I didn’t want to do this, because I feel like this meme has already been mauled to death by angry feminists, and the people who responded to their blatant statements of prejudice. That’s probably why I put it off until it was pretty much going to be labeled an afterthought, but the more discussion I’ve seen and heard on the bear vs man topic, the more I realized this has to be done.
Why?
Because men have let women totally con them.
Again.
They got you talking about this on their terms, guys. The minute they did that, they won the game, and this one doesn’t reset after 30 minutes. Now it looks like this stupid meme and its associated false characterizations of men are going to be a permanent part of the rhetoric around gender issues and associated law, and policy, without ever examining why the effort to impose that narrative happened in the first place.
There’s been a lot of discussion about this, mostly revolving around things that are, or at least should be, obvious. The claim that it would be more of a threat to a woman to find herself stuck in the woods with a man than with a bear constitutes a false allegation. A lot of people are arguing that point, and they’re right, of course. There’s no doubt that a bear that wants to eat you or eliminate you from its habitat would do so before you even knew what hit you, and your death would be horrific.
There’s no doubt that among men, malicious violence is not a normal, common behavior, but one that is so unacceptable to them that the so-called patriarchy categorically outlawed it and created punishments intended to deter the behavior. As PEW research reported in an article by John Gramlich, “What the data says about crime in the U.S.,” in 2022, the FBI reported 380.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people, or 0.38 per 100… 0.38%. That statistic factors in the number of violent crimes, but not how many of them are committed by repeat offenders. Taking that factor into account, we can figure out that the number of perpetrators would be less than the total number of incidents. In other words, in 2022, the FBI’s crime report indicates that less than 0.38%, or under 38-one-hundredths of one percent of the population, was responsible for all of the violent crime in the country.
There’s no doubt that as a population, men care about women. Unlike feminists, who only care when women are targeted, while excluding male victims of violence from their circle of compassion, the so-called patriarchy didn’t exclude women from the protection of any laws against various forms of malicious violence. In fact, they created whole categories of crime and punishment just to emphasize that it’s especially forbidden to target women… at least if the perpetrator is a man.
Men have also made sure that when outliers among their population do target women with this abnormal, socially unaccepted, and illegal behavior, women have full legal resources to make a case against the perpetrator, and uninhibited access to a system that helps them with that. When a man targets a woman with malicious violence, the victim can report the crime to law enforcement, triggering an investigation that affords her a unique right to support for her contributions to the process. Like any victim of violent crime, she can provide evidence to support her allegation, and have her day in front of a jury to confront the perpetrator with evidence and testimony about what he did. Because she is a woman, if she shares a domestic relationship with her perpetrator or the crime she has reported was sexual in nature, she has unique access to support from government funded organizations that will provide her with an advocate to guide her through the process and defend her legal rights throughout.
That extra-high level of protection and support is only available to women. The so-called patriarchy, a system under which it is alleged that men have power and women are largely excluded from it, did that for women, but not for men.
If that’s not enough, thanks to laws and policies created by the so-called patriarchy, a woman today who even just seeks medical attention after being targeted with malicious violence can count on personnel at the facility where she seeks treatment to help her get that process started. She doesn’t even have to talk to police first. If she does, they will encourage her to seek medical treatment, where evidence to support her case against the perpetrator will be gathered… again, especially if the crime is sexual in nature… but if she seeks medical attention first, she’ll have help contacting law enforcement. In fact, many areas have mandatory reporting laws in effect that require medical personnel to report disclosure of felony crimes or certain types of injuries indicating felony violence to law enforcement.
Between the fact that under this so-called patriarchy, most targeted violent crime victims are men, and the fact that most law addressing violent crime treats violence against women more severely than violence against men, it’s pretty clear that men view women as a protected class.
Malicious violence, already a socially unacceptable behavior, is not just unacceptable but wholly taboo for men to use against women. Men who violate that taboo are condemned for it, shamed for it, punished for it, and excommunicated from polite society for it. It’s silly for women to state a preference for being alone in the woods with a bear rather than with a man.
But that’s not really the point, is it? This has never been about the facts, the man or the bear.
This is about an entirely different animal.
Women – not all, but far too many – are arguing that men on average are more likely to behave violently toward women than bears are, and they’re violently mauling statistics in pathetic attempts to bolster that claim. You’d expect that if this narrative was just a mistake, that when shown statistics proving that less than 1% of the population is so violent, women would be relieved and grateful to get information that proves they can safely have relationships with the other half of the population… wouldn’t you?
