Man vs Bear

A neurodivergent response.

There’s a game that boys and men like to play called “would you rather” that I’m sure most everyone reading would know about, has played, or could guess what it is. Essentially you pick 2 ridiculous scenarios and you ask your buddy to pick one. Sometimes you get to ask clarifying questions, sometimes not. Usually it’s just done to pass the time, and so having been in the Marine Corps, I found myself frequently subjected to both having to wait around for hours in one spot until the next thing came along. Hurry up and wait, as they say. I always found this game annoying and immature, though, sometimes someone would come up with something thought provoking.

Years after high school, military, and college, I was diagnosed with ADHD and ASD. So, looking back, the lack of nuance, the seemingly braindead scenarios, the guffawing over an unexpected response that could be turned into a jokey insult at the answerers expense, well, it makes sense now why I didn’t like to participate or be present for any of it.

Now, for the last couple weeks, internet society has been playing this game on social media, from TikTok to podcasts. It’s really “simple”; “Would you rather be trapped in a forest with a bear or a man?” There’s some variations of the question, sometimes adding “random” and such, but that’s the gist of it, and primarily, it’s being asked of women. There’s rarely and additional context and it seems “it depends on the man” isn’t a valid answer. So, from my perspective, it seems most are saying “bear”.

Admittedly, I’m not coming at this from the typical perspective. But I’m a male, watching this ongoing cultural conversation about gender and masculinity and watching the train wreck that is the unintended consequences of societal wide male displacement take place in slow motion in real time. Perhaps my opinions on this are dismissible because I’m not a woman, I’m missing the point, or I’m taking it way too seriously. If you are of that opinion then you are free to ignore this and go about your day. I can’t help it I was born male and with a brain that overcomplicates things and takes things literally. I’ve tried to ignore the trend and go about my life but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so. Every time I come across this I get more annoyed by it and this is my attempt to untangle why I find it so problematic.

Let’s start with the most autistic take: The lack of nuance in the given scenario makes it impossible to make a meaningful decision and attempting to make a decision says more about individuals than it doesn’t about men in society.

This entire things is dripping with logical fallacy and psychological bias. One of those not being examined at all is real vs. perceived threat. The amount of times your brain makes your body react to mundane things as if you’re literally dying throughout the day is probably higher than you care to admit, and/or higher than you consciously realize. The threat response system in the brain is old and simplistic; on or off. It can’t actually tell the difference between a real threat and perceived threat. So people answering that they would rather be trapped in a forest with a bear instead of a fellow human, are either failing to utilize or are being denied the opportunity to utilize the higher brain functions to determine the actual risks and severity of the given scenario.

“You’re taking this too seriously. The point of the trend-,”

You were given the opportunity to scroll on earlier, why are you still here?

I get it, that it’s more about the conversation that needs to happen in respect to women and men, how not all men are risks, but the uncertainty makes it so women live in a state of persistent vigilance. They take measures for their safety on a daily basis in ways that most men probably don’t consider. They don’t know what men really pose a threat, and so, as discussed earlier, the brain makes every man a threat. The man vs bear trend seeks to illustrate that men need to come to terms with this, to realize that on the whole, men would rather be mauled by a bear than walk next to a strange man at night. Perhaps that’s a bit disingenuous. To be more accurate they would rather be stuck in a forest alone, knowing there’s a bear in the woods, rather than there being a man in the woods.

Unequivocally, the answer is bear.

But may got have mercy on your soul for offering a different opinion on the trend. No one will support a different perspective, you’ll get dragged in the comments to no end.

This isn’t about whether or men or bears are safer. This isn’t about statistics. It’s not about what the worst case scenario is. It’s not even really about the stories of women and them living in a state of constant threat and vigilance.

This is a game. People ask the question, people answer the question, then people laugh or get angry at those answers. But why is it, if men have emotional responses to that question, if they feel offended or bothered by it, they are immediately shut down or dragged for it? There are a ton of videos of women telling men to sit down and shut up. If you want me to find some, I’ll start making a spreadsheet and we’ll go through each one.

