Honestly, when I was a young male teen on reddit, I internalized a whole bunch of stuff like this, and it's made me uncomfortable around women. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, scared, or feel unsafe and combined with a whole lot of self hatred/loathing/negativity in general over a long time basically indelibly etched into my mind that anything remotely romantic with women is not ok.
Please, please, please understand that I'm not being like "woke feminism made me hate women and fucked my life up!" It's just when I was young and my brain was more malleable, it hurt being male when people would talk about men being predators, etc. I wanted to distance myself from that as much as possible, and went so far the other way for so long that it honestly fucked me up mentally. I have other trauma around women that makes it uncomfortable, namely a lot of being asked out as a prank. (There is no good response, if you said yes, then hahaha you fucking loser you actually thought someone would interested in you? If you said no, then you're gay and you should go kill yourself)
I'm no longer male, and now know I'm not straight, but that shit has stuck with me. Sometimes I fear that I'm not actually attracted to men, that I'm just desperate for affection and my brain is broken where dating/intimacy/relationships with women is concerned. (Then a man starts kissing me and it dispells my doubts for a while.)
I don't really know why I'm sharing this. I guess I just wanted to say that while men who are upset at women about women choosing the bear don't get it and are part of the problem, the messaging can have serious impact on people for the worse. Certainly not saying that women shouldn't speak up about it. I think it's natural to be upset about how men are seen in this context, and that that anger is frequently directed at the women speaking up, shooting the messenger so to speak, when it should be directed at the system and society that allows such treatment of women to be commonplace.
Fuck it's too early in the morning and I'm rambling and oversharing. I hope someone finds some value in this word vomit.
Omg, this is exactly why I made this post. Thank you so much for sharing this homie. I think there are plenty of people who share this experience and emotional relationship with the situation and it’s so very important to know that yours is valid as well. 🧡
This is a very thoughtful discussion of “incels” and the unique challenges men face today.
It addresses male loneliness and the colossal changes in society—in terms of economics and sexuality—that have greatly affected men over the last few generations.
It also highlights many of the ways in which incel identity is misunderstood, presenting the phenomenon in a wider context—allowing space for greater understanding and empathy.
i think it's really simple.. we don't gather in order to accomplish things together.. not in the real world, solving real problems.. men become friends when they solve problems and build things together.. think barn building among the Amish.. and we basically can only drop the competitive thing if we're trying to work together, but then we get right to work.. and that's our normal socialization.. when we see one another, we immediately like to reminisce about something we fixed or conquered together.. back in my grandfather's day, they spent free time at the men's social club, to brag about exactly that and drink and play cards all evening.. we haven't figured out how to replace that stuff.. so we're all just adversaries all the time, learning how to get better at combat and shit..
right, games are the current substitute.. many men aren't interested in games, because there's nothing real about them, and i don't think it really suffices as a substitute in general..
It’s kind of hard to summarize, it really is “Patriarchy 101” (or maybe 102) with the Barbie movie as a narrative base. It was good to hear things I’ve intuited explicitly stated
This post is in two parts. The first is my attempt at an objective analysis of what lessons we should take from this.
The second part is my subjective introspection of why I feel the way I do about it. I'm still not sure if sharing that part is a good idea; but I wrote it to gather my own thoughts and feelings, and maybe it can help someone else. Or maybe it is just a giant wall of text that no one wants to look at.
First, the analysis:
The story with the bear hypothetical has almost nothing to do with gender dynamics. Sure, there is a gender politics point to be seen. A lot of women fear men. However, that is not a new insight. That observations has been a major part of the gender discourse for as long as I have. Almost no one is being introduced to that concept through the bear hypothetical.
Having said that, if you, dear reader, are part of todays lucky 10,000, then congratulations! If you are interested in learning more, then I would suggest avoiding anything that mentions "bear", and instead start with metoo. That was another time this type of gender dynamics conversation went viral, and produced a much healthier discourse.
In an ideal world, the bear hypothetical would have been made, and quickly forgotten about; either because someone was venting, or just struck out on a rhetorical point. These things happen. People who hear them see the context in which they happen and everyone moves on.
