I have some extra emotional capacity today so (see edit*) I'll post some wrong think: but can we stop antagonizing populations that feel disenfranchised by society and therefor giving the truly evil fucks out there an easy population to brainwash and feed extra scummy ideologies to?
Young nerdy men who feel excluded from society that dont have any strong female figures in their life are barraged by a constant stream of messaging that could easily be interpreted as "(white) men are evil and the source of all problems with society"
By constantly antagonizing them for not being able to navigate the political nuance of those messages, we give an incredibly easy pathway to the more toxic ideologies that the Tates of the world will pull them into to profit off of them, because they are the only figures who will give them praise and a sense of belonging.
Edit: Its a new day now, and I no longer have the energy. If you want to vent, understanding that venting in this manner will bring about little to no positive change, you do you, I will no longer be responding
The thing is, I've seen statements like this before. Except when I heard it, it was being used to justify ignoring women's experiences and feelings in regard to things like sexual harassment and feeling unsafe, since that's "just a feeling" as well. It wasn't okay then, and it's not okay the other way around. The truth is that feelings do matter, on both sides. Everyone should feel safe and welcome in their surroundings. And how much so that is, is reflected in how those people feel.
The outcome of men feeling being respected and women feeling safe are not mutually exclusive. The sad part is that someone who is reading this here is far more likely to be an ally than a foe, yet the people who need to hear the intended message the most will most likely never hear it nor be bothered by it. There's a stick being wedged here that is only meant to divide, and oh my god is it working.
The original post about bears has completely lost all meaning and any semblance of discussion is lost because the metaphor is inflammatory by design - sometimes that's a good thing, to highlight through absurdity. But metaphors are fragile - if it's very likely to be misunderstood or offensive, the message is lost in emotion. Personally I think this metaphor is just highly ineffective at getting the message across, as it has driven people who would stand by the original message to the other side due to the many uncharitable interpretations it presents. And among the crowd of reasonable people are those who confirm those interpretations and muddy the water to make women seem like misandrists, and men like sexual assault deniers. This meme is simply terrible and perhaps we can move on to a better version of it that actually gets the message across well, instead of getting people at each other's throat.
Honestly I am so goddamn tired of this shit, everytime something like the bear question comes up it blatantly tilted in one side or the others favor and dissent is crushed in both sets of spaces and no one learns anything.
Best take in this thread by a long shot. I'd like to add that there's nothing wrong with a little thought experiment to illicit a point. But the internet has become such an inhospitable place to any kind of discussion requiring nuance and patience.
You're right, feelings do matter, and this post did not dispute that. It's just that safety matters more.
It saddens me that the default interpretation of this is accusatory and requiring of defense. Not to personally blame you, this is very common and clearly a systemic reaction, but I don't know enough psychology/politics/sociology to understand why, just enough to know it's bad.
But it doesn't say you personally are unsafe, it says that the odds that a man chosen at random is unsafe is high enough that women - understandably - fear being left alone with a random stranger to a level at least comparable with being left alone with a bear.
An enormous number of men fail to understand just how common and how terrifying it is for women to be harassed, assaulted and raped by men. And that is exactly what the bear/man hyperbole is pointing out.
And the reason people with takes like yours get chewed out for it is because you could do some reflection and consider
what is this systemic issue, what behaviours might make women around me scared, what can we as a society do to change this, and what can I do to avoid women around me fearing I may be unsafe?
But instead, they take it as a personal attack, and so respond
why am I being attacked for someone else's behaviour?
Edit: here's another example in a similar format to demonstrate how the meme is being misinterpreted, note how your first response wouldn't be "why are you accusing all priests?!"
"Who would you rather babysit your child, a bear or a Catholic priest?"
I clearly said: it's not targeted at you specifically, but at that fact that women are disproportionately more likely to be harassed or assaulted, and when that happens, the aggressor is almost exclusively men.
They're not scared of you because you're personally scary, they're scared of you because there's an ingrained culture of sexual harassment of women by men. So when you say "that's a nice dress" to a woman you don't know, she's not thinking "aww cute", she's thinking "is this guy being nice, or will they threaten me if I turn them down?"
Seriously, ask literally any woman you know if they've ever been sexually harassed, and the answer is almost guaranteed to be yes.
I would 100% pick a Catholic priest
Yes, I know that, that's how hyperbole works. My point is that such a statement shouldn't be interpreted as "every priest is a child molester" but as "there's a concerningly high rate of them, and they're probably not a good option for childcare."
You are accusing everyone
When did I say "all men are <whatever you're saying I'm accusing all men of>?" Stop making this about you, and actually try to understand why interactions with men can be terrifying for women.
If you are not targeting all men, stop talking about men as one generalized body.
Sorry, when you say “I’d rather encounter a bear than a man” it sure as hell sound like you are saying all men are dangerous. If that isn’t what you are saying, you are saying it poorly.
It was highly contagious, that is, it spread widely. But so was the whole "would you still love me if I were a worm" thing and it was "effective" for the same reason: Gals thought "Oh I want a 'yes' to that answer that'd be so emotionally satisfying" and guys thought "WTF why would I want a worm if there's something more behind it why can't my SO speak plain English": It spread by exploiting the emotional kick gals get out of tripping over guys for having a particular default interpretation. No, it is not a "wrong" interpretation to think of the question as "rather with a bear or a man like me". If you don't want men to interpret the question like that then pose it differently. Simple as that. But then it wouldn't be as inflammatory and with that not as contagious.
Each and every time one of these things comes around one of two things happens for the average guy: We a) fall right into a trap and then get accused of being insensitive or b) we recognise the trap, lift our hands, walk back slowly, then faster, then even faster, until making a go at the 10km parcour world record. Because yes that kind of shit is a giant red flag.
It's like those people who are proud of being "brutally honest" but in reality what they care about is not the truth, but the brutality, just from the other side of the gender distribution.
But nobody is purposefully "wedging a stick" between allies and enemies. No secret society is plotting to prevent you from sending any message of safety. The metaphor is not designed, or created for a specific purpose. You have to realise how crazy and for real dangerous this way of agumenting is.
You aim for a good purpose, then use basically the debate version of biological weapons of mass destruction to make your point.
Just for any small argument about a small thing between sexes, like always it's fun for people to discuss, and some get mad, but
For you to use the narrative of psy ops, learned no doubt subconsciously, to speak like there is a secret cabal that want you to be fearful, we must unite against some kind of expression just because they are coming for you.. No
If anyone takes it too far it's talk like that, and you unironically talk about how reasonable people are hard to come by
Just because noone sets out to do a thing on purpose, individually, as a group, organically, conspiratorially, whatever, doesn't mean that the resulting system of action does not act with a particular purpose in the wider system.
Life, for example, has the purpose of hastening the heat death of the universe: We reduce entropy locally and to do that increase the rate of entropy increase in the wider universe. It's what we do. It's our purpose, as far as the universe is concerned, whether we like it or not, whether we intend to or not, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we try to or not.
These kinds of memes (bear, worm, what have you) have a particular impact. That impact is their purpose. If you don't like the impact I suggest advocating against the practice instead of saying "but nobody meant to". Have some Goethe.
Purpose implies intent more than outcome. I agree with your overall stance but think something like "result" would be more effective. Calling it the "purpose" makes a similar accusation to anyone who wants to have this debate to what it itself is making about men in general, which will just increase the divide. I don't think you're deliberately trying to do that, but I think it could end up being the result.
Your overall point does capture how this whole thing has made me feel. Even as someone who didn't get offended, understands what women who would "prefer the bear" are actually saying and doesn't think I'm owed any attention from anyone that doesn't want to give it to me, the only thing this meme makes me want to do is disengage even more. And a younger version of me would have really resented being made to feel like my mere presence was offensive or scary.
It's a system thinking heuristic. The reason "purpose" is used instead of result is a) "the result of a system is what it does" doesn't actually make sense, as systems aren't events in time but, well, systems which have non-negligible timespans -- it sounds something like "what is the result of a dishwasher" -- I dunno, what is it doing? Is it standing there? Short-circuiting and on fire? Washing dishes? All that is part of what "a dishwasher" is, does, and therefore, its purpose in the grand scheme of things. And b) precisely to stop people trying to find purpose in motives, intentions, etc, to go with a materialistic instead of idealist interpretation of things. To quote Beer: "There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The purpose of prisons is to rehabilitate? Well maybe in some countries, in other countries no matter what the stated intent is their purpose is to be a place where people can get degrees in how to do crime.
No it's not and that's a terrible way to view the world.
Are you the same idiot who argued with me before because he thought he'd found the Word of God in this random philosophical exercise?
Edit: nope, different moron. I wonder why this silly thing is making the idiot rounds lately? It's like when a 19 year old has their first philosophy 101 class and thinks they've gained supreme knowledge of how the world works.
It's systems thinking and if you think it's terrible then because it's terribly good at getting rid of excuses. "Oh but you see the intent of the prison system is to reduce crime, never mind it doing the opposite, move along, nothing to see because intent is all that matters".
Yes, it's a thought exercise, not a tautology. And it's not a great thought exercise either, because people of low intellect apparently assume it's a tautology because of how it's worded.
Downvoted not because it isn't true, but because they aren't automatically mutually exclusive and because it is an unnecessary jab at half of the human species. Why are we paying attention to divisive bullshit instead of focusing on things that actually have the potential to help?
We need different methods to reach people who either aren't interested in listening, or who don't think what they're doing is "bad". This will require a lot of work and research, but the first step is acknowledging that the current efforts are not helping.
"I realized men are evil, masculinity is toxic, these are statements of truth and the only ones who deny this shit are cis men themselves." - CheesyCheese1 This thread
☝️ Top comment when i got here. This issue brings out as many misandrists as it does misogynists.
Even my gf who wasn't aware of this meme picked the bear vs a random man when i asked her, so obviously there is a problem. But in reality i don't give a shit if some rando woman would prefer a bear over me in the woods, whatever makes her feel safer i guess. I do care about being tarred with the rape brush though, and this topic is being used to attack all men rather than just the problem ones.
Because the solution to women getting assaulted is to make men think about their actions. The post wasn't anymore divisive than the average black twitter meme. It was a simple tongue in cheek piece about how women have the impossible task of figuring out if a man is going to be their life partner or their rapist & murderer.
I’ve never once even thought about hurting a woman?
then you'd know it's not about you. I don't think women want to potentially be mauled to death by the bear, it's simply preferable to the horrible shit men do to women with astonishing regularity. kidnapped and raped to death, or kidnapped and raped for decades.
do you need links, to show how unfortunately regular this kind of thing is? because they'll turn your fucking stomach. just because you're ignorant about how often it happens doesn't mean you should take it personally when women make a logical choice. they're safer with the bear. You've never thought about hurting a woman, that's great, but it doesn't do shit for the women who have had this shit done to them by men for the history of the species.
It’s absolutely divisive. Stop.
oooOoh poor boy, it hurts your feelings huh? get over yourself.
there's some real delusional entitlement going on here. one for all the supposedly 'good guys' who feel blamed for rapists - I don't rape women but would never begrudge their need to defend themselves. telling women they need to take literal risks for the sake of 'not hurting the good guys' feelings' seems kinda fucking gross.
I don't get why any man would jump to defend the chuds, unless they feel pointed out as a chud.
It absolutely is. You are saying no man, myself included, is safe. That no matter what good we might do individually, we will always be viewed as monsters. Can you not see why men find that hurtful?
It absolutely is. You are saying no man, myself included, is safe. That no matter what good we might do individually, we will always be viewed as monsters. Can you not see why men find that hurtful?
look mate if you want to self identify as a rapist / creep, be my guest. if you want to identify that way and then wonder why people find it creepy, well, I don't have the crayons.
If you think women assume all men are rapists, you're wrong. if you think women assume some men are rapist creeps, that would be EXTREMELY RATIONAL. Now, compare those two categories with the number of times a woman has had to worry about being raped by a bear.
Come on, you can do it. Count on your toes if you need to. There we go: it's none.
I’m not self identifying as anything. You are saying woman should be more scared of me or any other man. And bears may not rape, but they do other damage.
Imo this doesn't impact the men who would do such a thing in the slightest. You're just making the ones who have empathy feel bad, those who would rape are just getting their egos stoked by this fad: "Look at me, I'm more dangerous than a bear! That means I'm badass"
The problem is a large portion of rape is not done by serial rapists who rapes every chance they get, it's done by average dudes once or twice when an opportunity arrives. Most rape cases involve someone known to the victim.
Rape culture (as awkward and taboo of a phrase as it as) is a real thing that this bear analogy is pointing to. You may not have anything to examine in yourself that is the result of that culture but a metric fuck-ton of men do have internalized rape cultural aspects that need to be examined and extracted. The fact that so many women picked the bear is a testament to how pervasive that culture is, at least in their eyes.
The point isn't to stoke the egos of the serial rapists with no empathy, it's to use empathy to make the "average-Joe" rapist examine his internal biases before they turn into an actual rape.
I'm a woman (a trans one if that matters to you) and have experienced sexual assault and domestic violence from both men and women.
I know the point that people are trying to make with the whole bear thing.
But I think the friction comes from women talk about this as a theoretical to make a point, where men are thinking more literally.
And I do belive that no one in there right mind, if actually given this option in real life, would pick a bear (unless maybe it was definitely one of the more harmless species).
Each and every one of us, even those of us that have survived SA, have had countless uneventful interactions with men you don't know. Even when it's just one on one. And its mostly normal biases that makes us remember the shitty ones more. And something a lot of people forget is that the vast majority of SA victims already know their assailant, so the idea of a rando assaulting you is even less likely. So yes I would much rather be in the woods with a man, than a wild fucking animal. And if you're a reasonable person, then you would too.
Honestly I think it depends more on the guy than the bear. Any time you're alone in the woods (at least in the US) it's safe to assume you're with a bear, that's where they live. Most bears keep to themselves though.
People tend to be less low-key, and less predictable. To me it seems more likely that a random guy could follow you around, take your stuff, or generally make life more difficult. There's also a higher chance for a guy to assist you and make things easier, but I can understand how the potential risk could outweigh the potential benefits.
Nono you're not allowed to judge the man individually. You're required to judge before you see both the man and bear so that we get a properly over-essentialised judgement how else are we going to propagate in- / out-group divisions.
it makes me happy that this is near the top of this thread, but this comment is also only 15 minutes old, so i'm not sure how far down the pipeline of this post, it'll track.
(This is me being glib) It depends on what kind of bear we're talking about. Blackbear be big noisy and confusing, grizzly play dead, big hairy gay guy like best case scenario.
As a trans woman who has also been sexually assaulted, it has more to do for me with what danger is more real to me. I've experienced zero bear attacks. Nobody I know has experienced a bear attack. Why would I fear one? Of course, consciously yeah, I know a bear is dangerous, but I have no real world experience to back that assumption up.
Men though? Yeah, I've been sexually assaulted by men. I've been physically assaulted by men. I've had family and friends who've been physically and sexually assaulted by men. That danger is real to me. I know that if a man I don't know is nearby me he could do those things to me, and I have the real world experience to prove that assumption correct (the assumption that they could, not the assumption that they would.)
Therefore, of course I'm more scared of the man than the bear. And of course I'd choose the bear over the man. I don't care if it's the wrong choice, I'll take my chances to not have to relive that trauma, even if it means risking my life. Not like I'll have time to regret that decision if the bear decides to kill me. Probably. And most women I know when asked expressed the same sentiment in different words. We're more scared of men than bears, but that doesn't mean we literally think men are more dangerous than bears.
Is it the logical choice to pick the bear? Probably not, but humans are not logical creatures. I'd rather make the wrong choice than the scary choice.
I agree. I never said it was a good mindset. Therapy is definitely something we need to learn to deal with this and think logically. The issue is so absurdly many women have been traumatized by men that the mental health support systems would be so overloaded that it's just a fact that only a miniscule fraction of women would ever be able to receive help, even if we had absolutely perfect support systems.
So the only solution is to prevent them from getting traumatized in the first place. But the entirety of Lemmy seems really resistant to that conversation. Would rather quote statistics about "oh the average man isn't likely to assault you" than to accept that the ones who do are dealing enough damage that the problem needs to be dealt with regardless of what the average man is doing.
This is a great look into the mindset of someone who's been through SA. Thanks for sharing.
The point I think a lot of men are trying to make is that: In the same way that somebody who commits SA may have been abused themselves, women who are prejudiced against men create a new victim. Treating a harmless man as worse than a dangerous animal is an experience that most every man goes through and that sucks.
I can understand and sympathize with your position. But it doesn't absolve you of your behavior. Just like someone who commits SA isn't off the hook because they were beaten as a child and that screwed them up. I feel for someone who was abused growing up, but they don't get to throw up their hands and say it's not their fault they victimize others. Compassion is crucial, but at the end of the day, everyone is responsible for their own actions.
But what's going on here isn't something within the control of most people. When you're abused by somebody you don't choose to fear those people, you fear them because that's what your brain is wired to do to avoid repeated trauma. Like I said, therapy is the solution, but only part of the solution. The other part is fixing the issue causing the trauma in the first place. Men aren't being victimized by the women who fear them, they're being victimized by the other men who caused that fear.
And I want to be clear, because I've realized at this point that this isn't obvious anymore in today's world, fear is not an excuse for misandry. At the same time, fear of men is not misandry. Somebody saying they'd rather pick the bear should be met with "oh, we should fix the issue causing them to fear men more than bears," not "oh, they should fear bears more."
I also want to be clear that this isn't even a gendered issue despite the fact that it's been made into one. A man who's been abused by women and would rather pick the bear should also be met with compassion and "how can we reduce the number of female abusers?" I've actually been abused by women too. In fact, more often than I have men. I want to be clear that even though this discussion has been about men specifically, I feel the exact same way about women. That we still need to be compassionate to their victims and accept that the people who traumatized them are the problem, not their trauma.
Fearing somebody is not an action you perform, it's a state you're in.