But that’s not what they do. When provided with evidence that contradicts their narrative, and logic that proves they’re quite irrationally misusing their statistics, they very clearly demonstrate that it is more important for them to maintain it than to know they are safer than they thought: They ignore everything that doesn’t support it, hone in on the few areas of violence that men haven’t been able to eliminate from all women’s lives, and then double down, cry misogyny, claim they’re not being heard or not being considered, and whine that you just don’t “get it.”
They’re right. You don’t get it. I’m able to tell you that because I do get it, and you are being way too nice about this whole discussion. It’s far worse than just everyday misandry. The aspects of femininity that fuel this phenomenon are profoundly disgusting.
There are three things going on here, and the first two are deliberately, gratuitously cruel.
One is pecking order maintenance.
The second is predatory sexual fantasy.
Both of those are reprehensible.
The third thing is just shameful.
A lot of people have already touched on the first thing, but I’m going to explain it anyway.
Women know the comparison they’re making is bullshit.
They’re not making that comparison because they need sympathy for a fear that exists and is legitimate. Remember, the argument they’re making is that there’s no discernable difference between the overwhelming majority of men who are no threat to anyone… in other words, normal men… vs the small part of the male percentage of the tiny minority of the population that is criminally violent, who are comfortable targeting women instead of other men despite the taboo they face against doing so.
I can’t emphasize this enough:These women are arguing that among men, there is no obvious behavioral difference between those who respect and enforce social and legal standards, and those who maliciously violate our society’s taboos. That’s the gist of the argument that women have no way of knowing which men might victimize them, making them supposedly less predictable than bears.
Well, let’s look at this through a lens of logic and evidence instead of the misandric one that’s been applied to date.
If there was really no discernible behavioral difference between normal men and maliciously violent taboo-breakers, why is the percentage of the population that commits violent crimes so small? If women really couldn’t judge which men are dangerous, why don’t they distance themselves from all men? Why do women dress and accessorize to attract men, flirt with, and date men, and even marry them if they live in constant fear due to being unable to differentiate between nonviolent and maliciously violent men? Are these harridans trying to convince the listener that men are dangerous, or are they just trying to imply that women are stupid?
And don’t tell me that women are striving to distance themselves from men. The exact opposite is true.
Consider the following:
Feminist women have spent decades fighting legal and social battles to ensure that women have access to men’s institutions, organizations, clubs, athletic teams, even men’s locker rooms and bathrooms. Even when women have similar things available, team for team, club for club, job for job, they still demand access to whatever men do, whatever men have, wherever men are.
If you suggest there should be places men can go that women cannot, organizations or institutions available to men without providing women access, or even activities or interests men might have that women wouldn’t equally pursue, women object, and feminists threaten legal action.
Even men’s safe spaces for nudity have not been allowed to remain private. Ever since the conclusion of Ludtke v. Kuhn in 1978, female sports journalists have had legally-enforced access to the locker rooms of male professional athletes. And don’t let anyone tell you they’re not going where men are nude, because female reporters have complained about men’s nudity and men’s “rude” objection to being approached by female reporters while nude in men’s locker rooms since the Boston Herald‘s Lisa Olson made public comments about that in 1990.
In fact, even when women don’t legally have access, that doesn’t always stop them from entering. It’s not necessarily legal for people to enter the bathroom designated for the opposite sex, but as Ipsos public affairs reported in 2017, about half of US women reported using men’s restrooms to avoid long lines for women’s restrooms.
Makes women sound just terrified of men, doesn’t it? Women are so very, terribly, horribly, awfully scared of men that they’ve not only spent decades fighting to be closer to them, but nearly half a century fighting to invade men’s naked time. It makes perfect sense. Yeah.
And don’t think the bear narrative happened because, as feminists would like you to believe, men are uniquely likely to engage in sexually aggressive behavior, either. That belief has been discredited since the 90s, when P.B. Anderson and group’s book “Sexually aggressive women: Current perspectives and controversies” came out, including statistics on “Women’s motives for sexual initiation and aggression.”
Anderson and group surveyed 461 college age female students regarding sexually aggressive behavior with males, and according to their results, 1 in 4 women had committed forcible rape using at least the threat of violence, with 1 in 5 having used violence, and 8% admitting they used a weapon.
Additionally, 3 in 10 had used an intoxicant to override a refusal, and 3 out of 5 admitted they’d had sex with a male partner while he was intoxicated. More specifically related to the locker room and bathroom issue, 30.6% admitted to exploiting a compromising position and 7.4% to threatening self-harm, for a total of 38% or nearly 2 in 5 admitting to using blackmail as a tool of sexual aggression. If that’s not enough, 1 in 4 also admitted using a position of power or authority to engage in sexual aggression.