However, this hypothetical was posted on TikTok. TikTok is an amazing app. An unironic triumph of artificial intelligence. It is capable of turning humans into engagement with an efficiency that we thought was impossible just a decade ago. And this bear hypothetical is great for engagement. Toxic engagement, but engagement none the less. It then spread to other social media, which have similar (although less advanced) algorithms designed to create engagement. I don't think it is a coincidence that the lemmyverse was late to the bear party. Or that when the bear party reached us, such a disproportionate amount of the content has been at the meta level. We do not have the same toxic algorithms here. The meme only made it here as spillover after the big social media sites made it such a huge thing.
Regardless of how this meme came to be so large, is it useful? I would argue not. Look at all the discourse it has generated. How much of it has been productive? How many problematic men do you think listened to the discourse and took away the lesson you want them to take away? How many problematic men do you think listened to the discourse and took away that the entire movement you are trying to advance is stupid? Sure, plenty of men understood what you are trying to say; but those are not the ones that you need to reach. The ones we need to reach took away the other meaning. Beyond simply missing the point, many of them are now inoculated against the point.
Now comes the introspective part of the post. This is about how the meme and surrounding discourse made me feel and why. I don't claim to know how it made most people feel or why. This is just one person's feelings, motivated by their specific perspective and lifetime of experience. And that is the first point: there is a huge landscape of possible thoughts someone can have to the meme, of which I had a few. The meme, however, forces me to project all of those thoughts into a single decision: man or bear.
This is not a criticism of the discourse around the meme. The meme itself pushes me to pick a side before I read any of the discourse, before I even think about responding to it, before I even start engaging with it on a conscious level. The first thing I need to do is pick a side, and all of my subsequent thoughts are colored by that initial binary.
I picked man. And that hurts; because my tribe picked bear. And so, I find myself being "part of the problem", and being in the camp that is identified by an ideology that I do not like and is against my values. And that hurts.
I recognized that engaging with the meme was not healthy, but the algorithms are too powerful, so I kept reengaging and disengaging as it kept getting shoved back into my face. And the meme picked at a lot of other scars I have.
Many commentators have described the dichotomy as man=literal thinking and bear=metaphorical thinking. I have nothing novel to contribute to that analysis, but it is a good framing for this point. Growing up, I was very much "literal thinking" kind of kid. I still am a "literal thinking" kind of person, but it is my childhood experience that matters here. It was clear to me from a young age that my kind of thinking was not welcome, and so I learned to keep my thoughts to myself. When I did share them, they were beated down, and I never quite understood why. The discourse around this meme pokes at those old scar, and that hurts.
Growing up, I never really understood this whole boy vs girl thing. Sure, I understood that there were some clear physical differences, and could easily classify people into boys and girls. And I understood that I got classified with boys. What I didn't understand was such a big deal. Why did the girls get one room, and the boys another. Why the girls have their set of cliques and the boys have theirs. Why the girls got to wear nice clothing while I was stuck in a stupid suit and tie. For a long time, I thought everyone was simply acting. That no one wanted to be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes. And so, I acted. The few times I tried talking about, the adults would just say that I am trying to "be difficult"; that I do not actually believe what I was saying. In high school, I learned about transgender people. That was enough for me to logically convince myself that gender must be a real thing. After all, if everyone was just acting anyway, why would so many people insist on acting as the wrong one. I never really internalized that lesson, but the logical knowledge was enough to let me compartmentalize it and just go along to get along. Most of the time. This kind of gender essentialism discourse forces those boxes back to being the center of conversation, which pokes at those old scars, and that hurts.
Several months ago, there was a very moving article posted in one of the trans communities. Musings of a trans man wrestling with many of the same issues I talked about. How he had to spend his childhood acting a gender he didn't feel. How the exact same aspects of his self would have been received so differently if he was born a different gender. How he had to deal with the cognitive dissonance that comes from believing in, belonging to, and benefiting a movement that is in many ways between oblivious to and hostile of anyone who is not cisgendered [0]. In reading that article, for the first time I can recall, I felt heard. Someone put so many of my own thoughts and experiences down on paper. Someone else read that and thought it was so good that they had to share it with their community. And that community was unanimous in accepting it.
And so, I opened up. I shared my own thoughts. Not all my thoughts. But there was one thread running through all of the original article that really spoke to me that I wanted to crystallize and explore. Overall, I was agreeing with the same piece that everyone else was agreeing with, just doing so through my own lense.
