Unless you stay well clear of social media of any kind, you’ve probably picked up something about women choosing bears over men.
The gist of it is a question: Would a woman prefer to be alone in the woods with a man or a bear?
The women choosing the bear generally say “bear” because the bear wouldn’t rape them. This is probably true. We don’t hear much about ursine sexual assault.
Of course, the flip side is that the bear is entirely more likely to maul you to death in a horrible fashion, eat you, and then allow you to become Winnie’s Pooh.
Women who are fond of this question and the ensuing debate figure this should wake men up to the reality of their sex or something, that this debate says plenty about men.
That’s bullshit, pardon my language.
No one has ever pretended that rapists don’t exist. Far too many of us are well aware that they do, having helped pick up the pieces of lives torn apart because some violent jackass had to hurt someone for their own gratification.
We’re well aware these people exist. We don’t need lessons on that regard.
We also happen to know that the percentage of the male population that would do such a thing is actually low.
Instead, what’s interesting to me about this discussion—other than the hilarious memes, anyway—is what this says about both women and the perception of men that many possess, particularly college-educated women.
At least some of the women picking the bear are women who have been victimized by men to some degree or another. Some are just hurting from a recent breakup or are still hurting from some long-ago trauma. I’m not talking about sexual assault necessarily, but for some reason, a man hurt them and they figure a bear can’t be any worse.
Others have bought into this narrative that rapists lurk around every corner. And, to be fair, there are too many.
According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, there are more than 463,000 cases of rape in this country each year. I don’t think absolutely anyone thinks that’s an acceptable number.
Yet there are nearly 166 million men in the US.
If each rape were committed by a different individual, that’s 0.27 percent of men are rapists. Since some males rape more than one woman before they’re caught, that actual percentage is likely much lower.
Now, let’s also be fair here. RAINN also notes that one in six women have been the victim of either a rape or an attempted rape. That’s an average, and since a number of women report being the victim of multiple sexual assaults over their lifetimes, it should be noted that the average of just under 17 percent might actually be lower as well.
While any number higher than zero is too high, sexual assault isn’t particularly common.
Yet how many times are we told that men represent a danger to women simply because we’re walking down the street behind them at the wrong time of day? How many times are we a threat simply because we speak to them on the street or try to strike up a friendly conversation?
A lot of these women have bought into this idea that the male sex represents a threat to them simply by existing. That individual men represent a massive threat.
There’s been a media narrative for years about how dangerous men are, and to be fair, we can be if we so desire. That’s why people like me argue about keeping biological men out of women’s sports, for example. Even in a competitive but friendly environment, a man is capable of brutally injuring a woman, even unintentionally.
But the statistics don’t exactly support the narrative.
On the flip side, bear attack statistics are ridiculously low. This likely contributes to women feeling safer with the bear, to be sure, however, let’s also remember that bears and people tend not to co-exist in the same place very often. They keep to themselves so there’s not a lot of chance for interaction.
If men and women were similarly segregated, would we see an even lower incidence of sexual assault? Possibly.
This is a strange case where the statistics are meaningless. All that really matters is the perception, and the perception here has a lot of women looking like idiots. I say that not because having concerns about strange men is stupid, but that they’ve let it get to far to the point of stupidity that they’ll take an acknowledged predator over the potential one.
The media screws people up. It’s apparently done so to an entire generation of women who think being eaten is somehow preferable to a guy looking at them funny.
Then again, no matter how much you hate the media, it’s not enough.
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Another issue, mentioned elsewhere, is that for many of the women answering they'd rather take their chances with the bear they're safe to do so because the chances of them being stuck in the woods in the first place with either bear or man are rather low in the first place. With the incredibly long odds of being in such a situation, there's no downside to scoring social media brownie points (so to speak) by claiming to prefer the bear's company.
(Never mind that their idea of "bear in the woods" is probably Baloo or Yogi and Booboo, not Cocaine Bear.)