I can think of a few others. I’ve been alone in the woods, running low on water, and a man has shared some with me. Injured and the man has stopped to ask if I’m all right. Tired and I’ve been able to ask the man how much further to the summit, or simply gotten some encouragement to keep going.
I think many guys’ (myself included) initial reaction to the question is to try to logically parse your Bear Risk vs Human Risk. Partially because of the typical male brain and partially because the idea of fighting a bear is kinda cool. My first thought isn’t “Which one makes me feel scared?” but “Which of these can I take in a fight?” and my success rate against random men might not be great but it’s gotta be better than my chances of fist-fighting a bear. I don’t doubt that some percentage of men are strongly offended by the implications or feel they need to explain to the woman asking the question that bears are, in fact, potentially dangerous. But I’m also sure that if I asked the same sort of question to my male friends, we’d happily settle in to debate which is more dangerous. We have no emotional attachment to the question so it goes right to percentages.
It is, of course, tone deaf to respond this way to the woman asking the question since it’s more of a thought experiment on about women in society than an actuarial assessment on the relative risks of sending women to the Planet of the Bears. But I wouldn’t read every counter-response as “Men can’t accept that…”. Without the emotional resonance, it comes across at first blush like asking if you’d rather fight a horse-sized duck or fifty duck-sized horses.
This is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned the base rate fallacy in my earlier post.
The question kind of assumes you’re going to be attacked, or at least that’s how it felt to me. I told my boss ‘at least the bear won’t rape me’ and we didn’t talk about it anymore.
I’ve never hiked alone, but when I hiked with my husband, we saw a bear once. It was a ways away and seemed very lethargic so I felt no fear. On a different day, we saw a guy up above us a bit on the trail with a long gun sort of slung over his shoulder. I was quite fearful and asked my husband to put some distance between us and him.
Copied for truth. This has been a very revealing discussion indeed.
Off topic: I never heard of this before seeing this thread today, and then just saw a reference to it over at Bored Panda.
Okay, continue.
I think a lot of overestimation of risk stems from trauma, at least it did for me. When you’re physically primed to expect harm from a situation, statistical comparisons can’t make the fear disappear. Only healing can do that.
Then there’s the fact that, because women encounter so many more men than bears, we’re bound to get hurt by one eventually. So the survival mechanism kicks in because we don’t know which one it’s going to be.
Thus the statistical probability of being harmed by any given man is very low, but the statistical probability of being harmed by one or more men at some point in life is quite high. When we hear this hypothetical I think many women are thinking more of the latter than the former.
For me this means I’m looking at the statistical risk of being harmed by any given man, a random man out of all the men I’ve encountered so far – the odds of being harmed by a single encounter are pretty low, one out of thousands I’m guessing – so I’d rather take my chances with the man.
Yeah–your response was on-point, but on-point to a garbage analysis, not to the question itself. It’s why I say that the question is interesting, but a lot of the follow-up is pretty bad.
If you’d rather see a bear than a strange man in the woods because “I will not have to see the bear at family reunions,” you’re either misunderstanding the question, or you have messed up family reunions. If you’d rather see the bear because “the bear sees me as a human being,” I don’t think you know how wild animal psychology works. And if you would rather see the bear because “statistically women are safer with bears than men,” your statistical analysis is terrible.
The question is interesting. The elaborations on the question largely aren’t.
I think I’ve talked before about how tired I am of the Men are Monsters thing. I have to balance that with the reality of sexual assault and other violent crimes against women and how that affects trauma rates among women and women’s psychology in general. I’m not blind to the harm caused by some men, or the even larger percentage of people who are apologists for those men (which really exacerbates the injustice and trauma when women are harmed - our real societal problem if you ask me is one of enabling these crimes.)
But that doesn’t in my mind translate to “expect harm from every man you meet.” I don’t see how that’s helpful. I don’t really enjoy the kind of social media discourse that has been driving a not very nuanced discussion of the issues. I don’t really enjoy the soapbox ranting aesthetic and I hated when I found myself doing it too. But I hate social media in general. This is the only place to have a nuanced discussion about anything these days.
A random, unarmed man is less able to kill or maul me physically than a bear.
But which one is more likely to?
Sometimes you can talk your way out of a males attack.
This is a thought provoking thread.
Sometimes, it’s better to shut up and listen. Men, this is one of those times.
Oh, good grief.
I am a woman. I’ve been one (counting being a girl) for over 70 years now. I am not, and have never been, terrified of men regardless of what the men are doing. Almost all women live around men almost all of the time. Nearly all of us trust a number of them, and yes this depends on the behavior of the individual men. Claiming that all women are terrified of all men no matter what the men are doing is nonsense.
I am aware, as any adult woman with any sense is, that statistically I’m far more likely to be attacked by a man than by a bear.
I have encountered both strange men and bears in the woods, and quite a lot of strange men outside of the woods. I have not been terrified by either. I have in some incidents been moderately frightened, once by a bear, more than once by a man or by men; in all cases this was relevant to the particular situation and the behavior of the man/men/bear.
I didn’t vote in the poll on these boards asking that question (which I didn’t recognize as a prevalent meme, having only seen it here), but commented in the poll discussion thread more or less as above.
Both bears and rattlesnakes will avoid humans, if given the chance.
