The bear is honest, either it eats you or it fucks off. The bear would never pretend to be friendly to gain your trust, or pretend to fuck off and instead stalk you for days. I can more accurately surmise a bears intentions than i can for any random man because all the bear could possibly want out of me is a meager amount of food.
Men getting angry about this are being upset by the possibility that they could potentially be considered threatening, by a completely uninformed third party nonetheless. And their chosen recourse is to demonstrate threatening behavior.
Some men are real snowflakes tbh
I’m a man and I endorse this message.
One thing about being a man is other men drop their guards around you and say the things they believe about their roles regarding women and masculinity. In my experience, most men are fine. Many are confused about who they are and their place in the world but do their best to be good people. Other men are just rotten, selfish, and/or broken people for many reasons. They’re often victims of abuse who perpetuate that abuse.
Some, though, are also confused and do their best, but what their best looks like is informed by people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. They believe women are somehow subhuman and that treating them as such is natural, right, and good. They believe in a social hierarchy and that might makes right. These are the men to worry about. The bad men I mentioned before generally know they’re bad or are broken enough that one can notice. These guys, though, appear normal but will absolutely fuck you over to get what they believe they deserve, all the while patting themselves on the back for being such an upstanding person who is “just enforcing the natural order”.
That’s why I’d also choose the bear.
Animals fear men for a reason. Men’s BO triggers an acute fear response in rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, mice and hamsters. This experiment did require the animal to be sacrificed, hence why it only involves common laboratory animals.
Anyway. They noticed men would underestimate the suffering of a laboratory animal. They already knew that prey animals hide their pain when they are scared. This is to make them less of an easy target for birds of prey to hunt. Because a limping rabbit, is a much easier meal.
The reason why there was a difference in welfare scoring done by men and women, was because this fear response got triggered. They did an experiment where they had shirts be worn by a man, woman or both for 24 hours. Found that the animals didn’t care for smells of women, but feared BO from men. It wasn’t a skill issue, or lack of empathy.
We also find in wolves who are used to humans, that they are more hostile towards strange men than they are towards strange women.
Testosterone is not a friendly hormone. It leads to being easily agitatated in all mammals. The only reason higher levels of androgens in humans, correlates with decreased aggressive behaviour is because when we produce more androgens, we produce more estrogens. Which in turn fascilitate communication between two regions in the brain that determine emotional impulses and whether or not the person acts on it. Hence why men are less aware of their emotions (it’s not just societal influence), more impulsive and more easily agitated/aggressive than women.
With bears you know what you can expect. And there are even things that can be done to save yourself. But with men? You never really know their intentions. It’s why women’s intuition exists at the level it does.
This is something I was not aware of. Love to look more into it. Can you link the papers that have studied this for further reading?
I found this paper and it seems to find some things that would agree with your statements and some that would not. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0018506X19304519
For me the big takeaway is that some men and women are violent and that is a brain type that is the root cause that just happens to express more in men than women.
I try to understand your post, and my conclusion is that you arbitrarily chose to abbreviate “body odour”(?) as BO? That’s the only possibility I can think of what it could mean in order for the post to make sense
It’s on us as men to call out the bad men. They’re much more likely to listen to us. There’s one memorable time for me where I stepped in and the creep who was going to grope my friend tried bargaining with me about it. Many of them will shirk back when they see another man angry at them.
Men need to be better about calling out the shitty misogynists. Because the thing is, misogynists inherently don’t care about women calling them out. When another man tells them to check themselves and shut the fuck up, they take notice.
I too would prefer the bear, and I say that as a man. My masculinity isn’t threatened by acknowledging there’s creepy men out there.
Yeah you can see that in action in this very thread. Anybody who mentions they’re a woman tends to get downvoted regardless of the actual content of their comment.
Like, homeboy you’re just doing a sexism.
That is one thing I am trying to teach to my nephew and especially other adults. Best part is the teenager didn’t need to be taught. I am always caught a little off guard when I bring something up and he immediately says the obvious. I don’t have to fruitlessly explain why something is wrong. Silly quirks of Gen Z/alpha aside, I finally have some hope.
Everyone needs to call out shitty behavior. I get frustrated with people, even those I love, who don’t want to “get involved” and just ignore it. I don’t care if you think they are set in their ways, like that makes it ok. I don’t care if they get upset. Fuck that. There are always exceptional situations where doing so will get you beaten, killed, disowned, or worse, but even then I wonder if it is worth the cost sometimes.
