Of Bears and Men

Perhaps you have seen the TikTok question about Men vs Bears going around lately.

“If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?” 

Women’s answers to that hypothetical question have sparked an ongoing debate about why the vast majority say they would feel more comfortable choosing a bear. It has also sparked a huge backlash of violent and vengeful posts about women from men who do not understand why we answered that way.

Just to be clear, this is not about fistfighting a man or a bear. This hypothetical question has nothing to do with approaching the bear, hugging it, dating it, or interacting with it in any way.

It’s about how very UNSAFE we feel around strange men that we don’t know.

Even the men that we DO know can often turn on us and become angry, violent, or assault us for no reason, with no warning. Most women grow up being warned against men. The men in our lives will tell us that we shouldn’t be alone with men. That we shouldn’t trust them. Many fathers even make jokes about threatening their daughters boyfriends with shotguns.

More than that though, almost every woman I know has been approached in an inappropriate way SEVERAL times in her lifetime. These stories are shared amongst women freely, but men seldom know or care what we experience, because it’s so different from their own life experience that they can’t even fathom what it is that we go through.

Also worth noting is that the Man vs Bear analogy has nothing at all to do with “All men”. We are not talking about “All men”. However, if I handed you a bowl of Skittles and told you that one of them was poisoned, but the rest of them were safe, how comfortable would you actually feel eating out of that bowl?

Likewise, if you were in a room full of snakes, and we told you that one of the snakes was venemous, but the rest were harmless, would you choose to purposely interact with ANY of the snakes? Or would you keep a safe distance, hoping to avoid the one venemous snake?

For most of us who were born as females, the danger is ever present and we never forget it because men won’t let us forget it. It’s not just our mothers and fathers warning us against strange men. It’s the men themselves, and the things that they do and say to us.

One of my earliest memories of men being creepy, was when I was about 8 years old. We lived in Arizona. My younger sister and I, and two of the neighbor girls who were the same age as us, were walking to the corner store a couple blocks away. Two grown adult men in a pickup truck drove slowly beside us for half a block saying dirty things to us, asking if we wanted a ride. We said No but they wouldn’t stop. We ran that last block to the store. They called our parents, and our dads jumped in the truck and went out and drove around looking for the truck. They didn’t find them.

That same year, when I was 8 or 9 years old, I was very much a night owl. My parents and sister would be fast asleep, and I would be wide awake, so I would either read a book with a flashlight under the covers, or I would sneak out to the living room to watch television. Our couch was in front of a giant picture window. One night around 2am, I was sitting on the couch watching tv, and the shade was only half closed. I heard a knock on the window behind me! I turned to look and it was a grown adult man, dirty, disheveled, with wild curly hair. He pointed to my front door and walked towards it, obviously hoping I’d open the door for him. Instead, I screamed.

My parents came running out into the living room and I pointed at the window. Dad, who was in his underwear, grabbed his antique sword and went charging barefoot out the door after this man, while my mom called 911. Dad didn’t catch up to him, but the cops came and they spent the next couple hours searching for him. I don’t remember if they caught him or not.

Around the same time period, my family used to be friends with a family who had an adult son with developmental disabilities. He went to adult daycare but lived at home with them. When they would go on vacation, my family would take care of him at our house. I never told my parents, but he spent a lot of time trying to touch me inappropriately. I was always trying to escape from him when he was alone in a room with me. I knew he had some kind of disease that made him clinically retarded and therefore couldn’t help how he behaved, but it was so scary for me as a child to constantly be fending off this grown person who was 100x stronger than I was. Thankfully he was also 100x slower and couldn’t catch me if I ran.

When I was 13, I was hanging out with a friend in her neighborhood. There was an 18 year old boy that was friends with her older brother. My girl friend and I had snuck into her brother’s alcohol stash and were drunk. This 18 year old boy saw us out roaming the neighborhood and started talking to us. He invited us to his house so he could “make lunch for his grandma”, but there was actually no sign of any grandma when we arrived.