You seem incredibly well adjusted for what you've been through and clearly you've learned a lot from your life experience. Thanks for laying all that out. It was very insightful. I think we agree on 99% of this. So at the risk of splitting hairs, I'm going to put a magnifying glass on that last 1%.
I think fear absolutely victimizes people. I've seen xenophobia and homophobia do plenty of damage. Men are far from a disenfranchised minority and I think the issue of women's safety is much more pressing than men being treated unfairly in some situations. But it still shouldn't happen.
You're right that in a way it's the fault of the dangerous men who abuse women. But in a way, hypothetically, it's really the fault of their parents who sexually assaulted them. But in a way it's the fault of their parents genetics that made them mentally unstable, etc, etc all the way back to the first multicellular organism. This thinking, however true, isn't very useful. People need to take responsibility for their own actions.
We agree fear is not an excuse for misandry. I don't think it's unreasonable for women to fear men after having a traumatic experience. However I can still point out the problem here. I think a good example is the trolley problem. If you pull the lever to only kill one person instead of six, I can both: agree with your decision but also point out that you killed someone. You can argue that's insensitive to your difficult dilemma, but I think it's worse to pretend like someone isn't getting hurt. That one person who died still was a life with people who will mourn them.
I think what's irking men about this whole bear thing is not that the result is not what they want or even what they expect. It's that a huge chunk of people seem to not even see it as a problem that most men are being judged for something they have nothing to do with.
I've never been shot or held at gunpoint, but I have have the shit kicked out of me. But still if given the option to face a person with a gun and a person with the bare hands. I don't think I'm going to pick the the guy with a gun.
There's a serious difference in the level of trauma between these examples, and the level of exposure to the dangers of the counter. Sexual trauma is a hell of a lot more scarring on your psyche than simply being beaten. In addition, at least in the US we're exposed to gun violence every day as opposed to basically never for bear attacks. Even in other countries with better gun control, you're dramatically more likely to hear about somebody being shot than you are to hear about somebody being mauled by a bear. Not only that, but it's really easy to process "get shot, you're dead." It's not as easy to make yourself believe you're definitely gonna be killed by an animal that has whole guides written on how to survive them.
Those two things combined make your example far from comparable. In addition, I'm not saying in any way that the fear is justified nor that no attempt should be made to fix it, what I'm trying to point out us that people don't realize how intense a fear it really is when they get offended at people making this choice.
Obviously, therapy is important to learning how to handle that fear and think more logically, but if every woman who needs it sought therapy for this, there just aren't enough therapists in the entire world to handle the load. Not even close. So a bigger part of the solution is, y'know, making sure women aren't getting traumatized in the first place. But everybody here wants to skip that part for some reason.
You're free to disagree, but for me and many others, I've been through both, and I'm definitely waaaay more scared of being sexually assaulted again than being beaten half to death again. They have very different effects on your psyche. Physical violence I react far more with anger than fear, even if I was terrified in the moment. When it looks like it's happening again, my brain says "Fight back." When I'm afraid of sexual trauma being relived, my brain says "Escape, now. Can't escape? Submit. Maybe that way they won't kill you too at least."
How about you miss the entire point and get aggressive for no reason?
Seriously, what kind of response to "I've been traumatized by men" is "you should traumatized by bears too?"
I'm a woman and the same way that women feel about men in this whole meme thing, is the exact same way I feel about women...
I don't trust women within a hairs inch of my life and I would rather be with a bear than a Woman but I bet you I'll get super downvoted for this opinion.
My wife shares the same opinion. It’s not something she can discuss in her social circles, but she feels like she’s been backstabbed in more awful ways by her fellow women.
When she gets in that pattern, I try to remind her that people tend to suck and you have to be choosy regardless of gender.
Anyone engaging on any side of the debate are fools. Any topic antagonizing half the population will somehow stir up some noise.
It's like saying all women are bad at sport because they don't train hard enough. It's ignorant and serves only the purpose of creating a divide in the population.
My edge-case where I run into something semi-related to this issue is when I go on my daily walks and get caught walking behind women. I’m a fast walker, it pains me to have to slow down for people and I don’t like having to walk awkwardly around other people walking too slow (especially if they’re just barely slow but not too slow). I realize that the Flash is trapped in a living hell walking behind all these goddamn slow walkers.
I dislike walking behind women especially, nothing that’s their fault, they’re just living life, but because then I get extra self-conscious, like, “Oh geez, what if they think I’m following them or that I’m trying took at their butt or what if I’m making them uncomfortable.” It’s about the implication. Walking slowly isn’t an option because it extends the whole thing out and makes it worse, so then I have to re-route my whole walking routine on the off-chance my very existence might make somebody else uncomfortable.
I’ve tried saying things to them to try to put them at ease like, “I wasn’t planning on raping you,” or “Hey, it’s ok, I’m not a rapist,” but nothing seems to work, if anything, it makes them more uncomfortable. I honestly don’t know what women want from men.
That's quite the universal statement. I think first and foremost, men need to learn that they might not be part of the problem, but that there are many very problematic ones among us.
The feeling of general suspicion is what we need to tackle. If you don't grasp the problems and their magnitude, you will naturally take offense in being suspected.
We need to take this feeling and turn it into anger towards the disgraceful people that are the reason for the suspicion.
So on the contrary, I think men's feelings actually matter a lot, if you want to reach a world free of misogyny and violence against women.
Sometimes things aren’t your fault but are your problem. And men making excuses like “just locker room talk” and not confronting other men in their lives who do or say toxic things or espouse ideas or personalities that generally make women uncomfortable are our problems, whether or not they are our fault.
I mean, it depends. I am not my own gender police, I don't see my life with my peers as "shaping the culture of manhood" because having gender in common is basically irrelevant and there is absolute no sense of belonging for me into "manhood" as a gender. We are not talking about contributing to shape the culture of your organization, or club or something, where there are (or should be) some form of shared values.
In fact, I find this whole idea between silly and sexist, where by sexist I mean rigid attributes applied based on gender.
The way I see it is that I - as a man - have absolutely nothing to do to help with the overall problem and the only way that I can help improve is by not being part of it (in this case, not assault, rape, stalk, harass etc.). That's pretty much the end of it.
I have no heard a man express what you would call a toxic opinion in like twenty years. And yet women are still just as afraid. Crime rates are at an all-time low, yet women are more afraid than ever.
Whether it’s my problem is my decision. Primarily, it is women’s problem. And they have practical steps they can take to fix that problem. I refuse to make someone else’s problem my own problem, if that other person is ignoring steps they themselves can take to fix it.
I’m all for helping out, but only people who have done the first step themselves.
Women’s general attitude toward this is “It’s my problem but it’s your responsibility to solve it” and I say fuck that. I have my own problems to solve. My life is, in fact, absolutely full of problems that take all my energy to solve.
You’d think that it would appear on video maybe once, somewhere on the internet, if it were happening. Can you link to a place where men are saying these things? If not, does that indicate something about the rate at which it’s happening?
I can link to videos of UFOs and videos of dogs walking on their hind legs. Are these defining our culture? If not, what does that imply about something you can’t find a video of?
I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Or for another example, see Andrew Tate and all the idiots who follow him.
Anger is a feeling that leads to alienation, and an alienated beast is the most dangerous one.
We should be on a watch for potentially dangerous behaviors and offer help so that people gently unlearn their ways.
That's not to say people who have already committed some form of abuse shouldn't be punished, but that we should fight for those who can become dangers and support those who recognize their mistakes and genuinely strive to do better.
Maybe a divide for you, my SO says she'd pick the bear if it wasn't me. And I don't blame her.
Instead of arguing the merits of this debate, maybe its worth analyzing your own merits. Men (individually but amongst their peers) should be ashamed that women typically seem to want to pick a bear over themselves, instead of falling further into the rut that pushes everyone - not just women - away from their social circles and friend.
Someone tells you they'd rather be getting mauled by a bear? Take the hint. The divide exists within your head, make friends, be kind, and you'll find happiness
Edited for individuals to contextualize on their peers instead of generically
Men should be ashamed that women typically seem to want to pick a bear over themselves
Shame is an individual thing. Men, plural, is a whole bunch of people. Why should I be ashamed for the actions of people that aren't me?
...and just to be clear here: I'm not even arguing that we shouldn't battle this one out between the genders. But collective punishment is against the Geneva convention and I really don't like to stay quiet when people commit war crimes.
Wait sorry I just read your comment, who the fuck said war crimes? You should be ashamed of your peers if they're misogynistic, whats a war crime there lmfao
Me. I said war crimes. Collective punishment is a war crime. You cannot hold people to account on the basis of group membership.
If you want to make a sensible statement, try "You should be ashamed if you don't distance yourself from misogynists". In that case you say someone should be ashamed for their own actions (or inaction), not for something some amorphous group did. Also changing the general "men" to "your peers" is peak goalpost moving.
I dont know what you think my goal is, clearly you're better at phrasing, so if we go with "You should be ashamed if you don't distance yourself from misogynists", where is our disagreement?
You think I shouldnt be ashamed of the friends I once had? Because I certainly am. You should be ashamed of people who break social contract, because that is explicitly what that would entail.
You think I shouldnt be ashamed of the friends I once had? Because I certainly am.
Given that you said "once had" not "still have", no I don't think you should be ashamed. Having broken with them, having learned, what blame is there that could be laid on you?
Because I was once naïve to who they are now, and perhaps being younger at the time I could have, maybe, been a more potent guiding voice to a couple guys in specific, and only later did I learn what they had committed when I was still associated. And if that shame is a way I can guarantee my merrits, then I can live with it.
Lmfao, being socially ashamed of the peers you choose to associate with === being a German during the nuremburg trials?? You know what was probably 110% worse? Being Jewish in Nazi occupied territory.
Get a goddamn grip on reality. If I had said ship all men tp Australia sure, my apologizes my original phrasing didn't appease you enough. Professional victimhood at its finest.
Im sorry you got rejected one too many times, hope you can figure it out.
Yeah they just wanted to throw random shit out - like women picking the bear is a war crime because it punishes all men. I think they want women to choose to take the risk of potentially gambling their life away AND be raped / kidnapped, they shouldn't just be able to risk a life threatening mauling because that would punish all men.....
jfc the gymnastics these fucks will go in order to deny that rape and kidnap are genuinely things men do, and have historically done to the point where women literally have to carry the stress of self defense 24/7 and even worse, their most frequent assailants are known.
SO FUCK YEAH BRING ON THE BEAR, they probably don't know them personally so that'll up the odds that the bear will just ignore them. And even if the bear kills them brutally, it's not going to rape them, so they got that going. But it's a war crime to pick the bear jfc
like women picking the bear is a war crime because it punishes all men.
Not what I said. Demanding that I feel ashamed because there's men who do shitty things is the collective punishment, the war crime.
Have you ever considered that there's humans who do shitty things? Why aren't you ashamed of that? Why are you shirking responsibility? Are you secretly in league with them? Why are you not experiencing crippling guilt, knowing that Hitler and Pol Pot exist and are of your group, as I just randomly assigned it? Why aren't you flagellating yourself yet?
Yes, the statement is hyperbolic -- obviously. But you should be able to see how the general pattern, not just its extreme, is toxic.
where did I do that? seriously, point out where I told you to feel ashamed.
You didn't, someone else did and that's where I brought up the whole collective punishment being a war crime thing. Simply wanted to set the record straight on what it was a reference to.
So what’s the root of your guilt mate?
Well, two decades ago I did engage in gang-tickling of gals. Nope I'm not sorry, they're not traumatised, also I got a date out of it but I can definitely see how some people would like to tie a noose from that one.
Would you choose the bear, the guy with downcast eyes boiling with repressed rage, or the one pushing you into the swimming pool while you test the temperature?
Never got good at stealing scrunchies, I'll have to pass on that one. And don't tell me only guys do that kind of thing I once had to fish my home keys out of panties.
Ah well there's that pesky language thing, I do mean individually, if I intended carrying the burden of sins of all my fathers I would be weighed down to hell.
Edit: Actually, I don't mean individually, if you have a friend that you tolerate some of their more misogynistic views, try to actually be the better influence, Ive failed some former friends in that regard, and they will fall deeper into that pit.
Edit edit: some nice upstanding men here, you wouldnt hold your friend accountable to SA?
What a gotcha, im sure you never got to know someone well enough their true colors start to show? Because from my experience, they know to hide their true intentions because it tends to push people away. And thats when you cut them out. Whats so complicated?
You had bad experiences with people of the other gender.
You think now that every man is exactly the same, and if they don't, they're just evil manipulators who want to hide their true evil nature.
You're complaining about people who generalize with the other gender because of their past experiences (aka. sexists).
You 100% agree with the post, so you support neglecting people's feelings as long as they're from the other gender.
So... Are you a sexist incel? Why should men respect your feelings or validate your past experiences then? Stop trying to solve sexism with more sexism, it doesn't work like that. And please don't disrespect me or assume shit from my personal life amymore, it's just lame.
They want confirmation, acknowledgement, so the second a tastefully edgy joke is cracked their true colours are going to come flying because they'll say something that's just offensive, not actually funny.
Im proud my SO would rather pick me, and I can likely speak on her behalf that she would choose the bear over you, whoever you are, and no offense intended.
Thats the person you should be to who you choose, as soon as you're trying to convince a woman that you're a better pick, you're fighting a loosing battle.
Feel however you want, but don't drag me into the what other people have done. I don't deserve the prejudice, and I'd rather just not interact with you.
Very few people someone gets near enough to be grabbed by want to rape them. Nearly every bear someone gets near enough to be grabbed by wants to kill them. A large number of women feel it is better to be killed by a bear than live with their irrational fear that every man they get near shall rape them. The fear not being rational is irrelevant as the fear is based upon a more than likely chance, approx. 25% is reported, that at some point the fear was justified and not irrational. However those numbers are screwy as folks that get raped are more likely to get raped again.
I'd give percentage chances of each occurring, (the National Park Service estimates the odds of being attacked by a bear are about one in 2.1 million.), but the media seems to only report percentage of gender raped not chance of rape.
Please show where I stated anything of the desires of the bear. I'm hinging nothing on proximity. You are simply assuming things I did not state. I covered that it wasn't a risk assessment. Only thing bogged down is so bogged with your assumptions.
No, you did not. You wrote in response to what you pretended I posted. You again are only bogged by your choice to pretend I posted something very different than I posted.
What percentage of women do you suppose have had a man threaten to rape or kill them? Get violently angry at them? Sexually assault them or a friend? I reckon it’s near 100%.
The fear isn’t that all men will assault them, it’s that any man might. It’s not irrational, it’s based on experience. There are men in this thread arguing that women should be arming themselves to stay safe, right alongside men arguing that fear is irrational.
Fuck the men with hurt feelings. Your fellow men have proved themselves dangerous, time and again. Women will treat you like dangerous predators until men as a group start policing their own and building a world where women don’t have reason to fear.
I'd happily discussed what I posted. I have no interest in discussing your imaginary post which you chose to address rather than my post. I also have no interest in discussing anything with someone that wishes to pretend I posted anything other than I did.
What aspect of your post are you interested in discussing? I found your assertion that the fear was irrational interesting, but if that’s off-limits we can talk about some other part…
Bruh, it's not even about rape. A dude negatively impacting a woman's physical or emotional well being compromises their safety.
The odds you mentioned of bear attacks seem a lot lower than the odds of a woman having to deal with shit from men. I say this as a man who worked in the boreal for 10 years and with a pile of construction folks (men and women).
You're asking for statistics in bad faith of the argument. Seems like you're the one slap-fighting here - if you wanted to actually engage in logical discourse, you'd have presented statistics yourself, which you have not.
There's obviously no statistics on the rate of how many bear-human and male-female interactions happen. One rarely happens, the other happens billions of times per day. We can prove that bears are more aggressive and dangerous than humans though.
In one black bear study 88% of fatal attacks were a result of the bear being the aggressor. Note that black bears are known to be timid of humans, and notoriously not aggressive.
So, statistically even the more timid bear species are wildly more aggressive to humans than humans to bears. Unless you have data that proves that men are more aggressive to women than bears are to humans, this is the closest we get to proving men are statistically safer than bears.
I would love to know how you went from percentages, which you quoted and I replied to, to overall numbers. You realize that's not what you were talking about, right?
I'd specify further - a solo man/bear interaction with a woman in a remote location
I don't want cubs or captivity involved, and no bystanders. It might be more fair to make it strangers only too... That data is going to be a lot harder to quantify through
So what people are meaning to say is women's feelings are more important than men's? I think the statistics should matter xD. But I don't think bears attack people as often as people are trying to make out.
You're just discarding every opinion as "toxic masculinity" which is actually worse than engaging in logical discourse.
I'll do everything in my power to empower women and make them feel safe. This thought experiment has unfortunately been detrimental and used to attack men.
"It's not you" - yes, and nothing I said made it about me at all. See how fast you went on the offense on a completely neutral comment? You should listen to your own advice and listen the points being made equally as much as you're lobbying others to do.
I read some of these, more to get insight into how other people think, but often I come to the conclusion that there is very little I can do to help and that people who behave that way aren't people I want to help. My ego is just fine, thanks, but blind hostility isn't something I welcome into my life.
Here's the thing...if you get upset that a random woman that you don't know would take the hyperbolic position that they would rather be in the same room as a bear than with you, you're likely the exact type of man that these memes are talking about. They are meant to expose fragile egos that don't understand how intimidating they are to women. They know how dangerous a bear is. They don't know how dangerous you are. That's the point...
Here's the thing...if you get upset that a random woman that you don't know would take the hyperbolic position that they would rather be in the same room as a bear than with you, you're likely the exact type of man that these memes are talking about.
What the heck? Expressing resentment at the implication that you are more threatening than a bear based solely on gender is evidence that you are, in fact, more threatening than a bear? How does that follow? You don't need to have a fragile ego to recognize the unfairness of it.
They know how dangerous a bear is.
If they would rather be alone with a bear than a random stranger of any gender I'm going to say they don't.
