Gentlewomen prefer bears

It's all fandom and it's all ridiculous

I was admittedly lukewarm on the original "would you rather" discourse surrounding men as compared to bears. There was a Midsommar joke to be made, so I did, but that was meant to be the extent of it. Beyond that, this seemed like a debate for the horde of amateur statisticians who spent several days gamely trying to calculate the mathematical odds of death or dismemberment at the hands of each creature, using such relevant factors as (I am just guessing here) the species of bear; the setting and/or season; whether bear or man or both might have recently consumed cocaine, and if so, whether there is any cocaine left; etc.

But then I reposted Megan McArdle's followup thread to her (very good) article about the man-vs-bear debate, and then someone in my replies told me that I was missing the point, which is that men are dangerous and women should fear them, and then I was like, arghhhh. Because I know this is the point. It is always the point! And it is always a bad one. 

The problem, or at least a problem, with this topic is that the whole debate is based on vibes and fandom-based internet discourse, but it's dressed up as something data-driven. People start out feeling a particular way, affiliating with a particular team, and then go hunting for statistics to explain why whatever that team’s position is only right and reasonable. For instance, people on Team Men Are Trash, who start out wanting to believe that men are categorically dangerous to women, will often bring up a study in which 13% of the respondents, a group of 82 male college juniors at a university in North Dakota, said they would hypothetically commit a rape if they were assured of getting away with it. 

Look: of course, in an ideal world, the number of men who answered "yes" to the would-you-rape-someone question would be zero. But you simply cannot map this data point, such as it is, onto the likelihood of any one man assaulting any one woman in any one woods in 2024. In truth, I'm not sure how well it even maps onto the real-life propensity for sexual violence of the ten male undergrads who answered this question in the affirmative (and who were probably only taking this survey to begin with because they needed the extra credit to pass Psych 101.) Even if we assume that they were answering the question seriously (I am extremely skeptical on this front), how much weight does would carry, really, in this context? 

It reminds me of those other self-reported datasets that sometimes go viral online, in which people estimate their odds of winning a fight against various animals in hand-to-hand combat: a horse, a lion, a turkey, a turtle. People always laugh at the egomaniacs who give themselves a better-than-even shot against the literal apex predators, but I'm more intrigued by the delusional majority who think they could easily fight, for instance, the turkey. (Narrator: You could not easily fight the turkey.) Humans just aren’t the most reliable assessors of their own abilities, generally speaking. What we're capable of, what we'll want, what we would or could do given the opportunity: we struggle to answer these questions accurately even when there’s an actual decision involved and we’ll have to live with the material consequences of our choices. People make trainwrecks of their lives every day because they failed to accurately anticipate how they would behave in a given situation. Relocate this "what would you do" exercise into some sort of consequence-free fantasy realm and… I don't know, I guess I'll believe in your ability to commit the hypothetical felony sex crime when I see it¹.

But of course, the entire man-vs-bear debate is itself located in a consequence-free fantasy realm — the same one that periodically spews forth one of those polls that asks women what they would do if all the men in the world suddenly disappeared. Women respond to these prompt with things like "I'd go for a run late at night," or "I'd hike alone in the woods," or "I'd wander the streets in my underwear for funzies," and it's all in good fun and sisterly solidarity, but only because everyone knows it's absolute baloney. Perhaps needless to say, there's a whole lot of stuff we'd be doing, urgently, if all the men in the world suddenly vanished, and absolutely none of it involves recreationally wearing lingerie. But there's also an overlooked inverse truth to this: if you really believed that half the population of the planet was such an imminent and categorical danger to you that you needed to fear them every time you went outside, there are certain things you would do, in your everyday life, to protect yourself — and the women who claim to believe this aren't doing any of them.  

Meanwhile, if we actually wanted to have a serious discussion about women’s relative risk of being harmed by men, we would have to eventually at least mention that men are vastly more likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of random violence. They are far more dangerous to each other in this context than they are to women. We’d also want to mention that when it comes to violence against women, the man you should actually be worried about, statistically, is someone you already know. We don’t mention this, though, because we would rather post things like this:

You know that phenomenon we were just discussing, of the crazy things people claim they would do when they know full well they will never be called on to back it up? As of this writing, 36,000 people have liked this cartoon. I can’t imagine that a single one of those 36,000 actually believes that the outcome depicted in it is possible, but if it were, I also believe that not one of them would actually want it to happen or be a willing participant if it did. I don't care how much you hate men, I don't care how many S. Craig Zahler movies you've watched, absolutely none of you are going to just casually behead and eat the dead body of a random guy you met in the woods.

Some people will claim otherwise, of course, but that is because they are too neck-deep in the fandom-based beef between Team Women Are Irrational and Team Men Are Trash to have a serious conversation about anything.

1. Not that I want to see it! A PSA, please don't commit any sex crimes and if you do, please definitely do not show them to me.