He convinced us to play strip poker with him in the basement. My friend ran home for lunch but left me there. He assaulted me. I never told anyone when or how I lost my virginity. It completely fucked me up for like 20 years though. What a horrible secret to keep to myself at that young age. When I came home late, smelling like alcohol, I got grounded for the rest of the summer. I had a lot of time to reflect on what happened to me, and I thought it was my fault for sneaking alcohol and for going there in the first place. I never told a soul becasue I was so ashamed.

When I was 16, a boy that I was actually friends with and trusted got me drunk at a party. We went on a walk to the lakefront where we all used to hang out and smoke weed as teenagers. I thought we were going to smoke a joint. Instead, he assaulted me there and then walked me back to the party. I never told anyone about that either. I was so ashamed. It took me many years to realize it wasn’t my fault.

When I was 17 and regularly had to ride the public bus to work after school, a man in his 60’s or 70’s tried to lure me off the bus and back to his apartment one day because he wanted to “take pictures” of me. I was so creeped out, but all I could do was shake my head. Ugh.

When I was 18, I was in the woods by my favorite lakefront area. I was practicing my devil sticks all alone in a quiet place. All or a sudden there were about a dozen boys on the trail. The younger ones were like WOW what are you doing? So I showed them and they were happy. The little ones continued on the path but the older boys (6 of them) were still watching me. They started saying creepy stuff to me, so I walked back towards the beach away from them. They followed me, laughing, and asked if I was scared. I started running. 4 girls came up the path and I yelled RUN so they turned around and ran with me out to the beach, where they had a huge group of other girls waiting for them. The boys stopped chasing us and went back up the path. Those girls all walked me back to the parking lot and got me safely in my car. There was a bus parked in the lot from some kind of group home, which is probably where those boys came from. I STILL won’t walk alone in the woods almost 30 years later.

There have been several times, as an adult, when I was catcalled at night in a creepy manner, or followed by a man demanding that I interact with him, when I thought I was going to have to defend myself. For that reason, I stopped walking alone at night. Thankfully the older I get, the less this happens. Which is another issue – why are underage girls and women in their 20’s the preferred target for all of these predatory men??? Probably because they are so naive, they have no clue how horrible and creepy these men are yet. Which means they are susceptible to abuse.

One of the other major examples of “Men I can’t trust” was my ex husband. I’m not going to get super detailed here at this time, but to summarize, I was abused verbally, mentally, financially, and physically by a violent alcoholic, for several hellish years, before I was able to escape from my marriage and start over.

He tried to kill me more than once. I had to get a restraining order in 2008 after the first time he tried to kill me in a drunken rage. Up until that point, he had just been abusive, but in 2008, things escalated. The reasons I couldn’t leave sooner were complex, but it came down to, I tried to divorce him several times, and he always told me that “If I can’t have you, no one can”. He even threatened to drive us into oncoming traffic one day if I didn’t tell him I loved him. Of course I told him I loved him. I was absolutely fucking terrified though.

Unfortunately, he also isolated me and separated me from my friends and family. He terrorized my dogs and cats. He punched holes in the walls of my house, and destroyed priceless things that had belonged to my grandmother which could not be replaced. She had died in 1999 and he knew how precious everything she had ever touched was to me. He systematically destroyed as much of it as he could in drunken fits of rage and violence.

I can’t even begin to describe all of the different times that he abused me, tormented me, terrorized me, demoralized me, mocked me for being upset about the abuse I suffered, secretly recorded me, secretly recorded other people, stole money from my purse to buy alcohol, pretended to black out and not remember what he had done to me, and just absolutely tried to destroy me and my health in every way possible.

Once, I woke up from my ambien-induced sleep to find that I had a broken ankle. I suspected that he did it because we were getting ready to do an event for a nonprofit organization that I had helped found and he wanted me to suffer, standing on my feet the whole weekend with a broken ankle. He swore he didn’t remember doing it. That good old “I was drunk and blacked out” excuse got so tired. I knew he remembered everything and was just lying. Never apologizing for all the ways that he hurt me, and never admitting that he remembered what he did to me was just another part of the abuse.

He frequently SA’d me in my sleep – I’d wake up and he would be in the act of having sex with me without my consent.

I was so afraid of him. I asked for a divorce a dozen times over a 5 year period, and received nothing but angry threats and violence in response. It wasn’t until 2013 that I decided I would rather die than be married to him for one more moment. I sold my house and moved back to Milwaukee with my family, and was finally able to convince him to sign the divorce papers.