The original post was a bad-faith engagement farm that became much more popular than it ever should have been. It ended up bringing up a bit of good discussion and a lot of insane takes.
Once again, it's a hyperbolic statement. They don't really want to be alone with a bear. They are merely pointing out that they trust you less than a bear. A bear would simply kill them. What a man could do to them is far worse than anything a bear could do. If you can't understand that, that's the entire problem.
Lived experience shapes our reality. It's an absurdist analogy that paints the picture of women feeling unsafe around men they don't know due to their lived experience. It's not misandry, it's caution, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. The outrage at such meme is pretty much indicative of the issue at hand. Men tend not to feel unsafe around women they don't know whereas the flipped scenario is the opposite. That says something about society, not women.
I don’t think it’s lived experience for many. Much of it is fear impressed by others. And I’ve certainly felt fear at being alone with the wrong woman, or a child. One false accusation and my life is over. I actively avoid being alone with women and children. But that doesn’t mean I’m picking bears over people.
Good lord, dude. When I was talking about fear, I meant fear for one's life or well-being. I also said "man they don't know," not "wrong." The people you should be directing your anger towards are those who have created an environment within society where women don't feel safe, which is other men who think they're entitled to women's bodies, who get angry when rejected instead of moving on, who commit acts of violence against women, and any other disgusting act you can think of. Your emotions are misdirected.
Who says I can only be angry at one group? I am angry with the men in that group, but also the people that would place me in that group merely because I also possess a penis.
The part you aren't getting is obvious, it's not misandry. The gymnastics you're going through to deny basic logic is impressive though. Thanks for the links, they were pointless. Trust me, if you want to compare lists, mine are longer.
And in the overwhelming majority of these cases, the perpetrators are men, AND NOT A SINGLE FUCKING ONE WAS A BEAR.
Edit: and cute strawman, no one's implying ALL MEN, just the creeps. Which you might identify with but doesn't cover the entire gender. Women making the logical choice - pick from a population that def has rapist creeps or a population that isn't known for kidnapping and raping women, gee whiz batman...
You have no understanding of statistics. How many more men does the typical woman encounter a day than bears? I’m willing to bet women encounter dozens or even hundreds of men, but pretty well zero bears. The RATE of bear attack per encounter is much higher than the rate per encounter with men.
Your argument makes no sense. Sorry, anyone who thinks they are safer with a random large wild carnivore that has sharp teeth and claws than a random human male is foolish.
And, yes, you are implying that all men are rapists. After all, the statement isn’t that you merely don’t FEEL safe, but that you are not safe, period in the presence of a man. Therefore it is implied the man will 100% harm you.
Oh don't get it twisted sparky, I'm a guy. I understand why women feel threatened because I've seen men be fucking creeps my entire life.
The bear will never rape the women. Get it through your dense fucking nugget. Goddamn it's been repeated over and over again.
Let me imply this: your defensiveness over this is hilarious. If you're not a creep predating on women, you wouldn't feel upset about this at all, it's simple math: the bear will never rape the women, keep it in a box, kidnap it, force it to bear children, etc, etc., etc, so no matter what statistics you want to pull out, it's NOTHING COMPARED TO THE HISTORICAL RECORD ALONE.
You sure don’t seem to get that. You think rape is the only tragedy that can befall a woman.
No, it's simply the one we were talking about at the moment. That and how women seem to prefer death by bear than trusting many men, and how guys like you are making that logic seem pretty fucking sound every response lol.
You realize men rape other men too right?
So you know, I'd actually pick the bear myself. Because THERE'S STILL NO HISTORY OF BEARS RAPING PEOPLE - MEN OR WOMEN.
Just because women can be rapists, and indeed, there are women who are rapists, does not and should not have any bearing on the point.
This is the same as yelling "all lives matter" into a crowd of BLM protestors. Yeah, no shit. Just because one thing is true doesn't mean that the inverse is impossible.
but but whataboutism at it's finest. great job mate. fantastic work, on behalf of all men, I'd like to ask: FUCKING STOP. Stop trying to stick up for our side because it's not helping.
There are no sides here. The fact that you think their are sides tips your bias. Every human is capable of horrible things regardless of age, race, or sex. The bear thing is so dumb and clickbait.
Fellas, it's not that your feelings don't matter, everyone's feelings matter, it's that your feelings don't matter more than the safety of others.
You're getting mad at the wrong shit here. You're mad at the women for not wanting to be stuck in a forest with a random dude, when in all actual fact, that decision was borne from a plethora of experience with random dudes, most of that experience being negative.
Almost all of that negativity is because there's to fucking many creepy ass dudes making us all look bad. To be blunt, I have high hopes, and expectations from my fellow man; especially when it comes to respecting women. Yes, there's a nontrivial number of crazy bitches out there, in the same breath, there's a lot of crazy dudes too. They're making us all look bad. Be mad at them.
The women are only making the best decision for their own health and safety, based on their experience. Be the change you want to see in the world, my brothers. Be that change.
This topic keeps coming up because people keep talking past each other. There is a real, measured, evidence backed problem. The victims are saying “I feel this way, and it causes me to behave this way” and those who are neither victims nor perpetrators are upset about the way they are choosing to express that in a general sense. Now this meme itself is not more helpful than the bear, it didn’t give any new information. But it’s a good expression of that general frustration when no one listens. At least on Lemmy, there is a certain defensive response rather than an understanding empathetic one on this topic. This meme in particular seems harsh, but it’s driven by decades of talking about this, or not being able to talk about this, because the response is always so negative. Everything from “why did you dress that way” to “you should have know before you married them” to “not only women” (yes but that’s the topic at hand so). I would hope that some can come to understand this sentiment. I hope that this community improves.
they genuinely don't understand; they think: ah, but the bear is a much more fearsome predator than I am, the woman would choose me any day!
Nah man, the bear's never, ever, ever going to rape the woman. Woman will roll the dice with their lives, but no one wants to be kidnapped and raped to death - an actual fear women in this day and age have - and the bear will never ever 100% will not rape a woman.
clear cut logic to me, I don't fault women one bit.
I see it as simply the combination of: "the devil that you know is better than the devil that you don't", and "there are fates worse than death".
To be plain: the worst the bear can do is kill you and eat you (hopefully in that order). That's what we all know. We 100% know that and I don't think anyone is going to argue that point.
But a complete fucking stranger? They could be Hannibal for all you know. Keeping you alive by cutting off your appendages and feeding them to you.
The main culprit of this is toxic men who will send unsolicited dick pictures to unsuspecting women as an opening line, then put them on blast for not responding positively to being assaulted by penis pictures they didn't ask for.
The kind of guy that wouldn't see anything wrong with saying "you should smile more, you're so pretty when you smile".
The fact is, being a woman on the internet, you can, quite easily, get bombarded by complete strangers with all kinds of fucked up shit that sexualizes you and reduces you to an object only worthy of living if you can pleasure a man.
With the mountain of fucked up shit random dudes do to women online, I do not understand why anyone would ever be surprised that they would pick a wild fucking animal over the likely outcome of being stuck in the woods with any of the kinds of creepy fucking guys that troll around the internet, showing their dick to everyone with tits.
I'm a guy, I'm not surprised by any of this, and I don't blame anyone for saying "bear", it's honestly, a safer bet.
I'm just going to say it. Any arguments of "what about..." Are effectively pointless banter.
It's not adding anything to the discussion, and bluntly it's actively trying to distract people from the point, and change the discussion into something different.
This post, and most of the other bear ones, are in normie forums full of people not familiar with feminist discourse. The reason for that? It's funny, cathartic, shocking, and a little inflammatory. And that's fine, it's meant to be. It gives it reach and allows people to learn and others to teach. The problem is that when men do find this to be shocking and inflammatory, they need to channel that emotion somewhere, and antagonistic/angry internet discourse is not the correct way respond to that.
There was a popular post the other day of "If you don't understand why women pick the bear, you are the bear", that directly antagonises the exact people who need to hear about why women choose the bear, and those people don't need to be antagonised, they need a little empathy and non-confrontational discussion to get there.
When I talked to them calmly, and acknowledged the way they feel, validated their emotions, then explained the topic to them, every single one I talked to accepted the core point and came out better for it. Take that angry energy, educate, and direct that energy in the right direction.
It's not that men's feelings should trump women's safety. It's that you need to think about why people are disagreeing so you can effectively talk to them
yea but like at the same time annoying a bunch of butthurt lonely guys really isnt solving the problem and rather pushes them towards the manosphere which is where the problems start to grow
The bear meme is meant to make men uncomfortable and surprised by how they are seen as a generalization among women. It isn't meant to be anti-men or anything, it's just meant to show the lived experience of women to men in a hypothetical absurdity.
I get that, and you're right. But a lot of people are taking the meme too far, and taking something that was originally good, and making it it anti-men.
Men's feelings actually matter, and we as society need to start actually thinking about them, rather than just telling them to man up all the time.
I've talked to a whole bunch of anti-bear men, and all of them accept the point when told in an empathetic way that acknowledges their right to feel the way they do. You can take that feeling and channel it as a force for good, rather them antagonising them and pushing them further away
(Not saying you in particular are doing this)
Edit: Please respond instead of downvoting. I'm failing to see the problem with identifying that there's a enough antagonistic commenters that maybe it's pushing people in the wrong direction. And we now require an over-correction of empathy to undo that damage.
What part is sexist? There can be no equality if uncomfortable realities are brushed aside, illuminating the very real lived experience that women are constantly wary of the average man allows us to confront said issue. Telling women that they are "wrong" and just need to feel different about the issue just perpetuates this distrust.
The part where there's 3.8 billion men on the planet, and although the stats are hard to put together, lots of contradictions, they point to less than 1% of them being incarcerated (for all crime not just crime against women) even vastly exaggerating that to 5% (to account for men not being caught etc) leaves 95% of the general male population being decent and no threat. Blaming men, when men aren't the issue is sexist. Blaming religion, poor education etc would be less sexist and aimed more towards what the actual issue is and help work towards a cure, man Vs bear does nothing but divide and spread fear.
Stats show that black people perform a higher amount of crime than other races, does this mean we should be racist? Does this mean you'd pick a random bear over a random black person? I don't think it does, because it's not the colour of their skin, nor is it the apparatus between some bodies legs that defines them. Blaming the wrong thing is sexist, or racist in both these cases.
I'm not saying women aren't walking around terrified, but a lot of that has to do with polar discussion that doesn't help like man Vs bear telling them they should live in fear and does nothing to help the actual problems. And if you don't believe that to be true you are part of a much bigger problem humanity is facing, misinformation and fear mongering.
This is just an elaborate "not all men," and just shuts women up.
You said it yourself accurately, women are walking around terrified. The average woman heavily distrusts the average man. This isn't a call to demonize men, but to showcase that collective distrust so we can move beyond it.
What good does it do unless we look at the causes. All this does is divide people. Why is that the right thing to do? We should be joining together to extinguish toxic masculinity, stamp out religion and improve education. Not radicalising toxic femanisity
Again, you're missing the forest for the trees. The fact is, many men think that equality has already been achieved, despite systemic power imbalances.
Radical feminism is a good thing, "toxic feminisity" is largely a strawman myth.
I think you're missing the point entirely. The man Vs bear argument serves no purpose but to divide. And when people fight with emotion, exactly what you're doing, women lose the right to abortions, to vote. There's no logic behind these decisions, they are fueled only by the emotions of closed minded people. Adding to the fire helps nobody and in fact takes things a step backwards.
Misinformation and fear mongering isn't the way to solve this issue. Alienating the 95% of decent men that want the same thing as women won't help the cause. You're blaming the wrong group of people with polar blanket statements like man Vs bear
So, we should generalize entire groups of people to teach them a lesson. No matter their feelings or the fact that the majority of people in said group are just living their lives. A bunch of bad apples should make and entire group socially responsible.
Got it. 👍
Yes there are too many men who think they live in the 50s and can do whatever they want to woman. If you say ALL men are like that, you're invalidating the effort of most men trying to be better human beings while being assholes.
If you can't understand that. You are not looking to make things better, just to throw hate around.
I don't know. Seems kind of straightforward to me. Women's safety is more important than men's feelings. I agree with that statement. Do you not agree with that statement?
Ethics? Feelings can be uncomfortable, but even the worst feeling are survivable. Safety is like physical safety. Like death is a possibility if things are not safe.
Womens safety is more important than men feeling that raping women is bad?
Yes. Also, men feeling that raping women is bad, is good for the safety of women. So, no need to stop feeling that. It would be preferred even.
Womens safety from being bombed by russia (nuclear warhead btw) while men have feelings about that one argument they had last week?
Yes. Swap the sexes see if it still makes sense. Do you want die because some woman had a fight and had feelings about it? BTW, if you have some story behind this hypothetical. I would be interested to hear exactly how a man's feelings about argument turns into Russia bombing a woman.
Feelings can be uncomfortable, but even the worst feeling are survivable.
yeah, so then by this logic, women shouldn't be choosing to be with a bear, assuming that's what we're still talking about. Unless this post is meta ironic and i'm missing that from the beginning, than the entire premise of half the comments on this post are bullshit.
Safety is like physical safety. Like death is a possibility if things are not safe.
yeah, and the reason why people are picking the bear, is due to emotional safety, they do not feel safe around men, that's the point, it doesn't matter whether they are more/less physically safe around the man over the bear, or vice versa, the entire point is the emotional safety. Which is the one thing that people don't seem to realize when commenting on this (granted the meme in the OP seems to clarify this to a significant enough degree i'll give them a pass. My point here is that you need to communicate clearly, because otherwise you could be saying literally anything.
Yes. Also, men feeling that raping women is bad, is good for the safety of women. So, no need to stop feeling that. It would be preferred even.
i agree, but in this case, the irony here is that we aren't supposed to care about the feelings of men generically, which would include this, because somehow the entire generic of "women being physically safe" is now more important, than the entire offending class of people against women.
Yes. Swap the sexes see if it still makes sense. Do you want die because some woman had a fight and had feelings about it? BTW, if you have some story behind this hypothetical. I would be interested to hear exactly how a man’s feelings about argument turns into Russia bombing a woman.
the point here was that these statements weren't related at all. I was literally just putting two irrelevant things together. It's literally just nonsense to articulate my point about why this statement is not a very good one. It's broad enough that my nonsense statement is following the premise accurately here.
yeah, so then by this logic, women shouldn’t be choosing to be with a bear,
What women are saying, is based on all the information shown to them and what they have gathered on their own. Given a choice between a random man and a random bear. They would chose to be lost in the woods with a bear. They feel physically and emotionally safer with the bear. Is their assessment accurate/correct, who knows?
Does this mean all men are rapists? No, no one has said that.
it doesn’t matter whether they are more/less physically safe around the man over the bear,
I disagree, why would physical saftey not be important? A bear could be happy just leaving them alone and eating berries. A man might decide to do something physically unwanted/dangerous to them.
My point here is that you need to communicate clearly, because otherwise you could be saying literally anything.
I agree, I wish the people who are raging at me and down-voting me would be nice, and tell me what interpretation they have of the statement. Instead I am getting vague feelings posting with no arguments. Thank you for diving into this with me.
i agree, but in this case, the irony here is that we aren’t supposed to care about the feelings of men generically
No one in this conversation has said that. The feelings of men are important. The feelings of women are important. The saftey of men is more important that the feelings of women.The safety of women are more important than the feelings of men. Saying one does not contradict the other.
the point here was that these statements weren’t related at all
I agree, I thought this was a hypothetical, sorry I was wrong.
Men's feelings can have an effect on the saftey of women. Imagine if the majority of men felt like they were owed sex even if women didn't want it. These feelings will cause most women to be physically unsafe.
What women are saying, is based on all the information shown to them and what they have gathered on their own. Given a choice between a random man and a random bear. They would chose to be lost in the woods with a bear. They feel physically and emotionally safer with the bear. Is their assessment accurate/correct, who knows?
they're not physically safer though, that's the problem. There is almost no world in which that would make sense statistically. "feeling safe" and "being safe" and two entirely independent concepts, sure you might be in a sketchy area that you know is unsafe, and as a result feel unsafe, that might be because it is unsafe. But that also doesn't mean that it is, which is why people often get caught up with shit in these types of situations.
How many times have you seen someone go "man i just though something bad was gonna happen, and then it did" and yet they didn't do anything about it?
Emotionally they'd prefer to be around a bear sure, but if the statement here is that "feelings don't matter" then the answer should literally be the opposite, because those feelings simply wouldn't fucking exist. on account of the not mattering part you can't just go "well feeling unsafe, means that you think you're physically unsafe" because in this example, there is literally no way to feel unsafe. It's hypothetically impossible. You cannot "use any information you've gathered" because that information is obviously emotionally relevant. The only real data you could use here is statistics, and those would probably paint an extremely favorable position for my argument. (even ignoring the under-reporting, because those are more than likely repeat offenders, who have almost certainly already been reported at some point)
Like i said the OP did a much better job here, maybe the OP of this thread was a little more clear? Idk at this point, but i've seen a lot of "safety is more important than feelings" statements, which would be what i'm complaining about specifically here. If i'm wrong then oh well.
I disagree, why would physical saftey not be important? A bear could be happy just leaving them alone and eating berries. A man might decide to do something physically unwanted/dangerous to them.
this is the problem. Physical safety is theoretically important here, but we are talking about a rhetorical device specifically designed to be controversial and "illogical" because the entire reason behind it, was to make a point, that women have different experiences leading to them understanding people differently, and as a result influencing their emotional state to a point where it confounds with what is typically misconstrued to be "physical safety" the point of the original statement was literally never about physical safety. If it was about physical safety there would be a 1 in 2 chance that any random man is a serial rapist. Apologies if i'm being a little brazen here, but i don't fucking believe that.
the hypothetical here is literally about being lost in a forest with two less than optimal options, one is a bear, and the other is a man, arguably the animal of your own fucking species is probably going to be more ok with this. This is also ignoring the conflation that the bear is just "fucking somewhere eating berries" and not, with it's cubs. Freaking out because you just fucking teleported into the woods (because otherwise the original hypothetical doesnt make any fucking sense) or at best, not even aware of your presence, which, seems unlikely. While also making the conflation that "a man might do something" yeah, literally anybody could do literally anything at any time. How many people do you see walking down the street with a bag/backpack and don't think twice about the fact that it could have a bomb in it? How many times do you drive down the road/highway assuming that someone behind you, infront of you, or passing you isn't going to fuck your day up completely? The answer is a lot Yeah sure a man might do something, the keyword here is might. The bear might also fucking do something. The man might also not even realize you exist to begin with.
