Man Versus Bear: Better the Devil You Know

What the men didn’t get

Photo by Daniel Diesenreither on Unsplash

Unless you’ve been in a coma, under a rock, or on a sensible vacation recently, you’ll have seen the ‘Man vs Bear' debate on socials. A TikTok comment in a March 12 post by @callmebkbk kicked it all off. While talking about misandry, he said that for women:

“If you’re alone in the woods, seeing a man is ten times scarier than seeing a bear.”

Note that he didn’t pose it as an either/or question for women, just as a fact about our lives. On March 19, it went viral after he asked men to think about why the world looks so different for women that we might pick the bear encounter.

All hell, as the saying goes, broke loose.

While women listed the hundreds of reasons they preferred the possibility of running into a bear, men lived up to expectations, swooping in with all the reasons women were wrong. Their collective ability to miss the point, even while mansplaining the issue to women, should be a new Olympic event.

So, once again, let’s break it down:

“Men have created the safest space that has existed in a billion years.”

Ah, relative privation — from an archaeological anthropologist, no less. (Not). Usually voiced in the “Not as bad as…