I was so traumatized from that whole ordeal that I didn’t date again for YEARS. I was just so grateful to be alone in my own space and not have any kind of stress, violence, or drama invading my life anymore. There is such peace in being alone.

Another type of abuse and violence I have experienced from more than one man, is being trapped in a moving vehicle with an angry, screaming, unhinged man who is swerving in and out of his lane. Here’s another example of why I insist on driving myself everywhere, and will never allow a random man to drive me in his vehicle again.

Back in 2018, I had a girl day planned with my friend to go get Sushi in Green Bay. At the last second, her guy friend decided to invite himself along on our girls day. I was originally supposed to drive us that day, but he *insisted* that he would drive us in his pickup truck.

I knew this man from work and from having mutual friends. He had hung out with our group several times. He was one of those disenfranchised far right conservative men, poorly educated, who had a huge chip on his shoulder about liberal women of any type, but I had done several big favors for him in the months before that, and I though we got along alright enough at the time, so I didn’t mind if he came. My female friend was also a far right conservative, but we had always gotten along just fine. We also worked together.

Worth noting, is that this man was also an opiate addict. He had a bad accident a couple years prior to this, and had become addicted to prescription opiates from his doctor. After his doctor cut him off due to his marijuana use, he started to really rage out more and more often. Not just this time but several other times, I had seen him get upset and angry, and everyone had forgiven him because he was disabled after his accident, and withdrawing from opiates, so we tried to have compassion for him.

On the way to Sushi Lover (a 45 minute ride each way) my girl friend sat in the front passenger seat. After we ate dinner, I sat in the front passenger seat for the drive home. He had his radio set to an AM talk show where they were discussing Brett Kavanaugh and the sexual assault allegations against him. I wasn’t really listening, since I was half turned around talking to my friend in the back seat about other stuff. All of a sudden, with no provocation and for no reason, this conservative man driving the truck started flipping out on me, talking about how us liberal women are so against men, and how the allegations against Kavanaugh were all lies, and basically just saying some really batshit insane sounding rants about liberal women and rape allegations.

I was like hmm, I haven’t really had time to listen to the news lately so I’m not up to speed on what’s happening, therefore I don’t really have an opinion yet, and I’m not really in the mood to be forced to talk politics right now. He screamed over me, told me to shut the fuck up when he was talking, and started absolutely screaming his head off about Hillary Clinton and how liberal women like me voted for her and wanted to see Kavanaugh in jail for no reason because we hate men.

I laughed, because I was a libertarian, not a democrat. I never voted for any democrat in my life, including Hillary, but because I have some very liberal viewpoints like “women are full people and deserve full bodily autonomy,” and “Gay people are valid human beings that deserve full human rights including marriage”, I had become accustomed to far right wing batshit insane men telling me I must be a hillary voter. It typically elicited a laugh from me, since seeing a delusional person melt down over some nonsense bullshit lies they made up in their own head, is kind of comical.

He spent the entire 45 minute ride SCREAMING AT ME, swearing at me, telling me lies about how I voted for hillary, and screaming about how he only assumed I thought about men. I had never said a single thing he was attributing to me. He had made it all up, 100% pure unadulterated bullshit. He was swerving dangerously all over the freeway, and just was absolutely batshit insane unhinged the whole ride back.

I didn’t say a single word or look at him after that. I started texting on my phone to tell a trusted friend where we were, how unsafe I felt, and that this man was a violent and dangerous man. I wanted to make sure that if something happened to me, my real friends would know to have him arrested immediately. That’s how violently angry he was. I sincerely feared for my safety. He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed about false rape allegations, Brett Kavanaugh, Hillary Clinton, and Liberal Women, and how, in his opinion, men have been nothing but mistreated and abused by nasty liberal women. It was astounding how wrong he was, yet how righteous and justified he felt.