So this is what men have to look forward to when showing and expressing emotion? There’s this claim that women want emotionally healthy men, but in practice, women have no idea how to actually respond to men being emotional. Particularly if that emotion is disgust or offense.

So for me, it’s not about the question. The answer is bear. What’s more important that this trend is highlighting is the complete and utter dismissal of alternative viewpoints because men have the audacity to feel something about the question and express it. So, given that the subject matter is heavy, mainly physical and sexual assault, women get to immediately say “you don’t get it. You’re not listening to women and their stories” and invalidate anything the man has to say. I’ve heard statistics thrown about that vary pretty wildly, which, I get it, it’s not about being precise with statistics, it’s about the fact that women have to take extra precautions everyday to not put themselves in compromising situations, etc. But brandishing about inaccurate statistics doesn’t help your cause. Because as soon as someone can say “your data is inaccurate” then they can proceed to undermine your point. Which is missing the point. So I’m doing my best not to do that.

Let’s be very clear: men are more dangerous than bears in nearly every context. Fundamentally because men are more dangerous than every animal on the planet, hence our status as the dominant species on the planet. This question is irritating and annoying and it’s not doing what people think its doing or want it to do for a lot of people.

If you slightly change the scenario, say, it’s “you’re alone in the forest and there’s a man that wants to kill you and there’s a bear that wants to kill you, what do you choose?” Bear. “You’re in a forest and the man is someone you trust and the bear is hunting you and wants to kill you and the man loves you and wants you to survive.” If you say bear in this context I’m assuming you’re just here to be contrarian.

The man is not more dangerous than the bear in every context. But women don’t know which men they encounter are safe and so they would generally pick the bear. And I can see everyone yelling at me “Yes, that’s the point! The constant fear and looking over your shoulder, never knowing the intentions of the man on the sidewalk, in the store, at the gas station. We don’t know, therefore, we have to act as if they are a threat.” Don’t mistake this as an attempt to downplay the real threats women face.

But the use of this ridiculous thought experiment being used as a measure of a man’s intelligence or awareness of the real threats is frustrating. This being used as another scapegoat to illustrate how inferior men are, how they don’t get it, therefore, all that they are and all that they contribute is undermined and ignored, is frustrating.

To the point where any man that get’s a little annoyed or frustrated by the blanket attempts to characterize all of us as murders and rapists gets shut down because if we’re offended then we’re part of the problem. That is not how equality works. And for all the touted “men should be more emotionally available” rhetoric, women are consistently proving that *they* are as emotionally unsafe as we are physically unsafe.

That’s the problem I have with these ridiculous and childish attempts to get your point across.

You might attempt to justify it with “men are getting the point so we need to resort -”, no. Stop. We are getting the point. Millions of us. I’ve seen equal amounts of engagement from men advocating for the women, calling men to be better, etc etc. What more do you really want from us? The majority of adult men will take things seriously and adapt and change if given the chance to do so. But this conversation seems to assume that women are helpless victims in all scenarios and have no responsibility to grow up and mature alongside the men.

Society will almost gladly launch into a conversation about men and violent crime, but try to bring up the emotional and verbal abuse women have carried out against men and its a different story.

It’s silly to me that I end up feeling like I’m the only one in a conversation that sees how this attitude towards a people group is a pattern that gets repeated throughout societies to demean and mistreat anyone that offers dissent.

Conditioning a generation of young boys to grow up feeling like they are a threat to all things good and decent in the world is going to have some terrible consequences. And those consequences are already showing up in society.

This gets to the heart of what’s going on here; this is a manipulative and toxic method of delivering an important message. To quote a woman on TikTok, “the message is getting lost in the mess.” This whole trend is an emotionally manipulative ploy to get across a message that women at large feel unsafe around men. You don’t get a free pass to use abusive tactics because you have been abused or are closely related to a victim of abuse, or tangentially identify with someone who has been abused.

Let me try to be clear again: this is not about who is safer. This is not even really about the silly trend. This is about the more damaging trend of making it ok to invalidate the opinions of entire swaths of the population because a small minority make life hell for the rest of us.