It's important to remember that in the field of statistics, unless explicitly stated otherwise, the functional utility of the term "might" is equivalent across all situations, because there is literally no way to quantify "might" There is no statistical likelihood that something happens, or doesn't it merely has the possibility of happening. Quantifying that is an incredibly easy way to fuck up all kinds of numbers.
I agree, I wish the people who are raging at me and down-voting me would be nice, and tell me what interpretation they have of the statement. Instead I am getting vague feelings posting with no arguments. Thank you for diving into this with me.
yeah, i don't even bother upvoting/downvoting anything because i just come here to talk with people lol. Although judging by this point this thread is probably long enough that nobody is even reading it anymore lol, which is only beneficial to the both of us.
No one in this conversation has said that. The feelings of men are important. The feelings of women are important. The saftey of men is more important that the feelings of women.The safety of women are more important than the feelings of men. Saying one does not contradict the other.
yeah, i mostly just came here to argue that this statement is bad because it's vague and wrong, and neither of those make for a particularly solid argument. Sometimes it's useful to use arguments and statements like that as a mechanism to conceptualize things, which is why i even started this thread to begin with, i thought it would be interesting to conceptualize such a vague statement through such a strict rule set. It's a good way of learning about things, because it forces you and other people to think about it.
I agree, I thought this was a hypothetical, sorry I was wrong.
yes, the idea there was to make a point about how easy it is to say something nonsensical with no foundation and have people go "yeah that makes sense, i like this statement" people will try to make sense of shit that doesn't make sense, because we've been led to believe that words strung together have meaning. This is why chatgpt is so fucking good.
Men’s feelings can have an effect on the saftey of women. Imagine if the majority of men felt like they were owed sex even if women didn’t want it. These feelings will cause most women to be physically unsafe.
absolutely (not to mention make them statistically, less physically safe), which is why the statement being parroted by this post irks me, because it's obviously not considering the whole picture. And don't get me wrong, i do like the original statement from the get go, because the idea behind it is that "women feel so emotionally unsafe around men, that they would rather be with a bear, in the woods, because they have no prior experience with bears" the point is that it's supposed to be absurd, because it is, and the only reason why it is absurd is to make a point, about the underlying problem. The current problem is that people seem to have lost the concept of the original statement, and are simply now doing the usual "internet screaming match" over it, much like i did earlier in this comment lol.
The point is not that you would rather be with a bear the point is that you would rather not be with a man given the option of a bear and people seem to be focusing on the fact that they would rather be with a bear instead. The underlying problem here, as we can all agree, is that bears are not fun to be around, they shouldn't be more fun than being around a man, that's bad that's not something that should even be possible, yet it is.
they’re not physically safer though, that’s the problem.
I think this kind of misses the point. Women have given us their feelings on the man/bear topic. Which are implicitly valid as all feelings are (from men or women). Telling them that they have done an incorrect assessment of the situation is invalidating their feelings. This of course adds weight against the man category especially how a large group of people got personally offended by a data point. The interesting piece of information here is that women feel less safe with a man than a bear. Not that their feelings are rooted in reality, because they don't have to be.
The signal the women are getting is that yeah, their feeling don't matter. If their feelings don't matter, what else doesn't matter? Are they going to get "um, actually-ed" when they try to set personal boundaries. Can you see that if a lot of men don't respect women's feeling and personal boundaries that it can turn into a physical saftey issue?
To answer your paragraph about what is likely to happen or if the assessment is correct. I don't care. It's a roll of the dice. The bear will kill the woman sometime and the man will kill the woman sometimes and other times nothing will happen. I am not a bear scientist nor a sociologist, I don't have the numbers in front of me. The question of what actually would happen is uninteresting to me as it is a hypothetical. We don't need to accurately prepare for the man/woman/bare/woods situation, it's not likely to happen.
I did a quick (probably bad) google and I got this: "1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted).". from https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem.
Something about would you feel safer being stalked by a creepy dude or being stalked by a bear in the woods. Both could equally kill you, just one is more likely than the other to actually kill you.
Close, but it's just "would you rather" with any random man in the woods vs a random bear. No implied creepiness on the man's part. Just who would you feel more safe knowing one of the two is in the woods.
You're being reductionist to the point of losing the actual point but, if we assume you're doing so in good faith, then yes. Without a doubt yes. Given a choice between a person's feelings being hurt and a person getting physically hurt, the latter should win, especially when the only reason those feelings are hurt is because the person refuses to try to understand why or is so fragile they're unable to handle criticism.
Most men I know aren't made uncomfortable by this and, so far, the only ones who do have their feelings hurt are absolutely the ones women should choose the bear over. Not because they're bad people, but because an important point is being made and instead of trying to understand, they dig their heels in, refuse to understand, and now gripe about being victims because people are talking about things they don't want to think about.
I'm being far more universal than the obsession this narrow cisgender thread promotes. It was an issue with the pandemic. It is an issue with abortion rights. It is an issue with elections. It is an issue with so many things, that you would have to want to be willfully ignorant to focus on any single one. Your problem is humanity and their obsession to sacrifice people's safety for their feelings. People who put their feelings over your safety are the ones who should be avoided. No need to bring pandas into it.
Well, obviously surviving is a bigger deal than one feeling...but, in some cases, having a feeling can lead to surviving something or succumbing to something.
I believe the reason the sign is highlighting women (all women) as opposed to specifically transgender women or people in general is that so few people are transgender,, that's the Canadian 2022 census because it actually included questions on gender, resulting in 0.33% of the population stating they identify with a gender other than that they were assigned at birth. Whereas women usually make up just over half the population, and have usually been made to feel unsafe by men (for example, 97% of women report being catcalled), without touching the rest of the violence against women, almost all of which is perpetrated by men.
If I'm off the mark I would love to hear your thoughts.
I think they're trying to argue that transgender women aren't real women and that respecting them and allowing them to use spaces that align with their gender identity is endangering women.
That's how their comment reads to me, the way they dismissed the meme gives off those vibes.
All the angry men here complaining about this meme are coping, face it men are seen as evil and dangerous by women, and they are right to see you that way. I was once like the people here talking shit about "misandry" and then my egg cracked and those angry masculine mannerisms melted away after I went on estrogen.
It was then that I realized men are evil, masculinity is toxic, these are statements of truth and the only ones who deny this shit are cis men themselves.
You're correct, but you're every bit as angry as they are, and your comment is so devoid of any respect or empathy for men as fellow human beings that you're only making things worse for everyone.
You are the ammo that anti-sjw grifters put in their guns.
Like it or not, men are 50% of the population, and no one is getting anywhere by needlessly antagonising them
Not only are they 50% of the population that's circa 3.8 billion men, the stats are hard to find accurately but less than 1% of them are incarcerated for crime (all crime not just sexual assault) even if you were to drastically enhance that to say 5% (to account for men that have never been caught etc.) that still leaves 95% decent men in the world.
The men Vs bear thing is a bullshit hypothetical designed only to divide and not address the real issue women are facing, from religion (especially in politics), poor education and internet fear mongering such as the men Vs bear topic designed to make people live their lives in fear instead of correcting the issues.
I'm not trying to say women don't live in fear, just that sexism isn't the way to fight sexism. It's pretty common knowledge that black people have the highest statistics for crime in general (without going into further discussion) does this mean we should all become racist? Because I certainly don't think that's the answer, just like topics designed around sexism aren't the answer here.
It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but more misinformation and exaggerated statements is one of the biggest threats currently facing humanity, man Vs bear does nothing but add to this.
Yes there is a problem, yes it needs addressing, discussions like this are far from helpful and only alienate half the allies.
The whole discussion is entirely feelings based, as despite the percentage men actually committing being really low (as far as our stats can tell) it doesn't really matter that much.
Same with the bear, actual bear attacks are so statistically unlikely to occur that it's irrelevant to the discussion, even if we had the required stats to make it a 1 to 1.
Assuming only 1% of men do something (illegal or otherwise) that makes a woman feel afraid, that 1% can do that to multiple women. If they do it to 100 different women, that's enough that 100% of women have experienced it.
Negative experiences stick in our mind a lot more readily than good ones, and it creates the perception that a chosen random man could be more dangerous than a bear.
And I'm not saying they're wrong, my take away is still that enough men are shit, and we as a society need to do better.
Equally, using shock value and absurd hypotheticals is going to cause emotional reactions in men, and sure, that gets the message out. But we can't act surprised and start demonising men when they act shocked and disagree with the absurd hypothetical. It's valid to feel hurt by the statement, and telling people their feelings don't matter distracts from the issue
The discussion is the right one, but we all need to start blaming the right people. Toxic masculinity, religion and poor education.
Dividing people like this isn't the way forward.
It's so tiring seeing the men coming in and deliberately misunderstanding what's being discussed. They will do literally anything, appear dumb as rocks, to not recognize rape culture and admit potentially any fault or responsibility towards it's continued existence. They take everything personally instead of being able to see that societal problems there are also responsible for helping to fix.
Are we also going to tolerate the same with Islam and terrorism? POC and safety because "crime statistics"? If those are not acceptable because it's not anyone's individual responsibility for others in an involuntarily assigned group, why is this ok?
Here's the problem with that statement. I agree that there is a problem with men committing rape. However, I (along with most men) have never raped anybody. Furthermore I have not done anything to perpetuate the actions of the minority of men who do commit sex crimes. Therefore I do NOT take responsibility or admit fault for their actions.
Saying that men as a whole are the problem is offensive and unhelpful. It's how random peaceful Muslims feel when conservatives tell them they need to take responsibility for the actions of terrorists and take action to stop terrorists "in their community" like all Muslims are in one big group chat.
I would straight up give my life to prevent a woman I don't know from being raped. Idk what more you want from me.
Your tiny bit of discomfort is clearly more important than rape culture that, yes you too, are contributing to. This is contribution to ignoring rape culture.
Your willful ignorance and not listening to women is enabling rapists.
the difference is that the patriarchy exists and favors men. there is no systematic structure that puts Muslims above others, at the expense of others, in a way that is parallel to what the patriarchy does.
i get what you are saying, and maybe not too long ago i was professing quite similar feelings, but i encourage you to self interrogate how big of a difference that is. truly hope this is helpful.
So it is the level of "privilege" that does or does not allow the commission of -isms then. The better off the target is, the more acceptable discrimination is? That is also a very Western perspective. It would be ok to tell Muslims in the Middle East that terrorism is their responsibility because their country's power structure does put Islam firmly above others?
This "some animals are more equal than others" stuff is moral equivocating. If something is wrong if done to a group that isn't "in power", then it is also wrong to do it to the group "in power". This isn't a zero sum game. We don't have to weight the guilt by association for a black man when compared with a white man because systemic racism competes with systemic patriarchy. If you do think that the immutable characteristics a person is born with are the most important things about them, I would encourage you to self interrogate how messed up that is.
So it is the level of "privilege" that does or does not allow the commission of -isms then.
No. It is the presence of privelege at all in the first place that holds all of us responsible to address that privelage as a reality when protecting one another.
The better off the target is, the more acceptable discrimination is?
No, I reject that characterization of what intersectionalist feminism is altogether. Read further for more.
That is also a very Western perspective. It would be ok to tell Muslims in the Middle East that terrorism is their responsibility because their country's power structure does put Islam firmly above others?
No, because you are equivocating two different meanings of “responsibility.” Feminism calls for a brother’s keeper responsibility, not direct culpability responsibility. It is absolutely valid for example, to expect Islamic leaders or followers to speak out against violence — and they absolutely do without you or I even asking. Much similarly, I ask Christians in the U.S. to recognize their position of power and to speak out against christofascist or transphobic violence, and that happens also (though perhaps less frequently than I would like). On the same level, I ask all men to take brother’s keeper responsibility and to hold one another accountable, recognizing their position of privilege while taking steps to protect others, especially when it comes to listening to women expressing their lived experiences rather than talking over them.
It’s a subtle difference but so incredibly important, so read it again if needed. Brothers keeper responsibility, not direct culpability.
this comment section has been so enlightening about the makeup of this side of the fediverse. and all i can say is i am so sorry. i always guessed it was a male-heavy makeup but i never thought it would precipitate this badly.
this community usually veers leftist and toward respecting human dignity, but it appears as soon as women express the pain and fear that is forced upon them for merely existing all of that is lost and their comments are getting 30/70 downvoted, even in conversations where folks have already acknowledged the caveat of the importance of non-alienating.
it’s clear there is a lot of work to be done when one of the most progressive communities i have ever followed is so packed with malinformed spite as soon as the subject comes to humans asking for the basic privilege of safety.
Your comment really hits the nail on the head, esp the dumb as rocks part. I think part of that stupidity is legitimately not being able to see past our own privilege.
Yeah. I give some benefit of the doubt but after seeing plenty of varied and good explanations I'm tired of holding everyone's hand who's had plenty of chances to learn. After a while it just becomes men not listening and believing women which is too typical.
People's safety is more important than people's feelings.
I have some extra emotional capacity today so(see edit*) I'll post some wrong think: but can we stop antagonizing populations that feel disenfranchised by society and therefor giving the truly evil fucks out there an easy population to brainwash and feed extra scummy ideologies to?Young nerdy men who feel excluded from society that dont have any strong female figures in their life are barraged by a constant stream of messaging that could easily be interpreted as "(white) men are evil and the source of all problems with society"
By constantly antagonizing them for not being able to navigate the political nuance of those messages, we give an incredibly easy pathway to the more toxic ideologies that the Tates of the world will pull them into to profit off of them, because they are the only figures who will give them praise and a sense of belonging.
Edit: Its a new day now, and I no longer have the energy. If you want to vent, understanding that venting in this manner will bring about little to no positive change, you do you, I will no longer be responding
The thing is, I've seen statements like this before. Except when I heard it, it was being used to justify ignoring women's experiences and feelings in regard to things like sexual harassment and feeling unsafe, since that's "just a feeling" as well. It wasn't okay then, and it's not okay the other way around. The truth is that feelings do matter, on both sides. Everyone should feel safe and welcome in their surroundings. And how much so that is, is reflected in how those people feel.
The outcome of men feeling being respected and women feeling safe are not mutually exclusive. The sad part is that someone who is reading this here is far more likely to be an ally than a foe, yet the people who need to hear the intended message the most will most likely never hear it nor be bothered by it. There's a stick being wedged here that is only meant to divide, and oh my god is it working.
The original post about bears has completely lost all meaning and any semblance of discussion is lost because the metaphor is inflammatory by design - sometimes that's a good thing, to highlight through absurdity. But metaphors are fragile - if it's very likely to be misunderstood or offensive, the message is lost in emotion. Personally I think this metaphor is just highly ineffective at getting the message across, as it has driven people who would stand by the original message to the other side due to the many uncharitable interpretations it presents. And among the crowd of reasonable people are those who confirm those interpretations and muddy the water to make women seem like misandrists, and men like sexual assault deniers. This meme is simply terrible and perhaps we can move on to a better version of it that actually gets the message across well, instead of getting people at each other's throat.
Honestly I am so goddamn tired of this shit, everytime something like the bear question comes up it blatantly tilted in one side or the others favor and dissent is crushed in both sets of spaces and no one learns anything.
Best take in this thread by a long shot. I'd like to add that there's nothing wrong with a little thought experiment to illicit a point. But the internet has become such an inhospitable place to any kind of discussion requiring nuance and patience.
You're right, feelings do matter, and this post did not dispute that. It's just that safety matters more.
It saddens me that the default interpretation of this is accusatory and requiring of defense. Not to personally blame you, this is very common and clearly a systemic reaction, but I don't know enough psychology/politics/sociology to understand why, just enough to know it's bad.
It’s saying men are inherently unsafe to be around. How is that not accusatory?
This isn’t about women’s safety versus men’s feelings, it’s about women’s feelings (of safety) versus men’s feelings (of respect).
But it doesn't say you personally are unsafe, it says that the odds that a man chosen at random is unsafe is high enough that women - understandably - fear being left alone with a random stranger to a level at least comparable with being left alone with a bear.
An enormous number of men fail to understand just how common and how terrifying it is for women to be harassed, assaulted and raped by men. And that is exactly what the bear/man hyperbole is pointing out.
And the reason people with takes like yours get chewed out for it is because you could do some reflection and consider
But instead, they take it as a personal attack, and so respond
Edit: here's another example in a similar format to demonstrate how the meme is being misinterpreted, note how your first response wouldn't be "why are you accusing all priests?!"
It’s what it says to me and many of us. Perhaps it’s the messaging.
What do you mean what behaviors? I don’t harass women. I barely talk to people I don’t know. But yet people are still scared of me.
And I would 100% pick a catholic priest. What a dumb choice. And, yeah, you are accusing everyone.
I clearly said: it's not targeted at you specifically, but at that fact that women are disproportionately more likely to be harassed or assaulted, and when that happens, the aggressor is almost exclusively men.
They're not scared of you because you're personally scary, they're scared of you because there's an ingrained culture of sexual harassment of women by men. So when you say "that's a nice dress" to a woman you don't know, she's not thinking "aww cute", she's thinking "is this guy being nice, or will they threaten me if I turn them down?"
Seriously, ask literally any woman you know if they've ever been sexually harassed, and the answer is almost guaranteed to be yes.
Yes, I know that, that's how hyperbole works. My point is that such a statement shouldn't be interpreted as "every priest is a child molester" but as "there's a concerningly high rate of them, and they're probably not a good option for childcare."