When we pulled up in front of my house, my conservative female friend said “do you want to come smoke with us at my house?” I said FUCK NO I DO NOT, and jumped out of the truck. I went inside and immediately blocked this violent, angry man-child on my phone, on facebook, and just everywhere possible. I never saw his face or spoke to him again. And I never saw or hung out with my so-called girl friend again either. She listened to him scream, rant, rave, rage, and threaten me for 45 minutes straight and never said a single word, so she was immediately cut out of my life after that day too. Sometimes, the misogyny is also coming from inside the house.

I was truly not OK for a long time after what he did to me. I know I wasn’t the first woman that he violently raged at like that, and I would bet money I wasn’t the last. I have cPTSD from many previous traumas, and this was not the first time a violent man had raged at me in a moving vehicle, so it gave me severe flashbacks. I cried for weeks after that, and found it hard to function as a person for several months.

Not that it matters for the purposes of this story, but a year later, I heard through another mutual friend that due to ongoing problems from his previous reckless driving accident, he eventually had to have his foot amputated. I said something in the spirit of “Well, it might not be the exact punishment I had hoped he would get in life, but I’m glad that karma caught up to him one way or another after what he did to me”. He had been SO HATEFUL towards me, so filled with rage, so violent, so hurtful and nasty and cruel, that I truly thought he was going to hurt me, or even crash the truck with me in it while he was swerving all over the road. So when I heard that he had to have an amputation due to the repercussions of his own prior reckless driving accident, I couldn’t feel even a little bit sorry for him. I still can’t feel sorry for him to this day. He was a monster.

In 2022, my boyfriend and I were taking a little road trip. It was around 9am, and we had left the hotel early to continue on to our final destination. We were on a US Hwy 2 driving up towards Drummond Island in the UP. It was very isolated, with no other traffic on the road at that time. We saw about a dozen eagles feeding on rocks in the lake next to the road, so he pulled over to the shoulder and we just sat there for a few minutes, quietly watching these magnificent birds feasting. All of a sudden, another truck stopped on the highway next to us. He was the only other vehicle we’d seen so far.

We looked over to see if he needed help or was just watching the Eagles. But no, he was ANGRY. From what we could hear, he was SCREAMING at us because we had pulled over. He didn’t check to see if we were OK or if there was a reason we had pulled over. He just sat there for like 2 minutes screaming inchoherently at us for, as far as I could tell, pulling over onto the shoulder of the highway for 2 minutes to watch the Eagles.

My boyfriend and I just looked at each other in shock, wondering what was wrong with this insane man. But we agreed that he might have a gun or something. He was clearly experiencing extreme road rage, for apparently no reason at all. We talked quietly and decided to turn our heads and just not look at him again, and eventually he went away, squealing his tires. We waited until he was long gone to pull away.

In 2023, I was driving slowly on a back country road, taking in the wildlife and scenery, when I saw a bear in the woods less than 50 feet from me! It saw me too. I stopped the car and just stared in wonder and awe, knowing that if it came towards me I could easily speed away and outrun it. It didn’t come near me though. It stared back at me for a moment, and then turned around and ran away in the opposite direction.

If I was in the woods alone (which I wouldn’t be, I know better) and I saw a man there, I would be a lot more scared than if I saw a bear standing there.

If the bear attacks me, at least no one will say I was asking for it with my clothing choices. If the bear attacks me, people will believe me when I say I was attacked. If the bear attacks me, it won’t be because it wants to assault me, or lock me in its basement and rape me. Chances are, if I see a bear in the distance, I can just leave, and it won’t follow me. If the bear attacks me, I won’t have to carry its fetus to full term in 24 states. If the bear attacks me, the worse it will do to me is kill me. If a bear attacks me, no one will say “Boys will be boys”. If a bear attacks me, a sympathetic judge won’t let him off easy because”he has such a promising career ahead of him”. If a bear attacks me, his rich parents can’t bribe the judge to let him off scott free. But since I’m not dumb enough to approach a bear or try to interact with it, it would be unlikely to attack me, unless it has babies nearby.

Unlike some men who get a thrill, or even sexual excitement, out of attacking women, the bear will typically only attack me if it feels threatened, or very hungry.

Based on my many lived experiences with men, I know that it could be quite dangerous to approach a man if I am alone in the woods. It would be unpredictable at best. Will he assault me? Will he unalive me? Will he think I’m a liberal woke Hillary supporter and commit violence against me based on that assumption that he just made up in his head because of how I look? Will he have a gun? Or maybe rope and a knife? Will he stalk me? I don’t know.