The comparison of men to bears and violent, murderous men, does psychological harm, whether anyone cares to admit it or not. And the dismissal of our contempt at being compared to violent criminals also does harm. Women have been harmed. Yes. Unequivocally. Historically, currently. Yes. I believe the stories of women. I advocate for change on a societal level and men need to grow up and take responsibility, be reasonable and intelligent and become the best versions of themselves. But the attitude and emotional manipulation from women stunts that and perpetuates harmful stereotypes that become self-fulfilling prophecies.

If women want men to become emotionally mature, then they have to stop treating our emotions like they are jokes and using emotionally manipulative tactics to get our attention and get their points across. Hurt people, hurt people. But women don’t get to perpetuate one half of the cycle while simultaneously calling out men on the other half. Men need to do better. No question. But so do women. And maybe men don’t have the words or emotional intelligence to voice this. But where in society right now are they going to learn that?

Men who want to do good are criticized for nearly everything. Search “guy with the list” on TikTok and you’ll see immediately what I’m talking about. We aren’t out there trying to make anyone’s life worse, we’re trying to make it better. We’re trying to be better. We’re going to therapy, spending time with our kids, having conversations about things when we can, exhausted but putting in the work to be better for everyone in our lives. And the constant bombardment of messaging that demeans and ignores these men, these good men trying to make a difference, is exhausting. But we don’t say anything. Because we know “it’s not about you”. And that phrase can cut so many different directions.

But it is about us, isn’t it? So we’re supposed to just take all of this comparison to violent criminals and not be bothered by it because “it’s not about you, stop making it about you, it’s about the stories of the women affected by domestic abuse” also “men need to step up and call out the bad behavior among themselves. Men need to start having these conversations, and develop empathy and compassion for women affected by-”, so it is about me then. You want me to somehow not internalize the comparison between me and a bear, and that a random woman finds me more threatening than a bear, while simultaneously internalizing the fact that if I’m not doing something to prevent bad men from being bad men, I’m part of the problem. I am somehow responsible for the bad behavior of men I don’t even associate with. And I need to be empathetic towards women. Ok. Great. But what happens when I get emotionally exhausted by all this? Where do I go? Who do I talk to? My therapist? I can only offload so much onto that poor woman in a one hour meeting each week.

If women don’t have the freedom to exist in such a way that they don’t have to worry about being physically assaulted, as they claim, then I claim men exist in an extremely similar state on an emotional level. Women want us to be emotionally available then they hurt us when we try.

So, if I appear threatening to a woman, it’s on me to attempt to appear less threatening, in a physical sense. Then, in the same logic, if a woman is emotionally threatening to me, that should be on them to adopt a less threatening posture, right?

Oh god no, I can hear the comments now. “It’s not our job to coddle you. We’re not your mommy. Man up and handle your shit. If my emotions are too much for you to handle, go find less.”

Except, you are mothers. Not my mother, but millions of mothers are living out this hypocritical and entitled lifestyle in front of their children. If men are supposed to be able to develop emotional maturity, how are they supposed to do that when women won’t give space to men to be emotional? Despite that, I know millions of young men are trying to figure it out.

But I’m making it about me again aren’t I? Because it’s perfectly acceptable to call out men in every way imaginable but calling out women for performing similar behavior is definitely not ok right now.

So, here, it’s relegated to a little blog page where no one will see it and be offended by it. Which, the irony continues doesn’t it, because, if someone reads this and is offended by it, how I respond will be based on their gender. If its a woman, I’ll have to give space for her offense. If its a man I’m perfectly within my rights to say “suck it up and do better.”

But I probably just took everything too literally and missed the point and made it about me. That wasn’t my intent. My intent is show that people hurt people, and it’s not just one side or the other, and to actually make progress, everyone is going to have to stop dismissing and ignoring and demeaning each other and actually come to the table to talk and disagree and navigate conflict and find solutions. But people just want the solutions, not the work and disagreement and trial and error that is required for the solutions to manifest.

So, here’s to dissent and resolution on the path to a better tomorrow.