All I ask is for people to try and be better. It takes time and a lot of it is confronting yourself. First step is to stop doing X bad behavior. Next is to take ownership of every time you think that way and question why. Getting in the mindset of “I can’t do X around “those” people or they get mad” is the wrong place to be in.
I do understand when people don’t want to put themselves in harms way or risk their life, but that’s a minority of the situations. Most of the time you can speak up and say it’s fucked up.
And the impact of outreach is really understated, and quite safe. I still remember how my perception of “well how was she dressed?” was totally shattered – some college students, men, were talking to us in high school, and they told us to think it through. No one goes “oh she’s showing a lot of her skin, I think I’ll rape her”. It’s so obvious in retrospect, but those guys really opened my eyes.
All I ask is for people to try and be better. It takes time and a lot of it is confronting yourself.
Exactly. I haven’t been perfect on this. I didn’t understand the #yesallwomen thing several years ago, and was hung up on “yeah but it’s not like all guys are bad”, until my sister really broke it down for me and explained her own experiences.
I’ve said terrible things out of insecurity and jealousy before, and my friends made it clear that yeah it was fucked for me to say, but it was important to recognize it and move past it. I didn’t have to feel guilty forever, but the important part was understanding that what I did was not okay. And that really helped me learn from my mistakes without feeling burdened by them. It’s a learning process, but you have to surround yourself with good people who’ll call you out and guide you if you screw up.
Remember all the women getting angry about the Pence Rule (never be alone with a woman who isn’t your wife) and some men saying they follow it because it’s a good idea because while most interactions aren’t going to result in false accusations any of them potentially could and the stakes are too high to leave it to chance? Remember all the claims that that is wildly misogynistic?
This bear thing is essentially the same.thing with the genders flipped.
anyone who even for a moment considers ‘bear’ is just showing they have absolutely no real experience in any sort of wild situation. Never choose an encounter with a bear, it is a predator and the apex predator of wherever you are to boot, its a ridiculous exercise meant to rile people up.
with this same argument id 100% take a dinosaur over any woman, because hell, she might knife me when I least expect it, but the allosaurus has a clear motive.
Anyone who is afraid of bears has absolutely no experience in the wild. It might do you some good to actually get that experience in the wild. A hike is much better for your brain than writing a post about how outraged you are that someone “made a ridiculous exercise meant to rile people up”
The fact that you don’t understand why women think the bear is safer is exactly why we’re picking it.
Let me spell it out for you - the bear will either kill me and eat me or leave me alone.
The man may try to rape me. And leave me alive with the suffering that results from that rape. And there’s a chance he may impregnate me and in many states in this country, I will not be able to abort it and will have to give birth to it, which is another assault on my body.
I would rather just be eaten. At least in that case the pain ends.
Heres a fun fact for you, Bears are known to eat their prey alive, so no. he wont kill you and eat you, it will be the other way around. so you will live the rest of your very, very short life being eaten alive by an apex predator.
Women here. I too would choose bear. Everytime. I’d rather get ripped apart than take a chance on a strange man.
This is the same thing I said but it’s downvoted. The only difference I can tell is that you mentioned you’re a woman.
There’s even other replies saying the same thing, but also specifically mentioning they’re written by a man. They’re not being downvoted en masse.
That’s pretty fucken stupid, huh?
quick edit: except for other guy replying to this, but he’s obviously being too much of an ally to get the upvote treatment, y’all are inconsistent.
The bear would never pretend to be friendly to gain your trust, or pretend to fuck off and instead stalk you for days. I can more accurately surmise a bears intentions than i can for any random man because all the bear could possibly want out of me is a meager amount of food.
idk, as a man i’ve been toying with the idea of just being threatening at all times. I still don’t know how i feel about it at a philosophical level. But it keeps people away from me, and i don’t like people so.
But on the other hand it’s probably worse than just being a decent person to decent people? I don’t know. Sociology is complicated as fuck dude.
This seems like a slight mischaracterisation:
the possibility that they could potentially be considered threatening, by a completely uninformed third party nonetheless.
The statement is actually that the possiblity of men potentially doing something is so high or so severe that the average bear is preferable.
The rest of your post is opinion though, and if you genuinely believe that the average man is more likely to be dangerous than the average bear, I don’t think it’s possible to change your mind
If you genuinely believe that the average man is more likely to be dangerous than then average bear… that’s just statistics.
"The chances of being injured by a bear are approximately 1 in 2.1 million, according to the National Park Service. You are more likely to be killed by a bee than a bear, and way more likely to be killed by another human than by either bear or bee.
