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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?
So after reading of this online trend I decided to look up information on bear attacks in Russia, as I remembered reading that those often become a serious issue on a local level.
There's an interesting tidbit I've found: "Kamchatka brown bears are generally not dangerous to humans, and only 1% of encounters result in attack." (The cited source is a Kamchatka Ecology and Environmental Institute study.)
To be sure, brown bears are no joke, and the Kamchatkan subspecies is even less of a joke: "The Kamchatka brown bear is the biggest brown bear in Eurasia, with a body length of 2.4 m (7.9 ft) to 3 m (9.8 ft) tall on hind legs, and a weight up to at least 650 kg (1,430 lb). It is about the size of the Kodiak bear..."
Anyway, the 1% figure is somewhat surprising and seems to underpin the feminist argument at first sight. However, I'd be very surprised if solitary female-on-male encounters in the woods were statistically as dangerous anywhere in the world.
1/100 encounters resulting in attack sounds like a lot? I looked at the citation for that and the statistic is based one naturalist's observations of his own encounters during a period of study. It's more accurate to say, of this one man's 270 encounters with bears during his study on bears, he was only attacked 1% of the time. I assume this researcher is experienced in the field, knows what to look for, and maintains awareness of his surroundings. Your average person may have different results if they were to stumble upon, rather than seek out, 270 bear encounters in the woods. Even so, 1% still sounds like a lot. There's got to be a few Alaskan bushmen who have had hundreds of encounters without an attacks. Probably because they stay the hell away.
Bear behavior in an encounter relies on a lot of different factors. Distance, whether either part is surprised, what time of the year it is, male or female, whether it has cubs nearby, how hungry it is, etc. The infamous Grizzly Man guy (and his girlfriend) were attacked and eaten by a hungry, sickly, aging bear at the end of feeding season.
A person's behavior will influence the outcome as well. The author of the study aggressively yelled at two bears that attacked him which scared them off of the charge. Do bears do false charges? I know my regional black bears can be pretty responsive to aggression. He doesn't differentiate if so.
In a third instance:
Lucky guy! Bears are cool. Way cooler than bear vs. bad man discourse.
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I guess it depends what an encounter is (eg how close, how many people were around, what defensive options undertaken by the humans). But again women probably see 100 men a day and don’t get attacked. Obviously being alone increases the odds of a male attack but being alone would likely need to massively increase the risk rate to get close to 1% (and that 1% itself may need to be adjusted).
I would expect being alone would massively increase the risk rate. How many people would steal a stack of bills if they were left out in the open but there are people all around who knows they don't belong to the thief, vs how many would steal the stack of bills if they had total anonymity?
But the risk rate is probably 0.000001 or something like that so even with a massive adjustment hard to get to 1%
I can't pretend to know the exact numbers, but I think you're vastly underestimating the danger men pose women, and the numbers can shift truly massively. I think a lone woman walking through a busy mall in day time is almost certainly will not experience any violence. There is a slim chance, there are some mentally ill psychos out there who randomly assault women, but it's neglible.
Meanwhile, I think the odds of a lone woman walking through certain Chicago streets at night is almost certain to experience violence. Far greater than just 1% at least, despite how low her odds were around dozens of men in the mall.
Being in a random forest with a truly random man would be somewhere in between those. The man, on average, would probably be worse than the men in the mall, since a random man could be a guy in jail or a 3rd world militant, but also is probably better than the men hanging out on the Chicago streets at night. Both of them being alone would be in between the woman being surrounded by civilized strangers in a mall and the man's criminal buddies on the street too. I'd give somewhere between 0.1-5%, personally, of being assaulted.
So if I was a woman, I'd probably take a man over a black bear, but not other types of bears.
But part of the problem with Chicago is you are likely to encounter a number of men (ie there isn’t just one person). So your theory could be correct but your odds per encounter is still probably overstated.
You also ignore age. Is the guy 40? 50? 30? That needs accounted for.
You have to account for damage per attack. Even if you are right, the woman has a much better chance against the dude then a fucking bear.
Finally, I think the 1% bear attacks is grossly misleading. The fact pattern here necessarily suggests the man or bear is very nearby. That, coupled with the lack of expertise with bears, greatly increases that 1% figure.
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