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There is a recent trend on TikTok and social media where people are asked if they would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man. Surprisingly, (or perhaps unsurprisingly to some of you), many people, especially women, are saying they would rather be stuck with a bear than a man. When men are asked this question and the script is flipped to "would you rather your daughter be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man", a lot of men seem to respond with bear rather than a man as well.
Here is a link to a Today.com article about this topic: https://www.today.com/news/bear-or-man-woods-tiktok-trend-rcna149611
It has a live poll, and at the moment the split is 28% with a man, 65% with a bear, and 7% in between.
That's 68% of respondents that would be more comfortable being stuck with a bear than a man. 68%! Unfortunately, there is no breakdown of who the respondents are, the best I could do is look at the average demographics for people who go to Today.com, which is 61.39% female and 38.61% male. Assuming the readers of this article has a similar demographic breakdown as the average person going to the website, and that all female readers chose a bear, that means that a solid chunk of men also are more comfortable being stuck with a bear than another man in the forest.
I found another poll on a women's forum asking the same question - the split there is 15% male, 85% bear at the moment.
So all the evidence seems to point that your average woman would rather be stuck with a bear than a man.
Here are some general arguments for why women are choosing bear over men, trying to not strawman to the best of my ability:
The way news and social media are spinning this is that this reveals just how dangerous the world is for women, that women live their day-to-day lives in constant fear of the men around them because of how dangerous the world is to them. Frankly, I cannot relate to this view, perhaps because I am a man, but I also think this view can only develop when society, social media, entertainment, and the news are constantly bombarding you with all these negative notions about men. Your average woman is safer, far more liberated, has more rights, and meets more people than at any point in history (and especially compared to the entire scope of human history), and yet fear and hatred of men are more prevalent than ever before.
If anything, what this question reveals is just how warped women's views of men are and how negatively men are depicted in society.
It also reveals how people poorly use statistics to rationalize their stances. They will look at the raw number of bear attacks to the number of assaults/rape/sexual on women and then assume the two can be directly compared without any adjustment. Oh, only 1 person dies to a black bear each year in the US but but 5000 women are murdered each year, that means I'm 5000 times more likely to be killed if I were in a forest with a man than with a bear. Nearly everyone encounters at least several if not hundreds of men per day, and most people won't even encounter a bear in their lifetime. If women encountered the same number of bears as the same number of random men they encountered in their day-to-day lives, those numbers would be very different.
In reality, women encounter hundreds of men every day and not a single one of them rapes or assaults them. I'm not saying their fears have no basis in reality, or that they don't take actions that increase their safety, but do they have any idea what percentage of men would actually attack them?
The average man is far more likely to be of help if you're stuck in a forest because they would likely help you get out of the forest. No doubt women have received plenty of help for free throughout their lives on the basis of being a woman, and yet they still fear the idea of a man more than a bear. I'm going to try to put some estimates on the likely outcome for each scenario:
You may disagree on the percentage, but even if you were extremely generous to both ends for the other perspective it would be extremely difficult to justify the percent chance of the negative outcome being better for the bear instead of the man. So in all situations, you are far more likely to get a better result with a man than a bear.
It would be interesting to see how people would respond if you asked them would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a black man. Would the fear of being thought of as a racist overcome the fear of men?
Maybe I'm stunted, but I think this is an essentially elementary school bullshit, on the level of pulling girls by their braids (does anyone still do it?) or calling boys/girls gross: confused flirtation going too far. To the extent that adult American women are sincere in saying that they're less afraid of a bear, they're stunted too; unfit to be citizens, literally infantile, living in an egocentric world where "beliefs" are merely transient activations of the underdeveloped brain, means to coordinate physical wailing and flailing to get gibs from the infinitely caring environment. Admittedly this is an adaptive mode of reasoning in a spoils-based society, so long as you belong to the correct caste.
But I presume they aren't sincere, for the most part, and just do not care about contents of their words or the impact on too serious men. So it's signaling and taking jabs at men.
Few great comedians are women, but on average women are impressively adept at wordplay and deadpan sarcasm, in my experience.
