Dare I ask what the man vs bear meme is all about and why it seems to be upsetting men so much? [CW: sexism]

There was a guy who responded to this.

His mom was attacked by a bear and wrote a book about it. He said that she felt safer around men than around bears in response to this trend.

Thing is though, she did an AMA on Reddit a few years back and someone trawled through the answers and found a question where she was basically asked her this exact thing. She said that she feels safer around bears than men and that she carries a gun when she goes hiking but not because of the risk of running into a bear again.

There have been some really good responses from women defending choosing a bear. Here's a few that stuck out to me that I remember:

[CW: assault/SA]

"At least a bear sees me as human"

"Nobody would ask me what I was wearing if I got attacked by a bear"

"The worst that a bear can do is kill me"

"If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me"

"When I got attacked by a bear I screamed at it and it ran away, when I got attacked by a man he smiled, covered my mouth, and said that he was just going to enjoy it more"

"A bear would only take 5 minutes"

"A bear wouldn't kill me for pleasure"

A lot of "defensive" men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it's a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they'd rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust.

The question is very specifically worded to ask women if they would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man.

I saw one really good response from a man who clearly wasn't quite over the line with regards to women's liberation and feminist values - think a middle of the road kinda guy - and his partner asked him if his daughter was in the woods alone would he rather there be a bear or a woman in the woods. He immediately said "With a woman" almost reflexively.

When he got posed the same question except with a bear or a man you could see him really wrestling with the question as he considered the implications and the risks. I think he settled on the bear but the point wasn't about getting him to agree with women, it was getting him to understand some of the risks that women, trans people, and femme people weigh up on a near constant basis due to the risk that men pose.

In a similar vein, on a wild tangent, because I'm amab/masc presenting when the opportunity is right (either when there aren't women around or when a guy has escalated a discussion) I will often drop the question on them and ask what their rape plan is. Generally they squirm and have to, for the first time, think through what they would do to mitigate their risk of being raped and what they would do if they were in that situation.

Often the answers are really poorly thought through, such as "I'd fight back" or "I wouldn't get myself into that situation" 🙄

Sometimes it cuts through though and you can get a man to reflect on how pretty much any woman/trans person/femme person is going to have a very well developed rape plan with all sorts of strategies for mitigating the risk and how they carry these plans with them and enact them all of the time.

Which leads into my next tangent. An autistic femme presenting person talked about their experience trying to mask to fit in due to growing up undiagnosed and how it's a response to a constant pattern of being ostracised, judged, and harassed for not fitting in but the moment that you drop the mask, people tend to respond really poorly to that so it's a real double-bind where you either compromise your needs (and often your health) to get treated badly fairly often or you don't make that compromise and you get treated badly for it.

I jumped in the comments and said "Y'know there's a parallel here - women often report a similar double-bind where when a guy hits on them they either have to very gently and politely try to decline without coming off as being coy or they can be blunt and straight-up refuse but a blunt rejection very often gets an abusive response whereas a polite rejection gets ignored and compromises her own needs."

That wasn't anything widly political to say. I was just trying to invite allistic women to be like "Hey yeah! I understand that kind of experience where you are confronted with the choice of being treated like shit for just expressing yourself directly or you have to placate someone else's needs and expend all of this energy just trying to get them to not treat you badly (and often they end up treating you badly after all that effort anyway). That sucks. I didn't realise that's what it was like for autistic people for most of their social interactions."

But of course some ex-military jerkwad guy who was late self-identifying as autistic had to charge headlong into the replies to turn it into being all about men, all about him, and all about his own experience (and ableist perception) of autism to the exclusion of others. It was a perfect example of male fragility and it was yet-another example of guys doing that thing where they think they're defending men by arguing that they aren't capable of determining whether someone consents and that they cannot help but sexually harass women. Imagine how monstrous I am to argue that men are very much capable of knowing better and they can do things like "controlling their impulses like a mature human" being rather than being like wild animals that need to be physically restrained in order to protect the people around them. These dorks think the absolute worst of men and my hunch is that this kind of reply is mostly a self-report.

Dudes rock /s