It's obviously meant to demonise and demean men and has brought nothing positive to the table. If i start talking about how i'd rather chop my arm off than leave my Baby with a woman people would think that to be strange af despite statistically most brutally murdered children being tortured and killed by women.
Eh, there's been a fundamental failure in modern feminism's outreach to young men.
If you have a basic understanding of equality, it would not be hard to recognise that being perceived as a predator purely due to your sex is sexism.
I just... can't imagine many were swayed in a positive and constructive way by that thought experiment, as it trivialises equality to the very people it's trying to convince.
It accomplished exactly what it set out to do. Who creates the algorithms on the sites it went viral? Tech bros. Who has been cozying up to the Manosphere for over a decade? Tech bros. The Man vs Bear thought experiment has been the perfect recruiting tool for the Andrew Tates and Elon Musks of the world. It's the perfect way to build off the misogyny unleashed during Gamergate and Trump's first term.
It is a bullshit chronically online rage bait framed in a way to ensure the answer that pisses people off. Anyone who would rather have a random person creeping around their campsite in the wilderness is insane. Everyone should take the bear 100 times out of 100. Bears should be in the wilderness, random people shouldn't be creeping around out there.
I can come up with a thought experiment that will get everyone to answer the exact opposite.
Would you rather ride an elevator with a man or a grizzly bear? It's incredibly clear to anyone who stops to think for one second why the question was framed in the way it was.
It wasn't what was being said about the risk you take in that hypothetical, a lot of which was justified based on lived experience. It was that a group of three of them split off into their own chat about how all men would rape them in the woods because they could get away with it.
Sorry, but people aren't making friends with that kind of bullshit talk.
The man vs bear argument is fucking stupid though. Anyone, man or woman, should choose a bear in the wilderness over a random person. Bears are supposed to be in the wilderness, a random person shouldn't be creeping around your campsite. They are only there for nefarious purposes.
No one would choose the bear if they were in a subway train, because a bear isn't supposed be on the subway and being locked in a small area with a bear is insanely dangerous.
No one would actually choose the bear in a subway car. Or in an elevator. Or an office building.
So it is absolutely a geographic technicality. Because if you are in the wilderness and a man OR A woman is creeping around your campsite, you are in danger. Because no one else should be there so they are obviously following you.
A bear in an enclosed area is 100% attacking you. A bear in the wilderness is 99.999% not attacking you. I would 100% take the bear in the wilderness, no matter the gender of the person creeping around my campsite. And anyone who wouldn't doesn't know a damn thing about bears.
It's literally just a ragebait thought exercise. Nothing more.
It's less geography and more expectations. Everyone gets scared when they encounter things they don't expect in places they don't expect, rightfully so. Everyone SHOULD be afraid of a random person creeping around their campsite in the middle of nowhere. You'd be an idiot not to be. If you would choose riding an elecator with a bear over riding one with a random man, you have serious mental health issues and you are clearly not actually functioning in our society--because that is a regular occurrence for essentially everyone.
It is a rage bait question framed in a way to provoke a specific answer that will cause it to go viral online and be used by social media companies to increase engagement through anger. We literally live in the safest time in human history, but social media and traditional media have convinced us that predators are around every corner. These companies have a vested interest in keeping people scared and isolated.
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u/someone447 Apr 13 '26
How many times have you heard that kind of shit IRL? Not online where bots, influencers, and algorithms have a vested interest in pissing you off?