When did I say "all men are <whatever you're saying I'm accusing all men of>?" Stop making this about you, and actually try to understand why interactions with men can be terrifying for women.
If you are not targeting all men, stop talking about men as one generalized body.
Sorry, when you say “I’d rather encounter a bear than a man” it sure as hell sound like you are saying all men are dangerous. If that isn’t what you are saying, you are saying it poorly.
But it doesn't say that
It was highly contagious, that is, it spread widely. But so was the whole "would you still love me if I were a worm" thing and it was "effective" for the same reason: Gals thought "Oh I want a 'yes' to that answer that'd be so emotionally satisfying" and guys thought "WTF why would I want a worm if there's something more behind it why can't my SO speak plain English": It spread by exploiting the emotional kick gals get out of tripping over guys for having a particular default interpretation. No, it is not a "wrong" interpretation to think of the question as "rather with a bear or a man like me". If you don't want men to interpret the question like that then pose it differently. Simple as that. But then it wouldn't be as inflammatory and with that not as contagious.
Each and every time one of these things comes around one of two things happens for the average guy: We a) fall right into a trap and then get accused of being insensitive or b) we recognise the trap, lift our hands, walk back slowly, then faster, then even faster, until making a go at the 10km parcour world record. Because yes that kind of shit is a giant red flag.
It's like those people who are proud of being "brutally honest" but in reality what they care about is not the truth, but the brutality, just from the other side of the gender distribution.
Yes, feelings matter. Beautifully put.
But nobody is purposefully "wedging a stick" between allies and enemies. No secret society is plotting to prevent you from sending any message of safety. The metaphor is not designed, or created for a specific purpose. You have to realise how crazy and for real dangerous this way of agumenting is.
You aim for a good purpose, then use basically the debate version of biological weapons of mass destruction to make your point.
Just for any small argument about a small thing between sexes, like always it's fun for people to discuss, and some get mad, but
For you to use the narrative of psy ops, learned no doubt subconsciously, to speak like there is a secret cabal that want you to be fearful, we must unite against some kind of expression just because they are coming for you.. No
If anyone takes it too far it's talk like that, and you unironically talk about how reasonable people are hard to come by
Gee
Wonder why that is brother
The purpose of a system is what it does.
There are plenty systems that are not controlled by a cabal, yes
Just because noone sets out to do a thing on purpose, individually, as a group, organically, conspiratorially, whatever, doesn't mean that the resulting system of action does not act with a particular purpose in the wider system.
Life, for example, has the purpose of hastening the heat death of the universe: We reduce entropy locally and to do that increase the rate of entropy increase in the wider universe. It's what we do. It's our purpose, as far as the universe is concerned, whether we like it or not, whether we intend to or not, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we try to or not.
These kinds of memes (bear, worm, what have you) have a particular impact. That impact is their purpose. If you don't like the impact I suggest advocating against the practice instead of saying "but nobody meant to". Have some Goethe.
Exactly, which is why your rhetoric is damaging
Purpose implies intent more than outcome. I agree with your overall stance but think something like "result" would be more effective. Calling it the "purpose" makes a similar accusation to anyone who wants to have this debate to what it itself is making about men in general, which will just increase the divide. I don't think you're deliberately trying to do that, but I think it could end up being the result.
Your overall point does capture how this whole thing has made me feel. Even as someone who didn't get offended, understands what women who would "prefer the bear" are actually saying and doesn't think I'm owed any attention from anyone that doesn't want to give it to me, the only thing this meme makes me want to do is disengage even more. And a younger version of me would have really resented being made to feel like my mere presence was offensive or scary.
It's a system thinking heuristic. The reason "purpose" is used instead of result is a) "the result of a system is what it does" doesn't actually make sense, as systems aren't events in time but, well, systems which have non-negligible timespans -- it sounds something like "what is the result of a dishwasher" -- I dunno, what is it doing? Is it standing there? Short-circuiting and on fire? Washing dishes? All that is part of what "a dishwasher" is, does, and therefore, its purpose in the grand scheme of things. And b) precisely to stop people trying to find purpose in motives, intentions, etc, to go with a materialistic instead of idealist interpretation of things. To quote Beer: "There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The purpose of prisons is to rehabilitate? Well maybe in some countries, in other countries no matter what the stated intent is their purpose is to be a place where people can get degrees in how to do crime.
No it's not and that's a terrible way to view the world.
Are you the same idiot who argued with me before because he thought he'd found the Word of God in this random philosophical exercise?
Edit: nope, different moron. I wonder why this silly thing is making the idiot rounds lately? It's like when a 19 year old has their first philosophy 101 class and thinks they've gained supreme knowledge of how the world works.
https://lemmy.world/comment/9746636
It's systems thinking and if you think it's terrible then because it's terribly good at getting rid of excuses. "Oh but you see the intent of the prison system is to reduce crime, never mind it doing the opposite, move along, nothing to see because intent is all that matters".
Yes, it's a thought exercise, not a tautology. And it's not a great thought exercise either, because people of low intellect apparently assume it's a tautology because of how it's worded.
It's not a thought exercise but a modelling discipline.
Those are more or less synonymous.
I can tell you've been huffing too much philosophy because you insist on weird hair splitting like this lol
Downvoted not because it isn't true, but because they aren't automatically mutually exclusive and because it is an unnecessary jab at half of the human species. Why are we paying attention to divisive bullshit instead of focusing on things that actually have the potential to help?
What will help?
It's also sexist to call all men rapists. Women rape as well.
Well say no more!
Oo! Oo! Are we doing reductionism??
Let's say more about this!!
Sees question mark
Uh oh. Sorry dude. Downvoted for using the forbidden punctuation. Them's tha rules...
"I realized men are evil, masculinity is toxic, these are statements of truth and the only ones who deny this shit are cis men themselves." - CheesyCheese1 This thread
☝️ Top comment when i got here. This issue brings out as many misandrists as it does misogynists.
Even my gf who wasn't aware of this meme picked the bear vs a random man when i asked her, so obviously there is a problem. But in reality i don't give a shit if some rando woman would prefer a bear over me in the woods, whatever makes her feel safer i guess. I do care about being tarred with the rape brush though, and this topic is being used to attack all men rather than just the problem ones.
I support sexual assualt because I think associating all men with sexual assault is divisive? Eat shit and die.
Because the solution to women getting assaulted is to make men think about their actions. The post wasn't anymore divisive than the average black twitter meme. It was a simple tongue in cheek piece about how women have the impossible task of figuring out if a man is going to be their life partner or their rapist & murderer.
"Hey, would you rather be alone with a bear or a man?"
"A bear. And you should think about what you've done." "... Huh? "
Do you not understand that, as a very straight man, I've never once even thought about hurting a woman?
It's absolutely divisive. Stop.
But have you thought about challenging a man who does?
Ah yes, let me open myself up to physical violence because I'm a man and that's my place in the world.
Shut the fuck up
Are you aware that you get to make that choice and that women don't?
Are you aware that, as a man, I still have the right to protect myself?
God, go fuck yourself you troglodyte.
then you'd know it's not about you. I don't think women want to potentially be mauled to death by the bear, it's simply preferable to the horrible shit men do to women with astonishing regularity. kidnapped and raped to death, or kidnapped and raped for decades.
do you need links, to show how unfortunately regular this kind of thing is? because they'll turn your fucking stomach. just because you're ignorant about how often it happens doesn't mean you should take it personally when women make a logical choice. they're safer with the bear. You've never thought about hurting a woman, that's great, but it doesn't do shit for the women who have had this shit done to them by men for the history of the species.
oooOoh poor boy, it hurts your feelings huh? get over yourself.
Is vague with their wording, immediately backpedals to "I dOn'T mEaN aLl MeN"
Shut up
there's some real delusional entitlement going on here. one for all the supposedly 'good guys' who feel blamed for rapists - I don't rape women but would never begrudge their need to defend themselves. telling women they need to take literal risks for the sake of 'not hurting the good guys' feelings' seems kinda fucking gross.
I don't get why any man would jump to defend the chuds, unless they feel pointed out as a chud.
It absolutely is. You are saying no man, myself included, is safe. That no matter what good we might do individually, we will always be viewed as monsters. Can you not see why men find that hurtful?
look mate if you want to self identify as a rapist / creep, be my guest. if you want to identify that way and then wonder why people find it creepy, well, I don't have the crayons.
If you think women assume all men are rapists, you're wrong. if you think women assume some men are rapist creeps, that would be EXTREMELY RATIONAL. Now, compare those two categories with the number of times a woman has had to worry about being raped by a bear.
Come on, you can do it. Count on your toes if you need to. There we go: it's none.
So some, vs. None.
Now work it out.
I’m not self identifying as anything. You are saying woman should be more scared of me or any other man. And bears may not rape, but they do other damage.
I mean... the historical record is replete with horrible shit men do to women:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_violence_against_women
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Incidents_of_violence_against_girls
https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-mmiw
https://people.com/crime/gallery-elizabeth-smart-jaycee-dugard-kidnapping-survivors/
https://www.ranker.com/list/famous-serial-killers-of-women/ranker-crime
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf
so you figure it out for yourself mate, I have neither the time nor crayons.
Imo this doesn't impact the men who would do such a thing in the slightest. You're just making the ones who have empathy feel bad, those who would rape are just getting their egos stoked by this fad: "Look at me, I'm more dangerous than a bear! That means I'm badass"
The problem is a large portion of rape is not done by serial rapists who rapes every chance they get, it's done by average dudes once or twice when an opportunity arrives. Most rape cases involve someone known to the victim.
Rape culture (as awkward and taboo of a phrase as it as) is a real thing that this bear analogy is pointing to. You may not have anything to examine in yourself that is the result of that culture but a metric fuck-ton of men do have internalized rape cultural aspects that need to be examined and extracted. The fact that so many women picked the bear is a testament to how pervasive that culture is, at least in their eyes.
The point isn't to stoke the egos of the serial rapists with no empathy, it's to use empathy to make the "average-Joe" rapist examine his internal biases before they turn into an actual rape.
However, women’s feelings does not equal women’s safety.
I'm a woman (a trans one if that matters to you) and have experienced sexual assault and domestic violence from both men and women.
I know the point that people are trying to make with the whole bear thing.
But I think the friction comes from women talk about this as a theoretical to make a point, where men are thinking more literally.
And I do belive that no one in there right mind, if actually given this option in real life, would pick a bear (unless maybe it was definitely one of the more harmless species).
Each and every one of us, even those of us that have survived SA, have had countless uneventful interactions with men you don't know. Even when it's just one on one. And its mostly normal biases that makes us remember the shitty ones more. And something a lot of people forget is that the vast majority of SA victims already know their assailant, so the idea of a rando assaulting you is even less likely. So yes I would much rather be in the woods with a man, than a wild fucking animal. And if you're a reasonable person, then you would too.
Honestly I think it depends more on the guy than the bear. Any time you're alone in the woods (at least in the US) it's safe to assume you're with a bear, that's where they live. Most bears keep to themselves though.
People tend to be less low-key, and less predictable. To me it seems more likely that a random guy could follow you around, take your stuff, or generally make life more difficult. There's also a higher chance for a guy to assist you and make things easier, but I can understand how the potential risk could outweigh the potential benefits.
Nono you're not allowed to judge the man individually. You're required to judge before you see both the man and bear so that we get a properly over-essentialised judgement how else are we going to propagate in- / out-group divisions.
it makes me happy that this is near the top of this thread, but this comment is also only 15 minutes old, so i'm not sure how far down the pipeline of this post, it'll track.
(This is me being glib) It depends on what kind of bear we're talking about. Blackbear be big noisy and confusing, grizzly play dead, big hairy gay guy like best case scenario.
As a trans woman who has also been sexually assaulted, it has more to do for me with what danger is more real to me. I've experienced zero bear attacks. Nobody I know has experienced a bear attack. Why would I fear one? Of course, consciously yeah, I know a bear is dangerous, but I have no real world experience to back that assumption up.
Men though? Yeah, I've been sexually assaulted by men. I've been physically assaulted by men. I've had family and friends who've been physically and sexually assaulted by men. That danger is real to me. I know that if a man I don't know is nearby me he could do those things to me, and I have the real world experience to prove that assumption correct (the assumption that they could, not the assumption that they would.)
Therefore, of course I'm more scared of the man than the bear. And of course I'd choose the bear over the man. I don't care if it's the wrong choice, I'll take my chances to not have to relive that trauma, even if it means risking my life. Not like I'll have time to regret that decision if the bear decides to kill me. Probably. And most women I know when asked expressed the same sentiment in different words. We're more scared of men than bears, but that doesn't mean we literally think men are more dangerous than bears.
Is it the logical choice to pick the bear? Probably not, but humans are not logical creatures. I'd rather make the wrong choice than the scary choice.
Unrelated to the topic, but this mindset is exactly why far-right movements are getting so strong right now.
I agree. I never said it was a good mindset. Therapy is definitely something we need to learn to deal with this and think logically. The issue is so absurdly many women have been traumatized by men that the mental health support systems would be so overloaded that it's just a fact that only a miniscule fraction of women would ever be able to receive help, even if we had absolutely perfect support systems.
So the only solution is to prevent them from getting traumatized in the first place. But the entirety of Lemmy seems really resistant to that conversation. Would rather quote statistics about "oh the average man isn't likely to assault you" than to accept that the ones who do are dealing enough damage that the problem needs to be dealt with regardless of what the average man is doing.
This is a great look into the mindset of someone who's been through SA. Thanks for sharing.
The point I think a lot of men are trying to make is that: In the same way that somebody who commits SA may have been abused themselves, women who are prejudiced against men create a new victim. Treating a harmless man as worse than a dangerous animal is an experience that most every man goes through and that sucks.
I can understand and sympathize with your position. But it doesn't absolve you of your behavior. Just like someone who commits SA isn't off the hook because they were beaten as a child and that screwed them up. I feel for someone who was abused growing up, but they don't get to throw up their hands and say it's not their fault they victimize others. Compassion is crucial, but at the end of the day, everyone is responsible for their own actions.
But what's going on here isn't something within the control of most people. When you're abused by somebody you don't choose to fear those people, you fear them because that's what your brain is wired to do to avoid repeated trauma. Like I said, therapy is the solution, but only part of the solution. The other part is fixing the issue causing the trauma in the first place. Men aren't being victimized by the women who fear them, they're being victimized by the other men who caused that fear.
And I want to be clear, because I've realized at this point that this isn't obvious anymore in today's world, fear is not an excuse for misandry. At the same time, fear of men is not misandry. Somebody saying they'd rather pick the bear should be met with "oh, we should fix the issue causing them to fear men more than bears," not "oh, they should fear bears more."
I also want to be clear that this isn't even a gendered issue despite the fact that it's been made into one. A man who's been abused by women and would rather pick the bear should also be met with compassion and "how can we reduce the number of female abusers?" I've actually been abused by women too. In fact, more often than I have men. I want to be clear that even though this discussion has been about men specifically, I feel the exact same way about women. That we still need to be compassionate to their victims and accept that the people who traumatized them are the problem, not their trauma.
Fearing somebody is not an action you perform, it's a state you're in.
You seem incredibly well adjusted for what you've been through and clearly you've learned a lot from your life experience. Thanks for laying all that out. It was very insightful. I think we agree on 99% of this. So at the risk of splitting hairs, I'm going to put a magnifying glass on that last 1%.
I think fear absolutely victimizes people. I've seen xenophobia and homophobia do plenty of damage. Men are far from a disenfranchised minority and I think the issue of women's safety is much more pressing than men being treated unfairly in some situations. But it still shouldn't happen.
You're right that in a way it's the fault of the dangerous men who abuse women. But in a way, hypothetically, it's really the fault of their parents who sexually assaulted them. But in a way it's the fault of their parents genetics that made them mentally unstable, etc, etc all the way back to the first multicellular organism. This thinking, however true, isn't very useful. People need to take responsibility for their own actions.
We agree fear is not an excuse for misandry. I don't think it's unreasonable for women to fear men after having a traumatic experience. However I can still point out the problem here. I think a good example is the trolley problem. If you pull the lever to only kill one person instead of six, I can both: agree with your decision but also point out that you killed someone. You can argue that's insensitive to your difficult dilemma, but I think it's worse to pretend like someone isn't getting hurt. That one person who died still was a life with people who will mourn them.
I think what's irking men about this whole bear thing is not that the result is not what they want or even what they expect. It's that a huge chunk of people seem to not even see it as a problem that most men are being judged for something they have nothing to do with.
I've never been shot or held at gunpoint, but I have have the shit kicked out of me. But still if given the option to face a person with a gun and a person with the bare hands. I don't think I'm going to pick the the guy with a gun.
There's a serious difference in the level of trauma between these examples, and the level of exposure to the dangers of the counter. Sexual trauma is a hell of a lot more scarring on your psyche than simply being beaten. In addition, at least in the US we're exposed to gun violence every day as opposed to basically never for bear attacks. Even in other countries with better gun control, you're dramatically more likely to hear about somebody being shot than you are to hear about somebody being mauled by a bear. Not only that, but it's really easy to process "get shot, you're dead." It's not as easy to make yourself believe you're definitely gonna be killed by an animal that has whole guides written on how to survive them.
Those two things combined make your example far from comparable. In addition, I'm not saying in any way that the fear is justified nor that no attempt should be made to fix it, what I'm trying to point out us that people don't realize how intense a fear it really is when they get offended at people making this choice.
Obviously, therapy is important to learning how to handle that fear and think more logically, but if every woman who needs it sought therapy for this, there just aren't enough therapists in the entire world to handle the load. Not even close. So a bigger part of the solution is, y'know, making sure women aren't getting traumatized in the first place. But everybody here wants to skip that part for some reason.
Very hard disagree.
You're free to disagree, but for me and many others, I've been through both, and I'm definitely waaaay more scared of being sexually assaulted again than being beaten half to death again. They have very different effects on your psyche. Physical violence I react far more with anger than fear, even if I was terrified in the moment. When it looks like it's happening again, my brain says "Fight back." When I'm afraid of sexual trauma being relived, my brain says "Escape, now. Can't escape? Submit. Maybe that way they won't kill you too at least."