Most of the people that have assaulted me or scared me haven’t looked scary at all. They looked just like every other man in the world. They were someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s uncle, someone’s brother, someone’s friend. In some cases, they were MY friend.

Most women eventually learn that even the most charming man can suddenly decide to assault us, abuse us, and worse. We hear from news and from the men in our lives that women are not believed. Are not valued. We know, based on things we’ve heard men say with our own ears, that if we tell people what happened to us, no one will believe it because “He seems so nice” or “Are you sure? Because I know him and he’s never done that to ME”.

What’s really telling is that there seem to be two types of men. The first type of man is aware of how frightning and predatory his fellow man can be, and generally, his response will be something like “I’m so sorry that other men have made you feel unsafe. I will call other men out when I notice them being creeps because I’m an ally and women deserve to not be assaulted”.

The second type of man IS the reason we’d prefer to meet a bear in the woods. This other type of man is rude, condescending, and ANGRY to hear that we’d choose the bear over him. They have made a lot of very rude memes denigrating women, implying that we’re stupid because they imagine we’d hug or fight or fuck the bear. There’s a bunch of memes mansplaining to us how we must have never seen a bear and obviously don’t know anything about them. There are also a lot of memes where the man trips us so he can run away from the bear, with captions like “You said you preferred the bear!” The eagerness and speed with which they express their desire to get violent revenge on women because of our answer to a hypothetical question just proves that we are 100% right to choose the bear.

They say”NOT ALL MEN” and “I’m a Nice Guy, Bitch!” and expect us to apologize to them for *checks notes* “hurting their feelings”. They don’t hear us when we talk about being harassed, abused, assaulted, and raped, because they are too busy shouting over us about how stupid we are, and how we must obviously hate “All Men” and are, in their opinion, misandrists . They can’t understand why they are literally the men that we don’t want to meet in the woods.

It’s interesting how this group of men is so priveledged that they have never even noticed that other men are preying on both women and other men. Either that, or they are the men we are talking about who are preying on women and other men. Either way, their anger and other big feelings do not nullify our actual lived experiences. The fact that they can’t be bothered to hear or understand what anyone else has to say, means that they don’t really have a valid opinion at all. Their opinion was formed in a very priviledged vacuum. With zero input other than their own very big feelings and emotions. And yet they call women the irrational ones. Very strange.

If you’re one of the men who is upset, angry, and confused because the majority of women would choose the bear, then this next section is a must-read. Facts do not care about your feelings. Not only do men perpetuate MOST of the violent crimes in the USA, but they commit these crimes against both women and men. Women are more likely to commit crimes such as robbery, theft, and embezzlement. But men are more likely to murder, rape, and abuse both women and men. With women being victimized more often.

Here are some facts about black bear attacks in the USA:

Offensive attacks are very rare and include all of the killings by black bears. These are generally unprovoked predatory attacks in remote areas where bears have the least contact with people. Bears that visit campgrounds, bird feeders, and garbage cans almost never kill people, even though these bears have by far the most contact with people. The 750,000 black bears of North America kill less than one person per year on the average, while men ages 18-24 are 167 times more likely to kill someone than a black bear.

Most attacks by black bears are defensive reactions to a person who is too close, which is an easy situation to avoid. Injuries from these defensive reactions are usually minor. (Source)

In 2022, there were slightly more female victims of violent crime than male victims, with about 1,749,030 male victims and 1,762,840 female victims. These figures are a significant increase from the previous year, when there were 1,456,310 male victims and 1,278,390 female victims.

Violent crime in the United States includes murder, rape, sexual assault, robbery, and assault. While violent crime across all areas has been steadily falling over the past few decades, the rate of aggravated assault is still relatively high, at 284.4 cases per 100,000 of the population. In 2021, there were more property crimes committed in the U.S. than there were violent crimes.

