To be a Misandrist, You Kinda Have to Hate Men. Rational Fear isn’t Hatred.

Yesterday, a woman published a list of reasons women would rather encounter a bear than a man in the woods. Here are some of her reasons:

“The bear won’t say you were asking for it.
The bear won’t say it was consensual.
People won’t tell you you’re paranoid for being cautious around bears.”

It also pointed to an interesting statistic: In 2020 to 2022, bears killed eight North Americans. Men killed 12,000 women.

If you post the abovementioned quote online, men accuse you of misandry. If bears could talk, though, they wouldn’t call your fear bear-hating bigotry, and nor would any humans. Bears do, indeed, occasionally attack people. They have scary teeth, and if you watched Cocaine Bear, you’ll also know they do a lot of drugs, yet do we have any bear rehabs? No. No we do not. Down with coke. Up with 12-step bears.

It’s not bigotry if you’re acknowledging a truth, and those 12, 000 murdered women are real. Their bodies tell the truth. Their deaths tell the truth. Their silence tells the truth. Globally, 89,000 women were murdered in 2022. Thirteen per cent of rape survivors attempt suicide, so let’s add that to the statistics as well.

We aren’t scared because we hate men.
We’re scared because men are assaulting and killing us.

We’re not reticent to trust because we’re bigots.
We’re reticent because we’ve trusted men many times in the past, and that has caused us enormous trauma. Some of us barely got out alive.

We don’t distrust men out of choice. We distrust them out of necessity. Trusting too easily will eventually lead to violence. You might work through 20 good men in between the criminals, but those crimes are life-altering. We can’t afford to make one more mistake. Most of us are still working through the horrors of the last error, and we’re already exhausted from the trauma. Many of us just don’t have another rape in us.

I don’t hate bears. I think they’re beautiful beings. I think men are beautiful, too, especially those already in my life. To be a misandrist, you kinda have to hate men, but fear isn’t hatred, and nor is risk mitigation.

Male allies understand this. They encourage us to be careful with our trust, even with them, because they know that not all men are good. They aren’t threatened by that fact because they know they are good and that we will trust them in time.

Let me tell you something about the man who accuses women of misandry for citing femicide rates: He’d rather run into a woman in the woods than a man. He doesn’t hate men, though. He legitimately believes he’s immune from the accusation he keeps making against women.

I invite that man to spend a year in close quarters with a hungry bear — perhaps even one that hasn’t done rehab yet.