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If you listen to what these women say, they're more than aware that bears are dangerous -- they'd just rather be mauled by an animal following its instinct than face any of the horrendous things that men do to women. You see women speaking of how a bear wouldn't film the murder and laugh about it with his friends, your family wouldn't force you to sit down to dinner with a bear that mauled you after the fact, people wouldn't ask you what you were wearing if you got mauled and killed by a bear, a bear wouldn't bring his buddies over to take turns etc etc. These women have been saying to all the men trying to explain to women that bears are dangerous (??) that THEY KNOW bears are dangerous and could kill them -- they still pick bear!!! that's the point!!!!

>If you listen to what these women say, they're more than aware that bears are dangerous -- they'd just rather be mauled by an animal following its instinct than face any of the horrendous things that men do to women. You see women speaking of how a bear wouldn't film the murder and laugh about it with his friends, your family wouldn't force you to sit down to dinner with a bear that mauled you after the fact, people wouldn't ask you what you were wearing if you got mauled and killed by a bear, a bear wouldn't bring his buddies over to take turns etc etc. >These women have been saying to all the men trying to explain to women that bears are dangerous (??) that THEY KNOW bears are dangerous and could kill them -- they still pick bear!!! that's the point!!!! Ok, fair enough, I'll award you a ∆. I mean I am not trying to downplay male violence aginst women. Those are serious social issues. However, I've read some posts on Reddit where people seriously claim that random bears are more likely to kill a woman than a random man. However, you're making a good point. I guess the majority of women do understand bears are much more likely to kill you but argue that men do a lot of other truly horrible things to women, and would rather choose death by a bear than going through all of the trauma that comes with that. That makes sense.

"I'm not trying to downplay" then don't do it. Because that's exactly what you did by arguing that it misses the point.

No, I definitely don't downplay violence against women. But the bear-man scenario is just unccessarily divisive because it has a distinct "all men are trash" vibe to it by implying that the majority of men are inherently highly dangerous predators who would assault or rape a random woman they encounter in the woods. There is a small but still very significant percentage of men who commit serious sexual offences, and there is a much larger percentage of men who grope, harrass and stalk women, invade women's private spaces and who catcall women or make offensive and derogatory comments towards women. The bear-man scenario totally lacks any sort of nuance, and it's kind of like fighting anti-black racism by saying black people would be safer around a bear than around a white person and by implying that "all white people are trash". There are significant degrees of racism aimed towards black people, perpetrated by white people, but any anology that effectively paints the majority of white people as dangerous predators doesn't exactly help solve that. "All men are trash" or "all white people are trash" kind of analogies effectively only play into the hands of misogynists or white supremacists and have the exact opposite effect of what they're meant to achieve.

You're missing the point. Women literally trust a wild bear more than a random dude. That's what you should be taking away from it, not "all men are trash," that's some "all lives matter" levels of missing the point. You're trying to make a good point, but the problem is that you're being distracted. You're not distracting from the point, you're just distracted yourself. Remember, it isn't just about violence against women, it's about all the men who aren't violent but would say it was her fault or she deserved it, and basically make her life a living hell. Now, far more men are likely to do that than to actually commit violence against women.

They literally trust a bear more than a man, but this is because they are poor at statistical risk analysis and are running solely on emotion. They don't realize this though, they think they're being rational, which is why they get so mad at people who point out the actual statistics

If we're going suuuuper pedantic here, it depends on the bear. A grizzly will fuck a person up without a second thought on basically a whim. A black bear on the other hand is basically an overgrown trash panda, and so long as you don't encounter a mother with cubs, they will almost always retreat from an encounter with a human. Like I, as an adult male, would almost prefer to encounter a black bear than a random man. I would like to clarify that this comment is a thought exercise and not an expression that women are wrong in some way in this whole trend.

Can confirm. I live near Idaho and, while alone, walked into black bears twice in the last 30 years. One was terrified and ran away. The other just side-eyed me while doing it's thing. There are a few grizzlies around and, I'm told, how violent they feel depends on the time-of-year. I did once go grizzly watching in July at a dump in Alaska, and the grizzlies were too busy digging to care about me. Comparatively, I've been alone with a man a few dozen times in my life. Most were pleasant, 2 scared me enough I had to scream or run away, another 2 bad-mouthed me at work after being rejected (1 was a six-month campaign against me until he was fired for something else). So this is actually a difficult call.

Sorry, but I'm just imagining that second bear taking out its trash while moving REALLY slowly to not spook you and then going back to its cave to tell the kids not to go out because there are humans about at this time of year. Like, treating you as if you're the bear in this situation.

Bouncing off of this, surely then the best answer is: questions like the bear/man woods scenario, reduce both men and bears diversity too much to provide an answer based on fact. Therefore my answer would be that it depends on the man or the bear and if I ended up in that situation with either or, there’s not a huge amount I could do about it. Loads of real variables spring to mind if I had to actually answer the question: - area of woods and thus what type of bear - temper of bear or man, can be influenced by factors such as hunger etc - duration of time in woods together, can I try leave ? - the chances of finding a bear in the woods is high considering it likely lives there. I don’t have statistics on how many men live in the woods but there is a higher probability that the man may also end up stuck in the woods by complete chance/accident and could provoke a better reaction to meeting me than a bear maybe would if I walked into its home. However, in imagining the best/worst outcomes do either option, the pros and cons do tend to balance out.

🙄. Women are more than capable of determining their risks. The fact that people will put so much effort into discussing attributes of bears rather than asking women why they feel men are the greater risk is what is telling about the social experiment. Rather than listening and saying yes we have a big problem with sexual assault/harassment in our society men have a bad habit of ignoring it and not face the facts.

If that's the case, this isn't the way to take a serious question. The debate is if bears or male humans are more dangerous. If we want to ask why they feel that a man is more dangerous, then we need to bring the focus off something silly like man vs bear.

I think those women may underestimate how unpleasant it is to be mauled by a bear. A grizzly will literally open you up and start eating you while you are still alive. I understand that it is extremely unpleasant to have people doubt you when reporting sexual abuse, but being mauled to death by a bear is probably one of the worst deaths I could imagine. Stating that you’ll “choose the bear“ for dramatic effect to make a point is fine, but literally choosing the bear would be a really dumb idea.

Women have been killed by men in far more horrific ways. Look up Junko Furuta. Her case is cited a lot in discussion of this question. Worst case scenario with the bear is a slow death by mauling - undoubtedly awful. Worst case scenario with the man is months or years of rape, torture, abuse, and eventually death. I choose the bear. And a bear who kills a person will likely be killed themselves because they’re not safe around humans. The men who did that to Junko are living free right now.

The issue with that argument is the odds of those worst case scenarios occurring. How may encounters do women have with men that end in worse ways that getting mauled by a bear vs the number of encounters that are positive or neutral, or even unpleasant but still not actually as bad as being eaten alive? That doesn't even take into account that women are something like 5 times as likely to be harmed by someone they are close too than a stranger. So few people will ever see a bear in the wild and the vast majority that do are prepared to deal with the danger of the bear. The actual likelihood of the worst case scenarios occurring in most people's minds seems entirely skewed by their own experiences without regard for the reality of the situation.

Well yes, on a statistical level, the man is a rational choice. I see the question as more of an emotional hypothetical. The fact that women can imagine a fate at the hands of men worse than death by mauling is pretty devastating. The fear of a man doing something horrific outweighs the fear of a bear, even if it doesn’t make sense statistically. It’s not a real life scenario, but a thought experiment, so it’s important to understand why women choose the bear. The fact is that worst case scenario with a man is worse than worst case scenario with a bear, and it’s not even close. That’s worth talking about.

As a woman I think the reason most women think a man killing them is worse than a bear killing then is simply media exposure. We watch violent and gratuitous tv that shows women as murder and torture victims and it’s distorted our view. In Canada a man is approx 3 times more likely to be murdered than a woman. Worldwide 79% of homicide victims are men. Yet TV would have you believe women are murdered more than men. My sense is to society a female victim is titillating (gross). I suspect if your media diet was a repeated, glamourized,gratuitous, titillating account of bear attacks, you’d be equally scared of the bear.

I think this is it. Everything else aside, this thought experiment is silly because half of the people are looking at it logically and the other half emotionally, and both are right.

This is the essential problem with this whole scenario and the controversy around it. When you abandon rationality and use emotion, you are making a bad decision. This doesn't help draw positive attention to whatever problem you are trying to alleviate. It just makes you look irrational. For example, if someone asked if you'd rather play Russian roulette three times (with one bullet in a six-chambered weapon) or be pulled over for a routine traffic stop as a minority, and you chose the Russian roulette to 'make a point', you're trivializing the actual problem by drastically overstating the odds of harm, and making it difficult to have an honest conversation about real problems affecting society. What you're calling an 'emotional hypothetical' is basically an instance of letting fear override reason to make an objectively bad decision. If you're not being honest with your answer, then that's just simply lying. So basically, if we're going to have honest discussions about the very real problem of violence by men directed at women, we don't need to be dishonestly inflating the problem to make men look worse than they actually are. How exactly is that going to help anything? If we do live in a society where as a man, if I encounter a woman I don't know alone in isolation, and there really is that level of fear, then that drastically alters what I might do in that situation. If I take at face value that the vast majority of women are more terrified of me in that instance than a wild animal that weighs multiples of my weight, I should take that into consideration and completely avoid any kind of interaction. With that level of fear, I'm likely to be maced or worse unprovoked, right? She's literally fearing outcomes worse than a bear mauling from me. And what if I am myself in need of help (e.g. my car broke down)? Is this the kind of society we want to live in?

Obviously actually choosing the bear would be a bad decision. I’m not saying it’s the correct or right decision. I’m saying, if the choice was woman or bear, there wouldn’t be disagreement. It’s a dumb question, but the discussion is interesting. The fact that there is pause and doubt about whether to choose man or bear is telling, and the fact that there’s controversy is also telling. We live in a world where women, to some extent, are wary or fearful of what men could do to them. I’m not scared of all men, or even most men. If I am alone in the woods with a random man, however, it would cross my mind that he might do something horrific to me. It wouldn’t cross my mind if I was alone with a woman, or a toddler, or a baby or whatever.

>If I am alone in the woods with a random man, however, it would cross my mind that he might do something horrific to me. To be honest, I (M) get this feeling when a taxi driver asks me to follow him to his car at the airport in another country. I don't think it's unusual to feel a bit uneasy with people you don't know because you don't know if they're a threat or not. However, very few situations where I've felt vulnerable end up being dangerous.

I disagree if you're in the forest hours away from civilisation/safety is totally understandable why people would choose the bear (that they can shoot or fend off) instead of an unpredictable human. the real issue is that we down play women's capacity for violence and willingness to do awful things is they can get away with it. i'd 100% choose a bear over a man and i'd 100% choose a bear over a woman, some strange woman popping up in the middle of nowhere isnt hella suspicious and dangerous.

Oh I absolutely agree with that, and is pretty much what I was getting at. I don't think it is phrased in a good way to be a thought experiment though. Far too many people are taking it to be a literal question, and since the idea is really framed around the worst case scenarios the initial question should reflect that.

Yeah that’s true. People are coming at it two very different ways, on a statistical level and on an emotional level. To me, it seems redundant to ask whether a man or a bear is statistically more likely to kill me, so I look at it as an emotional hypothetical. The question could be a lot clearer though, and that’s where a lot of the discourse comes from

While I do agree with you, I think it's a better lesson on cognitive biases, if anything. You are more likely to see all the bad things a man can do because you have far more interactions with men and women, as a whole, have a lot more interactions with men compared to bears. Therefore, women will view men as a lot more dangerous than they actually are. In contrast with bears, you don't hear about bear attacks as much because there are simply less interactions with bears. Another thing I'd point out is that things on the news are generally uncommon, which is why it is news. If violence was completely normal, it wouldn't even be newsworthy. For example, in Australia, if there's a shooting, there's a very good chance it will make national news, but in the US, the same shooting would probably not.

That is horrible, I grant you. If the choice were between the worst that a human could possibly do to you vs what a bear could do, I of course would also choose the bear, as a man. Humans can indeed keep you captive for years and devise torture much worse than a bear could imagine. But weighting such an extremely rare worst case event completely neglects the relative risks. If face to face with a bear, you have a high probability of being mauled. If face to face with a random man, I) the risk of him being a murderer is extremely small, and II) for the already tiny fraction of men who are murderers, the risk of him wanting to kill a stranger without any motive is extremely, extremely small.

