Who loses ‘man or bear’ showdown? Women

Pop quiz for the ladies in the audience: Imagine you’re hiking through the wilderness, round a curve and find a bear standing in the path ahead of you. Fortunately, it’s looking the other way, so you hastily prepare to retrace your steps — only to find that a strange man has appeared at the other end of the path.

Assume you don’t want to wander off the trail and into unfamiliar woods. Which do you choose, dear reader? Man or bear?

If you’re wondering why I’ve confronted you with this unlikely quandary, the answer, of course, is social media. The meme is a viral sensation that seems to have originated with a 29-second TikTok video in which women were asked whether they’d rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. This being a hypothetical question asked by an engagement-hunting influencer, rather than real life, almost all the women chose the bear.

Largely, the internet took this in the lighthearted spirit in which it had presumably been meant. The flanks, however, promptly went insane. There were men complaining about misandry, as though the women in the video were dead serious. Other folks, apparently having decided that this stupidity wasn’t stupid enough, insisted that of course they were serious, because, obviously, bears are less dangerous to women than men are.

Which is when I stopped rolling my eyes and started to also take it seriously.

I understand the latter group wants to help women by emphasizing the very real threat of male violence. But it doesn’t help women to slander the overwhelming majority of men who would never dream of attacking a woman they had stumbled across in the woods. And it outright hurts women to reinforce harmful stereotypes about our sex: namely, that we are irrational, neurotic and bad at math. Far too many of these arguments commit statistical malpractice, especially the ones that purport to prove their point with statistics.

But wait, aren’t most violent crimes committed by men? Shouldn’t women be vigilant if they find themselves in some isolated spot with a strange man?

Yes, in the United States, men commit about 80 percent of violent crimes, a high percentage of them against women, especially sexual assault. So, yes, women should stay alert in such situations. But if women think about all the times we’ve found ourselves in an otherwise deserted street or empty parking lot with men we didn’t know, we’ll recall that in almost every case, the men left us alone.

The fact that violent criminals are likely to be men doesn’t mean that any given man is likely to commit a violent crime — any more than the fact that all U.S. presidents have been native-born Americans means that every native-born American has been president of the United States. That’s a statistical fallacy known as “confusing a probability with its inverse.” Alas, it’s not the only such fallacy to mar this debate.

The bear-baiters argue, correctly, that bears almost never attack humans, then incorrectly compare the small number of bear attacks to the large number of times men attack women. “Since 2020, there have been exactly seven women killed by bears and 15 nonfatal attacks on women” in the United States, notes one popular video, whereas “since 2020, there have been 8,000 fatal attacks on women by men and 1.6 million nonfatal attacks.”

I haven’t personally checked those statistics, or others of this type floating around on social media, because it doesn’t matter. Even if they’re accurate, they’re fatally undermined by another basic statistical error: comparing two numerators without adjusting for different denominators.

Using the same logic, I can “prove” that driving to the grocery store is more dangerous than eating tablespoons of arsenic, because 42,514 Americans died in car crashes in 2022, while arsenic poisoning kills about three people a year. But, of course, if we all megadosed arsenic at the same rate we climbed into automobiles, arsenic would kill a lot more people — presumably everyone, except the Amish.

Similarly, though violence from strange men is a much bigger problem for women than violence from strange bears, remember that, in a typical year, most women encounter somewhere between dozens and tens of thousands of men, while outside of a zoo, they will probably see zero bears. That larger numerator is spread across a much larger denominator.

However, in our hypothetical, the denominators are the same: one man or one bear. It would be idiotic to look at the numbers above and conclude that any random bear is less dangerous than a random guy. Though the National Park Service notes that bears usually leave humans alone, it also goes suggests a disturbingly long list of ways to get away from a bear or survive an attack.

Of course, there are other attacks that bears do not commit, and that women justifiably fear, especially sexual assault. According to a 2017 government survey, nearly 50 percent of women have had unwanted sexual contact with a man, while a woman’s lifetime risk of forcible rape is higher than 16 percent. One in 8 of those rapes is committed by a stranger — like our hypothetical man in the woods. All these numbers are appallingly too high. But that doesn’t mean 16 percent of men are rapists (many of these attacks are committed by repeat offenders). And we should also account for nonfatal but devastating bear attacks, such as the grizzly that ripped a man’s jaw off in Montana last September.

Such injuries would occur a lot more often if there were as many bears as men in this country. And if those bears lived among us, rather than way off in the woods, so a lone woman was as likely to encounter a bear as a man? A realistic assessment of the relative risks doesn’t seem to work out in favor of the bear.

And that’s what we need when talking about women’s safety: a realistic assessment of the unacceptable risk that a small minority of men pose to women.

Obviously, the bear-istas hope the bear comparison will inspire empathy for our vulnerability among the nonviolent majority of men. But then, if we want them on our side, best not to lead with the implication that men in general are dangerous predators. At best, you’ll sound like a maniac; at worst, men and women will take you seriously, exacerbating our society’s increasingly bitter gender divide, and possibly also the rising rates of debilitating anxiety among young women.

So, for heaven’s sake, stop suggesting that men are no better than animals. And ladies, if you should ever find yourself in a parking garage with a strange man and a strange bear, I wouldn’t recommend that you ask the bear to walk you to your car.