Ooh, I really like this analogy!
I’m glad you did the math because it really emphasized how dangerous men are, but why did you stipulate black bears? Shouldn’t it just be bears?
Ok.
750k black bears + 50k brown bears + 50k polar bears = 850k bears
Deaths, 1 black bear + 2 brown bears + 1 polar bear per year = 4 deaths/yr
New murder rate if men killed as often as generic bears 776 per year.
OK, now do sexual harassment and sexual assaults by various bear types. I’m gonna guess zero.
Because for the millionth fucking time that’s not the point. Why do people insist on bear statistics?
I really wanted the bear thing to be completely ignored, hence my request when starting this thread:
Kinda hard to do when you stick it in the title.
Of these choices, only the nest of hornets trumps the man in terms of possible danger. Unlike men, hornets always attack you. Fuck hornets.
They’re the bear necessities.
People who think the concern is justified, and people who think the concern isn’t justified, keep cherry-picking and misusing and outright making up statistics to justify their position. Anyone doing that is off-base, in my opinion, because nobody but nobody is conducting a statistical analysis before answering the question. To the extent that this question is interesting, it’s because of the immediate gut response, and because of what it shows about how women regard strange men that they meet in isolation.
Whether it’s a grizzly or a black or a polar or a dire bear is only relevant if a particular woman asks that question before answering. And to the extent that people are like, “Ooh, bears, I love seeing them!” it’s a bad question. But the bad question doesn’t necessarily invalidate what’s interesting about the answers.
It’s still relevant.
Yes, a naked unarmed man is unlikely to win a fight against a bear. But there’s no specification that the man met in the woods is naked or unarmed. He may very well be armed, whatever his intentions are. If his intentions are malevolent, he almost certainly is armed. This has been gone into in this thread previously and exhaustively and this insistence that of course a bear is more physically dangerous than a human is getting pretty absurd.
ETA: And you know what? It’s also entirely irrelevant. The question isn’t in any case whether a bear is more physically dangerous than a man. It’s whether a man is sufficiently more physically dangerous than a woman to be a genuine physical threat to a woman if he does attack her. And although there are exceptions, in most cases the answer is yes. The fact that the bear is in most cases also stronger than either the woman or the man doesn’t change the issue; even aside from the fact that “stronger” doesn’t always translate to “more dangerous”, and hasn’t done so with respect to hominims since we learned to effectively throw things.
Hornets only attack you if you don’t see the nest first. Or, of course, if having seen the nest you’re fool enough to approach it.
We have hornets here. I’m out in the fields and woods a lot. I have seen nests, which I stay well away from. I have not been attacked by hornets. (I have been seriously frightened about hornets once: when I was mowing in tall growth and suddenly realized that I’d just mowed far too close to a nest, and might in that tall growth have easily driven into it before I saw it. But I did see it, and stayed away from it thereafter; and they didn’t come after me.)
Pre-Emptive: Please no more on Hornets, not especially relevant to the thread.
Og bless the mods keeping this thread on track. It looks like work.
Seems clear that there are multiple ways to look at this, which is why it became an internet sensation. Kind of like those ambiguous math problems that invite a hundred thousand comments as if it were the most important question in the world.
Man has been referred to as “the most dangerous game” at least since the short story of that name came out a century ago. A bear has claws, size and strength, but a man has size and strength too (in comparison to women) and an extremely clever brain demonstrably capable of incredible feats and, unfortunately, incredible acts of cruelty and atrocity. I mean, which species rules all 7 continents, and which has been pushed into a few unpopulated wilderness areas?
Of course, I didn’t do anything to warrant distrust from a stranger, personally. And I could interpret this in a way comparable to racists assuming that, since the two black folks they interacted with this century were inner city gang members, they are justified in fearing any black person they meet in the future. Just because some men are rapists, kidnappers and murderers doesn’t mean I am, and to assume so without meeting me is hurtful bigotry.
But then that ignores the ways stereotyping can be good. There’s a reason it’s universal among humans. If there’s a giant ferocious dog in my path, or even a giant bear, I see no reason to engage it in conversation first before I decide to give it a wide berth. On the face of it that seems like it could be a reasonable conclusion to make about men, too, for many people in many circumstances.
And I think very few women are doing that.
What most of us are saying is that we can’t assume whether you are or are not if we don’t know you. (And in some cases it’s difficult to tell even then.) That is not at all the same thing as assuming that you are malevolent.
What I wrote in the first thread: I chose Bear, because on the very remote chance that the lone man in the woods was going to try to harm me, he’d win every time (unless I’m carrying a gun, which I’m not). But a bear isn’t going to be in the woods with a pre-existing idea of harming me. So I feel like the odds are better with the bear.
I used to walk a lot by myself for exercise. I’d walk for 3-5 miles pretty much everyday. I’m an early riser so sometimes I’d start my walk pretty early in the morning and sometimes I would go to areas that were still pretty free of any people around. I used to wonder what it must be like to not feel any anxiety or fear if I saw an unknown man on my walk. I’d imagine that is how most men feel and I’d wish I could feel that way too.
There’s also a homeless woman I used to see on my walk who was a bit on the scary side. She’d talk out loud and scream at some invisible person. I was scared of her, but in such a different way.
A couple of years ago a young woman was raped, sodomized and murdered by a man in an area I used to walk by myself.
It’s the rape I fear. So when bears start raping women, I’ll change my answer.
It might be helpful for men to familiarize themselves with the concept of Schrodinger’s Rapist. I think the essay does a pretty good job of laying out why there’s such a huge gulf in communication and risk assessment between men and women. For extra credit, go ahead and read the attached comments. For the lulz.
I read it years ago and have always regarded it as a good argument for not even trying to have a relationship with a woman. Romantic or otherwise. Heck, usually when I see it posted the people advocating for women’s issues usually try to downplay or distance themselves from it, since it makes women look so bad.
For that matter if somebody actually thinks like that then they shouldn’t try for a relationship with men, they should be living in some heavily armed single-gender enclave somewhere. Or as a hermit if they’re male.
Yes, if that’s your take, this is probably something that you should avoid. I read it and felt pretty good about my typical behavior.