So, I’m just assuming we’ve all seen the discussions about the bear.
Personally I feel that this is an opportunity for everyone to stop and think a little about it. The knee-jerk reaction from many men seems to be something along the lines of “You would choose a dangerous animal over me? That makes me feel bad about myself.” which results in endless comments of the “Akchully… according to Bayes theorem you are much more likely to…” kind.
It should be clear by now that it doesn’t lead to good places.
Maybe, and I’m open to being wrong, but maybe the real message is women saying: “We are scared of unknown men.”
Then, if that is the message intended, what do we do next? Maybe the best thing is just to listen. To ask questions. What have you experienced to make you feel that way?
I firmly believe that the empathy we give lays a foundation for other people being willing to have empathy for the things we try to communicate.
It doesn’t mean we should feel bad about ourselves, but just to recognize that someone is trying to say something, and it’s not a technical discussion about bears.
What do you think?

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0 points

Yeah I absolutely still don’t understand what this supposed Bear meme thing is… like I guess some girl chose to be in a room with a bear instead of in a room with a man? Was it just a meme? I have no idea what is going on or why everyone is so upset about it it seems like something to just divert attention away from something else

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27 points

A bear is a known a danger and really doesn’t care about you unless you piss it off. In fact, loud noises might just scare it away even if a brown bear.

While most men are probably safe enough to have around, enough are unsafe or just generally give off that vibe that women don’t want to be alone with them and a loud noise won’t scare them away. You might “know” you’re safe but they have zero reason to trust you.

Sure she might get someone who wants to work together to be mutually safe and will make efforts to leave her be otherwise, but she might also get someone who stands just a bit too close, who starts trying to “help” just a bit physically, or even who starts to get frustrated when they don’t get some kind of reward for just being some minimum level of decent. And if they’re really unlucky they get someone who just sees the isolation of the situation as an opportunity.

The bear is a known quantity. The man could be anything and there are far too many examples of every part of the spectrum. At least the bear won’t sexually assault her even at the worst.

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-19 points

Well that’s just ridiculous… a bear is a wild animal who will fucking maul you to death and eat you and doesn’t care about you at all … a man is a human being, and human beings can be reasoned with… I don’t knoooooowwwwww… this whole thing just, again, sounds like a way to get the masses riled up about something that really doesn’t matter and doesn’t really even make any kind of logical sense really in the grand scheme of things… it just seems like something to argue about for argument’s sake… it’s a good debate topic but that’s about it… be it resolved that men are worse than bears?? LOL I don’t know whole thing is kind of silly to me… but thank you so much for your explanation of it

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19 points

I like how they took the time to explain it extremely well as to why us women feel this way, and your response was simply “lol nah that’s bullshit”.

I’d much rather run into a bear in the woods than run into a man like you in the woods.

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6 points

It’s just a way to illustrate how a lot of women feel around men. No one is actually going into the woods to meet a bear.

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-4 points

It’s rage bait. It just a polarizing content meant to rile up the masses and make us argue and bicker. It takes some societal grievances and amplifies them needlessly.

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