Now as for men and their daughters, this is more obviously pure signaling to fit into the stereotype of an overprotective macho. No one's actually leaving anyone in a forest with a bear or a stranger, so it's a cost-free signal.
This is all trivial. The interesting question here, if any, is whether norms encouraging such long-winded and massive pranks are acceptable or a sign of dysfunction. Remember, many Americans are in fact retarded, paranoid, schizophrenic, pathologically anxious etc. – a middle-class joke that's presented as consensus can have real impact. Is [functional] 85 IQ enough to reliably distinguish ubiquitous mean-spirited kidding from common sense, without it leaking into world-model representations? Is 80? 75? The true distribution is not Gaussian, there are lumps on both tails, and plenty of outliers.
Beyond this straightforward utilitarian concern for unwell people and their close ones, though, I'd say the problem of normalizing casual deadpan sarcastic misogyny is the same as with any other kind of mistreatment, and the appropriate response is the same as we see high-agency minority groups provide to politically incorrect smartasses. It is perceived, correctly, as the beginning of a slippery slope towards rhetorical superweapons and physical discrimination. In a degenerating culture like the modern American one, defending your personal and your collective identity's honor is in fact the sane attractor; it's unsustainable for some subpopulation, even if it be all men, to be all sticks-and-stones-but-words stoics, and others be of the "if they don't fight back this means we can hit harder" persuasion. (I'd go so far as to say that you can't be a stoic period; stoics are simply cuckolds with extra steps, just like their hero Marcus Aurelius was a literal cuckold. But that's beside the point).
My (obvious) belief is that it's not really acceptable but there's little that could be done.
I think a lot of WEIRD people are stunted. And I don’t think men would do much better in a similarly worded “would you rather” scenario aimed at them. The issue is that the way we raise kids and the way we’re taught (or more properly mis-taught to judge risks, rewards, and dangers) tends to create an entire culture of infantile adults who can’t understand let alone handle the real world. And we do it to ourselves.
The first issue is extreme safetyism. We’ve gone from being a frontier people who were used to handling our own lives and the risks that came with it, to a people that are suffering from anxiety and depression in probably the safest environment humanity has ever known: a country that hasn’t had a war on her own soil in almost 200 years, where the biggest health risks are diseases of gluttony or old age, where most people face the workplace dangers of paper cuts, and where we commute strapped into cars that are designed to withstand collisions going much faster than they normally go. And I think a lot of it is down to safetyist lifestyles that not only don’t teach people to reasonably handle a risk, but create a mindset in which you’re taught to ruminate on the idea of injury death, insult and loss.
The second thing we’ve been taught is to put our own feelings on the level of facts. I’m not suggest that your feelings don’t matter at all, but I do think that we’ve put them much too far forward in our thinking process, which leads to all kinds of problems. First of all, feelings about a subject are not always true. You might be afraid of spiders, but if they aren’t actually dangerous to you, that fear is only going to harm you by diminishing your own life and your ability to live it. Second, focusing on feelings especially negative feelings just makes you feel worse. Focusing on positive emotions isn’t all that great either if you get so attached to the good feelings that the loss of them is catastrophic to you, or leads to unrealistic expectations of what life is like. Negative emotions are normal, and losses are common. You will experience both often. And if you’re focused on feelings, you’ll be miserable.
The third thing is that we aren’t taught to look to facts. Nobody is asking whether a thing they believe is actually true. They aren’t taught statistics, probability or logic in school, so they have no real toolsets to use to decide what is real or not or whether a thing they read or see is true. What are the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza? Would this not change how we think about what to do in those situations? What is the actual cause of inflation? Would knowledge of the cause change what we do to solve it?
I think the best things to teach kids are sensible risk taking, stoicism and not getting attached to luxury, and good sound thinking and truth-seeking. These things can be taught, and to be honest we used to teach them. In STEM and philosophy we still do. It’s just that we’ve removed most of this from the curriculum of people who don’t need to use them for work and then wonder why our systems don’t work and problems don’t get solved.
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