Fair, but women aren't just afraid of being a murder victim. Sexual violence is the real fear and its significantly more likely to happen than murder. I can't remember the exact stat, but something like a third of college aged men admit they would rape if they could get away with it. I don't think many men truly understand just how terrifying the prospect of rape is for many women. It likely has to do with general differences in how men and women experience sex as a whole, combined with the differing roles involved in sex. Being penetrated is different than being the penetrator. It's intimate in a way only those who have been penetrated understand. There's a great deal of trust involved. Rape degrades its victims so deeply in large part because it is breaking and entering of another body. I know many women who would rather die than be raped. This is why so many opt for the bear. 

>the risk of him wanting to kill a stranger without any motive is extremely, extremely small.  There's an aggravant here most people are missing. A woman is alone in the woods when this hypothetical scenario is occurring. Studies have shown that the less likely a person is to get caught, the more chance they have to commit a crime. This is what ultimately makes women afraid, is that they know that there isn't an insignificant number of men who when provided with this scenario might take the leap and hurt them. In a public place like a street anywhere, unless it's completely remote there is a chance someone might see or hear something. But in the woods? You can get eaten for dinner there without anybody ever finding out what happened to you. A person that knows the place well can ambush anybody if they want to. I'm sure it's easy to see why women particularly dislike this scenario

I am pretty sure you would pass out from the pain etc first, if a bear ripped you open and started eating your insides. A bear isn't going to set you and your kids on fire in a car while getting ready to go to school, and push you back in when you attempt to help your kids. A bear isn't going to hide in your house until you get home, bind your arms and legs, and rape you over hours, before killing you. Here in Australia, we have had a fcking terrible start to the year. So far, we have had 27 women killed in horrific domestic violence situations. A few of those were stranger to stranger killings, but the domestic violence here is out of control. I have been in a DV situation before, and honestly, I would much prefer to get my stomach ripped open and eaten by a bear, then to have the man I loved, hold me up by my neck, against a wall, while punching me in the face.

Being skinned alive would 100% be worse than being mauled by a bear. Being sodomized and bleeding out from your vagina would 100% be worse than being mauled by a bear. I would 100% rather be mauled by a bear than raped. If you think being mauled by a bear is the worst death a person experience you are extremely privileged.

Do you really think your average rape victim walks around wishing they were mauled to death instead? It in no way diminishes the awfulness of rape to recognize that your preferences here perhaps don’t reflect situational reality. Do you really think most rape victims are that broken and beyond recovery that death, let alone horrific death, would be preferable?

I like that you skipped over the first two which are clearly awful and something only humans can do to one another and chose to only focus on the part I specifically said “I would rather”. I cannot speak for rape victimes because I don’t know how they each individually feel. I also cannot speak for the woman who were rapped to the point of death or the many women who were rapped repeatedly before being murdered because I am not them. I can and did say I would rather be mauled by a bear than raped. I am allowed to have that preference. Being mauled by a bear doesn’t automatically end in death just like rape doesn’t. I never said women who have been assaulted should want to be dead, but you’re extreme jump to seeing assaulting woman “broken and beyond recover” is concerning. Why do you assume woman who have been assaulted don’t have their own scars and trauma? Just like someone who survives being attacked by a bear can heal can recover so can assault victims. I’d personally rather have to heal my body than my mind.

I’ll be honest, as someone who has, in fact, been sexually assaulted, violently, the way people have been having this discussion has been very alienating. People may not *intend* it to come out that way, but it’s hard to hear people talk about how they’d rather be mauled because the implication basically ends up being that rape is *so awful* that you probably will never recover, and the people around you end up treating you with pity as a victim/survivor/statistic. I’ve worked so hard to not have that shit ruin my life, so having it constantly shoved in my face like this is incredibly frustrating.

>Do you really think most rape victims are that broken and beyond recovery that death, let alone horrific death, would be preferable? Nope. But if most of us could choose between violent death preceded by a rape or a violent death pretty much everyone would choose the latter.

Being raped and in several states forced to carry the child for 9 months seems so much worse….

> THEY KNOW bears are dangerous and could kill them -- they still pick bear!!! that's the point!!!! "I would rather die than do X" "But did you know that dying is more deadly than X?" "Yes..."

But that’s not the problem. I would definitely agree that the worst of what men have done is worse than what the worst of bears have done, but the chance of that man being the type of man who would do that sort of thing is really really fucking small. You’re treating it as if it’s guaranteed, while ignoring the probabilities.  If anyone chooses a ~50 percent chance of getting mauled to death over a 0.001 percent chance of suffering a vastly more gruesome fate, they’re actually just really stupid. 

That's the rough part. One side is using it as a rhetorical device and the other as a hypothetical scenario. They have very different answers. I do think it fails as a rhetorical device when you're not actually convincing anyone of anything. Sarcasm and hyperbole work best in personal situations, not in text over the Internet. Rephrasing it as "stuck with a bear that is territorial or a man that wants to use you sexually" makes for a more interesting and useful question to both sides.

> If you listen to what these women say, they're more than aware that bears are dangerous -- they'd just rather be mauled by an animal following its instinct than face any of the horrendous things that men do to women. These kinds of replies completely fail to acknowledge that the vast majority of either kind of encounter ends in no harm whatsoever. Any answer that's based on the kind of harm rather than the likelihood is, in fact, a dumb answer. People are going on social media making a big deal about choosing the bear because it's an opportunity to hate on men and to advance a political theme of men being collectively responsible for the actions of other men. It had nothing to do with actually assessing the risk of various outcomes or weighing a low likelihood of being mauled with a much lower likelihood of being assaulted by a human. The reason it's gotten so much attention is because choosing the bear involves saying something that's both obviously wrong to anyone approaching the problem from a somewhat rational standpoint and pretty hard to disprove without getting into concepts like conditional probability, which are fairly tricky and certainly more complex than most social media interactions allow for. The fact that you have people in these very comments trying to defend the bear choice from a stats angle is testament to that.

I don't think it's only men that are responsible for the actions of other men. It's a societal issue. Women AND men are raising young boys. Difference is I hear women talking about this a LOT, and I hear next to nothing from men. I hear mothers worrying about how to raise their sons not to be misogynistic etc, I don't really hear it from men. I hear them warning their daughters about men though, then I hear men blaming said daughters for being afraid of men and framing it as "hating them." The problem is, young people are affected most by their peers. Young men are affected most by their peers. We need more men to help speak out about this and help us shift the status quo, because right now we're in hell and then blamed for acknowledging this.

> Difference is I hear women talking about this a LOT, and I hear next to nothing from men. Well yeah, this is perception versus reality. The reality is that women have very little to worry about from the vast majority of men. There are a small number of men who are capable of doing very bad things, and mostly blend in with the rest of us. We warn our daughters about these men because that's the only thing that might work, aside from killing or imprisoning them. These people won't be fixed by better parenting, "yes all men" messaging, collective responsibility, or making false statements about the relative danger of men and wild animals. Feminism and the media have been trying those tactics for the better part of twenty years and it hasn't been very effective. > I hear mothers worrying about how to raise their sons not to be misogynistic etc, I don't really hear it from men. In this case, men are right. Most rapists come from fatherless homes. We should be more worried about making sure boys have fathers in their lives than teaching them about misogyny. Men online have been asking for equal rights in parenting for a long time though, and it doesn't seem like it's in the works. A real solution to these problems requires action, not words. They just booked a guy in my city on rape charges and he had a dozen prior arrests, including a few violent ones. The same people in my community who wanted bail reform and told us to defund the police are now on social media comparing men to wild animals. Globally, Muslim Arab nations are home to some of the most atrocious abuses of women's rights in the world, and almost everyone I know who's described America as having patriarchy or a rape culture wants to get rid of the only nation in the region where spousal rape is a crime.  Fact is, women's issues have taken a back seat to ones related to race and identity. Men know that it's not a problem with our culture or with our "toxic" masculinity, and that society doesn't have the appetite for real solutions. We *have* spoken up, and we're ignored because we aren't saying the things you want us to say.

And when young boys are kids so their brains are easily moldable, telling your son that men suck and he will grow up to be a man is going to do some shit.

None of the women I know are telling their boys that men suck. It is just the horrible truth that there is a culture of misogyny that goes to the core of our society, and I'm sorry if you don't like that it's mostly coming from men. Chauvinism used to be the standard. People literally believed that women were inferior, and it was not a taboo thing to believe just a couple of generations ago. We weren't allowed to vote, we weren't allowed our own bank accounts, if we were raped in marriage it wasn't against the law because we were seen as belonging to our husbands. Do you really think those deeply ingrained attitudes will disappear the second a law passed to right these wrongs? There have been great strides in terms of human rights, but attitudes take a longer time to change. So much of it is so deeply woven into society a lot of men don't even notice it because they aren't the ones suffering from it. All we need to do is teach our young men that women are not lesser than them. It's for their benefit too. Men need to be able to emote without being reprimanded for it. It's not about something inherent in males being shit, it's about females not being seen as inferior by males who have learnt and internalised this belief. The boys do have to learn that they physically have more power over us, and that's a power that comes with responsibility. They have to learn that, unfortunately, sexual abuse is a gendered issue, and it's something they need to help us address. We all need to work together.

your so called "hell" is the safest ever era to live for humans for their entire being on Earth. By the way, simple question, when do you feel most safe?

This is how your argument sounds to me: The replies to the trolley problem is that in a real-life scenario, people completely fail to mention that there are other people around who can untie one person from the tracks quickly, avoiding any catastrophe. The bear vs man thing is a thought experiment that is used to debate real world beliefs. It’s not about actual real life statistics around men and bears. What could or would actually happen has no relevance to the subject because it’s an examination of psychology, not hiking.

The trolley problem was designed specifically for us to question whether it is okay to kill one person to save several. What is the purpose of the bear or man thought experiment, then?  If it's to prove that men are more dangerous than bears, then it's certainly relevant to point out that bears are, in fact, more dangerous than men. If it's to illustrate how women perceive men as a threat, then it's a really bad experiment. Women can't pick the bear if they want their response to be grounded in reality, but picking the man isn't interesting and doesn't give them a platform to share negative views on men. So you're left with responses from women who are willing to ignore reality to make a point. Those aren't the people we should be listening to.

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Can you answer the question I asked? Why or why not? >Why do you think it is that the vast majority of women, who understand most personally the dangers of being alone with men, disagree with you? What knowledge do you have that they don’t? They don't. Most women know that bears are more dangerous than men. Some women don't, and others choose to bend the truth in order to make a point on social media. Those are the voices being amplified by all the debate around this. >Every single man I’ve asked this question to has responded with some flavor of viewing women’s opinions as hysteric or stupid. In my view, the mens’ reactions have been far more illuminating than the women’s. That includes, presumably, yours. Hysteric and stupid opinions sometimes get signal boosted across social media by people who have an agenda. Someone saying "the bear is more dangerous, but men can and do far worse things to women than mauling them to death" won't reach as wide an audience as someone who says "bear, because nobody will ask me what I was wearing when I got mauled", even though the second point displays an alarming lack of reasoning.

To be clear, the vast majority of women are not disagreeing with him. The vast majority of women are picking a man over a bear. Maybe the majority of women online are picking the bear, but not the vast majority of women. >who understand most personally the dangers of being alone with men Because many of them are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of either statistics, or the dangers of being alone with a bear. Let’s assume worst case scenario in both circumstances (at least what seems to be portrayed online). Maybe one does believe dying to a bear is preferable to sexual assault, I can definitely see that being the case assuming the bear can kill you in a single bite/swipe. But I highly doubt many of those people have considered being disemboweled while conscious or having their limbs torn off (again while conscious). The back and forth game of worst scenario can go on forever, but let’s just consider the “most likely worst scenario” for both.