👍
How about you Google the man who's face was eaten by bear and then decide
How about you miss the entire point and get aggressive for no reason?
Seriously, what kind of response to "I've been traumatized by men" is "you should traumatized by bears too?"
Most bears would just walk away from you when you make a loud noise. Men would approach you. So even I as a man, would pick a bear
How many female teachers have been caught fucking their barely pubescent students this year alone so far?
It isn't a men-women problem. People just suck.
I'm a woman and the same way that women feel about men in this whole meme thing, is the exact same way I feel about women...
I don't trust women within a hairs inch of my life and I would rather be with a bear than a Woman but I bet you I'll get super downvoted for this opinion.
My wife shares the same opinion. It’s not something she can discuss in her social circles, but she feels like she’s been backstabbed in more awful ways by her fellow women.
When she gets in that pattern, I try to remind her that people tend to suck and you have to be choosy regardless of gender.
I feel like with men it’s usually more physical and with women it’s more social/mental. And physical is way easier to document and make stats out of
Have you had some negative experiences that led to this?
You spelled it wrong, the sign should say "Safety is more important than feelings"
This whole thing is bait.
Anyone engaging on any side of the debate are fools. Any topic antagonizing half the population will somehow stir up some noise.
It's like saying all women are bad at sport because they don't train hard enough. It's ignorant and serves only the purpose of creating a divide in the population.
Stop engaging in the divide.
I like this logical approach.
Also: eat the rich.
I see OP noticed how much traction and drama this post stirred up last week so they decided to try it for themselves.
My edge-case where I run into something semi-related to this issue is when I go on my daily walks and get caught walking behind women. I’m a fast walker, it pains me to have to slow down for people and I don’t like having to walk awkwardly around other people walking too slow (especially if they’re just barely slow but not too slow). I realize that the Flash is trapped in a living hell walking behind all these goddamn slow walkers.
I dislike walking behind women especially, nothing that’s their fault, they’re just living life, but because then I get extra self-conscious, like, “Oh geez, what if they think I’m following them or that I’m trying took at their butt or what if I’m making them uncomfortable.” It’s about the implication. Walking slowly isn’t an option because it extends the whole thing out and makes it worse, so then I have to re-route my whole walking routine on the off-chance my very existence might make somebody else uncomfortable.
I’ve tried saying things to them to try to put them at ease like, “I wasn’t planning on raping you,” or “Hey, it’s ok, I’m not a rapist,” but nothing seems to work, if anything, it makes them more uncomfortable. I honestly don’t know what women want from men.
That's quite the universal statement. I think first and foremost, men need to learn that they might not be part of the problem, but that there are many very problematic ones among us.
The feeling of general suspicion is what we need to tackle. If you don't grasp the problems and their magnitude, you will naturally take offense in being suspected.
We need to take this feeling and turn it into anger towards the disgraceful people that are the reason for the suspicion.
So on the contrary, I think men's feelings actually matter a lot, if you want to reach a world free of misogyny and violence against women.
Sometimes things aren’t your fault but are your problem. And men making excuses like “just locker room talk” and not confronting other men in their lives who do or say toxic things or espouse ideas or personalities that generally make women uncomfortable are our problems, whether or not they are our fault.
I wish I could do this at work. The most inappropriate things I hear in a regular basis are from my own leadership.
I mean, it depends. I am not my own gender police, I don't see my life with my peers as "shaping the culture of manhood" because having gender in common is basically irrelevant and there is absolute no sense of belonging for me into "manhood" as a gender. We are not talking about contributing to shape the culture of your organization, or club or something, where there are (or should be) some form of shared values.
In fact, I find this whole idea between silly and sexist, where by sexist I mean rigid attributes applied based on gender.
The way I see it is that I - as a man - have absolutely nothing to do to help with the overall problem and the only way that I can help improve is by not being part of it (in this case, not assault, rape, stalk, harass etc.). That's pretty much the end of it.
I have no heard a man express what you would call a toxic opinion in like twenty years. And yet women are still just as afraid. Crime rates are at an all-time low, yet women are more afraid than ever.
Whether it’s my problem is my decision. Primarily, it is women’s problem. And they have practical steps they can take to fix that problem. I refuse to make someone else’s problem my own problem, if that other person is ignoring steps they themselves can take to fix it.
I’m all for helping out, but only people who have done the first step themselves.
Women’s general attitude toward this is “It’s my problem but it’s your responsibility to solve it” and I say fuck that. I have my own problems to solve. My life is, in fact, absolutely full of problems that take all my energy to solve.
Your personal experience is not representative of the experience of the rest of the world. Though I am very glad that this has been your experience!
You’d think that it would appear on video maybe once, somewhere on the internet, if it were happening. Can you link to a place where men are saying these things? If not, does that indicate something about the rate at which it’s happening?
I can link to videos of UFOs and videos of dogs walking on their hind legs. Are these defining our culture? If not, what does that imply about something you can’t find a video of?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html
Or for another example, see Andrew Tate and all the idiots who follow him.
This, except that shouldn't be anger, really.
Anger is a feeling that leads to alienation, and an alienated beast is the most dangerous one.
We should be on a watch for potentially dangerous behaviors and offer help so that people gently unlearn their ways.
That's not to say people who have already committed some form of abuse shouldn't be punished, but that we should fight for those who can become dangers and support those who recognize their mistakes and genuinely strive to do better.
I agree. This general suspicion is not good. As Bruce Lee says, “Do not be tense, but ready”.
I recommend women take concrete steps to protect their own safety, so they don’t have to be constantly on high alert. That’s a terrible way to live.
When people justify racism with statistics: That's stupid and you're a bigot
When people justify sexism with statistics: Only one side's feelings matter! I'm going to post this divisive meme everywhere!1!
Edit Sexists know how to downvote, but not present a logical argument.
Stay tuned for the next "men suck" cycle: 'toxic masculinity is bad you should express your feelings instead of bottling them', more after the break
This rage bait is so old the Simpsons parodied it:
"Today's topic..."
I'm doing my part by playing with Arch Linux in my mom's basement instead of going outside. Where women are. And Arch Linux isn't. I use Arch btw.
Well I'll have you know I do the same but with Fedora Linux (like arch Linux but imo better). I use fedora btw.
I'll have you know my Linux runs on bears. Makes me, and all my many female friends who hang out, more comfortable.
I don't like much bloat in my Linux though; just the bare necessities.
Not sure what else this meme is doing other than actively creating a bigger divide between the genders...
"everything is going according to plan"
Maybe a divide for you, my SO says she'd pick the bear if it wasn't me. And I don't blame her.
Instead of arguing the merits of this debate, maybe its worth analyzing your own merits. Men (individually but amongst their peers) should be ashamed that women typically seem to want to pick a bear over themselves, instead of falling further into the rut that pushes everyone - not just women - away from their social circles and friend.
Someone tells you they'd rather be getting mauled by a bear? Take the hint. The divide exists within your head, make friends, be kind, and you'll find happiness
Edited for individuals to contextualize on their peers instead of generically
Edit edit, I mean go ahead, be reactionary
Shame is an individual thing. Men, plural, is a whole bunch of people. Why should I be ashamed for the actions of people that aren't me?
...and just to be clear here: I'm not even arguing that we shouldn't battle this one out between the genders. But collective punishment is against the Geneva convention and I really don't like to stay quiet when people commit war crimes.
So my initial response was "jesus fuck that's some unnecessary hyperbole, I get your point but that's ridiculous"
And then I realized that's the same response I have with women who pick the bear so
I dunno
Maybe you all suck?
Maybe we all care about things you don't care about?
Or maybe hyperbole is not the best way to make a point?
It depends. Largely on whether it's obvious that it's hyperbole.
Though as far as the gender war is actually a war I still think that the Geneva convention should definitely apply. By, you know, analogy.
I guess I could see what you were going for there, but it was a bit of a stretch imo
Wait sorry I just read your comment, who the fuck said war crimes? You should be ashamed of your peers if they're misogynistic, whats a war crime there lmfao
Me. I said war crimes. Collective punishment is a war crime. You cannot hold people to account on the basis of group membership.
If you want to make a sensible statement, try "You should be ashamed if you don't distance yourself from misogynists". In that case you say someone should be ashamed for their own actions (or inaction), not for something some amorphous group did. Also changing the general "men" to "your peers" is peak goalpost moving.
I dont know what you think my goal is, clearly you're better at phrasing, so if we go with "You should be ashamed if you don't distance yourself from misogynists", where is our disagreement?
You think I shouldnt be ashamed of the friends I once had? Because I certainly am. You should be ashamed of people who break social contract, because that is explicitly what that would entail.
Given that you said "once had" not "still have", no I don't think you should be ashamed. Having broken with them, having learned, what blame is there that could be laid on you?
Because I was once naïve to who they are now, and perhaps being younger at the time I could have, maybe, been a more potent guiding voice to a couple guys in specific, and only later did I learn what they had committed when I was still associated. And if that shame is a way I can guarantee my merrits, then I can live with it.
That's exactly the war crime mentioned before. How is that different from blaming every german for being from the same country as nazis?
Edit: The nazi analogy was just me trying to find an example that even a moron could understand.
... I failed miserably
Godwin's Law
Ignoring Godwin's law isn't the argument ender you think it is, fine, how is it different than blaming all black people for violent gang crime?
Lmfao, being socially ashamed of the peers you choose to associate with === being a German during the nuremburg trials?? You know what was probably 110% worse? Being Jewish in Nazi occupied territory.
Get a goddamn grip on reality. If I had said ship all men tp Australia sure, my apologizes my original phrasing didn't appease you enough. Professional victimhood at its finest.
Im sorry you got rejected one too many times, hope you can figure it out.
Yeah they just wanted to throw random shit out - like women picking the bear is a war crime because it punishes all men. I think they want women to choose to take the risk of potentially gambling their life away AND be raped / kidnapped, they shouldn't just be able to risk a life threatening mauling because that would punish all men.....
jfc the gymnastics these fucks will go in order to deny that rape and kidnap are genuinely things men do, and have historically done to the point where women literally have to carry the stress of self defense 24/7 and even worse, their most frequent assailants are known.
SO FUCK YEAH BRING ON THE BEAR, they probably don't know them personally so that'll up the odds that the bear will just ignore them. And even if the bear kills them brutally, it's not going to rape them, so they got that going. But it's a war crime to pick the bear jfc
Not what I said. Demanding that I feel ashamed because there's men who do shitty things is the collective punishment, the war crime.
Have you ever considered that there's humans who do shitty things? Why aren't you ashamed of that? Why are you shirking responsibility? Are you secretly in league with them? Why are you not experiencing crippling guilt, knowing that Hitler and Pol Pot exist and are of your group, as I just randomly assigned it? Why aren't you flagellating yourself yet?
Yes, the statement is hyperbolic -- obviously. But you should be able to see how the general pattern, not just its extreme, is toxic.
where did I do that? seriously, point out where I told you to feel ashamed.
Never did. Are you a rapist? then you have nothing to worry about.
You're hyperbole is pointless. I don't feel guilt for hitler and polpot because I'm not a racist genocidal maniac.
So what's the root of your guilt mate?
Past coming back to haunt you? If not, pick team bear dude, it's the logical choice.
You didn't, someone else did and that's where I brought up the whole collective punishment being a war crime thing. Simply wanted to set the record straight on what it was a reference to.
Well, two decades ago I did engage in gang-tickling of gals. Nope I'm not sorry, they're not traumatised, also I got a date out of it but I can definitely see how some people would like to tie a noose from that one.
Would you choose the bear, the guy with downcast eyes boiling with repressed rage, or the one pushing you into the swimming pool while you test the temperature?
Never got good at stealing scrunchies, I'll have to pass on that one. And don't tell me only guys do that kind of thing I once had to fish my home keys out of panties.
Ah well there's that pesky language thing, I do mean individually, if I intended carrying the burden of sins of all my fathers I would be weighed down to hell.
Edit: Actually, I don't mean individually, if you have a friend that you tolerate some of their more misogynistic views, try to actually be the better influence, Ive failed some former friends in that regard, and they will fall deeper into that pit.
Edit edit: some nice upstanding men here, you wouldnt hold your friend accountable to SA?
I don't have misogynistic friends for the simple reason that I don't make friends with assholes.
What a gotcha, im sure you never got to know someone well enough their true colors start to show? Because from my experience, they know to hide their true intentions because it tends to push people away. And thats when you cut them out. Whats so complicated?
Ok ok, let me understand you:
So... Are you a sexist incel? Why should men respect your feelings or validate your past experiences then? Stop trying to solve sexism with more sexism, it doesn't work like that. And please don't disrespect me or assume shit from my personal life amymore, it's just lame.
Where the fuck did you come from? It aint my fault some men are sensitive and cant just ignore comments online lol
They want confirmation, acknowledgement, so the second a tastefully edgy joke is cracked their true colours are going to come flying because they'll say something that's just offensive, not actually funny.
Excuse me?!
The fuck should I be ashamed for?
Why am I responsible for the actions of other men?
Go have your fucking guilt trip if you want to but don't include me.
Reading comprehension, my apologies for the poor original phrasing, but yes you should be ashamed if you dont get the point.
Assume I didn't get the point: what was your point when you said 'men should be ashamed that women pick the bear?'
Im proud my SO would rather pick me, and I can likely speak on her behalf that she would choose the bear over you, whoever you are, and no offense intended.
Thats the person you should be to who you choose, as soon as you're trying to convince a woman that you're a better pick, you're fighting a loosing battle.
Im really perplexed how this is complicated
I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.
Explain exactly what you meant when you said 'men should be ashamed that women pick the bear.'
Why should I be ashamed.
Explain.
Talk to your mother more, it'll go a long way.
Feel however you want, but don't drag me into the what other people have done. I don't deserve the prejudice, and I'd rather just not interact with you.
So if men are statistically safer than bears and women's safety is most important, then you agree "bear" is the incorrect choice?
I'm just trying to figure out all these incoherent memes.
Do you have those stats? I would love to actually see a comparison, instead of a slap-fight
Very few people someone gets near enough to be grabbed by want to rape them. Nearly every bear someone gets near enough to be grabbed by wants to kill them. A large number of women feel it is better to be killed by a bear than live with their irrational fear that every man they get near shall rape them. The fear not being rational is irrelevant as the fear is based upon a more than likely chance, approx. 25% is reported, that at some point the fear was justified and not irrational. However those numbers are screwy as folks that get raped are more likely to get raped again.
I'd give percentage chances of each occurring, (the National Park Service estimates the odds of being attacked by a bear are about one in 2.1 million.), but the media seems to only report percentage of gender raped not chance of rape.
dsfgasfsaf
I'm not a bear, but same.
Please show where I stated anything of the desires of the bear. I'm hinging nothing on proximity. You are simply assuming things I did not state. I covered that it wasn't a risk assessment. Only thing bogged down is so bogged with your assumptions.
I responded to what you wrote. Yes there was some inference based on your words. I’m not getting bogged down in prescriptive nonsense.
No, you did not. You wrote in response to what you pretended I posted. You again are only bogged by your choice to pretend I posted something very different than I posted.
::: spoiler spoiler , :::
What percentage of women do you suppose have had a man threaten to rape or kill them? Get violently angry at them? Sexually assault them or a friend? I reckon it’s near 100%.
The fear isn’t that all men will assault them, it’s that any man might. It’s not irrational, it’s based on experience. There are men in this thread arguing that women should be arming themselves to stay safe, right alongside men arguing that fear is irrational.
Fuck the men with hurt feelings. Your fellow men have proved themselves dangerous, time and again. Women will treat you like dangerous predators until men as a group start policing their own and building a world where women don’t have reason to fear.
Not relevant to my statement.
Ok. If you don’t want to discuss why post?
I'd happily discussed what I posted. I have no interest in discussing your imaginary post which you chose to address rather than my post. I also have no interest in discussing anything with someone that wishes to pretend I posted anything other than I did.
What aspect of your post are you interested in discussing? I found your assertion that the fear was irrational interesting, but if that’s off-limits we can talk about some other part…
Bruh, it's not even about rape. A dude negatively impacting a woman's physical or emotional well being compromises their safety.
The odds you mentioned of bear attacks seem a lot lower than the odds of a woman having to deal with shit from men. I say this as a man who worked in the boreal for 10 years and with a pile of construction folks (men and women).
None of which is relevant to my statement.
You're asking for statistics in bad faith of the argument. Seems like you're the one slap-fighting here - if you wanted to actually engage in logical discourse, you'd have presented statistics yourself, which you have not.
There's obviously no statistics on the rate of how many bear-human and male-female interactions happen. One rarely happens, the other happens billions of times per day. We can prove that bears are more aggressive and dangerous than humans though.
In one black bear study 88% of fatal attacks were a result of the bear being the aggressor. Note that black bears are known to be timid of humans, and notoriously not aggressive.
So, statistically even the more timid bear species are wildly more aggressive to humans than humans to bears. Unless you have data that proves that men are more aggressive to women than bears are to humans, this is the closest we get to proving men are statistically safer than bears.
Lmfao what a useless fact.
How many rapes or instances of physical assault on a woman were a result of the man being the aggressor?
It's almost like there's more men than bears.
I would love to know how you went from percentages, which you quoted and I replied to, to overall numbers. You realize that's not what you were talking about, right?
Forgot to include this in my post
,
I'd specify further - a solo man/bear interaction with a woman in a remote location
I don't want cubs or captivity involved, and no bystanders. It might be more fair to make it strangers only too... That data is going to be a lot harder to quantify through
dsfgasfsaf
So what people are meaning to say is women's feelings are more important than men's? I think the statistics should matter xD. But I don't think bears attack people as often as people are trying to make out.
dsfgasfsaf
Wait, you're saying the meme, instead of saying "women's safety", could say "women's feelings" and still be accurate? That's quite the take....
dsfgasfsaf
Do you think is the nature of males or is this learned behavior?
dsfgasfsaf
You're just discarding every opinion as "toxic masculinity" which is actually worse than engaging in logical discourse.