And all of that doesn’t even touch the percentage of women who admitted to using emotional abuse as a weapon of sexual aggression or using sex itself as a weapon of emotional abuse… all by the time they were college age.
Gee… why would men be at all reluctant to share a locker room with people who might behave like that?
Right now, the female and feminist hate listeners to Honey Badger Radio are composing comments about all of the reasons why women are not just entitled to, but need to be in those spaces and why it’s sexist if men don’t make those spaces available – in fact comfortable and inviting – for women. Well, you can make all of the arguments that you want, but that doesn’t change the way women’s sexual violence proves that having dangerous boundary issues is not a male-only behavior, or the way women’s choice to go into men’s spaces contradicts women’s claim that they fear all men. And yes, that’s the underlying goal of the argument that no men are different from the few taboo-breakers who target women with violence – to paint malicious violence as a strictly male behavior, and all men, regardless of their intentions or behavior, as a threat to women.
The fact that women live in a world where half of the population is male and expect to go wherever they want, do whatever they want and associate with whoever they want in relative safety, including when they invade spaces where it is normal for men to be naked, and do so against the will of the men whose space they are invading proves that women know more than they’re admitting.
They certainly know who they can get away with pushing around, don’t they? They don’t even have to think about it. They are so accustomed to their demands being indulged by men, even when it means men have to give up personal boundaries they’d never ask women to abandon, that they have no doubt their demands will be accommodated. They know that the men whose spaces they’re invading, on whose toes they’re stepping, wouldn’t dare to defend those boundaries as long as the person crossing them is a woman, because doing so could get a man into social or even legal trouble. Not only do they not fear violence in these situations… they don’t even fear noncompliance.
So… why would these women make such a blatantly and obviously – and stupidly – false allegation?
One reason, the hen pecking reason, is to put you in your place, to impose a sense of collective guilt and collective status as part of an untouchable caste, above which you can only rise by earning women’s approval. It’s the only means women still have left to pump up that old, worn out pedestal atop which they sit and demand veneration from lowly men, usually misusing the word “respect” to describe it. Now, do be a good boy and hand over your balls, but don’t you dare expose that nasty humanity of yours in the process.
Why would someone who fears you and believes you to be a misogynistic monster hell-bent on oppressing her and just waiting until nobody’s looking so you can do dastardly things to her expect behavior like that to work on you?
Wouldn’t it be more likely to come from someone who believes you’re predisposed to accommodate her?
She doesn’t fear you. She knows you fear being perceived as a malicious threat. She knows it matters to you enough that if she can convince you to feel like a woman-scaring, villain-ignoring clod, your resulting sense of guilt can be used to manipulate you into giving up more of your freedom of movement, your due process rights, your privacy, your lifestyle choices… your personal boundaries… to accommodate her stated needs. More succinctly put, she expects that if she can make you feel like the bad guy even though you have done nothing wrong, that will make you her doormat.
Next, let’s talk about that sexual fantasy. That has two aspects to it.
One continues from that henpecking issue. It’s not always just about exploiting women’s elite social position for increased male obligation, and you can tell by the way the women you’re arguing with about this talk about men. They get downright gleeful in their misandry, glistening with dupers delight as they generalize every type of violent crime to all men, breathlessly declaring that excluding yourself because you’ve committed no crime is an attack on their “lived experience.” Their whiplash voices castigate you for knowing your innocence, as if you demanded special recognition by being part of the non-criminal majority, rather than an exception to the rule… a rule that doesn’t exist, but which they want to impose on you anyway.
If it seems that all the women you’re hearing the bear vs man narrative from talk about is how evil, ugly, dangerous, and disgusting men are, if they seem to be focused on demanding that you accept their characterization of you as such and bear the related blame and shame, it’s not because those are their true beliefs about men. If they were, they’d be afraid to tell men they thought any of those things.
It’s because they get off on how they imagine their commentary is affecting you. They are basically using their own belligerence and their expectations regarding your reaction and how their comments make the public perceive you as their own personal spank bank… chatterbating, so to speak. Dominating your self-image, stroking your guilt and shame, and straddling the torn remains of your confidence as they envelope your whole cultural existence with toxic feminine psychological warfare.
It is exactly as gross as it sounds.
The second reason is even more exploitative. I talked about that several months ago in the HBR production, “We have to talk about ‘male violence,’ in which I pointed out that one of the primary subjects of women’s romantic fantasies is men risking their safety and wellbeing in a woman’s defense.