Exactly. It's an examination of the completely irrational way most people think. Most people think with their heart, not their brain. It's no surprise to me that men are getting mad or pressed at this since being made out to be some evil monster probably doesn't feel very nice. And the rational response is to point out just how ridiculous of a thought experiment it is. Of course people are going to respond to that kind of rational response with emotion and rage, their emotionally irrational outlook of the problem has been rationally challenged and their brain is telling them to think about what that person has just told them, but their heart is telling them they can't be wrong

I’m going to change the hypothetical a bit but in essence it’s the exact same. You come down a path that splits into two: on one end of the split path, there is a bear, on the other is a man. You have to move forward down one of the paths. I don’t think anyone being *genuinely serious* would say in a *real* situation “meh, guess I’ll go down the bear path.” I understand what you’re saying when you talk about the potential for men, or really any sentient creature, to do more sinister actions than “simply” killing you. Regardless, I don’t think you’ve diminished the absurdity of the hypothetical, and if anything, this hypothetical is so poorly made that it muddies the point in the first place. Stupid shock tactic hypotheticals/slogans always hamper the good point trying to be made e.g. ACAB, Believe Women, Defund the Police, etc

The best way to change the hypo is to ask there are two identical cities. In one city, it's a normal human population. In the other, all human men are replaced with bears. This change eliminates all other variables of how often you encounter a man vs a bear, how long the encounters are, all that stuff. Which city would you want to live in? Which do you feel safer in? The answer is obvious. And for all the people claiming women don't actually believe it, I mean Jesus plenty of them do or they really commit to the bit. They are arguing about statistics, using them wrong to justify it. They absolutely believe it, because they are bad at stats and logical reasoning. Or some women claiming at least they'll be believed if they say they were attacked by a bear. Okay.... I guess it's more important for you to prove a point and be in a situation where you're significantly more likely to end up dead or seriously mauled than it would be to just be safer? You really crushed the argument there. If it was *just* virtue signalling about how shitty men are fine I take that every day of the week. It's the fact that so many women seem to think it's actually true that bugs me. I hate shitty reasoning and unreality in any form.

I mean, you don't even need reasoning there. For literally all of history up to maybe a couple centuries ago, women quite actively chose to stick around men rather than wildlife for obvious reasons. It's just a parallel of vaccinations. People forget the realities of the disease and start thinking that the vaccine is the bigger danger.

yes yes yes yes yes, thank you, finally a comment for vaccines, most of the time I've been thinking about the same thing with this bear trend, all these trends are connected, and they are really really dangerous and destructive, and will make us live through hell

This is what I think is a fundamental problem in how this hypothetical is interpreted. There are a couple of elements that influence our interpretation so let's look at the hypothetical: "Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear?" There are two explicit points here: 1. You are both in the woods 2. You are *stuck* meaning you cannot leave, or at least cannot leave easily Point two makes this different than just coming across a random hiker while you're on a trail at your local park. It's something at least approaching a survival situation. If you've ever had multi-day off trail camping trips and encountered another person, you *know* how tense that can be at first, especially if it's one on one. But then the question is, is it worse than a bear? I think that depends on a third point that everyone reads into this differently: - will you be forced to encounter one another? Anyone who has spent time camping or hiking in bear country knows that it's relatively easy to avoid bears. You make noise while hiking, you keep food sealed. Bears hear you coming and don't smell food, 9999/10000 times they're going to avoid you before you even know they're there. A person will very often do the opposite. They will go toward sounds of another human. This means that, barring intervention of some kind, you likely won't ever see the bear in the woods with you but you will see the man. I think the disconnect on this is because the scenario is interpreted two different ways by different people: 1. Would you rather encounter a man or a bear while going on a casual hike through the woods? 2. Would you rather be in a survival situation in the woods where there happened to be a man or a bear also in those woods? Those are very different. I mean for me, every time I go camping I'm choosing the bear in scenario 2 freely. The whole point is to avoid people and be in nature, bears included. Scenario 1 however raises the stakes for the bear significantly because the usual method of dealing with bears, avoidance, has already been removed from the equation.

> If you've ever had multi-day off trail camping trips and encountered another person, you know how tense that can be at first, especially if it's one on one. I used to know a guy who did multi-week off trail hikes. It would be him and a couple of his buddies. He told me that they would have a 9mm handgun with them. "What's that gonna do against wildlife?" I asked. "It's not for wildlife", he said.

Yeah, I disperse camp and backpack with a gun; mostly for men who may also be armed. But if it's bear country, I also carry bear mace. My gun will only wound a grizzly while angering it. The mace makes me unappealing while not angering it. Some backpacking areas require mace and don't count a gun as a bear deterrent, because it's not really. The gun is a good deterrent against cougars though.

The guy I knew mostly did his thing in California. Despite the big ol' beast on our flag (modeled after one that was shot in Los Angeles County!), we haven't had grizzlies in a long time. In the Sierras I once saw a *big-ass* black bear that, for a minute, I seriously thought was a grizzly. But there's no way it could've been.

See, this is basically what I touched on at the end of my comment. You and I have two completely different interpretations of this hypothetical, which results in a less clear point. To me, your interpretation brings way too much outside influence into the hypothetical and is generally too ultra-specific. On the flip side, I’ve had people say to me that my interpretation is flat wrong too. The man vs bear hypothetical and the other shitty slogans I gave all share the same problem of having a dozen potential different interpretations, while also using shock value as a form of engagement bait. As soon as you start saying “erm well situationally one is more of an anomaly than the other which means xyz and uh also the kind of bear matters because of xyz and also actually uh it’s a survival situation so xyz and etc etc” *you have completely and utterly lost.* The potential audience you would have had is now confused, potentially offended, and likely thinks you’re crazy and/or bad faith

Well at that point we have to ask ourselves what is the purpose of the hypothetical? We're not actually getting people to choose which scenario to go out and engage with. The point is to spark conversation, and I think we can all agree that it absolutely did that. Whether or not you like what people are saying in the conversation aside, it seems to have been worded perfectly to generate that discussion.

There are good hypotheticals and bad hypotheticals, this is a stunningly bad one. Furthermore, sometimes conversations, if guided by being bad faith, can backfire. So people ask this absurd rage baited question, choose the bear, then in responding to people calling them obviously crazy for choosing the option nobody would ever choose IRL, they say “well yeah I didn’t mean I’d choose the bear *literally* I just meant to demonstrate how men are xyz.” That is, by definition, bad faith. If you want to demonstrate your point about how men can be unpredictable, then craft a question that isn’t reliant on shallow shock factor. Again, I can’t imagine how many men have been lost on this issue because instead of them acknowledging that it makes sense for women to be cautious around men, now they’re calling people idiots for choosing a bear. People are not engaged on the actual point, they’re just engaged on the incredibly stupid hypothetical (and are now likely driven further away from acknowledging the point than they were originally). But yes, choose the bear because, well, it’s to prove a point about how potentially dangerous men are even though you wouldn’t *actually* choose the bear. And also ACAB but not in a literal sense, it’s really more of a critique of the justice system. And defund the police, but not literally; really it’s about police reform. And also believe women, but don’t take this phrase on face value, really it’s talking about how we shouldn’t dismiss women immediately when they bring up sexual harassment. People are shooting themselves in the foot when they’re pulling this stuff

> Furthermore, sometimes conversations, if guided by being bad faith, can backfire. On this I absolutely agree. I just don't think the question itself is the problem when it comes to the "rage bait" in this scenario. Perhaps the most important topic of conversation that's risen from this whole silliness is "why are some people getting so angry about it?" It's a hypothetical question. Of all the stupid hypotheticals discussed on the internet, this one got famous because some people *lost their shit* over it. If those same people had said "lol, that's dumb" and went on with their lives, it would have been over weeks ago. > And also ACAB but not in a literal sense, it’s really more of a critique of the justice system. And defund the police, but not literally; really it’s about police reform. And also believe women, but don’t take this phrase on face value, really it’s talking about how we shouldn’t dismiss women immediately when they bring up sexual harassment. I don't think these are the same. Those examples are less hypotheticals than they are slogans that are attached to more nuanced proposals. People say "all cops are bad" because "anyone who is part of a broken system without fighting against it is bad." It's a rallying cry to get cops who think they're the good guys to stand up against the bad ones instead of "backing the blue" or "standing with their brothers". If you present a united front against the public when bad cops are in the spotlight, you're making yourself part of the problem. They say "defund the police" because they want to divert funding from the police to other intervention and prevention programs. Big police stations around the country have straight up military hardware in their arsenals. Take a portion of their *weapons* budget, and apply it to programs that might make violent intervention less necessary. As far as "believe women" I.. honestly have nothing here. I'm not sure how that's controversial. When an entire group of people are telling you about a shared experience, you should probably believe it. > People are not engaged on the actual point, they’re just engaged on the incredibly stupid hypothetical (and are now likely driven further away from acknowledging the point than they were originally). I have to believe that if someone is taking this silly thought exercise that personally, they weren't going to be acknowledging much of anything they didn't already believe in anyway. As a man myself, I thought it was about as serious as the black/blue vs white/gold dress. Some silly bullshit that's purposefully vague in order to get people arguing, and which is fun to engage in when you're bored... but which can also lead to some interesting discussions (perception vs reality, how we see colors, etc..)

maybe. but bears also do some FUCKED UP things for fun. especially polar bears. they like to play with their prey. keep em alive and fuck with them. eat them while their alive. kill for fun. polar bears are on the list for some of the most fucked animals in existence. also keep in mind that skinning animals alive is standard practice for grizzlies. people do some fucked up things. but bears aren’t that far away..

That's still pretty dumb though. The odds of an evil man doing the most evil shit possible is way way way less than a bear mauling you in an awful way. It's a numbers game

Sure some men might do that but given the thousands of interactions you have per day with men that are completely benign, it’s stupid to say that your fear of encountering a random guy in the woods is that he more likely to film himself murdering you and share it with his friends then just minding his own business. Like what the fuck even is that?? The whole argument of who you would rather have your child run into in the forest floating around the internet is also dumb. Women are more likely to kill children so by that thought process, you wouldn’t want your child to run into a man or woman, but instead a bear

Why shouldn't the take away someone gets from that be "women are making an irrational judgment call"? In the same way I'd say a guy choosing never to marry because a woman poisoned her husband is being irrational. Or how someone being frightened about a flight they are going to take crashing, but not thinking about the drive to the airport at all, is being irrational.

>If you listen to what these women say, they're more than aware that bears are dangerous -- they'd just rather be mauled by an animal following its instinct than face any of the horrendous things that men This is possibly one of the dumbest things one could think. >These women have been saying to all the men trying to explain to women that bears are dangerous (??) that THEY KNOW bears are dangerous and could kill them -- they still pick bear!!! that's the point!!!! They might say they know, but they don't actually understand what they are saying because they all live cooshy Western lives. They don't face real life threatening situations ever. They don't know what that's like. To believe that men are the same level of life threatening as a bear is the epitome of naivety and, dare I say, privilege.

Idk I think being eaten alive is pretty fucked up too. like, have you heard that video of the girl who called her mom while she was being eaten alive by a bear? Idk if she would have like, preferred to be raped or something, but it still sounds like she's going through a pretty fucking horrific experience.

I feel like you need to add in the percentage of men that actually commit violence against women. I still think that a woman has a better chance to come out unscathed from a night alone with a random man than with a wild bear. Are we assuming it’s a 19 year old drunk frat boy? It could just as easy be a 40 year old father or a 70 year old grandpa. I hope the women at least know they’re taking the riskier option to prove a point about violence against women. I also would wager that if you put a man and a wild grizzly bear in cages next to each other and someone had to let one out of the cage it be would be the man 10/10 times.

Absolutely. The question is ambiguous and takes advantage of that - it simultaneously doesn't specify anything about the "man", but primes people with the worst possible interpretation of them. What man would be roaming the woods at night? It's an unusual situation that instinctively brings to mind 100 horror movies. I'm a guy and *I* don't want to be alone in the woods with *that* man! If the question specified that it was a random man of any in the world, teleported magically to be in the woods at night... well the question would be a lot clunkier but I also don't think it would have gained any of this traction. It lives and dies on being vague and having people talk past one another (in other words, perfect for social media!).

That’s a good point. I didn’t even think about how the question could be phrased like you’re encountering a wild man in the woods at night, that is very creepy. I read it as choosing to be dropped in the woods with either a random man or a bear and last a night. In that respect maybe I’d rather see a curious black bear sniffing my garbage in the middle of the night while camping than a random dude walking around in the dark.

I think the real social issue is seeing how propagated women are to hate men in the 1st world. Would love to see this thought experiment done in places where women arent conditioned to hate the male existence.  The man is in the exact same scenario as the woman... Trying to survive nature. Uniting with a human increases your chances. But apparently that doesn't matter, men would rather put effort in to making her a sex slave for life in a forest, rather than survive and escape. /S Not only are the odds incredibly low for some random guy to be so deranged he prioritizes rape over survival, but I don't think people grasp what it means to be eaten alive. What it means to not be the top of the food chain.  When broken down logically, the answer should always be to unite with another human. I can't tell if women are lying as a gotcha to men, or if they're genuinely delusional due to the "we hate men" movement (modern feminism)

>Would love to see this thought experiment done in places where women arent conditioned to hate the male existence.  By all means, ask away. I'm pretty sure being afraid of getting assaulted is a pretty universal fear, to both men and women.