Some percentage of grizzlies and polar bears (not black bears) will consider humans as prey; so those are an exception to the above, although not acting like prey can sometimes be a defense. (Don’t run; but also don’t threaten. Also good advice re threatening dogs and humans.) We are not prey for rattlesnakes. They’re only going to waste venom on us if they feel threatened. It is unfortunately possible to accidentally threaten a rattlesnake, if you don’t see it in time.
If it started off in the USA or Canada, probably because there are bears in the woods in a number of places, but almost never lions. Especially presuming people are thinking of Panthera leo, and not the Cat of Many Names one of which is “mountain lion”.
Ack! The bear!
But also not really relevant to the thread. If what you’re trying to say is that some women are physically dangerous too: well, sure. And still not really relevant to the thread.
ETA: Also, I don’t want to listen to Noem; or particularly to look at her. I’d like to look at the bear, and it’s not going to start lecturing me on subjects on which I vehemently disagree with it.
No, it can’t. Either of them can maim a human, and either of them can kill a human. Only the human can kidnap a person, keep them imprisoned, and torture them for weeks or years.
It is unfortunate but true that a significant number of people have messed up family reunions.
I don’t know whether it is. Does anybody have a statistical analysis weighted for number of encounters? Is there even such a thing as any reliable statistic for how often women encounter bears?
And that isn’t, I think, what most people are doing. Recognizing the possibility of harm isn’t the same thing as expecting harm.
I have no way of knowing whether a random man is unarmed or not. At least, unless he’s openly carrying a weapon; but I have no way of knowing whether he’s unarmed if he isn’t doing so.
And I would assume that a man, or for that matter a woman, encountered out in the woods is quite likely to at least be carrying some sort of knife.
Or a bear’s; though not in English, or whatever human language you speak. But you can say to a bear in body language, ‘I am not acting like prey and also not acting like I’m about to attack you.’
Not guaranteed to work; but not guaranteed to work on the human, either.
In the 00’s and 10’s I ran or hiked hundreds of miles in the Georgia woods. I seldom if ever encountered single women. After Meredith Emerson that became a complete impossibility.
The women joggers who bought big dogs but didn’t bother to train them, who then lunged at anything coming, I learned to take in stride. I once saw a woman biking aggressively on a park path with her husband. She nearly hit a toddler and ran over a leash, dragging a dog to the ground. I caught up with them and asked her to be more careful. She flew into a rage and pulled a can of bear spray in an instant. The look of hate on her face was incredible. Luckily her husband calmed her down, saying “it’s okay - he’s a good guy.” She was clearly mentally unstable, and it was no stretch that she was that way was a result of abuse. I wanted to do something about the toddler and the dog, but I also felt really bad for the woman.
But you know what? I know your statistics, I know people who’ve been assaulted and even tortured. I can’t in anyway disagree with your viewpoint in light of this. Still, you hate me before you know me, and some of you think that’s so justified it’s fun. That’s what I don’t admire
Who, specifically, is this addressed to?
If you are a woman, expecting the possibility of harm from every man you meet means you are less likely to get harmed. Fact. It’s a crappy way to live, of course. Especially when you are also culturally obliged to appear trusting and friendly. Living in the inner city while in my early twenties embedded this lesson in me. See a man walking toward you on the sidewalk, no one else in sight? Move to the other side of the street.
I’d probably do the same for a bear, though.
I have hiked alone. I was hiking alone last week. 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.
But this is a weird response. @thorny_locust addresses the family returning reunions and stats so I’ll just add, wild animals absolutely see humans as human, and that’s one of the reasons they rarely attack people. It’s the reason that places where there’s a lot of risk of people encountering dangerous animals, there are signs warning people not to give animals food, etc., because both the people and the animals are safer if the animals recognize humans as something to avoid.
That is the key for me. I expect eventually I will get hurt but I consider that more a consequence of being alive than something I have much control over. A lot of women are extremely cautious but they still end up someone’s victim. I think there’s also a problem with society placing the onus on the woman not to get hurt. It doesn’t protect us, but the moment we are assaulted everyone is going to point and say, “You should have been more careful.”
As I’m sure you know, we’re far more likely to be victimized by people we know and trust. Then we beat ourselves up for ever having trusted that person. My abuser was someone who meant the world to me. I didn’t know he was a sociopath until later. It took me years after that to learn to trust my own perceptions. I always had to check with my husband: “This is what I’m thinking. Does this make sense to you?”
I’m tired of playing that game of wondering who’s going to be the next person to hurt me. It’s exhausting. I just want to live.
I’m not talking about being foolhardy. I abide by general safety rules. Hence I don’t go to the park alone.
Well, yes–but not messed up in the sense that “strange men from the woods” show up at them. I was being flip, but the problem there is that it’s conflating the problem of stranger danger with the problem of intimate and familial violence–both of which are awful, but it’s only “stranger danger” that the hypothetical addresses.
I strongly doubt that anyone has such a statistical analysis, which is why I think the claim that “statistically women are safer with bears than men” is a terrible claim. It looks like they made the claim an unweighted claim. If they have actuarial tables that they referenced, I’m wrong. Otherwise, using “statistically” in that claim makes it a bad claim.
It’s really unclear how wild animals think, but to the extent that they might have a category in their minds labeled “human,” it’s very different from the “sees me as human” from the memed response. They certainly don’t see a human being as “human” in the sense that they recognize you as a fully-realized individual with agency and rights. They see you as a threat or as food or as something uninteresting.
Men are also more likely to be the perpetrators of violence against men and women.
you have so brilliantly proved my point I assume you are joking