Apr 22, 2025 Society
Would you rather find yourself alone in the woods with a man or a bear? A carefully calibrated question designed to go viral, and it did; the swift reply of “bear” from most women framed as revealing and shocking in what that implied about men.
The question, initially posed in April 2024 in a video compilation of quick-fire street interviews, has since had a second life as a sort of meme — I often see comments along the lines of “this is why we say ‘bear’” left underneath articles about the most horrific misogynistic violence. These comments often come across as glib and rote in the face of serious and devastating transgressions, although I’m sure they are meant to convey sincere feeling.
While this memetic echo is used to evoke women’s deep and primal fear of men — this was how media coverage was pitched, too, with an emphasis on women’s ‘frightening reality’ and the like — when you watch the original video, the women answering don’t seem afraid or even like they’re taking the question that seriously. They mostly laugh when they answer, cheeky and sly like they’re in on a joke, which they are: Of course I’ll say bear, because men suck shit.
God, it was so performative, both the video and the overwrought articles that followed (“Men need to listen!” Okay, and then what?). It pissed me right off, to be honest. I simply didn’t buy that women were so very afraid all the time, and I didn’t think many of the women saying so really meant it either.
I was going through a period of feeling particularly out of sync with what passed for feminist thought in popular culture, and it was making me mean and uncharitable. Whichever wave we were in struck me as impotent and a bit whiny. I often thought about a tweet from an American writer I like, Brandy Jensen, who wrote in 2020 that “feminists [are] quickly overtaking atheists as the most embarrassing group i share my beliefs with”.
I kept wondering who it was all for, exactly. We all know men can be and are violent toward women — do we think anyone who doesn’t accept this basic truth will be swayed by a sassy analogy into changing their minds? Why did the online coverage have to be so breathless and credulous? It was cheap, I thought. I had a particular bee in my bonnet about what seemed to me a preoccupation with foregrounding women’s ever-present fear of men’s violence, our meekness, our status as perpetual victims.
It felt like the performance of both fear and jokey heteropessimism (men suck shit) had blurred into one useless, endless act. Say what you like about second-wave feminists, at least they had the guts to commit to lesbian separatism. Of course, the reason it was annoying me so much was that I used to do exactly the same thing. In my early 20s, I would talk a big game about how vigilant and afraid I was, in Facebook statuses and tweets and impassioned arguments with annoying guys. In reality, I acted as though the world was mine for the taking: walking home alone drunk in the dead of night, going home with someone and not telling anyone where I was, befriending random men at parties and festivals and in bars. I trusted my own instincts and they did a pretty good job of keeping me safe.
So why did I pretend? Well, I think I thought I had to, in order for my feelings to be taken seriously. Because really bad things actually had happened to several women I loved, and less bad but still wounding things had happened to many of us. I had recently come to understand basic feminist theory, which gave me the language to connect all these experiences together and see the bigger picture, and once I took a good look, I realised I was really fucking angry. I wanted change, now. I think they call that a raised consciousness.
But many of the more everyday things that niggled at me were, on the face of it, not so terrible. Certainly not crimes. It’s not illegal for a boyfriend to treat you with indifference and then act like you’re a crazy bitch for getting upset. It’s annoying but not life-ruining to realise that the group of guys you kick about with are slightly less interested in hearing what you have to say than they are in listening to each other, slightly less likely to laugh at your jokes.
Even the sexual harassment was, with a couple of rare exceptions, more irritating and demeaning than truly frightening. The grey-area sex more in the realm of dud roots than scarring experiences. Nothing you could march in the street over, just a thousand tiny little dents to your dignity. Retelling the stories of these small affronts, it never felt like they amounted to enough to justify how furious I felt. Connecting these quotidian hurts to rape on a grand continuum of male offences often felt tenuous, overblown. So I added a bit more to my stories. Pretended to feel more scared, more under threat than I really did.
For a long time, this period of behaviour has been a source of embarrassment. I pride myself on being an honest person, and I knew I had told a lot of small convenient lies to bolster an argument which should have been able to stand on its own, without embellishment.
In a 1994 essay about the slipperiness of how we talk about the events of our lives, and how we can lie, even to ourselves, about the impact of certain experiences, the writer Mary Gaitskill offers a compassionate explanation for this behaviour. “To speak in exaggerated metaphors about psychic injury is not so much the act of a crybaby as it is a distorted desire to make one’s experience have consequence in the eyes of others,” she writes. “Such desperation comes from a crushing doubt that one’s own experience counts at all or is even real.”
The reality, of course, is that despite decades of feminism as a political force (which waxes and wanes, but never disappears entirely), the gendered dynamics between men and women are still sick. Women are still not taken that seriously, in matters both practical and emotional. There is an ambient threat of violence from men in the world, even if it’s not the case that every woman (or even most women) feels it as a constant yoke around her neck, actively weighing her down.
And it was a mistake on my part (possibly even that old bugbear, internalised misogyny) which made me focus more on the feeling of being annoyed, on the feeling that this whole ‘man or bear’ thing was a bit hysterical, than on the persistence of that sick dynamic. I think in part I wanted to move away from this mode of combative needling as feminist praxis, because while women might be winning on the front of landing sassy zingers, men are still winning the actual gender war. And I know it, and the women in the viral video know it, and you know it, too, and it bothers you on a deeply primal level, but you don’t quite know how to talk about it, so you pretend you’d rather find yourself alone in the woods with a bear.