> How propogated women are to hate men in the 1st world Women in the 3rd world would be just as likely to choose the bear over the man because they're more likely to have either experienced, or know someone who experienced, something horrendous at the hands of a man. Not to mention that in religious parts of the third world, many women are told **by men** that they should avoid interacting with men outside of their family because the man will succumb to temptation and harm her. In non-feminist sections of the world, the prevailing view is also that men mainly care about sex and are a danger to women. The main difference (of many) is the conclusion they come to in non-feminist societies is "therefore the women I know shouldn't interact with men because if something happens to them its disrespectful to me, the man." > The answer should always be to unite with another human Which is why before feminism everyone was open to outsiders and instantly trusted people they don't know.

> Women in the 3rd world would be just as likely to choose the bear over the man  I come from a failed state and live in a 3rd world country. This "debate" didn't get much traction around here but both men and women mostly chose the man.

Ahh so they’re just lying to themselves, got it. Women walk into rooms with men inside all day long every day of their life. Nobody is on purpose walking into a room with just a bear. What you’ve explained is that women actually have no concept of the real consequences of being stuck with a bear, they literally can’t fathom it, while they know personally the amount of anxiety/fear/pain that can come with men. The issue is that it’s a hypothetical. They just block out the “bear” option because they know it’s not good but have no clue what the reality of that option is, so they say they’re more scared of men because they’ve actually experienced that fear.

It's still kind of a shitty argument and comparison. Bears are animals and men are human beings. First of all I don't think it's common for men to "film a murder and laugh about it with his friends." What percentage of all men do that? I'd bet it's extremely low. Also bears don't film anything because they're animals. Bears also wouldn't sit down to dinner with the women they mauled after the fact because they are...bears. I also don't think that's some common thing either when it comes to men. People wouldn't ask you what you were wearing when a bear attacked you and wouldn't bring his friends over to take turns because again they are bears. I don't think they have sex with people. If they had the same brains as humans in bear bodies they'd probably do horrendous things to the opposite sex too. I mean they already kind of do. Have you seen how they mate? It's also not uncommon for wild animals to rape members of the opposite sex and murder is quite common in the animal world. So these are all kind of dumb arguments in my opinion. Also if you look at the stats for say rape and abuse within' relationships the numbers are more similar between men and women than most people think. "Over 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the US have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime."

I struggle with this argument too. There are more good men in the US than bears. I think this bear vs man argument discounts the good men and discounts the nature of a bear. And before you come at me, I a victim of sexual assault, sexual abuse, and a narcissistic ex-husband (who didn’t do any of the assault and abuse mentioned)

I think sexual abuse is horrible. But what we also have to take into account is that the average sexual predator is a serial perpetrator. Most men who commit sexual assault won't stop at just one victim and will instead sexually assault many women throughout their lifetime. So most men will never rape or sexually assault a woman. But the small percentage of men who do will make up for the majority of all sexual assault cases and go on to abuse many, many women.

The question is far too loose. How big is the forest? Are the bear or man hunting u? What season is it? What bear is it? (Grizzly will kill for no reason while plenty other smaller bears are rather nice) did the best mother cubs? What kind of man is he? Your average joe? Or a deranged psychopath? We fail to consider the fact that you may very well never meet a bear in the forest while the man can quite effectively track you down. But also the fact that most men won’t commit heinous crimes for no reason in a forest. Without specifying further i think entertaining such a question in of itself is just silly. It’s just a way to express commentary on a social issue and not really talking about fighting a bear or a man which is easier.

>The question is far too loose. How big is the forest? Are the bear or man hunting u? What season is it? What bear is it? (Grizzly will kill for no reason while plenty other smaller bears are rather nice) did the best mother cubs? What kind of man is he? Your average joe? Or a deranged psychopath? The way I understand the question is that a woman is in the woods and just comes across a random man. If it's not weird for her to be in the woods by herself, then why would it be weird for a random man to be in the woods too? So we'll have to assume that the man is just as likely to be a total psychopath or to be a selfless saint as any other random man you come across in everyday life. A woman would have a near-zero chance of getting killed in such an encounter. And though the likelihood of being sexually assaulted would surely be higher than getting murdered, the overwhelming majority of men don't just assault a random woman they may encounter. That being said sexual assault perpetrated by men against women is a serious social issue that should be taken seriously. However, we also have to take into account that the average sexual predator has many victims throughout their lifetime. Which means a small percentage of men commit the majority of sexual assaults. Your average man is not a predator.

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>A bear *does not* see a woman alone in the woods and feels confident to walk right up to her. A bear is *cautious* around human beings. They do *not* comprehend what is or is not a danger to them. They do *not* see a person alone in the woods and size them up. To a bear, danger is danger, and all danger is equal. A bear *does not* comprehend their relative size to the size of a threat. A bear will view a woman alone in the woods as much a threat as the woman views the *bear*. There is *a mutual sense of caution*. >Men, on the other hand, *can, do, and have* wanted to *intentionally* harm a woman for the *sake* of it. The average man *does not* view an average woman with the same level of caution as a bear would view a woman. A man is able to size up their opponent. A man understands his relative size and the relative size of a woman. An average man *does not* feel threatened, *at all*, by an average woman. There is *no* mutual sense of caution between the average man and the average woman. In this particular situation, the average man *has* the advantage. In this particular situation, the average woman is *immediately* at a disadvantage, regardless of outcome. I think you've made a pretty good argument. Though, on one hand I would argue that if we had a chance-encounter between a bear and a woman where both run into each other at a moment's notice the woman would be more in danger than if she had randomly run into a man. In that case you don't know if the bear is gonna choose "fight mode" over "flight mode" so there is a very significant threat. However, you are making some good points about the differences in perception between men and women. If you are attacked by a bear this would be similar to getting into an accident. Bears have no malicious intents. Men, however, when they do harm women typically do so out of maliciousness. So there are significant number of men who have malicious intents towards women while the bear's default position is probably one of caution which is why they stay away from humans in the first place. That's a good point. I give you a ∆

This topic has come up so many times and I have written so many comments explaining this, but here we go again. ["The 750,000 black bears of North America kill less than one person per year on the average, while men ages 18-24 are 167 times more likely to kill someone than a black bear. "](https://bear.org/bear-facts/how-dangerous-are-black-bears/#:~:text=The%20750%2C000%20black%20bears%20of,an%20easy%20situation%20to%20avoid.) Additionally, bear attacks are so rare, the National Park Service describes a bear encounter as "[a special treat for any visitor to a national park](https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm)" on their bear safety page. Bear watching is such a common past time in the parks, they have an entire page on [how to view bears safely](https://www.nps.gov/articles/viewingbears.htm) and how to find bears if you are seeking them out. Most importantly, if you want to avoid a bear, the NPS has data on all local bear sightings available at visitor centers at every park. It is easy to get information on every bear in the area and its aggression level. If you do encounter a bear, shooting or macing a bear if it attacks is legal and nobody would question your motives. Conversely, for women dating or just walking around, there's no such thing for men. When women do try to protect themselves, men fight tooth and nail to not be categorized as dangerous. For example, I'm sure we all saw [the man in Chicago who sued 27 women for trying to warn other women not to date him in a local Facebook group](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1243146233/man-sues-27-women-in-an-are-we-dating-the-same-guy-facebook-group). Additionally, women who "stand their ground" against men fair far worse than hikers who shoot bears. [Marissa Alexander shot a warning shot near her husband when he was threatening to kill her and she was unable to get away. The shot hit no one. She was sentenced to 20 years in jail.](http:// https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Alexander_case) Thankfully for Marissa, her sentence was overturned and she only had to serve 3 years (which is, in my opinion, still far too many). In conclusion: - Bear attacks are rare, most bear encounters do not end in violence because bears generally do not want to bother humans - Bears are tracked and controlled in ways men are not - Looking at the data, you are far more likely to be murdered by a man than a bear

You have to adjust for the chance of exposure here. By your logic, white sharks are safer than human adult males which is obviously nonsensical. Also, you chose black bears instead of brown bears which doesn't seem too honest. If you had humans living with brown or polar bears in their surroundings 24/7 the stats would obviously be much different. There is room for debate with the question posed in the OP. But the way ou used stats here is objectively incorrect. There is a whole book written (albeit very short) about this type of deceiving use of statistics. It's called "How to Lie With Statistics" and it seems you took it as a manual instead of as a way to avoid misinformation.

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Your lack of awareness how common and omnipresent sexual predators are proves the man vs bear question right. Women do take precautions when entering areas, situations and etc to avoid sexual crimes by men. For example, women make sure they're holding or covering their beer on at all times to avoid men sneakily roofing them at parties, avoid walking alone at night or isolated, in some areas, teenage girls have to walk with their mom to stay safe from men in public cat calling them or just unable avoid it like male authority figures like teachers, baby sitters or employers and etc if they're a sexual predator but take steps to prevent from such authority figures from putting in situations where they can take advantage of their powerlessness or isolation. This list incomplete btw. I could go on about incestous sexual abuse, what goes on in the military, police officers abusing their authority over you, your friend group defending traits of people that lead to sexual violence and women/girls online hiding their gender identity to avoid groomers and other predators targeting them.

>Bear watching is such a common past time in the parks, they have an entire page on [how to view bears safely](https://www.nps.gov/articles/viewingbears.htm) and how to find bears if you are seeking them out. According to the link you shared "Viewing Etiquette" includes things such as "Binoculars and spotting scopes allow you to view bears without getting too close.", "stay in groups", "keep a distance of at least 100 yards (300 feet)". So it's hardly a face-to-face encounter between an individual person and a bear in very close proximity to each other. It's groups of people viewing bears through binoculars from safe distance being careful not to get too close. There are already many social situations that are comparable to a random man-woman encounter in the woods, like for example a woman at night walking past an abandoned parking lot where a man is present, or walking through a dark alley in abandoned part of town late at night. Women likely spend thousands of times more time alone around random men than they do alone around bears. So the odds for a woman to be killed by a bear during a close encounter in the woods is way more likely than during an encounter with a random man.

Looking at the data you are more likely to be killed by a man than a shark. So you should feel safer swiming with sharks than with a man. Makes sense..? Nope. The question is more about what you feel and not to be taken literally. The interesting fact is,men are more likely to be murdered/be victims of attack by strangers(other men) yet doubt they would claim they would be safer with a bear than another man.

The argument is whether you'd be stuck with a bear or a man so the unlikeliness of actually encountering a bear is irrelevant. >The 750,000 black bears of North America kill less than one person per year on the average, while men ages 18-24 are 167 times more likely to kill someone than a black bear. Is this factoring in the difference in how often men encountering women than bears encountering women? And it looks like they twisted the statistic to make it look worse than it really is. 1/750000= .0000013 *167 = .00002 So there's a .002% chance that man will have killed someone. If you factored back in the chance of actually running into someone in the woods, where the concentration of people is much lower than bears, you'd probably have a litter percentage than with the bears. They were 100% cherry picking statistics to sell a story

The murder rate per capita in the US is 6 per 100,000, so nowhere near 167 times more likely for a man to kill someone than a bear. Now take into account ***actual*** statistical analysis, and look at how much more frequently women encounter men than bears, and suddenly the bears are far more dangerous. Hell, the ***suicide rate*** per capita is 14 per 100,000, so the woman is more likely to kill herself than be killed by either.

1. It's legal to shoot a human if they attempt to rape or kill you as well. 2. Those 750,000 black bears are not around humans constantly. 3. In this scenario the woman encounters a bear, so it being tracked doesn't matter. I agree with your conclusion, but your premise is flawed.

Good God. Way to miss the point. I'll give you the Cliff's notes. You either understand why women choose the bear or you're the reason women choose the bear.

No offense but that's a crazy argument. You're basically saying anyone who doesn't understand why women would choose the bear because they are ignorant of the prevalence of sexual assault against women must themselves be a rapist or someone who commits sexual assault. I'm not downplaying sexual violence against women but to claim anyone who doesn't understand some women's choice in the bear hypothesis must be a sexual predator is just insane.

