this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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The people pointing out the women killed by bears vs men stats a few months ago need to understand this as well lol
Like I am fine if you want to meme or dunk on men but once you bring bad stats into it that’s when I get serious.
The first time I saw the man or bear question, I assumed it was a setup for victim blaming. Neither choice is going to be a win for the woman.
Based on experiences, she doesn't trust men so she picks bear? How dare she judge all men. So illogical!
Or she picks man? Then she should be prepared for an inevitable assault because eventually the man in the woods will be one of the bad ones and she should have known. She should have been more careful or just stayed home!
The whole thing was never a maths question. It was a rage bait question to rile up men who hate women and to give women an unwinnable binary choice. The only "winning" answer is to decline to play this stupid game.
The new women in mens fields trend is the same thing. Its there to agravate people by doing the thing people claim to hate just to a different group. Equality does not mean every one gets a turn at being the opresser and I can see why young people start to consider themself anti feminists if these two trends are the most interaction you've ever done with feminism. Which is likely since I don't really see any other big social media movements for it.
Maybe its not my place to critisize the way they choose to operate but all im saying is if you told me both of those trends were Russian plots to stoke anger at feminists I'd believe you easily.
All good points I hadn’t considered! However, some people did try to turn it into a math problem which I had to object to at that point, since they were doing it wrong.
I assume that part of the intent with these type of scenarios is to draw attention to toxic masculinity by baiting out toxic responses, which is fine and obviously it's effective if that is the intent. However, any attempt to respectfully disagree with the premise was also treated as toxicity and that just made me not want to engage with feminists or the discourse at all, which seems counter-productive.
This too is Not A Pipe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
Appreciate the link, but damn is that low-effort surrealism
Tell me you're old without telling me you're old :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpmGXeAtWUw
It's obtuse to treat the bear metaphor as a math problem. It's doubly so to correct the work.
But would you rather be alone in the woods with a statistician or a bear?
That's pretty F'ed up
Is it? Men as a class are privileged. I’m fine with punching up.
Note this does not apply to individuals and certain subsets of men who may be relatively less privileged (gay men, black men, etc.)
Why do you think it’s fucked up? What’s the harm?
You're asking what the harm in bigotry is?
No, I’m asking you to explain a specific harm in a specific case which I don’t believe matches any reasonable definition of bigotry.
Ah, so bigotry is okay when it's against specific groups then. Gotcha.
Attempts to dodge the question make it clear that you cannot articulate any harm here. Which is one of the things that makes it not bigotry. Go touch grass mate.
I shouldn't need to articulate why its harmful to insult people based on attributes they were born with. Sex and gender are protected classes under the laws of almost every developed nation. Bigotry is harmful, even if you think that the group you're being bigoted towards has some perceived advantage. Arbitrarily stereotyping 50% of the earth's population is foolish and closed-minded.
We’re not even talking about insulting people. We’re talking about humor that points out the very real fact that men are by a huge margin the main perpetrators of violence against women (and against men too!)
Again, how is that harmful?
You've moved the goalposts. Originally you said that it was okay because the targeted group is privileged, and now you're saying it's okay because they're the majority demographic for a specific crime. My response is the same either way though. It's wrong because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes against an entire group of people, rather than treating them as individuals like everyone deserves to be treated. Harmful stereotypes influence everything from common perception, all the way up to things like custodial preference in custody cases between two parents, regardless of the qualifications or behavior of the parents, or spousal abuse when the victim is a male. Substitute "men" for any other group and see how your majority demographic argument feels.
yeah I think the way I always read that question was in the hundred duck sized horses vs one horse-sized duck sense. The average woman passes by, say, in public, hundreds of men per day in a city, right? I read that question (and the implication) that they’d prefer from a safety standpoint if each one of them was a bear, which is more of a video game premise than a situation anyone would survive.
Men kill more women than bears even adjusted per encounter.
