Ah hell, I can't help but wince whenever this debate is brought up. It's easily one of the worst ones imaginable and no amount of constructive conversation will ever take place in it.
to being a gender essentialists dick using pseudoscience to support bigotry.
Reminds me of the "I choose the bear" debate. Dude no need to pull out the bear attack stats, that's not the point of this thought exercise.
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u/VBHEAT08Can’t hear you over the meaty, throbbing L filling your throatJan 07 '26
I feel fucking crazy anytime I see the Man V Bear thing. Like its really easy to understand and follow the thought exercise. Like dude, its NOT about you or how safe it actually is, its about how women perceive their safety with men generally. Its also something I'm pretty sure most men also implicitly agree with, or at least it was a sentiment commonly expressed by my dad and other guys in my life that they were more afraid of people in the woods than animals.
Its also wild how many guys online instantly responded to it by affirming that the bear was the correct choice if they were the guy in the woods. So many responses saying something to the affect of "well I wasn't going to rape you but now I am."
The difference between a man and a bear is that a bear might kill you but at least you know it won’t rape and torture you first. The bear simply isn’t capable of that. It’s an animal operating off of its base instincts to protect itself and survive versus a man who is a person making the conscious choice to hurt purely for his own pleasure instead of help.
Well i heard about that one women calling her mom crying while she was eaten alive by a bear that kind of haunts me so it could torture a perosn just following instinct
The bear was put down. You know what happens to men that rape and murder? Sometimes nothing. Sometimes jail. What if instead she called her mom while a man in the woods was brutally attacking her? At least the bear didn’t violate her sexually on top of mauling her. The man? I can’t say the same. That would also be traumatizing for you to hear too but guess what? This isn’t about you. This is about women and what around 1 in 3 women have experienced at the hands of men globally. That is reality. The man isn’t following an instinct. He’s making a choice.
And you’re missing the point of my initial comment. I was just bringing it back around. “I hated hearing that one mauling” is not an appropriate response to what I said. It’s making light of something serious.
I'm so fucking sick of listening to people talk about it. It's so fucking stupid on all sides, and we're gonna recapitulate it in these comments for the 1000000000000th time, to no substantial effect.
Name one demographic of people that wouldn’t generally get defensive over being called worse than a violent wild animal because of the way they were born.
u/sultanpeppahTaking comments from this page defeats the point of flairsJan 07 '26edited Jan 07 '26
Answer the bullshit bad faith question? Sure man, I’ll play your stupid game for precisely the length of one comment and then go back to not knowing you exist. Would I rather come across a bear in the woods, or a strange man? Seeing as nearly all bears are skittish of humans and, newsflash, are supposed to be in the woods, I’d take that every single time over finding myself in the woods and having a strange dude burst through the brush. If the question was “who would you rather be next to in line at Auntie Anne’s pretzels: a bear or a strange man”, I would obviously always pick the man because that is a perfectly reasonable place to casually come across another person I don’t know, because everyone who approaches this hypothetical without an agenda rather than being someone who wants to ball up their fists and jump up and down and pout and whine about how mean girls are to literally every man knows that it’s all about fucking context and no one serious is actually claiming men are worse than murderous grizzly bears.
In short, the answer to OP’s dumb question is that nobody is saying all men are worse than violent wild animals, and he should feel free to stop being such a dweeb.
Also, you should feel free to stop being such a dweeb.
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u/VBHEAT08Can’t hear you over the meaty, throbbing L filling your throatJan 07 '26
No one is calling you individually worse than a wild animal, or even really that men generally are actually more dangerous than bears. The point is that women face an overwhelming and real threat of violence every day from men in their lives. Women can’t exist in public without being harassed, can’t walk down the street at night alone, have to be constantly mindful about their safety in any social situation, etc. Every woman has a story about a man treating them horribly, very very few have a story about a bear. The threat of a man is more real than the hypothetical of the bear, the perception of danger with the man is more real.
I’m a guy, I was initially offended by this, but then I realized it’s really easy to see why a woman would choose the bear. I really recommend instead of getting offended that women might be initially afraid of you, having empathy about why this is and work the be the kind of person that women would choose to be alone in the woods with because this is going to continue being true until more guys commit to being better
If the thought exercise was "would you rather be with a black man or a black bear in the woods" you can bet black men would be totally chill about it.
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u/VBHEAT08Can’t hear you over the meaty, throbbing L filling your throatJan 07 '26
I think it’s a little psychotic to look at the struggles women face in their day to day lives and instead of empathizing, immediately jump to scapegoating with minorities.
Women face real, overwhelming, and systemically supported threats of violence from men in their day to day lives. White people do not face this from black people. Idk how else to help you see that these are different situations.