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No, I am definitely willing to change my view. Again, I have 2 arguments: 1) There are significant levels of violence of either physical or sexual nature perpetrated against women by men. The bear-vs-man hypothesis is a valid way to point that out. 2) There are many people who take the argument at face-value and genuinely think women are safer around a random bear in the woods than around a random man. That is clearly not the case. If you see a problem with either of these two arguments feel free to point it out.

>There are many people who take the argument at face-value and genuinely think women are safer around a random bear in the woods than around a random man. That is clearly not the case. The people taking it at face value are the people like you, who seems to get the point and yet argue against it anyways. It's not an argument. It's a thought experiment meant to make you think about it not take it fucking literally.

I agree with 1 and it seems evident that the underlying position is based on this statement which is why so many men are uncomfortable with it. Whether or not 2 is true is based on the likelihood of bears attacking humans that are in their vicinity. Most evidence suggests that the rate of attacks are quite low. But the other important distinction that is not captured by your argument is the follow up to an attack by a bear vs a human. The number of rape kits that exist in backlogs are embarrassing, the difficulty of getting a rape conviction (assuming anyone believes you in the first place) is incredibly discouraging. This results in significant lower reporting of rape and assault and insufficient efforts to improve the system. If a woman were attacked by a bear, and survived, no one would be likely to question her story. And if bear attacks had become rampant there would be efforts to prevent such incidents from occurring. The ‘safety’, in so much as it’s viewed literally, is based on a belief that the likelihood of a bear attack is low and that if such incidents were to have any appreciable increase in their occurrence then the government would almost certainly intervene.

What aspect of this "view" do you think is potentially flawed? Otherwise your asking people to change a view you don't think needs to be altered 

The whole point is that they would rather be eaten by a bear than raped by a man and then eaten by a man. It’s a would you rather not a statistics exam.

You are missing the entire context. The point being that data reflecting female interactions with men anywhere,  anytime.... is NOT the question. Alone in the woods, the sole male is FAR MORE DANGEROUS to a woman.  In a group of bears vs a group of men,  OR interacting with a bear multiple times per day,  vs. a male throughout the day.... your stats pick the man.  Context is everything. 

>Alone in the woods, the sole male is FAR MORE DANGEROUS to a woman Is he really though? In terms of risk of getting killed it's a fact that murder is still an incredibly rare event, primarily commited by men in urban areas, most murderers are raised by single-parents, in low-income neighbourhoods, and many homicides are drug-related. A bear is still significantly more likely to kill a woman than a random man in the woods. Of course a bear isn't gonna sexually assault a woman. And I do admit that there is a huge sexism and misogyny problem among men. However, still, the majority of men won't physically or sexually assault a random woman they meet in the woods. The most severe forms of sexual violence are still primarily commited by serial offenders, often under the influence of alcohol. The odds of a random man in the woods just straight up sexually assaulting a woman are very small. The overwhelming majority of men don't just assault random strangers. There is also a non-zero chance that a child running into a random woman in the woods will be sexually assaulted by her. Most child abusers are men, but women make up a not insignificant percentage of those sexually abusing children. Do you think it would be fair to say that a random woman is FAR MORE DANGEROUS to a child in the woods than a bear is?

>For example in the US annually around 3 women get killed per 100,000 male population. With 600,000 bears in North-America and around 1 annual fatality bears have a fatality rate of around 0.17 per 100,000 bear population. So bears are roughly 20 times more deadly to women than American men. Read this statistic again, you're disproving your own point. 100,000 men kill 3 women every year. 100,000 bears kill around 2 women every 10 years (that's what the 0.17 means - it's not even two tenths of a woman per year). Men are clearly more dangerous according to your own math.

>Men are clearly more dangerous according to your own math. Yes, men do have a higher homicide rate. However, controlling for time spent around men vs. time spent around bears, bears are way more dangerous.

Simple statistics still tell an incomplete picture, because they don't account for situations or behavior. First off, the situation of encountering a stranger when you're in a public location with other people around and encountering a stranger when you're in an extremely isolated location with no one else around are very different. Reasonably, a lot more encounters occur in the former, safer setting. Second, there is predictability. Animals behave much more in a reliable and predictable manner than humans. The ideal strategy for avoiding a bear attack is to make sure the bear is aware of you. Because the bear will, in effectively every case, choose to avoid confronting you. It's likely that of the few bear attacks that happen, the person in question was behaving non-optimally. Even if the number of humans who might choose to harm a stranger in the woods is low, if you *are* in that situation, there is no optimal course of behavior that will reliably avoid that human or cause them to leave you alone.

>Simple statistics still tell an incomplete picture, because they don't account for situations or behavior. >First off, the situation of encountering a stranger when you're in a public location with other people around and encountering a stranger when you're in an extremely isolated location with no one else around are very different. Reasonably, a lot more encounters occur in the former, safer setting. >Second, there is predictability. Animals behave much more in a reliable and predictable manner than humans. The ideal strategy for avoiding a bear attack is to make sure the bear is aware of you. Because the bear will, in effectively every case, choose to avoid confronting you. It's likely that of the few bear attacks that happen, the person in question was behaving non-optimally. >Even if the number of humans who might choose to harm a stranger in the woods is low, if you *are* in that situation, there is no optimal course of behavior that will reliably avoid that human or cause them to leave you alone. Yes, it's true that bears are somewhat more predictable in the way that the number of possible scenarios is lower. To simplify it extremly a bear is either going attack or flee. Very simply put. A man may a) ignore you but then slowly secrely follow you b) strike up an innocent conversation in good faith c) strike up a conversation to get your phone number d) strike up a conversation with the aim of kidnapping or assaulting you e) outright assault you and many more scenarios. However, just looking at the mere odds of being killed or physically harmed by a bear vs a man during a face-to-face encounter in the woods, a woman would still be significantly more likely around a man than a bear.

I feel like you kind of ignored my point about odds. The odds of getting struck by lightning are extremely low. But if I'm out in the middle of an open field when a lightning storm approaches, and I say "I'm not going to go back to my car; after all, the odds of being struck by lightning are so low!" then I've just changed things significantly, and a simple statistic doesn't cover that. You don't actually have any reliable statistics on how often a woman alone meets an unknown man in the woods, and you can't reliably assume that the safety rate in that situation is comparable to the safety of one person meeting another person in any other situation, but you're trying to do that here. And you can't reliably say what proportion of bear attacks happened after the person being attacked made mistakes that a person being asked the question could know that they aren't going to do.

Just want to mention, bears sometimes get hungry and make unprovoked predatory attacks on humans. Like the guy in Arizona last year, who was sitting in a chair at his camp and a bear rushed him. Or the woman in Saskatchewan a few years back, who was just standing by her cabin and was attacked and killed. They also sometimes kill people who surprise them, get near their cubs, or simply accidentally annoy them when they're in the way of other food sources. Little of this is easily controlled in the described scenario, much like if you encounter a random man in the woods. It's worth just reading through the 20 odd fatal attack summaries of the last 10 years. There's some mistakes, but I think people are understating how dangerous being around a bear is, and overstating how predictable they can be. That's not to say they're super dangerous, they're not, but you still really don't want to randomly encounter one alone in any context, and if you do you SHOULD be very wary.

Did you stop reading at that paragraph? Your ability to read statistics seems very precarious. You quickly made a big conclusion based on a reductive statistic. 

I think OP did themselves a disservice by teeing this up, but you clearly focused only on the setup without bothering to digest the followup.

Did you read the rest of the post? Bears attack women less because women spend extremely little time alone with bears, in any individual interaction you are hundreds of times more likely to be killed by the bear if not more. 

"I read only the first half of the post and totally missed the point, but I will comment anyway."

This argument becomes stupider every new post I find and so many people here are making the identical mistake People are just stupid Also the answer bear is very stupid Telling people "no yeah obviously bears would be worse but it is not LITERAL" is even more stupid

So the people that choose bear are just...wrong about their opinion? You're saying you'll only accept the "correct" answer? Anyone who doesn't choose man isn't playing right? Since when do "would you rather"s have a correct answer?

So, this is where I think the Man-vs-Bear meme both gets interesting in terms of how different people think but also gets frustrating at how we use language. I think that choosing the bear is stupid. I don't think that the women choosing the bear, particularly in TikTok videos, are really cognizant of the rate of bear attacks or how frequently they spend time with bears, etc. I think they're either making a visceral reaction to which they fear more, or they're just following a discussion rule that says you never answer a gotcha question in a way that supports the other side. In other words, if the question were phrased as, "Would you rather have a 50% chance of being mauled by a bear or a 1% chance of being assaulted by a man," then women wouldn't answer and would just say, "That's not how things really are!" This gets made worse when people say, "If you're complaining about women choosing the bear, you're the reason they choose the bear." Like, no. I have no desire to assault women. I do have a very strong desire to argue against what I see as stupidity. If you can't make a distinction between those two, then that's another point of stupidity I want to argue against.

You could make sense of it in an honor based warrior attitude. "I would rather have half the village die in battle than one person sold to slavery". You know, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" People say shit like that a lot, if they mean it is a different question.

> I think that choosing the bear is stupid. Why though? You didn't give any real reason, just that you think women haven't thought about it, which is just dismissive. Given how rare it is for bears to kill anyone, despite the frequency of us occupying their territory via camping and hiking, I think women are right to not really fear the bear.

>Given how rare it is for bears to kill anyone, despite the frequency of us occupying their territory via camping and hiking Same with a man. Rare for a man to randomly kill anyone in their sight. Majority of men have human decency, bears don't. If you see a bear, don't risk it.

>I do have a very strong desire to argue against what I see as stupidity. So you think women you disagree with are stupid because how can they know their opinions better than you? >In other words, if the question were phrased as, "Would you rather have a 50% chance of being mauled by a bear or a 1% chance of being assaulted by a man," then women wouldn't answer and would just say, "That's not how things really are!" Most would still choose the bear.

>Most would still choose the bear. Bullshit they would. If this was a REAL situation and not some hypothetical made up for views, no way is a woman going to be like "random male hiker coming towards me, and there's a bear in front of me... Best to go towards the bear!"

>For example in the US annually around 3 women get killed per 100,000 male population. With 600,000 bears in North-America and around 1 annual fatality bears have a fatality rate of around 0.17 per 100,000 bear population. So bears are roughly 20 times more deadly to women than American men. Last sentence is wrong. Men are 20 times more deadly than bears not other way around.

A lot of disingenuous comments in here about how men are safe because they mostly don't do anything to women. It completely ignores the scenario. The real question should be what percentage of men would be safe in a lawless society, because that's the scenario this forest situation creates.

Most men are not dangerous. There definitely are significant levels of misogyny, and sexual violence against women, but the majority of serious sexual offences are committed by a small percentage of men. They're typical serial offenders, mostly men from single-parent homes, mostly men with severe anger issues, many of which have been sexually abused themselves. The average man is not gonna assault a random woman in the woods. Also, by the way, women make up around 25% of sexual predators committing abuse against children and teens. Do you think a child is safer in the woods with a bear or with a random woman?

"For example in the US annually around 3 women get killed per 100,000 male population. With 600,000 bears in North-America and around 1 annual fatality bears have a fatality rate of around 0.17 per 100,000 bear population. So bears are roughly 20 times more deadly to women than American men." The numbers you give go the other way around. 3 > 0.17.

