The dumbest thing about the whole hypothetical is how it ignores the fact that men and women, obviously, actually live together, while bears live in wilderness, away from people, and most people won’t ever encounter bear in their lives. By that logic bees are also more deadly than bears, because they kill thousands of people per year while bears kill several. Cars kill more people than sharks too; would you rather swim in a pool full of sharks or cross a road?
Just one more TikTok brainrot pinning men and women against each other while the US rots from the inside. The last thing needed there is another divide, but here we go. It’s ironic considering that TikTok is Chinese and growing more popular and influential in the US, while almost all US websites are banned in China. You can’t even use YouTube without VPN. But then again, maybe it’s not ironic. Maybe it’s part of the plan.
I don’t know why this is at all controversial. Even in my Boy Scout days we had the cliche “the most dangerous animal in the forest is man.”
Bears have predictable rules. A bear won’t harm you for amusement, or expensive kit, or to avenge a personal slight, or to conceal a crime. I’m not even a woman and I’ll prefer the bear any day.
The problem is that it is a misandristic dogwistle used to convey that most men are horrible/dangerous, based on a faulty logic (men and women live together, while people don’t live with bears), pushed by Chinese social media (it originated on TikTok) to sow division in the US while their own country commits genocide and many other human rights abuses.
Most violent crimes and assaults are done by men, that’s a simple statistical reality. Sucks if that makes you feel bad, but it’s true.
People live together with people they have reason to trust. This is about running into a stranger in the woods, not your husband or wife or roommate.
Like, even as a man, if a bear approaches my campsite, I’ll just head the opposite direction and wait while the bear takes advantage of whatever food storage mistakes I made. But if it’s a man approaching my campsite, I’m making sure my weapon is on me.
I remember reading that there are different rules for black vs brown/grizzly bears, but I don’t remember which is which.
In the popular imagination, bears have a reputation for being wild and fierce and dangerous, but they also have a reputation for being cute and friendly and fuzzy. I suspect that different people’s differing attitudes and levels of knowledge about bears is one thing (among many!) that drives so many different responses to the question, and leads to it being interesting to talk about while also leading to some people talking past one another.
Naw. It only takes a few. Most men are fine. Most men never sexually assault a woman, because they have no desire to sexually assault women. Most of my friends are men, and i feel totally safe with all of them. And yet, essentially every woman has been sexually assaulted. A few bad apples have an enormous impact on everyone else. The same is true of police. I believe that most police are decent and trying to help the public. But a few bad apples make it unsafe to drive while Black.
And in both cases, the tendency of basically decent men (or police) to give the benefit of the doubt to ones who are accused of bad actions exacerbates the problem.
Black Bears: widespread in rural and wild northern and mountain areas of the US. Troublesome with garbage cans, campsite food, and bird feeders . About 200 lbs and despite the name their color varies quite a bit. Almost always just runs away when it sees a person.
Grizzly or Brown Bears: Only found in Alaska and northern Rockies in the US. Can weigh 1000 lbs. Closely related to Polar Bears. 90% of their diet is plants. They are much more dangerous than Blacks but also far less common.
If you are in Black Bear country. be careful how you store your food. If you are in Brown Bear country, read up on how to avoid them.
Yes, the large majority of people are ignorant clots who get nervous if they step off a manicured lawn in a city park, while at the same time entertain abysmally stupid fantasies about the real world that isn’t human. I can’t help that.
Also the meme is, obviously, really about how dangerous men are to women. Which is akin to gun facts – indisputable statistics, yet many men scream to the sky in protest of them.
Dogwhistles are silent, they rely on “wink wink you know what I mean?” This is not a dogwhistle, it’s “do you think strange men are more dangerous to you than 300lb wild animals?” with 90% of women saying “YES” without even having to mull it over.
Tiktok didn’t make them feel this way, the men did.
Dogwhistles are used to slowly move people over to more extreme/hateful beliefs. They put a bug in your ear, and another, and another. Which is exactly what this does (choosing a wild beast over a human being; dehumanization 101). Most people using it also use faulty logic (saying that bears only kill one person per year as opposed to thousands women killed by men, while ignoring the fact that people don’t live with bears and most will never meet one in their lives), confirming it is not rational or based in reality.
And men didn’t make them that way. Most women dogwhistling misandristic rhetoric use made-up abuse and harasment stories to portray themselves as more sympathetic and make their rhetoric more palatable. On Reddit, you can see that exact type of people claiming outrageous things, like claiming they had been sexually harassed 500-2000 times since the age of 13 (they seem very fixated on that age for some reason), which is hundred times less likely than being struck by lightning.