The bear vs man narrative is designed to make you feel obligated to do exactly that, not in regard to an actual bear, but against other men. It doesn’t even matter to her if her choices push you to face violence you’ve worked hard in your life to avoid. She doesn’t care that she has crossed your boundaries and overridden your choices regarding risk management. In fact, she thinks of the situation as something intimate. If you asked her to describe the phenomenon, she’d describe it in similar terms as she’d use to describe a date, calling the behavior sweet, chivalrous, loving, and romantic.
And don’t think your consent matters to her at all, because it doesn’t.The woman who claims to choose the bear is telling you that you’re obligated, because unlike the way you live your life with a myriad of ways in which you manage your risk of experiencing violence, it’s unreasonable to expect her to engage in anything like risk management. In her mind, that’s not her role in this relationship she has imposed on you. It’s yours, and you’re a misogynist for even thinking otherwise. She’s entitled to conscript you into service as her bodyguard, her shield, and the subject of her every fallen-guardian-angel fantasy.
Unfortunately, this plays out in women’s real life behavior, not just in words, and not even just in terms of the woman’s failure to consider how declining to manage her own risk creates circumstances that socially or morally obligate men to protect her. Choosing the bear can have other connotations.
When a woman chooses guys in the “bad boy” category and starts to experience negative consequences, what does she do? She finds a “nice guy” to play her hero, to rescue her from a guy he’d probably prefer to avoid, in a conflict both guys would probably prefer to avoid, while she stands on the sidelines egging them on and feeling aroused and elevated by the whole situation. Does it bother her that she manipulated her boy toys into actions they wouldn’t have taken without her involvement, and inserted unwanted violence into their lives? Well, that would require her to understand her personal agency and to care about their experiences, wouldn’t it?
When I learned the bad way that triggering something like this was a thing I could do if I wasn’t careful to avoid it, I was embarrassed and guilty that it had been my fault, but throughout my life I’ve heard other women and girls brag about this to each other, sometimes even trying to one-up each other with how much risk they could get a man to take on their behalf, or how dangerous the man they snagged can be to other men. Again, women do this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they think their protector’s role in it is romantic and sexy. They want to hear “I would die for you,” a phrase they view as a man’s greatest expression of love, without ever considering that wanting him to live, wanting to ensure his safety and comfort as much as their own, would be their greatest. A woman who doesn’t understand or consider that will live carelessly or recklessly in hopes of seeing you “prove” your love, at the cost of your wellbeing. She’ll even get mad at you if it never happens.
Despite all of the shaming and complaining women do about so-called male violence, women will fap to this. They’ll call it misogynistic, accuse you of objectifying women, and demand change if you use such a scenario as part of the hero’s journey in a fictional story written for men, but thumb through the novels on any shelf in the romance section of any bookstore, and you’ll find it somewhere in the majority of them. You might think roses on a random day would soften her heart, but you should see what shedding a little blood on her behalf… yours or the other guy’s… would do. It shouldn’t be the case, but many, many women choose “the bear” because they get off on getting you to risk yourself protecting them from him.
The third cause behind this narrative is something that can only be considered a form of privilege. When it comes to interpersonal risk, most women don’t spend any time considering just how easy they have it in comparison to men, being in the minority among stranger-perpetrated violent crime victims and victims of other forms of injury and death from socially expected risk-taking, like workplace accidents. They don’t credit normal, non-criminal majority of men with anything they do to keep the women around them safe because they’re so acclimated to it that it is invisible to them.
A woman will ask a man who isn’t doing a police or security job or anything of the sort to walk her to her car because she “feels unsafe,” believing that a criminal is less likely to attack just because he is there, and still not think of him as having done anything to protect her because after all, they weren’t attacked. Never mind the fact that having him there was supposed to be the deterrent. Never mind the fact that she expected him to confront a violent stranger on her behalf if they had been attacked. She won’t even consider the fact that she asked him along so she could let her guard down because she could expect his to be up enough for both of them. The only thing she will notice in that scenario is if the man she asks to be her impromptu bodyguard refuses. If he does that, she won’t consider that she might have been unreasonable in asking him to do that unpaid labor. She’ll consider him the asshole for failing to comply. Like I said, to her, your consent does not matter.
A woman will go through her whole day unconfronted by anything even remotely resembling a threat of violence and never give a moment’s consideration to the way normal men contribute to her safety. I’m not just talking about the men of the justice and law enforcement systems. Men’s social norms, especially the taboo against violent behavior against women, shield us long before the men of those systems come into play. Not only is it shameful for a guy to target women with violence, it’s riskier than targeting another man, as a woman is more likely to be cared about by people who will be moved to retaliate for her protection, or for revenge.
