are men scarier than bears?

what one viral video reveals about women's safety and men's perception of it.

A controversial video is going viral online asking women a simple, yet poignant question: would you rather be stuck alone in the forest with a bear or a man?

While we would expect women’s to answer anything but being stranded with one of the most terrifying creatures on earth, most of them said they feared a different kind of apex predator: the opposite sex.

@screenshothqThe question of being stuck in a forest with a man or a bear is circulating on TikTok right now and sparking some interesting conversation.... we know what our answer would be 🐻🌳 #manvsbear #tiktok #tiktoktrend #trending #challenge #streetinterview #voxpop

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The video launched an exhaustive conversation about female safety and sparked a debate about how much of a hazard men are to women. “Our mothers never warned us about bears,” one woman commented on the video. “When I play dead the bear would leave me alone, the bear wouldn’t,” said another. “If I got attacked by an animal, people would believe me and nobody would ask what I had on” quipped another. #NotAllMen would be a threat to a woman, but without the option to know which one they would be marooned with, many women preferred some bear over some dude.

The video launched an exhaustive, yet extremely online conversation about all the reasons women fear men more than bears. “Our mothers never warned us about bears,” one woman said. “When I play dead the bear would leave me alone, the bear wouldn’t,” said another. “If I got attacked by an animal, people would believe me and nobody would ask what I had on.”

But while this online discourse gave many men a lot to think about, others chose to get angry about it instead, claiming that women are liars (how original) and that they exaggerate the threat of male violence in their lives. But as we know, the size of the backlash to a feminist trend can often be commensurate with how much self-reflection it’s forcing us to have about the female experience. So instead of invalidating women’s feelings, let’s dig into them instead!

Why would women fear boys more than bruins?

Well for starters, it’s logical. To explain this, instead of a forest, let’s take an even higher stake situation like a battlefield. And instead of a bear, let’s go even bigger and use an army of people who have been trained to kill you. You’d assume that a woman would be less afraid of a man she’s stranded with, than the actual enemy right? Well, you’d be wrong.

According to data from the pentagon, male soldiers pose a more existential threat to female service members than war itself. Given that one in four women who join the military will be sexually assaulted by a man within her ranks, the fear of her fellow man (and in this case literal colleague) is a rational one. In fact, a woman in the military is more likely to be raped by a fellow service member than to be killed by enemy fire. It’s a chilling statistic, but a crucial piece of evidence that shows that for women, the call is coming from inside the house, or in this case, her own barrack. "The worst thing for me is that you don't have to worry about the enemy, you have to worry about your own soldiers," Dora Hernandez a member of the U.S. Navy and the Army National Guard told NPR after she was raped twice while on the job.

While bears and menacing armies present a real and vivid threat for women, men who are supposed to protect them can be statistically speaking, more treacherous.

Focusing on dramatic tales of violence like bear attacks, ignores the very real fact that the safest people and the safest places for men, are consistently the most perilous for women.

For instance, a house may be safe for men, but as the pandemic showed us with its unprecedented increase in femicide and domestic violence, the most dangerous place for a woman is not in the street, it’s in her own home. Every hour in 2021, more than five girls or women were killed by someone the were related to, which means that women aren’t safer when men are kept inside, they’re more at risk when they’re confined to being in close quarters with them.

And while men are safer around people they know, women are more likely to be killed or raped by people they know. So even if we were to let women choose to be trapped in the forest with a man she’s familiar with, it still wouldn’t offer her more safety, statistically speaking. While most men who are murdered are victimized by strangers, women are most often killed by someone they know, usually an intimate partner or a member of their family. Research shows than 90% of women know their rapist. Given that almost a quarter of sexual assaults happen by a current or former sexual partner, it means that a woman would be safer in a forest with a man she doesn’t know, than with anyone of her exes. Family is a secure place for men, but for women, it’s where they can be the most prone to attack.

The reason it feels counter-intuitive that women could be safer with bears than with men, or safer outside than inside their own homes, or safer with strangers than with men they know, is because we fundamentally misunderstand gender-based violence. We believe that self-defense classes and rape whistles will minimize our victimization, when the truth is that avoiding men we know might actually be a far more effective way to prevent our own abuse.

The most dangerous place for a woman is not in the street, it’s in her own home. Every hour in 2021, more than five girls or women were killed by someone the were related to. While most men who are murdered are victimized by strangers, women are most often killed by someone they know, usually an intimate partner or a member of their family. Given the numbers, this means that a woman would be safer with a stranger in the forest than with a man that she knows.

And even if the bear does attack us, it feels more comforting than the man doing it. At least a bear won’t sexually degrade me, torture me or hide me in his basement for 20 years. There’s something about being alone with the unbridled patriarchal male psyche that feels more frightening than being caught between the tentacles of any wild animal.

And let’s be clear that the problem here is not male. Men aren’t inherently psychopathic or bad across the animal kingdom. In fact, if bears had tik tok accounts, and a girl bear was asked if she would prefer to be alone with a boy bear or with a mountain lion (one of the few predators to bears), she would probably pick the bear, because boy bears don’t typically hunt girl bears. In other words, males aren’t destined to harming females of their own species.

But the bear vs man video makes us face an uncomfortable truth: that the patriarchy makes men go after their own kind. Even the language around mating and dating that likens men pursuing women as “hunting their prey” is evolutionary unsound. There are enough predators that women have to worry about, without the potential of one of their own turning against them. As the French anthropologist Francoise Heritier once noted, it’s not human nature that makes men eliminate or hurt women, it’s a system called patriarchy that legitimizes and justifies that violence. And while it may be depressing, it also means it’s changeable.

Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash

The bear experiment shouldn’t make men mad, it should make them pause. The more we can be curious about the experiences of women under patriarchy, rather than question them, the better positioned we are to modify the systems that harm us all. The fact that this dialogue about gender-based violence could be uncomfortable is what makes it most imperative. Men should be bold and have it, even if they’re scared. If women are strong enough to brave a bear alone in the woods, then surely men can muster up the courage to talk about the reason why.