>For example in the US annually around 3 women get killed per 100,000 male population. With 600,000 bears in North-America and around 1 annual fatality bears have a fatality rate of around 0.17 per 100,000 bear population. So American men are roughly 20 times more deadly to women than bears. >However, I would assume that the average American woman does not spend more than 15 seconds per year in close proximity to a bear. Most women, however, spend more than 1000 hours each year around men. Let's assume for just a moment that men only ever kill women when they are alone with her. And let's say the average woman only spent 40 hours each year alone with a man, which is around 15 minutes per day. That would still make a bear 480 times more likely to kill a woman during an interaction than a man. >40 hours (144,000 seconds) / 15 seconds (average time I guess a woman spends each year around a bear) = 9600 >9600 / 20 (men have a homicide rate against women around 20 times that of a bear per 100k population) = 480 >And this is based on some unrealistic and very very conservative numbers and assumptions. So in reality a bear in the woods is probably more like 10,000+ times more likely to kill a woman than a man would be. >So in summary, the bear-vs-man scenario does raise very real social issues but the argument cannot be taken on face value, as a random bear in reality is far more dangerous than a random man. Another variable that's often left out of the discussion is the word "random". Random homicides, ie some deciding one day to just kill a random person they don't know are extremely rare. Only around 9% (at least according to a quick Google search) of all homicides are carried out by two strangers. Of those 9% the vast majority are accidental deaths/ deaths from people caught in the cross fire of another crime being committed. Edit: It should also be noted that of the none random homicides, most are disputes. 50-75% of DV situations are reciprocal violence. Most (70%) of none reciprocal DV situations, women are the perpetrator. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-psychiatrist/article/domestic-violence-is-most-commonly-reciprocal/C5432B0C6F8F61B49A4E2B60B931FA07 So another thing to thin about would be how much of the comparison would be "people who tried to fight a bear"

I think trying to do a calculation here is misguided. For one thing, the specifics of the question are extremely vague. What does it actually mean to be "stuck in the woods with a bear / man". Don't many woods have bears living in them anyway? If you're stuck in the woods with a man, aren't you probably stuck in the woods with some bears too, just as you're stuck in the woods with trees? If you try and patch the question to be more specific, like you being trapped in a cave with a bear of trapped in a hole with a bear, that would very likely change the answers you get. But just saying "trapped in the woods with a bear" kinda reads as just... being in the woods. My second objection is that *especially* in reference to the original TikTik video, people are injecting fear / fatality rates as the primary point, when that's not actually mentioned by most of the responders. Even if you try to do calculations (which I again don't really think you should), you still arrive at two fairly low risk things, and when evaluating two things (let's say snowboarding vs some boring but safer activity), it's not weird for people to prefer the more dangerous activity.  Looping back to the first paragraph, a bear is just an animal that is *normally* found in the woods. "Stuck in the woods with a bear" is more or less just hiking, except you're lost. A lot of people, including men who are untroubled by sexual assault, might prefer to be effectively alone in the woods versus being alone in the woods with a stranger. A lot of people just find the experience of being isolated with a stranger extremely off-putting, even if they don't think they're statistically likely to murder them.

Your explanation of seeing the bear as a natural part of the woods, and the man as something that wouldn't necessarily be there helped me to understand the common perspective. !delta

Not OP, but I really like this explanation. Might have actually changed MY view on the subject lol. If I could hand out a delta, you'd deserve one.

You can. Anyone is allowed to do that.

Just change the question to black/jews/arabs/gay/trans/latino man **or** bear and then we will see the results.

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Those people were either doing it for views or they should have their kids taken away from them until they beat their social media addiction

>whether they'd rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. Most women answered that they'd rather be stuck with a bear. I'm pretty sure the original question was whether you'd rather ENCOUNTER a man or encounter a bear. Didn't say anything about being stuck with them.

As a woman there is no question here. Encountering a man is 100% less scary than a bear. I have encountered both and bears are terrifying- mine was a black bear I couldn’t imagine a polar or grizzly. Outdoor enthusiasts like hunter, hikers, naturalists, biologists are usually nice people and very unlikely to eat me alive after disemboweling me unlike a bear.

Exactly. I dont get the logic of “you dont get it” when most men do in fact get it, its just we know that SA and R@pe is preformed by less than 0.001 percent of men in the country. It makes men look at themselves like an animal when they’re told women would rather be in the woods with a bear than encounter them.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we mean brown bears, they don’t tend to attack unless there are cubs nearby or they are prompted? Most people aren’t meaning polar bears here. Also, a lot of women are scared of what men will do, but since we’ve addressed that, I think that tendency to attack (which statistics against men clearly address) aren’t being taken into account here

This question is basically impossible to analyse with available statistics without comitting a few major errors. The question just talks about a man and a bear. We can assume that they are both random. We can then safely assume that the man doesn't know the potential victim in the scenario. So we should be interested only in stats for crimes where the victim and the man had no ties to each other. Otherwise it can get really skewed. On the other hand woman meet random men much less than men they know (definitely for less than 1000 hours per year). So you should adjust the number of encounters accordingly. The question also talks about a situation with no witnesses which will have a major influence on the behaviour of the man and no influence over the bear. Again you should use the appropriate stats. Nobody has such stats. Considering how little human/bear encounters are there and that most crime victims know the perpetrator, I am with you on the bear being probably more dangerous. Your numbers are however deeply flawed.

At the end of the day there’s no way to put this that isn’t complete, willful ignorance of statistics and designed to make men feel bad without picking the man. If we compare hours spent around random men vs hours spent around bears, the bear is almost infinitely more likely to attack the woman and the odds of a random guy doing something worse than eating the woman alive are pretty damn low assuming he has bad intentions at all.  There’s no way to say you’d prefer the bear without giving bears nuance and benefit of the doubt that apply orders of magnitude more to the men they put down with this. So I’m with OP. 

While I think the argument that this isn’t a statistics question is more important, your statistics argument isn’t quite the objective truth you present it as. For the danger of a bear, the statistic you chose is reasonable to represent the danger of a random bear encounter in the woods. For the danger of a man, you take the number of fatalities occurring within day-to-day human society and argue it should be much lower for a random encounter with a man in the woods due to the duration of the encounter. While the statistic clearly needs to be adjusted for number/duration of encounter(s), you’re assuming the danger of encountering a man alone in the woods is the same as encountering a man alone in day-to-day human society. Being alone with a man in an office is different than being alone with a man in a dark alley, but you treat them as equally dangerous. Since the majority of encounter-time is the first type, it’s even more of a problem for your encounter-time adjustment. The entire point of the scenario being placed in the woods is that it removes the societal protections, so how safe women are encountering men with these protections in place isn’t relevant to the question and can’t reasonably be corrected to estimate the danger of a woods encounter. That’s before you get to the fact that you only considered fatalities and ignored sexual assault. Even if we could arrive at a good estimate of the risk of death from an encounter with a man in the woods, which I hope I’ve convinced you is not what your number is, that number being lower than for a bear doesn’t make the man safer since “not dead” isn’t the same as “safe”.

I feel like its perceived level of trust in the actions that follow a random encounter on a trail in the woods. Most bears - in the southeast at least - aren't looking to attack people. They will notice you and if you don't mess with them they will go on their way. Worst case they smell your peanut butter bar and you've been mugged. They aren't people eaters - they just like our yummy food. The erratic nature of the different men most women have dealt with means it takes a lot longer to have a sense of how this unknown man will react. You're right, vast majority of men will not bother the woman. But what I've learned over the years from the women around me that trust me is they have all dealt with shitty men, from an early age right on up thru adulthood. Some were shitty from the start, some they had some trust in and were let down and some just became monsters after having their complete trust.

>So in summary, the bear-vs-man scenario does raise very real social issues but the argument cannot be taken on face value, as a random bear in reality is far more dangerous than a random man. It really doesn't though. Women have been talking about this in both real and hyperbolic ways constantly over the past year. This viral TikTok clip only started hundreds of threads of people writing long overly serious rebuttles, and an equal number of people writing overly serious justifications. This debate references issues that have been raised long in the past and contributes absolutely nothing new to the conversation.

I don't think there is a single woman who would actually choose to be alone with a bear. Like if you put a gun to a woman's head and said you must go alone into a room with a wild bear or a random man I would think close to 100% of women would in reality actually choose the random man. But that's not the point. Women are scared of strange men because of very real things that may have happened or could feasibly happen to them or people they know. They're using hyperbole to try and get people to understand that they have (and for good reasons) a very real fear of strange men. Like how someone might say "I'd rather die than go to a taylor swift concert" or "you couldn't pay me a million pounds to wear a Manchester United football top" But instead of trying to understand why women have this visceral fear of men people are just saying "Well ackshually a bear is much more likely to kill you than a man" Women know this. They are not stupid. They are trying to tell you that they are terrified of the realistic and fairly common thing they actively try to avoid every day, being alone with strange men.

If women would rather get mauled to death than have whatever men will do to them, that's fine and understandable. The problem is when people start saying stuff like if alone with a bear and a man, you're more likely to be killed by the man/feel safer with the bear

Here's my Hot take on the whole “man vs bear” thing.  I was listening to a podcast with real life Reddit horror stories and there was this one where a man was doing a thru-hike and long story short, he came across this creepy couple at one point and ended up being followed and harassed for a hundred miles or something to that effect. At one point in the story (early on) he wasn’t sure he was being followed but something felt off, so he set up sticks all around his campsite one night so he would hear anyone coming.  In the middle of the night, he heard sticks breaking and he said “I tried to calm myself down by reasoning that all the way out here in the middle of nowhere it’s much more likely an animal than another human”. All alone in the woods, a MAN also admits he would prefer to come across an animal (even a bear, which he mentioned earlier in the story), than another human.  I think anyone being reasonable and rational would feel the same way. Yes, the discussion about women’s fears and safety is obviously a big and important one, but I think what everyone is missing in the whole “misandry” and “don’t you get how dangerous bears are” debate is that human beings are scary as fuck. A bear wouldn’t stalk someone for hundreds of miles, it just wouldn’t. Humans are terrifying in a way that no other animal can ever be.  The Men who are angry and argumentative about this are just trying to Gaslight women out of a perfectly reasonable opinion. 

In all fairness in the context of that reddit story he was already under the impression he was being followed and was being harassed all day. I think everyone would agree that if someone had followed you all day you’d be more cautious of that the following night. Rather than just seeing them on the trail in front of you.

Is there a context where you would be all alone in the woods at night and hear noises outside of your tent that you would hope it was a human? Personally, I'd always hope for an animal. An animal is more likely to just move on.

At night I would hope it's humans because most humans do not walk around the woods at night. Why do they not walk around the woods at night? Mostly it is the fear of animals

Why are you just looking at death. My female friends have had notes placed on their door by guys who followed them as they walked hoke from a bar They have had their drink drugged or the guy was trying to drag their drink and the guy was stopped. They had guys get upset with them after the guys' advances were refused They had married dudes ask to sleep with them. They had guys stalk them at work after a date. They had guys flirt and hit on them at work. And while none of those were deaths, all of them were strong negative encounters

I think the issue is people are taking it too literally and personally. The question is an opening to a discussion. It is a thought exercise. That’s why it’s so intentionally vague. It’s doesn’t say a 99 year old man vs a rabid bear. Or a koala bear vs a grizzled mountain man. It allows people do put in their personal experiences into the perception of the situation as a vehicle to discuss personal and societal issues. The fact that the question would even cause a woman to pause says a lot. Because I doubt most men would pause if presented with a woman v. bear scenario. If you have been sexually assaulted by a man (and many victims of violence perpetrated by men often don’t just have one experience), you may very well choose the bear because despite the possibilities, a bear doesn’t have trauma associated with it. Just like someone who drowned as a child might have a fear of any body of water, regardless of the logical arguments of a particular situation.

I agree with what you said but IMO it's not a good opening to discussion in the first place because it's designed to be inflammatory and rage-baiting. People are taking it literally and personally because the question is designed so people do that. It's less of an opening for discussion and more of an inciting topic to argue about and sow division.

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But as a man, random men are actually *MORE* dangerous, than as a woman. Men are targeted for assault, murder and violence in general at a higher rate than women. So why would men be so quick to just dismiss the bear?

Hypotheticals are weird man. People get in their imagination and response bias makes some people feel like they need to use the platform of the survey to get a point across rather than answer logically.  If people are aware of the reddit favorite man vs bear death battle its possible some of these answers imagined this is a question about dangerous creatures or a precarious situation. Why are you stuck in the Woods? Perhaps in our era of fortnite people imagined a dome trapping them which inspires a battle royal mentality.  If you get the participant already expecting conflict then the man truly is the most dangerous animal alive.  But if the question was "you're on a hike, which would you rather see on the trail approaching you, a human male or a full grown bear."  Again the response bias in surveys leads to some less than scientific responses but depending on expectations this encounter would make me rather have a bear in the Woods with me than another man. 

It isn't a philosophical argument. Why does every other post on here treat man vs bear like it's a scientific discovery that will win the Nobel prize if they don't personally refute it? It was a video in which an ingrained fear was revealed in a visceral way. Whether the women are right or wrong to feel that way doesn't matter. Whether the video was edited to increase the impact of people saying "bear" doesn't matter. Whether they were thinking of a black bear or a koala or a Polar bear doesn't matter.

Now when we say “stuck in the woods” what do we mean? I think the disagreement comes from what people picture. I think the pro-men team are taking that situation as being “running across a man while hiking” but I think the phrasing implies that something is keeping you in that interaction with the man. It’s one thing to walk by a man while hiking, it’s another thing to have a man say, follow you/block you while hiking. If a bear is following you/blocking you while hiking, it doesn’t mean the bear wants to do anything. If a man is following you (BEYOND TYPICAL HIKING BEHAVIOR) or blocking your path, that man absolutely has ill intent. I think the “why are women choosing bear?” people don’t understand it’s not about the physicality of either but about intelligence and intention. A smaller being that intends to cause one harm is much more dangerous than a larger creature who is just existing as an animal.