I'm not here to argue about the bear metaphor, but this claim seems spurious at best. Even if there's only 1 fatal bear encounter per 10 years, the number of bear encounters is so low that I don't think this statistic can possibly be true. Do you have anything to back up your claim, or is this just a gut feeling sort of thing?
Have fun
This seems to be comparing percent of women who've been attacked by a bear to the percent of women who've been attacked by a man, which... I mean, I guess? But a more fair statistic would be comparing the percentage of bear encounters that result in an attack to the percentage of man encounters that result in an attack. This is also comparing fatal bear attacks to non-fatal man attacks. Not to mention, their conclusion that a woman is safer in a forest with 260 bears than with one man assumes that the man is with them, and the bears just exist somewhere in the forest and may never see nor even be aware of them.
I agree with the conclusion that a woman has a greater chance of being victimized by a man than by a bear, but this whole argument just feels like it's designed to not stand up to critical analysis with the intent of labeling whoever tries to call it into question a misogynist, though, and I'm not going to get into all of that again.
The entire question itself I don't think was ever meant to hold up to any analysis. It's more about making a statement on how threatened women feel in public. Bear attacks are rare while women are acutely aware of how dangerous being out in public feels. Roughly 20% will be sexually assaulted at least once, half of them before the age of 18, and that number jumps up to somewhere around 40% for trans women specifically, but the stats don't account for the cultural pressure that's exerted on every other woman outside of the victims by things like victim blaming and the way that men act in regards to women and their bodies. A simple look at current American politics is a perfect example of why women would "choose the bear."
The whole thing kind of reminds me of the question about the walrus and the fairy that went around Tumblr earlier this year. It doesn't matter what the stats say about the likelihood of a fairy being the one knocking at your door. More people would be surprised to find the walrus on their doorstep because at least with a fairy, you just have to accept that magic exists and not figure out how the walrus got there or learned how to knock on your door.
Sure, and that's fine - but if that's the case, why do we get long-winded explanations with stats and math like the one linked to earlier? Maybe not everyone got the memo that it wasn't supposed to hold up to scrutiny, but when someone writes something like that, apparently with the intention of it looking like an actual statistical analysis of an actual situation, they're opening themself up to analysis and criticism.
Honestly, I think you're spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it's not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.
I think that was inherently my problem with the whole thing. It may have had good intentions originally - using metaphor to draw attention to a problem in a way that might have gotten through to people who don't understand or reject more straight-forward discussion - and that's great when it works, but because of the absurdity of the premise, it ended up being a magnet for scrutiny and objections. As a result, there were three main kind of responses:
Group 3 were the truly toxic responses, and they did a good job at highlighting the underlying message (or perhaps at highlighting a specific kind of person, who will just object to anything a woman says no matter what, or who refuses to believe that women are justified in their fear of men, or who are incels, or whatever else), but they, and the responses to them, kind of took over the entirety of the discourse surrounding it... it became about those people objecting and others objecting to their objections. At that point, it felt like the whole point was to shine a spotlight on toxic individuals, and the real message was lost to that.
That was an interesting read but it's not the math per encounter. They strangely used lifetime stats and ignored number of encounters so it doesn't answer that question.
Some of the other commenters who point out flaws in the math seem to get their comments deleted or downvoted so that doesn't help. It's a controversial topic which makes it really hard to just crunch numbers without being accused of picking a side or trying to skew the results.
Coming up with the stat that 10% of men will commit a rape in their lifetimes is wild though, and super sad if true.
The person doing the analysis also takes a statistic about intimate partner rape including where the woman believes actual rape happened and where the woman felt like he might have tried to, then immediately casts it as actual rapes against strangers by serial street rapists.
It's not in the least credible
Wait why are we killing bears?
Fits of jealousy.
Do they? That’s hard to believe but if they did the stats right then feel free to share. How do you even measure the number of encounters?
Unfortunately, Steve's data is wholly anecdotal. He's killed 8 of the 10 women he's ever met, see..