I'll do everything in my power to empower women and make them feel safe. This thought experiment has unfortunately been detrimental and used to attack men.
"It's not you" - yes, and nothing I said made it about me at all. See how fast you went on the offense on a completely neutral comment? You should listen to your own advice and listen the points being made equally as much as you're lobbying others to do.
dsfgasfsaf
I read some of these, more to get insight into how other people think, but often I come to the conclusion that there is very little I can do to help and that people who behave that way aren't people I want to help. My ego is just fine, thanks, but blind hostility isn't something I welcome into my life.
Congrats, you pass the bare minimum for human decency, dudes. Accept that part and you won't spend time having to 'defend' yourself.
I'm not like that, so I don't need to worry about it, type of thinking
Here's the thing...if you get upset that a random woman that you don't know would take the hyperbolic position that they would rather be in the same room as a bear than with you, you're likely the exact type of man that these memes are talking about. They are meant to expose fragile egos that don't understand how intimidating they are to women. They know how dangerous a bear is. They don't know how dangerous you are. That's the point...
What the heck? Expressing resentment at the implication that you are more threatening than a bear based solely on gender is evidence that you are, in fact, more threatening than a bear? How does that follow? You don't need to have a fragile ego to recognize the unfairness of it.
If they would rather be alone with a bear than a random stranger of any gender I'm going to say they don't.
The original post was a bad-faith engagement farm that became much more popular than it ever should have been. It ended up bringing up a bit of good discussion and a lot of insane takes.
Once again, it's a hyperbolic statement. They don't really want to be alone with a bear. They are merely pointing out that they trust you less than a bear. A bear would simply kill them. What a man could do to them is far worse than anything a bear could do. If you can't understand that, that's the entire problem.
dsfgasfsaf
It's this sexist statement still being made? Cool, cool, cool... I mean it's not actually, but here we are with this crap still being said.
It's nice to change the subjects of racist phrases to get a free dunk on a lot of people that are cool to hate now.
So there mere presence of a man implies a lack of safety? It may be your feelings but it is also major misandry.
Lived experience shapes our reality. It's an absurdist analogy that paints the picture of women feeling unsafe around men they don't know due to their lived experience. It's not misandry, it's caution, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. The outrage at such meme is pretty much indicative of the issue at hand. Men tend not to feel unsafe around women they don't know whereas the flipped scenario is the opposite. That says something about society, not women.
I don’t think it’s lived experience for many. Much of it is fear impressed by others. And I’ve certainly felt fear at being alone with the wrong woman, or a child. One false accusation and my life is over. I actively avoid being alone with women and children. But that doesn’t mean I’m picking bears over people.
Good lord, dude. When I was talking about fear, I meant fear for one's life or well-being. I also said "man they don't know," not "wrong." The people you should be directing your anger towards are those who have created an environment within society where women don't feel safe, which is other men who think they're entitled to women's bodies, who get angry when rejected instead of moving on, who commit acts of violence against women, and any other disgusting act you can think of. Your emotions are misdirected.
Who says I can only be angry at one group? I am angry with the men in that group, but also the people that would place me in that group merely because I also possess a penis.
No one is talking about your penis.
STILL DON'T GET IT HUH?
Let's reduce it down to the simplest way it can be put: how many bears rape women?
Get it now?
Misogynists can't accept it I guess.
How many men maul women to death?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-hospitalized-after-mother-bear-attack-butler-county/story?id=107861488
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bear-b-c-squamish-attack-1.7201905
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/07/us/grizzly-bear-attack-yellowstone-idaho-killed/index.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57763443#
Implying all men are rapists is misandry, period.
How many women get raped by bears?
The part you aren't getting is obvious, it's not misandry. The gymnastics you're going through to deny basic logic is impressive though. Thanks for the links, they were pointless. Trust me, if you want to compare lists, mine are longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_violence_against_women
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Incidents_of_violence_against_girls
https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-mmiw
https://people.com/crime/gallery-elizabeth-smart-jaycee-dugard-kidnapping-survivors/
https://www.ranker.com/list/famous-serial-killers-of-women/ranker-crime
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf
And in the overwhelming majority of these cases, the perpetrators are men, AND NOT A SINGLE FUCKING ONE WAS A BEAR.
Edit: and cute strawman, no one's implying ALL MEN, just the creeps. Which you might identify with but doesn't cover the entire gender. Women making the logical choice - pick from a population that def has rapist creeps or a population that isn't known for kidnapping and raping women, gee whiz batman...
Come on, this isn't calculus.
You have no understanding of statistics. How many more men does the typical woman encounter a day than bears? I’m willing to bet women encounter dozens or even hundreds of men, but pretty well zero bears. The RATE of bear attack per encounter is much higher than the rate per encounter with men.
And this hypothetical man is a stranger, whereas 8 out 10 rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.
Your argument makes no sense. Sorry, anyone who thinks they are safer with a random large wild carnivore that has sharp teeth and claws than a random human male is foolish.
And, yes, you are implying that all men are rapists. After all, the statement isn’t that you merely don’t FEEL safe, but that you are not safe, period in the presence of a man. Therefore it is implied the man will 100% harm you.
now let's talk about shark week
Oh don't get it twisted sparky, I'm a guy. I understand why women feel threatened because I've seen men be fucking creeps my entire life.
The bear will never rape the women. Get it through your dense fucking nugget. Goddamn it's been repeated over and over again.
Let me imply this: your defensiveness over this is hilarious. If you're not a creep predating on women, you wouldn't feel upset about this at all, it's simple math: the bear will never rape the women, keep it in a box, kidnap it, force it to bear children, etc, etc., etc, so no matter what statistics you want to pull out, it's NOTHING COMPARED TO THE HISTORICAL RECORD ALONE.
You do realize there are harms other than rape? You sure don’t seem to get that. You think rape is the only tragedy that can befall a woman.
I am no creep. But I am pissed that you think that the mere fact I have a penis means I’m some awful rapist women should be afraid of.
But you know what, since bears are so safe, why don’t you go have a nice encounter with a hungry mother grizzly.
Lemmy is so much nicer since I discovered tags.
changes the subject because he has no retort.
No, it's simply the one we were talking about at the moment. That and how women seem to prefer death by bear than trusting many men, and how guys like you are making that logic seem pretty fucking sound every response lol.
You realize men rape other men too right?
So you know, I'd actually pick the bear myself. Because THERE'S STILL NO HISTORY OF BEARS RAPING PEOPLE - MEN OR WOMEN.
Bellend.
Women are rapists as well.
Thanks for the logical fallacy.
Just because women can be rapists, and indeed, there are women who are rapists, does not and should not have any bearing on the point.
This is the same as yelling "all lives matter" into a crowd of BLM protestors. Yeah, no shit. Just because one thing is true doesn't mean that the inverse is impossible.
Sorry, I thought we were doing over broad, unnecessarily divisive generalities.
Point taken.
but but whataboutism at it's finest. great job mate. fantastic work, on behalf of all men, I'd like to ask: FUCKING STOP. Stop trying to stick up for our side because it's not helping.
There are no sides here. The fact that you think their are sides tips your bias. Every human is capable of horrible things regardless of age, race, or sex. The bear thing is so dumb and clickbait.
Funny, because every single woman I've spoken too IMMEDIATELY understood and picked the bear.
Don't you think it's odd that women everywhere are choosing a wild 800lb beast instead of putting their faith in men?
Perhaps there's a reason you're tiny mind just can't comprehend.
Do you live in India?
no, I live in a state where we have bears.
Here's my hot take on all this:
Fellas, it's not that your feelings don't matter, everyone's feelings matter, it's that your feelings don't matter more than the safety of others.
You're getting mad at the wrong shit here. You're mad at the women for not wanting to be stuck in a forest with a random dude, when in all actual fact, that decision was borne from a plethora of experience with random dudes, most of that experience being negative.
Almost all of that negativity is because there's to fucking many creepy ass dudes making us all look bad. To be blunt, I have high hopes, and expectations from my fellow man; especially when it comes to respecting women. Yes, there's a nontrivial number of crazy bitches out there, in the same breath, there's a lot of crazy dudes too. They're making us all look bad. Be mad at them.
The women are only making the best decision for their own health and safety, based on their experience. Be the change you want to see in the world, my brothers. Be that change.
Well said.
Can we fix this comment for the whole lemmy instance to read?
Men's feelings is what makes some of them unsafe to begin with.
We can't address safety concerns of women without addressing the thinking of men, and trying to shut men up a little harder is not gonna help.
This topic keeps coming up because people keep talking past each other. There is a real, measured, evidence backed problem. The victims are saying “I feel this way, and it causes me to behave this way” and those who are neither victims nor perpetrators are upset about the way they are choosing to express that in a general sense. Now this meme itself is not more helpful than the bear, it didn’t give any new information. But it’s a good expression of that general frustration when no one listens. At least on Lemmy, there is a certain defensive response rather than an understanding empathetic one on this topic. This meme in particular seems harsh, but it’s driven by decades of talking about this, or not being able to talk about this, because the response is always so negative. Everything from “why did you dress that way” to “you should have know before you married them” to “not only women” (yes but that’s the topic at hand so). I would hope that some can come to understand this sentiment. I hope that this community improves.
.
If we could just add one more line at the bottom: "but men's feelings ARE important", then I think we'd be on the right path.
Or just replace the whole thing with
"dont assault anyone.
physically, mentally or emotionally.
Man, woman, or in between."
It would get zero upvotes because everyone agrees with that statement.
The problem with the bear thing is it was always about feelings, not safety. Men's and women's feelings. Perceptions of safety.
Well upvotes ARE the most important thing.
How are so many people angry at a simple fucking hypothetical?
Telling on themselves
they genuinely don't understand; they think: ah, but the bear is a much more fearsome predator than I am, the woman would choose me any day!
Nah man, the bear's never, ever, ever going to rape the woman. Woman will roll the dice with their lives, but no one wants to be kidnapped and raped to death - an actual fear women in this day and age have - and the bear will never ever 100% will not rape a woman.
clear cut logic to me, I don't fault women one bit.
I see it as simply the combination of: "the devil that you know is better than the devil that you don't", and "there are fates worse than death".
To be plain: the worst the bear can do is kill you and eat you (hopefully in that order). That's what we all know. We 100% know that and I don't think anyone is going to argue that point.
But a complete fucking stranger? They could be Hannibal for all you know. Keeping you alive by cutting off your appendages and feeding them to you.
The main culprit of this is toxic men who will send unsolicited dick pictures to unsuspecting women as an opening line, then put them on blast for not responding positively to being assaulted by penis pictures they didn't ask for.
The kind of guy that wouldn't see anything wrong with saying "you should smile more, you're so pretty when you smile".
The fact is, being a woman on the internet, you can, quite easily, get bombarded by complete strangers with all kinds of fucked up shit that sexualizes you and reduces you to an object only worthy of living if you can pleasure a man.
With the mountain of fucked up shit random dudes do to women online, I do not understand why anyone would ever be surprised that they would pick a wild fucking animal over the likely outcome of being stuck in the woods with any of the kinds of creepy fucking guys that troll around the internet, showing their dick to everyone with tits.
I'm a guy, I'm not surprised by any of this, and I don't blame anyone for saying "bear", it's honestly, a safer bet.
Yup. I'd add: Men rape more MEN than bears rape humans.
This easily understood statement will probably make them bonkers.
I don't even get it. Like if I'm hiking in the woods alone, it's because I want to be alone. Please pick the bear, I don't want company.
At least when I get to the bear, he'll be sated and less likely to eat me.
Fragile ass masculinity
can we just drop this stupid joke that many missed the point of? its getting real annoying real fast. people suck, get over yourselves.
I don't think that's where we all came out of
I'm just going to say it. Any arguments of "what about..." Are effectively pointless banter.
It's not adding anything to the discussion, and bluntly it's actively trying to distract people from the point, and change the discussion into something different.
Fuck off with that shit.
This post, and most of the other bear ones, are in normie forums full of people not familiar with feminist discourse. The reason for that? It's funny, cathartic, shocking, and a little inflammatory. And that's fine, it's meant to be. It gives it reach and allows people to learn and others to teach. The problem is that when men do find this to be shocking and inflammatory, they need to channel that emotion somewhere, and antagonistic/angry internet discourse is not the correct way respond to that.
There was a popular post the other day of "If you don't understand why women pick the bear, you are the bear", that directly antagonises the exact people who need to hear about why women choose the bear, and those people don't need to be antagonised, they need a little empathy and non-confrontational discussion to get there.
When I talked to them calmly, and acknowledged the way they feel, validated their emotions, then explained the topic to them, every single one I talked to accepted the core point and came out better for it. Take that angry energy, educate, and direct that energy in the right direction.
It's not that men's feelings should trump women's safety. It's that you need to think about why people are disagreeing so you can effectively talk to them
yea but like at the same time annoying a bunch of butthurt lonely guys really isnt solving the problem and rather pushes them towards the manosphere which is where the problems start to grow
Yes, this is the correct take.
The bear meme is meant to make men uncomfortable and surprised by how they are seen as a generalization among women. It isn't meant to be anti-men or anything, it's just meant to show the lived experience of women to men in a hypothetical absurdity.
I get that, and you're right. But a lot of people are taking the meme too far, and taking something that was originally good, and making it it anti-men. Men's feelings actually matter, and we as society need to start actually thinking about them, rather than just telling them to man up all the time.
I've talked to a whole bunch of anti-bear men, and all of them accept the point when told in an empathetic way that acknowledges their right to feel the way they do. You can take that feeling and channel it as a force for good, rather them antagonising them and pushing them further away
(Not saying you in particular are doing this)
Edit: Please respond instead of downvoting. I'm failing to see the problem with identifying that there's a enough antagonistic commenters that maybe it's pushing people in the wrong direction. And we now require an over-correction of empathy to undo that damage.
The cure to sexism is definitely more sexism.
What part is sexist? There can be no equality if uncomfortable realities are brushed aside, illuminating the very real lived experience that women are constantly wary of the average man allows us to confront said issue. Telling women that they are "wrong" and just need to feel different about the issue just perpetuates this distrust.
Listen to women.
The part where there's 3.8 billion men on the planet, and although the stats are hard to put together, lots of contradictions, they point to less than 1% of them being incarcerated (for all crime not just crime against women) even vastly exaggerating that to 5% (to account for men not being caught etc) leaves 95% of the general male population being decent and no threat. Blaming men, when men aren't the issue is sexist. Blaming religion, poor education etc would be less sexist and aimed more towards what the actual issue is and help work towards a cure, man Vs bear does nothing but divide and spread fear. Stats show that black people perform a higher amount of crime than other races, does this mean we should be racist? Does this mean you'd pick a random bear over a random black person? I don't think it does, because it's not the colour of their skin, nor is it the apparatus between some bodies legs that defines them. Blaming the wrong thing is sexist, or racist in both these cases. I'm not saying women aren't walking around terrified, but a lot of that has to do with polar discussion that doesn't help like man Vs bear telling them they should live in fear and does nothing to help the actual problems. And if you don't believe that to be true you are part of a much bigger problem humanity is facing, misinformation and fear mongering.
This is just an elaborate "not all men," and just shuts women up.
You said it yourself accurately, women are walking around terrified. The average woman heavily distrusts the average man. This isn't a call to demonize men, but to showcase that collective distrust so we can move beyond it.
What good does it do unless we look at the causes. All this does is divide people. Why is that the right thing to do? We should be joining together to extinguish toxic masculinity, stamp out religion and improve education. Not radicalising toxic femanisity
Again, you're missing the forest for the trees. The fact is, many men think that equality has already been achieved, despite systemic power imbalances.
Radical feminism is a good thing, "toxic feminisity" is largely a strawman myth.
I think you're missing the point entirely. The man Vs bear argument serves no purpose but to divide. And when people fight with emotion, exactly what you're doing, women lose the right to abortions, to vote. There's no logic behind these decisions, they are fueled only by the emotions of closed minded people. Adding to the fire helps nobody and in fact takes things a step backwards. Misinformation and fear mongering isn't the way to solve this issue. Alienating the 95% of decent men that want the same thing as women won't help the cause. You're blaming the wrong group of people with polar blanket statements like man Vs bear
This does not even move the needle in accomplishing that in any way. It is divisive BS.
We should think about the bears safety now that jealous incels will be hunting them down for having better odds of being alone with a woman.
Incels are getting jealous of the attention these posts are getting even
Lots of incels are hunters in the first place. You're making a great point. We should really save the Bears from the incels and from women.
Why won't someone think of Da Bears!
What is this referring to? I think I'm OOTL
Bear meme
So, we should generalize entire groups of people to teach them a lesson. No matter their feelings or the fact that the majority of people in said group are just living their lives. A bunch of bad apples should make and entire group socially responsible.
Got it. 👍
Yes there are too many men who think they live in the 50s and can do whatever they want to woman. If you say ALL men are like that, you're invalidating the effort of most men trying to be better human beings while being assholes.
If you can't understand that. You are not looking to make things better, just to throw hate around.
love how this post is turning this fascinating thought experiment (which a lot of people don't seem to understand very well)
and turning it into correlation, not even causation of correlation, this is literally just taking two random things and smashing them together lmao.
there are so many variables to how this can be interpreted that make this a very difficult to comprehend statement.
I don't know. Seems kind of straightforward to me. Women's safety is more important than men's feelings. I agree with that statement. Do you not agree with that statement?
based on what though? Womens safety is more important than men feeling that raping women is bad? I think that might not check out.
Womens safety from being bombed by russia (nuclear warhead btw) while men have feelings about that one argument they had last week?
I mean, i like reductionism as much as the next guy, but you gotta give me something palatable, not just word salad.
Ethics? Feelings can be uncomfortable, but even the worst feeling are survivable. Safety is like physical safety. Like death is a possibility if things are not safe.
Yes. Also, men feeling that raping women is bad, is good for the safety of women. So, no need to stop feeling that. It would be preferred even.