And when bear encounters do happen, they are most often nonviolent. Bears are as afraid of you as you are of them, and bears want to avoid humans at all costs. The most common outcome of a bear encounter is that the bear flees." https://www.idausa.org/campaign/wild-animals-and-habitats/bear-attack/
“One in five women in the United States experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetime.” https://www.nsvrc.org/resource/2500/national-intimate-partner-and-sexual-violence-survey-2015-data-brief-updated-release And that’s not counting all sexual assault, and it’s not counting regular violence, just rape.
If that doesn’t change your mind, I don’t think it’s possible to change your mind because you’re not interested in facts.
Your entire post is inaccurate because it takes into account the frequency of being near a bear. Your chance of being injured by a bear greatly increases as you get near a bear.
Thank you for the response. It’s calm and well reasoned. I did some math, and it doesn’t support my position without assumptions, but I’m keeping it because it was effort and I think it’s helpful.
My main argument is that those stats have massive amount of bias due to the amount of men the average woman encounters vs the amount of bears a woman encounters. I think the actual likelihood of being attacked by a man in an encounter vs a bear is still a lot higher on the bear’s side, but I can’t find stats for that. Assuming a woman encounters 1000 different men a year and 1 bear (which I think is fair), changes my math to 0.008% for the bear vs 0.00014% for the man.
Taking UK stats. As I’m most familiar with them. 41 homicides were perpetrated by a strangers in 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2023#the-relationship-between-victims-and-suspects
Male population is 29.2 million as of the latest UK census. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/male-and-female-populations/latest/
Do the math assuming all homicides were committed by men. Is a 0.00014% chance of a male killing a stranger.
The US has approx 900,000 wild bears plus maybe another 100,000 brown bears (cannot find a clear source for this). So lets call it an even 1 million. https://wildlifeinformer.com/black-bear-population-by-state/
According to your article on bears, there have been 4 deaths in the last 50 years. So averaging 0.08 deaths a year.
Which is 0.000008% chance of a bear having killed a person that year.
Yeah I’m not afraid of Jewish people by nature though? You’ve just typed some antisemitic bullshit trying to assert… what exactly?
You don’t know anything. There’s a reason that the real name of “bears” is taboo in many cultures. Just the act of saying its true name made the ancients shit their pants in fear of accidently summoning one. Bears are no joke. They kill on a whim. You can’t reason with bears. You can’t plead with bears. Bears are equal opportunity killers. They kill men, women, children, trans, straight, queer, ponybros, attack helicopters all the same. Your only chance is to make yourself appear too much a hassle that they rather go eat something else. Let all these women and men who approve of the OP’s post be tested irl. See if they will sing the same tune.
I’ve been in the woods, alone, with bears in the same woods, countless times, and I clearly haven’t been eaten.
I mean, you even say in your post that being too much of a hassle to eat is all you need to do. Can’t say that any men I’ve ever talked to wanted to have less sex with me when I indicated I’m a hassle to eat.
You are so whacky a person that this took genuine effort to determine whether or not it’s satire. I know when you typed that up it probably seemed hard hitting and effective, but I’m just imagining someone earnestly saying “You don’t know anything.” as an OPENER and I cannot stop laughing about it.
To me it’s the same as people opening with “No.” and then explaining why the previous person’s statement is flawed. The only time that’s a valid opener is when the previous statement was clearly a yes or no question, otherwise it’s blatantly rude and abrasive. And extremely common on here.
This is terrible logic to go by.
If you generalise half the population and insult them then of course people are going to be mad at you.
This is like some boomer saying “All feminists are easily offended lesbians that just like to shout out people”
Then smugly being like “haha you proved my point” when a femininst rightly takes issue with that statement.
Also bears can’t type, which introduces a massive bias during data collection.
Well they did say “smarter than the average”. Technically true, but must have meant something like… ten standard deviations from the mean.
This is also an indicator of the world’s best insult as per the comic Basic Instructions:
“I find you argumentative and easily offended.”
Basically no one is allowed to respond to it.
This is like some boomer saying “All feminists are easily offended lesbians that just like to shout out people”
Then smugly being like “haha you proved my point” when a femininst rightly takes issue with that statement.
Worse than that even, as feminists are less than half the population and an ideology you choose to belong to, rather than a demographic you are born into.
If you generalise half the population and insult them then of course people are going to be mad at you.
As a random man I don’t feel insulted by this at all. I would also rather be in the woods with a random bear than a random man. The bear is more predictable in preferring to have nothing to do with me.
I would also rather be in the woods with a random bear than a random man.