It is usually said that most victims know their attacker, and the data backs this up. In 2021, very few murders were committed by strangers. The same goes for rape and sexual assault victims; the majority were perpetrated by acquaintances, intimate partners, or relatives. (Source)

Facts from Wikipedia’s article titled “Sex Differences in Crime“:

A 2008 review published in the journal Violence and Victims found that although less serious situational violence or altercations were equal for both genders, more serious and violent abuse was perpetrated by men.

It was also found that women’s physical violence was more likely motivated by self-defense or fear while men’s was motivated by control. A 2011 systematic review from the journal of Trauma Violence Abuse also found that the common motives for female on male domestic violence were anger, a need for attention, or as a response to their partner’s own violence.

Another 2011 review published in the journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior also found that although minor domestic violence was equal, more severe violence was perpetrated by men. It was also found that men were more likely to beat up, choke or strangle their partners, while women were more likely to throw something at their partner, slap, kick, bite, punch, or hit with an object.

In 2014, more than 73% of those arrested in the US were males. Men accounted for 80.4 percent of persons arrested for violent crime and 62.9 percent of those arrested for property crime.

In 2011, the United States Department of Justice compiled homicide statistics in the United States between 1980 and 2008. That study showed the following:

• Males were convicted of the vast majority of homicides in the United States, representing 89.5% of the total number of offenders.
• Young adult black males had the highest homicide conviction rate compared to offenders in other racial and sex categories.
• White females of all ages had the lowest conviction rates of any racial or age groups, however these statistics do not isolate Asian offenders from a diverse ‘other’ category. Asian women are considerably less likely to commit homicide than white American women.
• Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological father conviction was slightly higher than for biological mothers.
• However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% of the people that were convicted were males.
• Victimization rates for both males and females have been relatively stable since 2000.
• Males were more likely to be murder victims (76.8%).
• Females were most likely to be victims of domestic homicides (63.7%) and sex-related homicides (81.7%)
• Males were most likely to be victims of drug-related (90.5%) and gang-related homicides (94.6%).

2011 arrest data in suburban areas from the FBI:

• Males constituted 98.9% of those arrested for forcible rape
• Males constituted 87.9% of those arrested for robbery
• Males constituted 85.0% of those arrested for burglary
• Males constituted 83.0% of those arrested for arson.
• Males constituted 81.7% of those arrested for vandalism.
• Males constituted 81.5% of those arrested for motor-vehicle theft.
• Males constituted 79.7% of those arrested for offenses against family and children.
• Males constituted 77.8% of those arrested for aggravated assault.
• Males constituted 58.7% of those arrested for fraud.
• Males constituted 57.3% of those arrested for larceny-theft.
• Males constituted 51.3% of those arrested for embezzlement.

From 2003 to 2012, there was a decrease in the rate of crime overall, but an increase in crimes committed by women. There was an increase in arrest rate for women of 2.9% but a decrease in arrest rate for men of 12.7%. This demonstrates an increase in arrests for women which only slightly offsets the decrease in arrest for men resulting in a decrease overall in arrest rate in the United States. Arrests rates for women had a sizable increase in the following crimes: robbery (+20.2%), larceny-theft (+29.6%), and arson – property crime (+24.7%).

The trend results from 2003 to 2012 showed the vast majority of crimes were still committed by men with around 88% of homicides and 75% of all legal felonies. According to government statistics from the US Department of Justice, male perpetrators constituted 96% of federal prosecution on domestic violence. Another report by the US department of Justice on non-fatal domestic violence from 2003 to 2012 found that 76 percent of domestic violence was committed against women and 24 percent was committed against men.

The fact that there are a not insignificant number of men who also say they would choose the bear is very telling.

To the small percentage of men who are committing the vast majority of the crime, the rest of us BEG you to be better, to do better.

The bottom line is, we want to be able to trust men. We just find it extremely difficult because of our own lived experiences. But don’t get it twisted. There are plenty of men we trust. We know lots of decent, kind, safe men that we would love to go for a hike in the woods with. Just because we choose the bear in the hypothetical situation doesn’t mean that we hate all men.

This has been an eye opener for women though. The incredible numer of hateful, violent, angry, condescending, bullying, and cruel responses we’ve seen in the past several weeks from real men in our lives, have definitely shown us who is safe and who is not. We’ve been listening to everything you say very closely. And that’s why we still choose the bear.