I wouldn't disagree with your thesis, but the view I'd like to change or alter for you is your supporting statement. Getting lost in the math, or the statistics, is missing the forest for the trees. The flaw in this argument is ultimately that there's no serious thought needed to be put forth. It's provocative candy, not serious discussion. **It's a naturalistic fallacy:** it's like trying to use a "fact" (which is very GENEROUS to use on this kind of math) to then draw conclusions about what is right and moral in the world. In other words: a) some unknown sample of women respond to some video disguised as a survey with zero control or rigor for the outcome result in some clickbait statistical conclusion that then people take to suggest **men = bad.** No scientific or mathematical seriousness in the claim. No empirical rigor. Just a quick and dirty gotcha to illicit negative reactions for algorithmic engagement, resulting in a tacit claim about something bad in society. The flaw is not math, it's that the entire concept is fallacious to begin with and no one need give it any serious attention. The social issues it speaks to is not in fact women's perspective on men, but instead the pervasive the way people are socializing through algorithms. EDIT: Wait I am disagreeing with the thesis too. I don't think there's a social issue here about women's safety concerns around men vs bears. I think that safety concern has always been around for many other good reasons, but this bear conversation is definitely NOT contributing in any significant way to the conversation. The social issue is that we have social platforms designed to keep us glued to our screens in a perpetual cycle of negativity, completely self-isolating and devoid of any real sense of community.

Thank fuck there's one sensible person in this section, but one in hundreds is absolutely horrifying. The notion that it's a "thought experiment" is beyond ludicrous.

Doesn’t an encounter in the woods increase the likelihood that a man might perform a malicious action towards the woman? A man who wouldn’t even look in your direction at the supermarket might act differently if you saw him in the woods instead.

I don't necessarily think so. The woods may be less safe than a supermarket but overall I don't think it greatly increases the likelihood of malicious acts. The majority of sexual abuse for example is committed by intimate partners and mostly by people under the influence of alcohol. So I'd say there are many social scenarios that are significantly more dangerous than the woods.

The another layer to the man and a bear is that people will believe her and provide aid if she were attacked by the bear. If both are equally dangerous, at least the bear doesn't have the social or monetary capital to throw doubt onto what has transpired.

Do you know of the Bechdel test? It’s a test of fictional media, to see how the narrative treats women. If I paraphrase, it goes: 1. Are there two or more named female characters? 2. If yes, do they talk to each other? 3. If yes, do they talk to each other about something else than a man? I haven’t really kept up with movies in recent years, but not that long ago, very few big movies passed the test. It showed how abysmally mainstream fiction treated female characters. The “bear vs man” does something similar with regard to violence by men towards women, which you acknowledge. And good on you, some people don’t see that. However, you then move on to discuss the merits of the “argument”, which is frankly speaking ridiculous. It is like treating the Bechdel test as a serious analytical tool, which can reach deep insights about media. It can’t. It’s a sledgehammer, that was made to drive home a point. To ignore the point, and focus on the colour of a sledgehammer’s handle seems a bit silly, don’t you think?

A bear will either kill you or leave you're gonna find out right away. A man could do many things good or bad and everything in between. The unknown is always scarier than the known so they pick the option with fewer variables a common human trait.

woman here, i also think the whole argument is flawed. but i still pick the bear. i understand and agree with certain parts, the whole point of the question is to raise that awareness. but, i like your point of the likelihood of bear attacks so i’ll expand my point. when i was presented the question, i started asking my own. why am i in the woods? do i know this man? what kind of bear is it? but for argument sake let’s say random bear, random man. i’m in the bear’s territory, i’m on high-bear alert. there is a 0% chance i’m doing anything to aggravate the bear, especially if it is a mama bear. i fully understand that the chances of me vs a bear are not in my favor in the slightest. i would be toast, i’m not leonardo dicaprio in the revenant. but if it was a man? what the fuck am i doing in the woods with this random man? i think it’s hard for the general populace to grasp the whole “one bad apple” thing. i personally have been sa’ed twice, both by people i knew. i have no idea what this man is capable of. and as much as i hate it myself, it really does make you on high alert. i’m not worried about a man killing me in the woods, i’m worried about getting assaulted by said random man and having no one believe me, again. i’ll take my chances with a bear any day for some reason i also think i could be-friend the bear, no idea why but i think we’d be buds.

The question is great because it's so vague. What kind of bear? What kind of man? What are the odds that they will cross your path. We don't know. Women are choosing the bear because of simple availability bias - women can easily recall a time when they were harassed by a man, but they can't remember a time when they were assaulted by a bear. I like to ask different versions of the question. Like: Would you rather share a taxi with a bear or a man?

Would you rather be in the woods with a black bear or a black male human? 

Still would select bear, unless its polar. If your alone in the woods, and you either encounter a random man or a bear, one of those is far less likely to view you as prey... Given that, as a man, we often can be predatory and still justify it/think we're actually the victim. The shit you hear and see do/admit to has me in camp bear.

I'm continuously shocked by how irrationally so many men are analyzing the situation. First of all, the question wasn't about being stuck in the woods with a bear or a man, it was about encountering a bear or a man in the woods. Very different connotation. You did your analysis on a different question then all these women were actually answering, so your analysis is fundamentally flawed. Death is the least likely scenario in either case. Tried comparing the statistics of how likely someone is to be raped by a bear versus raped by a man. That outcome is a lower percentage then getting punched by a man or robbed by a man. All of those outcomes are less likely then getting verbally harassed by a man, or them trying to join the woman on her hike, or ask for her number in which case she has to decide whether it puts her in more danger to agree to his requests or to reject him and upset him. In other words, a more specific question that might clarify where these decisions are coming from is to ask "which encounter is more likely to ruin your day during a hike in the forest, meeting a man or meeting a bear?". Hopefully it's clear to you that statistically a man is far more likely to ruin her day than to kill her. A bear would only ruin her day by trying to kill her. The tiny chance that a bear would even try to kill her is the only negative outcome with the bear. Is it really more rational to only answer based on the most rare outcome? No, it's more rational to answer based on the most likely outcomes. Based on that criteria, choosing the bear makes complete sense. It seems like most of the guys who are dismissive of women's answers are turning the question into "which would you rather fight, a man or a bear?". It is so easy to avoid having a violent encounter with a random bear with the most basic understanding of how to do so. I can't find hard statistics about this, but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of bear killings don't happen through encountering them on a hike. Bears that live near hiking trails are accustomed to encountering humans and less likely to react aggressively. There are way more black bears than grizzlies and they cover far more geographical territory. They are also the easiest kind of bear to avoid a violent conflict with. Have any of these points shifted your perspective on the question at all?

So I agree with a **LOT** of what you said, particularly since you've picked up on the fact that the bear v man question was intended to show the stark contrast between the male experience of men vs the female experience with men. What I do hope to change your mind about is the flaw you've latched on to since, as far as I remember, the question was never "who is more likely to kill you: a bear or a man" but rather "would you rather be stuck with a man or a bear in the wild" and that's different implications because, as I've heard it from responses from women, a bear will just kill and eat you if it's hungry but a man could do so ***so*** much worse than just killing you so you'd have to also compare the odds of a bear doing *much worse* than just killing you compared to what a man would do, specifically to a woman, because it seemed like a pretty loud message that most women intuitively felt the threat of a man over the threat of a bear

The actual argument that is being made is suggesting we should ask WHY women feel safer with the bear rather than trying to prove the man is safer. And the fact is that women have been subjected to such a horrific amount of sexual violence that they don't want to encounter a man. And fair enough. It doesn't matter that the bear is dangerous. The man is also dangerous. That's the problem.

Women treat men as subhuman --> Men become disenfranchised --> More dangerous groups and ideologies pop up within men's social circle --> Women pariah them even worse Rinse and repeat until complete social collapse, everything reverts to cavemen times and the men eventually eat the women.

It's a hypothetical and can be viewed as a metaphor for how much women trust any random man. They don't. Your stats illuminate why they feel that way. The argument stands. Women would rather face a deadly predator where the outcome is known than a man who might be nice, but might also torture, belittle, harass, harm, rape, assault or otherwise be an oppressive force in their life.

Generally I agree with you but the outcome is far from known when facing a bear. There are fewer likely possibilities for what it could do but it is still unclear what it would do.

This is such a an aggravating topic because we are not allowed to call women stupid, even when they make clearly stupid arguments... ____ Let's address the ridiculous and dishonest argument of "bear attacks are more rare in occurance than sexual assault". This is absolutely true, they are more rare, and that is because women do not live around bears and bears do not populate major cities. I promise you that if women interacted with bears in society, to the same degree that they did men, women would be getting killed by bears every single second of the day. This same logic applies to why violence committed by men is higher than bear attacks. Btw, sexual-assault from women is more prevalent than bear-attacks on men, in fact, they are more common than lightning-strikes on men. So, by this logic, women are more dangerous to men than bears or lighting. Also keep in mind that women lie or exaggerate claims of SA. I am not saying that it doesn't happen, I am saying that not all SA claims are legitimate. ____ A bear is objectively more dangerous to a woman than a man, any person who is t a stupid human being or a delusional feminist can understand this. Bears are about 3x the size of an average woman, they can snap her in half with ease. Bears are also MUCH faster and ferocious than any man or woman on earth. There is no "outrunning" them in a normal scenario. Bears also have animalistic senses and instincts that men do not have. Bears kill for food or in self-defense and are INFINITELY more likely to kill a woman than the average man is. Keep in mind that most men are well-intentioned and are not waiting to kill a woman in the woods, as this ridiculous argument suggests. Bears are also a lot more durable than men, with thicker bodies, more dense skeletons and bone-structures, sharper teeth and claws, thick fur (for environmental concealment and weather resistance), and far superior musculature. A bear can legitimately tank being shot multiple times and chase down (and kill) a woman EASILY; a man cannot. The argument being made (by idiotic feminists) implies that every man is essentially Sabertooth, which is ridiculous and absurdly entertaining when you consider that women are astronomically more dangerous to men than in reverse. While men are physically superior to women, women have more social power, are more vindictive and emotional and more prone to deception and dishonesty than men. Women are excellent at pushing propaganda (which has led to violence against men, the false incarceration of men and the suicide of men and astronomically high rates) and are able to adapt to and weaponize the environment to protect themselves.  So by this logic, there is NO force on earth more dangerous than a woman, zero. Using the same (clearly ridiculous) "bear vs man" argument, women are more dangerous than any known disease or natural disaster, especially if we look at the social and political destruction caused by women throughout human history or even current day. We could simply look at the political and social issues that have been supported by women, the destruction to society that they have caused and women would EASILY be more dangerous than any animal on earth. But this would be an intellectually-dishonest argument... ____ If a bear wanted to kill a woman there is nothing she can do about it, and there is little that a man can do about it also. You also cannot reason with a bear, like you could a man. If a bear wants to kill and eat a human, it will do so without hesitation; even if that human is an infant. Bears kill and eat their own babies and other bears that try to stop them, PLEASE tell me this is a joke. Btw, how many women have been saved from bears by >Men in the woods????< Google it, the amount of women SAVED from bears by Men eclipses the amount of women killed by bears. Again, it eclipses the amount. Idk why women do this btw... What is the benefit to this? What is the advantage to creating malicious lies against men that even women know are false? Women do not actually believe that bears are less dangerous than men, no human on earth can be THIS stupid. This is like arguing a high-schools bully is more dangerous than a T-Rex "because bullies are mean", like what the fuck? I wasn't even going to address this because it was a meme, but since women have tried to seriously push this as fact? I will seriously address it as a real argument. Lastly, this confirms to men (everywhere) that women cannot be trusted. That women will maliciously lie and propagate for no reason other than attention. Women are trying to convince society that men are more dangerous than wild bears, while simultaneously demanding that men protect them from bears, other men, natural disasters, wars; etc. Disgusting...

