I don’t go on social media so I don’t really get it but I have seen memes here and there of women getting mauled by bears presented in a “heh, serves her right” kind of way.
So weird that dudes complain that they can’t get women when the message they put out there is they hate women and make images of them being brutally mauled.
EDIT: I did not expect to see people I trust minimise SA here. I’m disappointed, that’s something I expect from a random chud blowing in from another instance, not you guys. Most of you were extremely cool in your answers, but to the one or two that weren’t. Do fucking better.
There was a guy who responded to this.
His mom was attacked by a bear and wrote a book about it. He said that she felt safer around men than around bears in response to this trend.
Thing is though, she did an AMA on Reddit a few years back and someone trawled through the answers and found a question where she was basically asked her this exact thing. She said that she feels safer around bears than men and that she carries a gun when she goes hiking but not because of the risk of running into a bear again.
There have been some really good responses from women defending choosing a bear. Here’s a few that stuck out to me that I remember:
[CW: assault/SA]
“At least a bear sees me as human”
“Nobody would ask me what I was wearing if I got attacked by a bear”
“The worst that a bear can do is kill me”
“If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me”
“When I got attacked by a bear I screamed at it and it ran away, when I got attacked by a man he smiled, covered my mouth, and said that he was just going to enjoy it more”
“A bear would only take 5 minutes”
“A bear wouldn’t kill me for pleasure”
A lot of “defensive” men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it’s a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they’d rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust.
The question is very specifically worded to ask women if they would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man.
I saw one really good response from a man who clearly wasn’t quite over the line with regards to women’s liberation and feminist values - think a middle of the road kinda guy - and his partner asked him if his daughter was in the woods alone would he rather there be a bear or a woman in the woods. He immediately said “With a woman” almost reflexively.
When he got posed the same question except with a bear or a man you could see him really wrestling with the question as he considered the implications and the risks. I think he settled on the bear but the point wasn’t about getting him to agree with women, it was getting him to understand some of the risks that women, trans people, and femme people weigh up on a near constant basis due to the risk that men pose.
In a similar vein, on a wild tangent, because I’m amab/masc presenting when the opportunity is right (either when there aren’t women around or when a guy has escalated a discussion) I will often drop the question on them and ask what their rape plan is. Generally they squirm and have to, for the first time, think through what they would do to mitigate their risk of being raped and what they would do if they were in that situation.
Often the answers are really poorly thought through, such as “I’d fight back” or “I wouldn’t get myself into that situation” 🙄
Sometimes it cuts through though and you can get a man to reflect on how pretty much any woman/trans person/femme person is going to have a very well developed rape plan with all sorts of strategies for mitigating the risk and how they carry these plans with them and enact them all of the time.
Which leads into my next tangent. An autistic femme presenting person talked about their experience trying to mask to fit in due to growing up undiagnosed and how it’s a response to a constant pattern of being ostracised, judged, and harassed for not fitting in but the moment that you drop the mask, people tend to respond really poorly to that so it’s a real double-bind where you either compromise your needs (and often your health) to get treated badly fairly often or you don’t make that compromise and you get treated badly for it.
I jumped in the comments and said “Y’know there’s a parallel here - women often report a similar double-bind where when a guy hits on them they either have to very gently and politely try to decline without coming off as being coy or they can be blunt and straight-up refuse but a blunt rejection very often gets an abusive response whereas a polite rejection gets ignored and compromises her own needs.”
That wasn’t anything widly political to say. I was just trying to invite allistic women to be like “Hey yeah! I understand that kind of experience where you are confronted with the choice of being treated like shit for just expressing yourself directly or you have to placate someone else’s needs and expend all of this energy just trying to get them to not treat you badly (and often they end up treating you badly after all that effort anyway). That sucks. I didn’t realise that’s what it was like for autistic people for most of their social interactions.”
But of course some ex-military jerkwad guy who was late self-identifying as autistic had to charge headlong into the replies to turn it into being all about men, all about him, and all about his own experience (and ableist perception) of autism to the exclusion of others. It was a perfect example of male fragility and it was yet-another example of guys doing that thing where they think they’re defending men by arguing that they aren’t capable of determining whether someone consents and that they cannot help but sexually harass women. Imagine how monstrous I am to argue that men are very much capable of knowing better and they can do things like “controlling their impulses like a mature human” being rather than being like wild animals that need to be physically restrained in order to protect the people around them. These dorks think the absolute worst of men and my hunch is that this kind of reply is mostly a self-report.
Dudes rock /s
“If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me”
That one really hits close to home, as a victim of SA and as someone who has several friends, I’ve personally witnessed several SAs that went unbelieved, many men opened the conversation with damage control and downplaying for a dude they’ve never even met, but if a bear/snake/black guy was so much as spotted, you’d bet your ass 5-10 males are going to get off their assessment and do something about it.
A lot of “defensive” men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it’s a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they’d rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust
I have no clue why men are so regularly offended when women talk about being unsafe in relevant conditions. I especially do not understand that when they themselves want to push the ‘real men must be dangerous/strong/etc.’ sort of BS.
It’s a TikTok thing. Hypothetically, would the woman being asked rather cross paths with a man she doesn’t know in the woods, or a bear? Lots of women pick bear, because as an animal its behavior is more predictable and arguably less dangerous to a woman than some random dude who for all she knows is a serial murdering rapist or some shit. And think of it this way: you see a bear in the distance and calmly walk the other way, most of the time you’ll be fine. It won’t follow you back to the parking lot, and then get into a car of its own and follow you back to your apartment.
Some men are upset by this reasoning and instead try to mansplain how dangerous bears are. (Bears will also not send you aggressive messages on social media berating you for some stupid TikTok meme bullshit)
So basically the offended men made a bunch of violent memes that kind of prove the women right lmao. Doesn’t take much for some misogynists to get weirdly aggressive.
(Bears will also not send you aggressive messages on social media berating you for some stupid TikTok meme bullshit)
I’ve heard enough of my friends’ Grindr experiences to know that this isn’t true.
I get your point generally, and I agree generally, but women are taught and conditioned to be particularly cautious around men since very young due to the fact that men are the most dangerous facet of daily life to women. And if you’re in some remote place, like a hiking trail where you’re alone, then that may understandably heighten fears.
Doesn’t necessarily have to be a professional serial killer but some guy could very plausibly kill a woman on a trail just because he got angry that she turned him down or maybe because she told him that in response to the meme she said she’d rather pass a bear.
In short, a woman wrote a piece in which she asks several of her woman friends, if they were alone in the woods, whether they’d rather run into a man or a bear. The majority chose the bear.
Man upset that they are considered dangerous to women then proceed to prove the point by acting like homicidal violent maniacs. “I’m not dangerous, not all men” I plead while punching a hole in the wall and threatening violence.
Bears however
It’s kinda funny. CHUD men LOVE bragging about how much of a badass killing machine they are, and everyone around them should fear them. So when they finally get the fear they want, they don’t like it.
i solely know of this from a vaush fan in my vague social circle talking about it and me having no clue what they were talking about so i went to r/vaushv and searched up bear to try and get what they meant bcs it was so obviously just some dumb shit they’d gotten from there and there’s like half a dozen threads of “”“progressive”“” men going full ranting about leftist misandry and comparing being afraid of sexual harrasment to systemic racism against black men
.
here’s the start of the current thread they’ve got going:
vaush fan
not some chud