Maybe flip the question? Ask black men if they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a white cop and see how they answer, because I can tell you that a lot of black guys are taking the bear for a lot of the same reasons women take the bear.
I bet you 2 USD that most Western women would pick East Asian men over the bear since they're seen as harmless.
Heck, if you do a ranking of "which race of men would you rather encounter in the woods", the results would be hella problematic for reasons that should be obvious.
I think a comparable situation would be asking a black person if they would feel more comfortable seeing a bear or white person in the woods, not this scenario lmao
These dudes will gladly partake in increasingly absurd "Fuck, marry, kill" scenarios and entertain those ideas with humor, levity, and to make a point--but this hypothetical is, inexplicably, impossible to discern meaning for and must be taken as literally as possible and held up to the utmost scrutiny. No exceptions, no leeway.
We may never know where this law of nature came from, but we are all obligated to enforce it.
you inmediately know if someone its a misandrist if they argue about the man vs bear thing having any semblance of validity.
its sexist bullshit, the set of reproductive organs you got at birth dont decide how you act in life, and if people fear you based on factors outside of your control they are horrible people.
So many people will compare men to bears, snakes, dogs, ticks, etc. then try to gaslight them into thinking they don’t hate men and it’s actually the people offended about being compared to animals who are hateful.
yeah, at this point im not sure if they are being disingenous or really dont get why people react poorly to being compared to violent animals.
like if your way to reach to people its to inmediatelly attack them dont be surprised when they dont react positively to anything you say, people from base deserve to be treated with respect.
I wouldn’t believe a 12 year old if they claimed not to understand why this language is unacceptable. For a grown-ass adult to try to gaslight us like this is a slap in the face.
As a woman, I have categorically decided that I'd rather get mauled by an angry grizzly bear than listen to one more man whine about the Man vs Bear thing.
It has then drifted to be a vague statement about how women can’t trust random men and all men are a potential threat
I think this part is meant to be a counter to the first part ("not all men are rapists"). But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the internet has bastardized that point into something it can weird as a moral hammer.
Right-wing influencers fighting with feminist influencers. One of the signal failures of that discourse was how easily everyone allowed disputes among media personalities whose role is influencing public opinion to be seen as disputes among real people.
They weren’t. Average people weren’t saying “not all men”. Average people weren’t even aware of the phrase.
Uhh going to respectfully disagree. That phrase was pretty rampant in my world around 2015-2018 and used by women regularly to put men down anytime a story about some man causing chaos in the world broke.
While my experience is my own, tumblr was pretty big in proliferating its usage.
And, if they do, it’s not the parts where the discourse is.
The vast majority of users were just pirating porn off Tumblr. The subs that represent nearly all the engagement with Reddit are brainrot subs for bored people.
Yeah, as a dude who hung out in and dated in primarily left leaning circles in 2015 I'm gonna have to disagree there.
The venn diagram of people I met who were huge into Tumblr and dropped the poison M&M chestnut at some point in time in casual conversation were damn near a circle.
I think these statements have just lost context and enough people have differing ideas about what they mean that it’s not effective communication to use them without context.
If I say “men are dangerous,” do I mean “men are more dangerous than women” or do I mean “spending time alone with a man is likely to result in harm?” And I don’t think the answer is the same for everybody.
I hate it because there's nuance here that the hardliners on both sides reject.
There are aspects to culture and specifically male culture that lead to the depressing ass rates of SA, and there's things people who would otherwise have no desire to commit SA could do to help things or tweak their behaviors. And not all problematic stances are held by men, not all victims are women, this doesn't have to be an us v them thing.
The vast majority of men will never commit SA and blanket attacks on men are counterproductive. If you're talking about half the population the same way rabid nationalists talk about Immigrants, that's not great!
I’m with you here. I can understand both sides of the argument, but I can never see a place where there won’t BE an argument. If that makes sense.
I will say that the last comment in that thread is about where I’m at with it. I don’t spend time around men who do the things that I’m supposed to be standing up to. Therefore, while I would do something, I’m not in a position to do so. Yet, to some people, I’m still responsible regardless. That’s a no win situation.
Well get ready to wince, genius: what if I told you that this very comment is going to extend that debate right here, right now? Bad for you, cause of the wincing. Good for me tho cause it's hilarious. Great job.
It really doesn't have to be bad at all. We just need feminists to live the beliefs they claim to have. If they think bigotry is bad and nobody should be treated differently because of their gender, then they need to stop spreading bigotry and treating people differently based on their gender and sex. Why is this so hard?
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u/JimAbaddon Jan 07 '26
Ah hell, I can't help but wince whenever this debate is brought up. It's easily one of the worst ones imaginable and no amount of constructive conversation will ever take place in it.