No, I think you’re still kind of missing the point here. The central idea is that in the bear’s natural environment out in the woods, like most other wild animals, it is far more likely to leave you alone if you leave it alone than to try to harm you.
As I’ve pointed out before, in a different environment such as an office building elevator, most woman would (rightly) be far more afraid of the presence of a random bear than of a random man.
Once again: The problem is that our society encourages or tolerates, to varying degrees, toxic and dangerous attitudes and behavior in men, and there’s no good way for women to determine which men are dangerous without a lot of time and effort. Thus finding oneself alone with a strange man can be as frightening as being alone in the wilderness with predators.
In other words, men are monsters. Hell, it’s the same logic as the US uses when it randomly drone strikes “military age men”; they are men, therefore they are both a threat and their lives are of no value.
As for toxic attitudes, men growing up being constantly lectured how their gender is brutal and evil is a great way of both creating and excusing them.
You’re just setting up straw men and not addressing my actual words.
I remember discussing this with you before, years ago, and multiple times, I believe. I’ll try to say this as kindly as I can - I think you should consider some very long, very deep, and very serious thinking about how you view women in your deepest self, and I’d highly encourage you to ask for the views of women. The words you’re using remind me of inceldom and worse.
There are also multiple confounding factors in play, including:
Personally, if the bear in the woods is an ordinary black bear then yeah, I’d probably choose the bear encounter as safest, even though I’m aware that the lone man is extremely likely to be just a harmless hiker.
If it’s a grizzly, on the other hand, I’m thinking more carefully about my options. I have been out in the woods with a (very distant) grizzly bear and it was fine, but I was definitely aware of the situation.
If it’s a polar bear up in a far northern forest somewhere, then fuck it, I’m definitely going with the lone-man encounter instead. Actually, even if I know for sure that the lone man in question is a crazy predator, I’m probably choosing to encounter him rather than the polar bear. A polar bear will seriously fuck your shit up, usually before you even know that it’s stalking you.
I think focusing on the bear misses the point. The point is that, in our society, women have good reason to feel fear of being alone around strange men.
Yes, but I maintain that the bear-vs.-man-in-woods debate is also somewhat severely skewed by widespread ignorance, and sensationalist media misinformation, about the sort of behavior that can be realistically expected from the average lone male stranger out in the woods.
Some men are monsters. All bears are animals.
With an animal, you can take precautions, and choose to act in a way that will encourage the animal to leave you alone. The vast majority of time, they won’t see you as prey, they might see you as a threat, but you’re not prey.
With a monster, you are prey. They see you, they identify you as prey, and now their goal is to get you, and you can’t just encourage them to leave you alone. As noted, it’s not all men, it’s quite a small number, but you don’t know until it’s too late when you’ve stumbled on one.
You demonstrate my point; I’m a man, therefore I must be a monster. You’re just picking a particular sort of monster to accuse me of being. As a man I can’t possibly be human enough to resent being called worse than an animal, after all. I must have some sort of nefarious agenda.
And, what exactly are men supposed to do about it? Kill themselves? I’ve never harmed a woman or molested a child, but that doesn’t matter; I’m evil because I was born evil. What a man does doesn’t matter; women will fear and hate them no matter what.
Also, this is an example of people enforcing the same toxicity they complain of. If a man expresses unhappiness at being hated, he’s accused of being evil for it. And then people wonder why men don’t express their feelings more.
I’ve enlarged part of my text to refute your claim that differences are not innate. (Unless your claim is that human culture affected hominins 6 million years ago.) The alleged claim about invariable is one I never made.
You phrase a truism.
I made carefully phrased claims which you implicitly exaggerate to be “absolutist.”
Just to trivialize sexual differences to make a point clear:
– Do both males and females produce testosterone and estrogen? Yes.
– On average do the sexes produce those hormones in the same proportions? No.
– Does ACKNOWLEDGING such differences aid understanding? Yes.