Attacking a guy means you’re up against a guy. He might be tough or wimpy, strong or weak, but he’s just one guy. Attacking a woman means you’re up against a screaming banshee and possibly every man within earshot, including her relatives, possibly even the female ones. They will also be more dangerous than they would be if confronted alone, because they’re protecting a loved one whose vulnerability they recognize.
She’s not thinking about that when she walks down the street, but she’s also not avoiding the street out of fear of violence. She’s not thinking about that when she promotes the bear meme, but she’s also not avoiding that conversation out of fear of violence. On some level, she knows she is protected. She simply gives no consideration to the man-built social and legal structures that protect her, because she doesn’t have to. Men will protect her regardless of her ignorance.
In fact, the majority of the time when a woman does experience violence, it’s because she chose to be in an environment or circumstance that was devoid of men who would protect her from whoever would harm her, and in many cases, what she experiences is violence that she initiated with her own violence.
Even then, in heterosexual intimate partnerships, her violence most often doesn’t elicit a violent response. Numerous times, I’ve cited the study “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence” by Daniel J. Whitaker and group, who found that 70% of one-way violence in heterosexual intimate partnerships was female-perpetrated as reported by both women and men, and that two-way abuse was associated with more frequent violence among women, but not among men. They further stated that studies of community samples found that a relatively low percentage of women endorsed self-defense as a primary motive for violence, and cited an earlier study as a source for the statement that a woman’s perpetration of violence was the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence. In other words, in 7 out of 10 reported cases where the abuser targeted a person who didn’t engage in defensive violence the abuser was female, and even when women weren’t the sole perpetrators, they were initiating frequently enough to be the majority of perpetrators, often to their own detriment.
Why does the study refer to women who initiate violence as victims?
That’s explained by differences in social attitudes toward use of violence depending on the sex of the user. When a woman uses defensive violence against a violent male assailant, it’s understood to be self-defense. When a man does the same against a violent female assailant, he gets categorized as the perpetrator. When a man escalates a conflict to violence in order to control a female partner’s behavior, even if it’s because the behavior is offensive, abusive, or dangerous, that is recognized as partner abuse. Feminists confronting evidence that abusive women do the same thing to their male partners created a whole new concept to excuse it: Preemptive self-defense, a way to categorize violence against a nonviolent target as “defensive” even though there is no eminent threat to the perpetrator. As a result, when researchers encounter instances involving female-perpetrated abuse of a male partner who defends himself, if that defense could injure her she is categorized as a victim even if the same would not be done when the sexes are reversed.
Women are so accustomed to this double standard that many don’t even recognize their own acts of violence as violent behavior. Meanwhile, they give little to no consideration to the reasons why they are safe in public places and the fact that those reasons don’t follow them to private places like the home. Their acclimation to those shields that modern civilization, fueled by men, affords to them, blinds them to the risk of more violence and injury should they choose and then batter “the bear” in an intimate environment where those shields don’t reach and their protectors aren’t present. Many women choose “the bear” and then are surprised when he hurts them, because they’re oblivious to how the majority of men protect women, and to the nature of the dangers from which they’re being protected. They don’t consider the fact that when “the bear” is a man with limits to how far they can push him, or with dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors, the reason he hasn’t been hurting them is often because other men have been doing the thing feminists claim men don’t do for women.
And when he does hurt them? Then, regardless of whether his actions stemmed from malice or self-defense, they call on the other men of their community to go bear hunting, as if they never made the claim there was no difference between him and them in the first place.
So, there you have it. Many women are promoting this narrative because they get off on saying abusive things to you and anticipating your pained reaction and the limitations they can impose on you by making their outlook the public’s general perception. Many do it out of a desire – often field by sexual fantasy – to enforce your obligation to protect them from dangerous, psychologically damaged men. Many do it out of sheer, blind carelessness. None do it because they really think you’re more dangerous than a wild, flesh-eating, natural killing machine.
Whatever the reason, each set is red flagging themselves as false accusers; one as deliberate abusers, one as predators, and one as careless disasters waiting to happen. Guys, if you’re heterosexual, this is probably one of the greatest dating litmus tests to ever come along. If she promotes the “choosing the bear” narrative on her social media or in conversation, and she doubles down when she gets any pushback on it, do not just walk away from her.
Run, and don’t look back.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807
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