Theres literally no way you genuinely believe this right?
I literally expanded on my reasons in the other reply.
There are literally a bunch of posts from other people explaining their reasons for preferring random bear as well.
The fact that a random man can be told multiple times “I don’t know you well enough to be comfortable with this,” with explanations, and they will still respond with “there’s no way you actually mean the words you are saying” is a big contributing factor.
i think i would probably be more concerned if i were alone in the woods with a woman honestly, like what the fuck did i do to be put in that situation? Why am i here at all? Is this an act of god?
Being alone in the woods in it of itself would be fucking weird, but a lot less fucking weird that being alone with someone else for some reason.
You’re walking through the woods and at the end of a clearing you see: either a man, or a bear staring right at you.
Which one makes you more uncomfortable?
If I slowly leave the area I’m fairly confident the bear will leave me alone and not follow. I’m spending the rest of my time in the woods wondering if that man is following me.
I havent read the article, but from the heading and the teaser of it it seems to be a personal opinion piece of what she would prefer and asking other women about it.
Where exactly does she actively insult all men?
Where exactly does she actively insult all men?
The part about saying she would prefer being alone in the woods with an animal that would maul and eat her alive than being with [insert trait you were born with].
If you don’t think it’s insulting, switch out the word “men” with gay/jew/trans or any other group of people and ask if those people would feel insulted.
It’s a statement that very likely would be removed by moderators and gotten you banned on certain instances on Lemmy if you did. I honestly don’t believe you’re asking that question in good faith.
I can’t say that I blame her and I’m a guy. Besides, you know she’s just being over the top to make a point. Take five seconds, look at what she’s really saying and stop looking for reasons to be angry at her.
Okay, let’s reframe this to be about a different specific group.
Let’s say this woman wrote this exact same opinion piece, but instead of it being about men in general, it was about black men specifically.
And she is just saying that she would rather take her chances with a wild animal than be alone with a black man. Is that perfectly okay and not insulting/demanding to black men in your eyes?
But, I mean, are you acquainted with said bear?
Are you on terms with each other’s intentions?
'Cause if you’re in the woods with a stranger, there is a 50 percent chance you’re going to have a bad time. Human or bear.
Stupid city folk. Comparing a BEAR with a honeybear…
A bear predictably would rather have nothing to do with me. If I treat a random bear with respect it will be more likely to treat me with respect than a random man.
See, the difference is that the OP didn’t use the word “all” anywhere. If you’re not one of the untrustworthy men, then it isn’t about you.
Would you accept this logic about any other group like that?
if someone said “Black people are thieves” then when you called them out they said “I didnt say ALL black people are thieves. If you’re one of the good ones, then its not about you.” would you just accept that as a perfectly reasonable statement or would you still call them racist?
Having something stolen from you most likely isn’t going to leave you scarred for life. And men are not, and have never been, an oppressed group. People who say “black people are thieves” say that because they are racist and want to veil their bigotry. Women who say “I’m scared of men” say that because they most likely have had negative experiences with them and understand that they are physically weaker than them.
If someone has been frequently harassed and endangered only by black people, I’m not going to tell them they can’t be cautious of black people.
Some men feel the need to prove their masculinity to this woman who’s obviously rage baiting, the rest of us are thanking the bear for taking one for the team.
I don’t see why you think the author is rage-baiting, rather than stating a simple truth.
For one, her title is a question. She’s also writing an opinion column. So no, not stating a simple truth.
Maybe it’s just a few of us, but it does seem pretty obvious to me that such an article is chumming the waters and the outcome of seeing a few sharks is wholly unsurprising.
I suppose it depends on how you define rage-baiting. I think she’s definitely trying to make a point, but I don’t know that she’s trying to make people angry so much as trying to get people to engage. Engagement is not inherently about anger and hatred, and depending on the actual content of the article (I noticed you didn’t mention anything about it so I assume, like me, you didn’t feel like googling it) it could be more about talking about her own experiences and why she might be more comfortable with a wild animal rather than a random strange man.
Your own response seems to be exactly why she’d write the article. Rather than being interested in engaging on the topic, you’ve already made up your mind based on the barest possible metrics.
I don’t feel any rage about that. Not even a hint of any possibility of anger, regardless of mood or whatever. I don’t think it is rage-baiting. The point isn’t to induce rage. The point is just that men are dangerous and often don’t acknowledge it.
Posts bait. Catches idiots. Stays relevant.
I’d generally pick a bear too, most of the time you could just walk away. A human might try to talk to me or something.