– Is insisting that these differences should be ignored or suppressed just “politically correct” malarkey? Yes. Often facts are inconvenient.
I am NOT any sort of misogynist, and generally ally politically with “progressive liberals.” But I prefer truth over falsities, however convenient those falsities may be.
I’m a man too, and this is not remotely what I’m saying, at all. You’re missing the point so widely that all I can say is “please reconsider how you think about women”.
Nah, this is about behavior exhibited by you personally. I don’t think @iiandyiiii would be suggesting to many if any other male Dopers that they give off a comparable kind of simmering grievance vibe.
Personally, I just tend to chalk it up to the usual @Der_Trihs pattern of qualifier deprivation. “Most women recognize that they have good cause to be afraid of a small subset of men, but can’t tell which male strangers are in that subset and which aren’t” translates into D_T-speak as “All women are convinced that all men are born evil.” Uh-huh, whatever, dude.
As a man… get over yourself.
It doesn’t refute my claim. We don’t know what emotional differences may have existed between male and female hominids millions of years ago, for example. We don’t know what aspects of their different social roles (other than the directly biological ones, such as birthing children versus not birthing children) were biologically innate rather than culturally evolved.
And then some of us see it as a romantic opportunity! My book got started by a scene where a man and woman encounter each other in the woods, and get in a fight! Enemies to lovers! Of course he kidnaps her, but all is fair in love and war!
I’m not really afraid of men. I’m aware that some men are dangerous but as a game of statistics the probability seems pretty low that some random guy will be my undoing. Of course if women blindly trusted every stranger they met and end up being raped, they absolutely will be blamed for not being more careful. It’s no win for women. Which is why we’re taught not to go out at night, or drink at parties, or hike alone, and most of us just avoid these things as a matter of safety because we don’t want to be blamed for our own victimization. You don’t even have to say it’s to avoid men. It’s to avoid predators. Men may do the same for all I know.
But at least his socks are clean, I hope? 
Oh, heavens no, he’s a mess. A beautiful mess.
I guess a metaphor I would use is Las Ramblas, I think that’s what it’s called. A major throughway in Spain where pickpocketing is relatively common. In fact it’s relatively common in tourist areas - my husband when we were in college was pickpocketed in Pamplona.
Anyway, they tell you when you walk down Las Ramblas to hide your wallet and valuables, to make it so they can’t easily be snatched.
If I follow that advice, am I saying all people who use Las Ramblas are dirty thieves? No, of course not. I’m taking reasonable precautions based on statistical risk. Especially knowing that if someone steals from me, as a foreigner I will be at a disadvantage. I’ll have little recourse. The cops can’t do anything about it.
Rape is several orders or magnitude more traumatizing than getting pickpocketed, but many of us will also have little recourse if we are victimized. So we follow our little rules. Does it make a difference? I don’t know. But following the rules makes me feel safer anyhow.
You frequently refer to Republicans as evil monsters who want to rape, subjugate and enslave women. How many Republicans do you think are men? So how many men do you really think are a threat to women?
Your positions are logically inconsistent. I have seen you double down on this countless times - including thread shitting in a thread asking women about their experiences of sexual assault - so I’m not going to argue with you about it any further.
But on its face your positions are incompatible. You frequently call a huge subset of men evil but get the vapors whenever women take sensible precautions to protect themselves. Give me a break!
This. There is a small minority of men who are monsters. And those men are usually bigger and stronger than women. So women fear them. The vast majority of men are not monsters. You can’t tell by looking, so women are a little cautious of all unknown men. But that’s certainly not because all men are monsters.
People aren’t born Republican.
Yet, somehow, most men manage to go throughout life without treating every man they meet as a threat.
And I note that people re carefully ignoring the question: What are men supposed to do about it? Kill themselves? Sit around flagellating themselves?
No, it’s not; you compared me to incels, who aren’t anything like me. You’re just demonizing me, for failing to demonstrate enoguh self-hate.