Liz Plank explains why.
A controversial video is going viral online asking women a simple, yet poignant question: Would you rather be stuck alone in the forest with a bear or a man?
While we would expect women to answer anything but being stranded with one of the most terrifying creatures on earth, most of the people in the video said they feared a different kind of apex predator: the opposite sex.
The video launched an exhaustive conversation about female safety and sparked a debate about how much of a hazard men are to women. “Our mothers never felt a need to warn us about bears,” one woman commented on the video. “A bear might actually stop if I play dead, a man will take it as an open invitation,” wrote another. “If I got attacked by an animal, people would believe me and nobody would ask what I had on” quipped another. #NotAllMen would be a threat to a woman, but without the option to know what man they’d be marooned with, many chose some bear over some dude.
While this online discourse gave many men a lot to think about, some chose to throw a temper tantrum about it, claiming that women are liars (how original) and that they exaggerate the threat of male violence in their lives. But as we know, the size of the backlash to a feminist trend is always commensurate with how much self-reflection it’s forcing men to have about the female experience. So instead of invalidating women’s feelings, let’s dig into them instead!
Why would women fear boys more than bruins?
Well for starters, it’s logical. To explain this, instead of a forest, let’s take an even higher stakes situation like a battlefield. And instead of a bear, let’s go even bigger and use an army of people who’ve been trained to kill you. You’d assume that a woman would be less afraid of a man she’s stranded with, than the actual enemy right? Well, you’d be wrong.
According to data from the Pentagon, male soldiers pose a more existential threat to female service members than war itself. Given that one in four women who join the military will be sexually assaulted by a man within her ranks, the fear of her fellow man (and in this case literal colleague) is a rational one. A woman in the military is more likely to be raped by a fellow service member than to be killed by enemy fire. It’s a chilling statistic, but a crucial piece of evidence that shows that for women, the call is coming from inside the house, or in this case, her barrack. “The worst thing for me is that you don’t have to worry about the enemy, you have to worry about your own soldiers,” Dora Hernandez, a member of the U.S. Navy and the Army National Guard, told NPR.
While bears and menacing armies present a real and vivid threat to women, men who are supposed to protect or fight alongside them can be, statistically speaking, more treacherous.
Focusing on dramatic tales of violence like bear attacks ignores the very real fact that the safest people and the safest places for men are consistently the most perilous for women.
For instance, a house may be safe for men, but as the pandemic showed us with its unprecedented increase in femicide and domestic violence, the most dangerous place for a woman is not in the street, it’s in her own home. Every hour in 2021, more than five girls or women were killed by someone they were related to, which means that women aren’t safer with men inside, they’re more at risk when they’re confined to being in close quarters with them.
And while men are safer around people they know, women are more likely to be killed or raped by people they know. So even if we were to let a woman choose to be trapped in the forest with a man she’s familiar with, it still wouldn’t offer her more safety, statistically speaking. While most men who are murdered are victimized by strangers, women are most often killed by someone they know, usually an intimate partner or a member of their family. Research shows that 90 percent of women know their rapist. Given that almost a quarter of sexual assaults happen by a current or former sexual partner, it means that a woman would be safer in a forest with a man she doesn’t know than with any of her exes. Home is a secure place for men, but for women, it’s where they can be the most prone to attack.
The reason it feels counter-intuitive that women could be safer with bears than with men, or safer outside than inside their own homes, or safer with strangers than with men they know, is because we fundamentally misunderstand gender-based violence. We believe that self-defense classes and rape whistles will minimize our victimization when the truth is that avoiding men we know might actually be a far more effective way to prevent abuse.
And even if the bear does attack us, it feels more comforting than the man doing it. At least a bear won’t sexually degrade me, torture me, or hide me in his basement for 20 years. There’s something about being alone with the unbridled patriarchal male psyche that feels more frightening than being caught between the tentacles of any wild animal.
And let’s be clear that the problem here is not male. Men aren’t inherently psychopathic or bad across the animal kingdom. In fact, if bears had TikTok accounts, and a girl bear was asked if she would prefer to be alone with a boy bear or a mountain lion (one of the few predators of bears), she would probably pick the bear, because boy bears don’t typically hunt girl bears. In other words, males aren’t destined to harm the females of their species.
But the bear versus man video makes us face an uncomfortable truth: Patriarchy makes men go after their own kind. Even the language around mating and dating that likens men pursuing women as “hunting their prey” is evolutionarily unsound. There are enough predators that women have to worry about, without the potential of one of their own turning against them. As the French anthropologist Françoise Héritier once noted, it’s not human nature that makes men eliminate or hurt women, it’s a system called patriarchy that legitimizes and justifies that violence. And while it may be depressing, it also means it’s changeable.
The bear experiment shouldn’t make men mad, it should make them pause. The more we can be curious about the experiences of women under patriarchy, rather than question them, the better positioned we are to modify the systems that harm us all. The fact that this dialogue about gender-based violence could be uncomfortable is what makes it most imperative. Men should be bold and have that conversation, even if they’re scared. If women are strong enough to brave a bear alone in the woods, then surely men can muster up the courage to talk about the reason why.
Liz is an award-winning journalist and international bestselling author. She hosts Synced, a podcast with Monica Padman and Dax Shepard, and the Man Enough podcast with Justin Baldoni and Jamey Heath, where they interview influential figures about their journey to manhood. Plank regularly appears on national and international television programs to provide a perspective on politics, gender issues, and reproductive rights, including The Today Show, The Daily Show, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, Fusion, Al-Jazeera America, and BBC World.
This piece originally appeared in Liz Plank’s substack Airplane Mode, which you can subscribe to here.
