PicoBlog

A meme has been heavily making the rounds lately; a question posed to women online this past week, give or take. What would you rather encounter in the middle of the woods? An unexpected man or a bear? Women are overwhelmingly choosing the bear, and a lot of men are getting mad about that. To be honest, it’s really a “not all men” response from men who don’t get just how high a percentage of women are sexually assaulted (or even killed) by men in their lifetime.

But let’s break it down, shall we?

The question isn’t what you would rather encounter on a public trail that is heavily traveled. It isn’t a question of what you would rather see if you’re camping in a popular camping area and go down to the creek to wash your hair. It’s a question of being in an area where you don’t expect to see anyone, and would you rather see a bear or a man.

In the middle of the woods, somewhere where you expect to be alone, you would anticipate that wildlife might be present. Not so much a man. So that’s first of all. No one is asking women, “If you’re in nature in general, would you always want to encounter a bear instead?”

Statistically speaking, the bear is safer in a secluded wooded area. If you do what you should, the bear will either ignore you or be startled off if you have to confront it. Most bear encounters are going to be standard brown bears or the even more skittish black bears, not an angry grizzly or worse yet a polar bear. And how many women are going to be in a secluded arctic area encountering a polar bear anyway?

The number of harmful bear encounters—much less lethal ones—are far, far less than the number of harmful male encounters. Men are more likely to pursue and attack than is the average bear.

It’s also about human nature. Would a bear initially be more terrifying? Sure. That’s part of the issue. You will be on guard against the bear immediately and take necessary steps. A man you might let your guard down just enough for him to get close and do harm. A man is less likely to be startled off by you if you confront him, because a man knows you’re alone and unprotected in these woods. A bear is just either minding its own business or looking for easy prey even if it is hungry.

The man is, by all accounts in the middle of the woods where you expect to be alone, a bigger threat by far. Hundreds of times more risky based on statistics of men harming women when they are vulnerable.

People have also pointed to the fact that if the bear attacks you, no one is going to question if the bear really attacked you or meant you harm. But people will go out of their way to defend the man by wondering “why did you go into the woods alone?” “Did you do something to entice him?” Etcetera and so on. You are more likely to get sympathy if you fall victim to a bear, even though you are less likely to be harmed. People somehow deep down accept that men are men and that’s their nature, or that women are liars when it comes to sexual assault and the like by men.

Also, if you encounter a bear in the woods you are more likely to have an interesting and ultimately harmless story and know that you probably will not encounter another bear in your lifetime. But the man is a reminder of how vulnerable you are any time you are alone in a place not heavily traveled, even if it’s not a villainous man you encounter in those woods. And you should not, as a woman, have to worry about men tracking you to those places or lurking there. But they do. They lie in wait or stalk women far more often than bears do—by a longshot.

Bears will stand down and understand the word “no” more readily than a man. And that is a disturbing commentary on men in this culture and how entitled they feel to not only assault women but to be offended when women reasonably choose to encounter a bear in the woods, where it lives, than a man in a place people aren’t typically supposed to be. 

Men by and large do not understand how often the women they know—and the ones they don’t—are assaulted by men. And they often don’t want to. It’s more important for many of them to be offended by the women’s answer to the bear vs. man question than to examine how normalized violence against women is and how often women are ignored or belittled when they are attacked by men.

No, the bear is the right answer in this hypothetical. And if that makes you angry as a man, you aren’t looking at things in the right context.

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