Yes. Swap the sexes see if it still makes sense. Do you want die because some woman had a fight and had feelings about it? BTW, if you have some story behind this hypothetical. I would be interested to hear exactly how a man's feelings about argument turns into Russia bombing a woman.
yeah, so then by this logic, women shouldn't be choosing to be with a bear, assuming that's what we're still talking about. Unless this post is meta ironic and i'm missing that from the beginning, than the entire premise of half the comments on this post are bullshit.
yeah, and the reason why people are picking the bear, is due to emotional safety, they do not feel safe around men, that's the point, it doesn't matter whether they are more/less physically safe around the man over the bear, or vice versa, the entire point is the emotional safety. Which is the one thing that people don't seem to realize when commenting on this (granted the meme in the OP seems to clarify this to a significant enough degree i'll give them a pass. My point here is that you need to communicate clearly, because otherwise you could be saying literally anything.
i agree, but in this case, the irony here is that we aren't supposed to care about the feelings of men generically, which would include this, because somehow the entire generic of "women being physically safe" is now more important, than the entire offending class of people against women.
the point here was that these statements weren't related at all. I was literally just putting two irrelevant things together. It's literally just nonsense to articulate my point about why this statement is not a very good one. It's broad enough that my nonsense statement is following the premise accurately here.
What women are saying, is based on all the information shown to them and what they have gathered on their own. Given a choice between a random man and a random bear. They would chose to be lost in the woods with a bear. They feel physically and emotionally safer with the bear. Is their assessment accurate/correct, who knows?
Does this mean all men are rapists? No, no one has said that.
I disagree, why would physical saftey not be important? A bear could be happy just leaving them alone and eating berries. A man might decide to do something physically unwanted/dangerous to them.
I agree, I wish the people who are raging at me and down-voting me would be nice, and tell me what interpretation they have of the statement. Instead I am getting vague feelings posting with no arguments. Thank you for diving into this with me.
No one in this conversation has said that. The feelings of men are important. The feelings of women are important. The saftey of men is more important that the feelings of women.The safety of women are more important than the feelings of men. Saying one does not contradict the other.
I agree, I thought this was a hypothetical, sorry I was wrong.
Men's feelings can have an effect on the saftey of women. Imagine if the majority of men felt like they were owed sex even if women didn't want it. These feelings will cause most women to be physically unsafe.
they're not physically safer though, that's the problem. There is almost no world in which that would make sense statistically. "feeling safe" and "being safe" and two entirely independent concepts, sure you might be in a sketchy area that you know is unsafe, and as a result feel unsafe, that might be because it is unsafe. But that also doesn't mean that it is, which is why people often get caught up with shit in these types of situations.
How many times have you seen someone go "man i just though something bad was gonna happen, and then it did" and yet they didn't do anything about it?
Emotionally they'd prefer to be around a bear sure, but if the statement here is that "feelings don't matter" then the answer should literally be the opposite, because those feelings simply wouldn't fucking exist. on account of the not mattering part you can't just go "well feeling unsafe, means that you think you're physically unsafe" because in this example, there is literally no way to feel unsafe. It's hypothetically impossible. You cannot "use any information you've gathered" because that information is obviously emotionally relevant. The only real data you could use here is statistics, and those would probably paint an extremely favorable position for my argument. (even ignoring the under-reporting, because those are more than likely repeat offenders, who have almost certainly already been reported at some point)
Like i said the OP did a much better job here, maybe the OP of this thread was a little more clear? Idk at this point, but i've seen a lot of "safety is more important than feelings" statements, which would be what i'm complaining about specifically here. If i'm wrong then oh well.
this is the problem. Physical safety is theoretically important here, but we are talking about a rhetorical device specifically designed to be controversial and "illogical" because the entire reason behind it, was to make a point, that women have different experiences leading to them understanding people differently, and as a result influencing their emotional state to a point where it confounds with what is typically misconstrued to be "physical safety" the point of the original statement was literally never about physical safety. If it was about physical safety there would be a 1 in 2 chance that any random man is a serial rapist. Apologies if i'm being a little brazen here, but i don't fucking believe that.
the hypothetical here is literally about being lost in a forest with two less than optimal options, one is a bear, and the other is a man, arguably the animal of your own fucking species is probably going to be more ok with this. This is also ignoring the conflation that the bear is just "fucking somewhere eating berries" and not, with it's cubs. Freaking out because you just fucking teleported into the woods (because otherwise the original hypothetical doesnt make any fucking sense) or at best, not even aware of your presence, which, seems unlikely. While also making the conflation that "a man might do something" yeah, literally anybody could do literally anything at any time. How many people do you see walking down the street with a bag/backpack and don't think twice about the fact that it could have a bomb in it? How many times do you drive down the road/highway assuming that someone behind you, infront of you, or passing you isn't going to fuck your day up completely? The answer is a lot Yeah sure a man might do something, the keyword here is might. The bear might also fucking do something. The man might also not even realize you exist to begin with.
It's important to remember that in the field of statistics, unless explicitly stated otherwise, the functional utility of the term "might" is equivalent across all situations, because there is literally no way to quantify "might" There is no statistical likelihood that something happens, or doesn't it merely has the possibility of happening. Quantifying that is an incredibly easy way to fuck up all kinds of numbers.
yeah, i don't even bother upvoting/downvoting anything because i just come here to talk with people lol. Although judging by this point this thread is probably long enough that nobody is even reading it anymore lol, which is only beneficial to the both of us.
yeah, i mostly just came here to argue that this statement is bad because it's vague and wrong, and neither of those make for a particularly solid argument. Sometimes it's useful to use arguments and statements like that as a mechanism to conceptualize things, which is why i even started this thread to begin with, i thought it would be interesting to conceptualize such a vague statement through such a strict rule set. It's a good way of learning about things, because it forces you and other people to think about it.
yes, the idea there was to make a point about how easy it is to say something nonsensical with no foundation and have people go "yeah that makes sense, i like this statement" people will try to make sense of shit that doesn't make sense, because we've been led to believe that words strung together have meaning. This is why chatgpt is so fucking good.
absolutely (not to mention make them statistically, less physically safe), which is why the statement being parroted by this post irks me, because it's obviously not considering the whole picture. And don't get me wrong, i do like the original statement from the get go, because the idea behind it is that "women feel so emotionally unsafe around men, that they would rather be with a bear, in the woods, because they have no prior experience with bears" the point is that it's supposed to be absurd, because it is, and the only reason why it is absurd is to make a point, about the underlying problem. The current problem is that people seem to have lost the concept of the original statement, and are simply now doing the usual "internet screaming match" over it, much like i did earlier in this comment lol.
The point is not that you would rather be with a bear the point is that you would rather not be with a man given the option of a bear and people seem to be focusing on the fact that they would rather be with a bear instead. The underlying problem here, as we can all agree, is that bears are not fun to be around, they shouldn't be more fun than being around a man, that's bad that's not something that should even be possible, yet it is.
I appreciate your reply.
I think this kind of misses the point. Women have given us their feelings on the man/bear topic. Which are implicitly valid as all feelings are (from men or women). Telling them that they have done an incorrect assessment of the situation is invalidating their feelings. This of course adds weight against the man category especially how a large group of people got personally offended by a data point. The interesting piece of information here is that women feel less safe with a man than a bear. Not that their feelings are rooted in reality, because they don't have to be.
The signal the women are getting is that yeah, their feeling don't matter. If their feelings don't matter, what else doesn't matter? Are they going to get "um, actually-ed" when they try to set personal boundaries. Can you see that if a lot of men don't respect women's feeling and personal boundaries that it can turn into a physical saftey issue?
To answer your paragraph about what is likely to happen or if the assessment is correct. I don't care. It's a roll of the dice. The bear will kill the woman sometime and the man will kill the woman sometimes and other times nothing will happen. I am not a bear scientist nor a sociologist, I don't have the numbers in front of me. The question of what actually would happen is uninteresting to me as it is a hypothetical. We don't need to accurately prepare for the man/woman/bare/woods situation, it's not likely to happen.
I did a quick (probably bad) google and I got this: "1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted).". from https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem.
I think I've seen this sign before.. If I'm not mistaken it's basically in every single strip club.
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I'm out of the loop on the bear situation, what happened?
Something about would you feel safer being stalked by a creepy dude or being stalked by a bear in the woods. Both could equally kill you, just one is more likely than the other to actually kill you.
Close, but it's just "would you rather" with any random man in the woods vs a random bear. No implied creepiness on the man's part. Just who would you feel more safe knowing one of the two is in the woods.
If you can't live knowing both of those are in the woods with you then I can only have faith in Darwin.
Shit meme
So, people's safety is more important than people's feelings, basically.
You're being reductionist to the point of losing the actual point but, if we assume you're doing so in good faith, then yes. Without a doubt yes. Given a choice between a person's feelings being hurt and a person getting physically hurt, the latter should win, especially when the only reason those feelings are hurt is because the person refuses to try to understand why or is so fragile they're unable to handle criticism.
Most men I know aren't made uncomfortable by this and, so far, the only ones who do have their feelings hurt are absolutely the ones women should choose the bear over. Not because they're bad people, but because an important point is being made and instead of trying to understand, they dig their heels in, refuse to understand, and now gripe about being victims because people are talking about things they don't want to think about.
I'm being far more universal than the obsession this narrow cisgender thread promotes. It was an issue with the pandemic. It is an issue with abortion rights. It is an issue with elections. It is an issue with so many things, that you would have to want to be willfully ignorant to focus on any single one. Your problem is humanity and their obsession to sacrifice people's safety for their feelings. People who put their feelings over your safety are the ones who should be avoided. No need to bring pandas into it.
Especially when alone in the woods. I feel like many people are glossing over this important part of the question.
It's not just any random guy you meet at starbucks, it's a random guy out in the middle of the woods.
Nono, only female safety and men feelings! Read the sign! /s
Well, obviously surviving is a bigger deal than one feeling...but, in some cases, having a feeling can lead to surviving something or succumbing to something.
Incels are so butthurt about this one. Grow up
Men's mental health is more important than women's feelings.
Yup.
I hope this isn't in context of the bear dilemma, because if so then that's a very contradictory statement.
I'm sorry, could you elaborate? Do you mean because transgender people are so much more likely to be the victims of violent crimes?
I believe the reason the sign is highlighting women (all women) as opposed to specifically transgender women or people in general is that so few people are transgender,, that's the Canadian 2022 census because it actually included questions on gender, resulting in 0.33% of the population stating they identify with a gender other than that they were assigned at birth. Whereas women usually make up just over half the population, and have usually been made to feel unsafe by men (for example, 97% of women report being catcalled), without touching the rest of the violence against women, almost all of which is perpetrated by men.
If I'm off the mark I would love to hear your thoughts.
I think they're trying to argue that transgender women aren't real women and that respecting them and allowing them to use spaces that align with their gender identity is endangering women.
That's how their comment reads to me, the way they dismissed the meme gives off those vibes.
But what if I'm a big huge baby about it, what then?
All the angry men here complaining about this meme are coping, face it men are seen as evil and dangerous by women, and they are right to see you that way. I was once like the people here talking shit about "misandry" and then my egg cracked and those angry masculine mannerisms melted away after I went on estrogen. It was then that I realized men are evil, masculinity is toxic, these are statements of truth and the only ones who deny this shit are cis men themselves.
You're correct, but you're every bit as angry as they are, and your comment is so devoid of any respect or empathy for men as fellow human beings that you're only making things worse for everyone.
You are the ammo that anti-sjw grifters put in their guns.
Like it or not, men are 50% of the population, and no one is getting anywhere by needlessly antagonising them
Not only are they 50% of the population that's circa 3.8 billion men, the stats are hard to find accurately but less than 1% of them are incarcerated for crime (all crime not just sexual assault) even if you were to drastically enhance that to say 5% (to account for men that have never been caught etc.) that still leaves 95% decent men in the world. The men Vs bear thing is a bullshit hypothetical designed only to divide and not address the real issue women are facing, from religion (especially in politics), poor education and internet fear mongering such as the men Vs bear topic designed to make people live their lives in fear instead of correcting the issues.
I'm not trying to say women don't live in fear, just that sexism isn't the way to fight sexism. It's pretty common knowledge that black people have the highest statistics for crime in general (without going into further discussion) does this mean we should all become racist? Because I certainly don't think that's the answer, just like topics designed around sexism aren't the answer here.
It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but more misinformation and exaggerated statements is one of the biggest threats currently facing humanity, man Vs bear does nothing but add to this.
Yes there is a problem, yes it needs addressing, discussions like this are far from helpful and only alienate half the allies.
Totally, you're right.
The whole discussion is entirely feelings based, as despite the percentage men actually committing being really low (as far as our stats can tell) it doesn't really matter that much.
Same with the bear, actual bear attacks are so statistically unlikely to occur that it's irrelevant to the discussion, even if we had the required stats to make it a 1 to 1.
Assuming only 1% of men do something (illegal or otherwise) that makes a woman feel afraid, that 1% can do that to multiple women. If they do it to 100 different women, that's enough that 100% of women have experienced it.
Negative experiences stick in our mind a lot more readily than good ones, and it creates the perception that a chosen random man could be more dangerous than a bear.
And I'm not saying they're wrong, my take away is still that enough men are shit, and we as a society need to do better.
Equally, using shock value and absurd hypotheticals is going to cause emotional reactions in men, and sure, that gets the message out. But we can't act surprised and start demonising men when they act shocked and disagree with the absurd hypothetical. It's valid to feel hurt by the statement, and telling people their feelings don't matter distracts from the issue
The discussion is the right one, but we all need to start blaming the right people. Toxic masculinity, religion and poor education. Dividing people like this isn't the way forward.
It's so tiring seeing the men coming in and deliberately misunderstanding what's being discussed. They will do literally anything, appear dumb as rocks, to not recognize rape culture and admit potentially any fault or responsibility towards it's continued existence. They take everything personally instead of being able to see that societal problems there are also responsible for helping to fix.
Are we also going to tolerate the same with Islam and terrorism? POC and safety because "crime statistics"? If those are not acceptable because it's not anyone's individual responsibility for others in an involuntarily assigned group, why is this ok?
see my comment here if you would
Same arguments, still wrong. Fuck off misogynist.
Here's the problem with that statement. I agree that there is a problem with men committing rape. However, I (along with most men) have never raped anybody. Furthermore I have not done anything to perpetuate the actions of the minority of men who do commit sex crimes. Therefore I do NOT take responsibility or admit fault for their actions. Saying that men as a whole are the problem is offensive and unhelpful. It's how random peaceful Muslims feel when conservatives tell them they need to take responsibility for the actions of terrorists and take action to stop terrorists "in their community" like all Muslims are in one big group chat. I would straight up give my life to prevent a woman I don't know from being raped. Idk what more you want from me.
Your tiny bit of discomfort is clearly more important than rape culture that, yes you too, are contributing to. This is contribution to ignoring rape culture.
Your willful ignorance and not listening to women is enabling rapists.
the difference is that the patriarchy exists and favors men. there is no systematic structure that puts Muslims above others, at the expense of others, in a way that is parallel to what the patriarchy does.
i get what you are saying, and maybe not too long ago i was professing quite similar feelings, but i encourage you to self interrogate how big of a difference that is. truly hope this is helpful.
So it is the level of "privilege" that does or does not allow the commission of -isms then. The better off the target is, the more acceptable discrimination is? That is also a very Western perspective. It would be ok to tell Muslims in the Middle East that terrorism is their responsibility because their country's power structure does put Islam firmly above others?
This "some animals are more equal than others" stuff is moral equivocating. If something is wrong if done to a group that isn't "in power", then it is also wrong to do it to the group "in power". This isn't a zero sum game. We don't have to weight the guilt by association for a black man when compared with a white man because systemic racism competes with systemic patriarchy. If you do think that the immutable characteristics a person is born with are the most important things about them, I would encourage you to self interrogate how messed up that is.
No. It is the presence of privelege at all in the first place that holds all of us responsible to address that privelage as a reality when protecting one another.
No, I reject that characterization of what intersectionalist feminism is altogether. Read further for more.
No, because you are equivocating two different meanings of “responsibility.” Feminism calls for a brother’s keeper responsibility, not direct culpability responsibility. It is absolutely valid for example, to expect Islamic leaders or followers to speak out against violence — and they absolutely do without you or I even asking. Much similarly, I ask Christians in the U.S. to recognize their position of power and to speak out against christofascist or transphobic violence, and that happens also (though perhaps less frequently than I would like). On the same level, I ask all men to take brother’s keeper responsibility and to hold one another accountable, recognizing their position of privilege while taking steps to protect others, especially when it comes to listening to women expressing their lived experiences rather than talking over them.
It’s a subtle difference but so incredibly important, so read it again if needed. Brothers keeper responsibility, not direct culpability.
It isn't always deliberate, I can guarantee you that.
this comment section has been so enlightening about the makeup of this side of the fediverse. and all i can say is i am so sorry. i always guessed it was a male-heavy makeup but i never thought it would precipitate this badly.
this community usually veers leftist and toward respecting human dignity, but it appears as soon as women express the pain and fear that is forced upon them for merely existing all of that is lost and their comments are getting 30/70 downvoted, even in conversations where folks have already acknowledged the caveat of the importance of non-alienating.
it’s clear there is a lot of work to be done when one of the most progressive communities i have ever followed is so packed with malinformed spite as soon as the subject comes to humans asking for the basic privilege of safety.
Agreed and well said. It's very disheartening. For me it's just another example of how pervasive and ingrained the patriarchy and misogyny is.
❤️
Not all men /s
Your comment really hits the nail on the head, esp the dumb as rocks part. I think part of that stupidity is legitimately not being able to see past our own privilege.
E: baha, downvote me harder, you nematodes
Yeah. I give some benefit of the doubt but after seeing plenty of varied and good explanations I'm tired of holding everyone's hand who's had plenty of chances to learn. After a while it just becomes men not listening and believing women which is too typical.