences some form of domestic violence (this includes slapping, shoving, and pushing) where only 1 in 4 men have experienced the same. If you look at actual injuries and not just pushing and shoving, 1 in 7 women have been injured by their domestic partner but only 1 in 25 men have.
And if you look at sexual violence statistics, women are 8 times more likely to be victims than men.
Cherry picking the statistic that men are more frequently victims of violence overall doesn’t come anywhere close to proving that women are unjustifiably paranoid. All that statistics proves is that men are more violent, which actually supports the exact opposite of your argument. Women have much more to fear from men than men have to fear from women, statistically speaking.
92 percent of serial killers are men, by the way.
Does this mean that most men are violent? No. It does not. Only roughly 1 percent of men are responsible for the majority of the violent crime in the U.S.
I would split the difference and say that women’s general fear of strange men may be influenced both by direct experience of harassment and assault and the complete proliferation of True Crime entertainment. And adding on to that, the impact of those lectures from other women about how to protect yourself from men, usually passed on with a cautionary tale. There doesn’t have to be just one cause.
Personally I think I’d be more afraid of the bear, but it’s a fact that I don’t go for hikes alone at my local park because of the fear of ending up someone’s victim, even though I know in my brain how statistically unlikely that is. The mind can’t control how the body feels and what is or is not perceived as a threat. If you add trauma onto that, you’re having to fight against some really strong instincts.
Well I would too, but then as a man, I’ve never ever been worried that a woman was about to assault me.
The possibility that a man might assault her is something that’s frequently in the back of a woman’s mind. There’s a lot of situations where women avoid going into by themselves just for that reason, whether it’s walking down an empty city street, or attending a frat party.
The vast majority of men aren’t going to assault a woman if they have a chance encounter in the woods. But enough men would, and if a woman encounters one of those men, without getting into gruesome details it’s likely to be one of the most horrifying and traumatic moments of her life. If I were a woman, I’d definitely rather take my chances with the bear.
And it rarely happens out of the blue. What happens is that for some reason a couple of guys will get their hackles up at each other, and if nobody backs down and apologizes for whatever started it, next thing you know they’re trading punches, and maybe more.
That’s not remotely likely to happen if I, a man, encounter another man while on a hike in the woods. I wouldn’t even be wary unless there’s something weird about the way the guy is acting, or if he looked like he just stepped off the set of Deliverance. Other than that, no worries.
I dunno, if my wife came home from a hike in the woods (ha!) and said she ran into some guy out there, I’d be “Huh, then what?” If she said she bumped into a bear, I’d be “Holy shit, what happened?”