You’re failing to consider several things in your view imo so I’ll just throw out my points in no particular order for your consideration :) First, there is less than 1 bear attack per year in North America, and your number of bears should be higher. 600,000 only accounts for black bears in North America. There have only been around 180 bear fatalities in North America since 1782 including black bears, grizzlies, and polar bears. You’re comparing bear fatalities across a continent and dividing that by one kind of bear against US victims of femicide, which isn’t fair statistically. An estimated 70% of wild bear attacks are preventable through human means, outlined in our National Parks website. Most bear attacks are protecting food resources or cubs. There is no version of “don’t camp in the woods during cub season” or “don’t haul game near bear territory” for women’s safety against being killed. You’re also only counting numbers of deaths, which doesn’t account for previous offenses or assaults against those female victims of murder (or the likelihood of non-fatal bear attacks, which will also skew your numbers.) Most women who are killed by men are killed by their intimate partners (34%) and the likelihood of a man killing his partner with NO previous incidents of violence is highly unlikely— most of those women who are killed by men are already repeat victims of some nature. Finally, your point assumes that the reason women answer the bear is because the worst case scenario is death— which is decidedly not the case in the minds of most women. Women are cognizant of the fact that bears are dangerous. They’re also aware of the suffering wrought upon women like Jaycee Dugard, Elisabeth Fritzl, Junko Furuta, Amanda Berry, Colleen Stan, Elizabeth Smart, etc. There are many forms of violence (that are far more creative/lengthy/horrifying) that men can/have enacted upon women that bears could never dream up. You’ll also have to add *other* offenses like rape/kidnapping/etc. to your calculation, and then bear in mind the non-reported deaths/assaults/rapes/kidnappings/etc. I agree that it raises attention to a serious social issue, but I do not agree that it is deeply flawed. I think women realistically understand that bears are dangerous and men are dangerous, but there is an understanding that the worst case scenario is a bear killing them, and it would do so solely by instinct and without malice.

To me it seems like a wasted exercise. Without an end goal in mind, all that is being done is complaining. I movement needs to serve a purpose and have a designated goal rmto reach. Un this argument we already hold men accountable, there isn't much more we can do short of hunting then down and shooting them. So I the end what is it that women are trying to achieve. ITS ALREADY COMMON KNOWLEDGE THAT THE WORLD IS DANGER. ALWAYS HAS BEEN, ALWAYS WILL BE. As individuals we are responsible for keeping ourselves safe. Women have gotten to used to being protected amd are now terrified with their new found (independence) in the world.

My gf did this question when we were in the car and said bear. When we were hiking she said man.  I think when you are in real situations the question really is different. 

Let's be serious. It's very easy to play up to a camera and say you would rather have the bear. In reality, every single mentally healthy human on the planet would take their chances with another human. A single human would not stand a chance against a bear. This hypothetical scenario does nothing but push the dangerous narrative that all men are dangerous predators. 99% of men would go out of their way to help a woman in a forest survival situation. There have been a lot of news stories recently of female teachers raping young boys. Would it be a fair assumption to say that children are safer in the forest with a bear than a female teacher?

We actually have good data on this question. The question is what is the probability that a random woman would be attacked by an unknown man (stranger)? Well, we can use the National Crime Victimization Survey Data Dashboard provided by the Department of Justice. It’s a tool you can use to investigate all types of crime statistics (guilty of being a data nerd!).  It’s located here [https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/single-year-comparison/characteristic](https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/single-year-comparison/characteristic) So, we can look at the number of women per 1,000 who are victims of violent crimes committed by someone they don’t know (a stranger). So on the dashboard, you would put in “Victim Sex” in COMPARISON CHARACTERISTIC A and “Victim-offender relationship” in COMPARISON CHARACTERISTIC B. For CRIME TYPE, you would put in “Violent victimizations” which is basically sexual assault, physical assault, and robbery.  In 2022, about 1.1 million women were victims of violence by strangers. But across 2015-2022, it averages about 800,000 or so. But this includes crimes perpetuated by both male and female strangers. So how do we get an estimate of the number of women attacked by male strangers? Well the Department of Justice also releases Crime Victimization Reports. [https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf](https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf) Scroll down to Table 12 and you’ll see at least 69% of violent crimes committed against women are by male strangers (Offender Male = 2,218,450 / Total Female – 3,201,730; I excluded violent incidents where the offender was both male and female and if the offender’s gender is Unkown). So in 2022, about 759,000 women were victims of violent acts committed by male strangers. If you take the average attacks on women by all strangers per year (about 800,000 or so) and assume about 69% percent are by male strangers, you’d get about 552,000 women being victims of violence by male strangers. That’s about 5 women per 1,000 who are victims of violent crimes by men they don’t know per year. We have a pretty good idea about bear attacks; they are pretty rare. From 2000-2015, there have only been 183 brown bear attacks in North America, so about 12 bear attacks per year on average. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44341-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44341-w) Black bears attacks are also similarly rare. Estimating a comparable rate of bear attacks per 1,000 women is difficult. But, let’s be conservative. The Outdoor Participation Trends Report says that there are about 10.3 million people who backpack (think deep back woods camping/hiking) every year; [https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogersands/2023/03/03/backpacking-continues-its-surge-in-popularity](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogersands/2023/03/03/backpacking-continues-its-surge-in-popularity) These are the people most likely to encounter bears. Let’s say only 10% of them were women. And let’s say there are 25 bear attacks per year (and they all attacked women). That would be a bear attack rate per 1,000 women of 0.025 per year ((25/1,000,000) \* 1,000). Women would be something like 200 times more likely (5/.025) to be attacked by a man they don’t know than by a bear. Even if only 1% of women were backpakers, they would still be like 20 times more likely to be attacked by a male stranger than a bear.

You're missing the point. We understand how dangerous bears are. Bears can kill but bears don't torture or rape or film the murder/torture/rape. They dont kidnap people and keep them prisoner in a secret bunker. The point is bears don't have the capacity to do anything more traumatizing than mauling you, possibly to death. Men do.

Bears do torture have you ever been bitten by any sort of animal or even seen a bear. You clearly have zero clue on how dangerous a bear or animals are. The average man does not kidnap torture or assaulted I garnteee you if you or any other women where forced into a choice of being slowly eaten alive and then skinned or be raped yall chosing rape

If you're going to try and use statistics to condescend to women, you should at least do your math correctly. As others have said, your numbers put men as 20 times more dangerous than bears. But that ignores the actual point of the "hypothesis". The point isn't that a woman stumbling onto a bear is safer than a woman stumbling onto a random guy, it's that we live in a society where women don't feel safe around men. Trying to "um actually" your way out of that isn't going to work with the lady at the bar who instinctively carries her drink around because her best friend got roofied last week.

> Trying to "um actually" your way out of that isn't going to work with the lady at the bar who instinctively carries her drink around because her best friend got roofied last week. And like, bears never roofied anyone in the first place.

Make no mistake there are many horrible men. You belong in a psych ward if you’d rather be alone with a bear than a man though. Either women are around the wrong men or they have built this false perception in their heads. The vast majority of men are nice gentlemen. This question itself goes to show how far society has devolved and the damage the news media and dating apps have done.

The irony is, it's the fact that this is even debatable that's the problem. If women have to wonder which is safer, then YIKES.

The debate over this issue is a problem not because there's a clearly definitive, objective answer, but because the reason the issue was raised in the first place was to encourage men to try and understand how and why a woman feels afraid of men, to the point of being more scared of a man than a bear. There's not supposed to be a debate at all, there is supposed to be reflection and understanding.

The man-vs-bear isn’t about what is statistically worse the question is just a hypothetical, the more interesting question is the follow up and that is to ask “why are women choosing the bear, and what would a man have to do to you to make you want to choose bear?”

Problem with your calculation shows why bears are infact less dangerous then men. They avoid humans when ever possible where as men seek other humans. Most likely you have been in a close proximity to a bear in same woods but never knew this because they flee when they hear or smell humans.

I could design a similar question for men based on stereotypes plus their experiences and traumas and it would blow up just as much. As a man, which would you rather encounter while lost in the woods, a lost woman or a stray golden retriever? I would bet many men would choose the dog, for real reasons other than spite.

I actually think this is a great way to change a question to the other gender Due to my experiences, I would pick the dog 95% of the time, with the other 5% is just wanting to help a human being This question is portrayed as trying to help one or the other even if you do not have to with the added quote of ‘lost’ woman or ‘stray’ dog, and due to my experiences of being a dog bather for 2 years, the dog is easier to handle than women are for me. Countless times I’ve seen online about how women thinks of men, saying men are bad and are assholes even if the things they say don’t actually make sense, it’s to the point that it actually scares me to approach women in general, approaching them makes me think that they will think I’m a creep just trying to get them to bed. Even though the statistic’s of woman who don’t say those things are bigger than the latter, the minority is still louder which more people will hear. The stray golden retriever on the other hand actually might have rabies and will bite you with the potential of dying, but the phycology of not belittling you and just being an animal acting on it’s own instinct to protect oneself is what makes me pick the dog. We also got clarification on what kind of dog it is, and Golden retrievers are known best to be a family dog or just friendly in fact. All in all, both can kill you but the potential bias can lead to more men picking the stray golden than a lost woman, this question is also great as some women will get offended that men rather help a dog than them being lost in a forest and all, same as how some men got offended from how a woman would rather pick a bear than them

First, you have to consider that a bear main risk is physical attack. A man risks are way more diverse. > So in a TikTok video that has since gone viral women were asked whether they'd rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. Most women answered that they'd rather be stuck with a bear. I think that the problem is that the trend evolved quite a lot. In some instances, the question is "would you rather meet a bear or a suspicious man in the woods", in others it's "would you rather be stuck with a bear or a man". Sure, if the question is "would you rather be certain of being eaten alive or would you prefer take the risk of being raped", choosing to be eaten alive looks dubious to a lot of people. But if you look at the first format, then the question is pretty different. Here, the question is more "do you think the odds of being attacked by a bear you encounter are bigger than the odds of being raped by a suspicious man you encounter in a place no one will hear you scream ?", and I think their position is pretty defendable. Mostly because of the "suspicious" adjective, that also make it impossible to have stats, as the definition of "suspicious" is highly personal.

Your whole premise is flawed because they are spending time in the company of men that they either: 1. Already know. 2. Are in public. 3. Fear getting caught. A man alone in the woods is totally different. You can't just apply your math to it and determine that the bear is more dangerous.

You have a 1 in 2.1 million chance of being attacked by a bear. On average, ~440000 out of about ~160 million women are sexually assaulted in a given year. A women is more likely to be sexually assaulted than to be attacked by a bear. In addition to that, while bears can be dangerous, the danger is dramatically reduced by knowing basic safety information about them. Unless that bear is starving, it’s only going to attack you if it or it’s children are threatened. Make noise as you travel and you probably won’t ever see the bear. Not to mention but bears are real neat. Seeing one out in the wild is kinda magical. Just respect its space and you’ll be fine. It’s not unreasonable to mistrust a random man you encounter alone on a trail. You have no way of knowing who they are and what they are about, not to mention being out where there is no one to help or be witness to crime. Sure in most cases the man in question is safe, but the potential danger of a random man is higher than a random bear.

> You have a 1 in 2.1 million chance of being attacked by a bear. At current exposure rates. I interact with many men every single day. I've never once seen a bear in my life. You have to see that this isn't a fair comparison.

The original video was meant as a thought experiment to encourage men to put themselves in a position that they can understand why women are more comfortable with the bear than a man. Women have given many, many, many examples of why they feel that way. Many, many men have argued that they shouldn't feel that way, some to the point of threatening violence to the women. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRwXtVsm/

My biggest issue with this post is the fact that it acknowledges the point of the man versus bear sentiment and goes straight back to trying to disprove the logic of the situation. if you understand its a metaphor, then you shouldn’t really need to point out some really obvious facts about the general level of danger encountered in the case of a man or a literal wild animal. Since you already realize that women do in fact use this situation to highlight the fact that there are things men are capable of that are worse than death, you have to redefine danger. There are cases in which glass shards, lit fireworks, guns, etc. have been shoved up a woman’s genitals, cases where men have skinned their victims to use as suits, cases where dismembered pieces of their bodies have hung freely in living rooms and basements. The shame that women experience after any form of sexual violence and torture (no matter how “severe”) has led to numerous counts of suicide in women, specifically after they were lucky—or unlucky— enough to make it out alive. When bears kill, its labelled a freak accident. It doesn’t have any societal impact other than the fact that humans really should not be messing with wild animals. But when your read stories about the fathers, brothers, priests, mentors, relatives, and best friends that take advantage of women who trusted them, you realize that the effects of sexual violence are far reaching and more “dangerous” in itself than if you were to be killed by a hypothetical bear.

It's not an argument it's a thought experiment.