Then, this happened (direct quote from the 1 response I got. Spoilered because even copying it was lightly triggering for me):
spoiler
Oh come the fuck on. Just shupt up, dude. “Not all men” is just a generally shitty response that shifts conversations about toxic masculinity, SA etc. away from those affected. It centers men in a conversation about issues that disproportionately harm women and nonbinary people. It is the telltale sign of men refusing to take responsibility for their own participation in coercive patriarchal structures, a horribly dumb behavior as patriarchy is provably harmful to men. Yet you folks can’t stop defending it and downplaying your complicity in it.
Notably, this is a thread about transmasculinity and the difficulties of having masculinity as a transition goal in a culture that has deeply contaminated masculinity to create oppressive structures and you dipshit barge in here to NOT ALL MEN this. You walk into a trans space and turn it into a platform for liberal antifeminism. Fuck you, you disgusting debate pervert, crawl back to reddit you stupid shit.
Also fuck yourself doubly for being a cis shit that tries to have an opinion about trans issues AND COMPLETELY IGNORES ANYTHING TRANS REALTED ABOUT THEM, i’ll file another report of your shitty post. We never should have federated with your shitty instance full of wehrmacht apologists, fuck you.
I reported that poster. Some time later, I discovered that I was now banned from the server. I had finally found my tribe. The most my tribe of any my tribe I had seen yet. I came out of my shell, spoke a little bit of my thoughts. And I was pushed back down, exiled from the tribe, and told to go back to the others. And that hurt. Also, getting called "cis" as a slur really pokes at the non-binary scar I talked about earlier, and that hurts.
And so, in comes the bear meme. Almost surgically designed to poke at all of those scars. And it hurts
What am I supposed to do when somethings hurts? Do I go to my tribe and vent? I can see a few brace (or stupid) posters in the various comments section expressing some thoughts similar to my own; but overall my tribe was united in saying that those posters were "the problem". And that hurts.
[0] I really do not want to go into the merits of those criticisms, as I do not think it is actually relevant to this post. Also, the original article does it better than I can.
I won’t lie, I don’t share a lot of experiences with you and others who are generously taking part in this post. But as this all has played out I recognized the absolute need for a post like this — separate from the memes, separate from potentially speaking over women, because there is a lot of unspoken pain.
This comment made my cry, friend. It is obscenely and heartbreakingly ironic the level of lashing out men can receive for simply stating their lived truth in the world of today. And your story is certainly a brutish example of that. I hope that you found some catharsis and relief having expressed your story here, and I hope that this can be a start of some continued recovering and healing both for you and the others in this community.
Importantly, since the P1 effects disappeared when correcting for baseline (priming) activity, these effects should be interpreted cautiously.
But it’s okay for us to pretend it’s a 100% accurate result for the purpose of a random blog post? I swear half the news I see about scientific studies is misleading or they just misread the paper
Edit: I could have picked many quotes from the study, that’s just one that stood out. It’s not some slam dunk in the paper.
'Men's rights' projects have proven to be successful gateway recruiting tools for the far right, there's no indication that they would stop fostering these sorts of communities.
The current iteration of The MRM is definitely an offshoot of The Skeptic Community on YouTube, which itself always had a fair amount of overlap with The Alt Right. Same way Environmentalism was an off-shoot of The Counterculture of The 1960s, and as such, always overlapped heavily with The Far Left
Environmentalism has been around for longer than the 60s, and the only reason it has an association with the left is because the right abandoned it. Protecting the environment is an apolitical position since we all live on the same planet.
'Men's rights' is purely manufactured by the right in response to the fall of conservative patriarchal norms that have traditionally placed men at the top of the social pyramid at the cost of other groups. The growth of social awareness and equity movements has forced the right to try and create counter-measures as their rigid heirarchy begins to fade and shrink.
The fundemental basis of all men's rights movements is a lie, namely that men are disadvantaged and that the toxic symptoms of patriarchy that effect some classes of men negatively are the fault of women and equal rights movements.
Every human being(Regardless of gender)is "disadvantaged" in some way. I'm no longer convinced that approaching these subjects as either "men's" or "women's" issues(Rather than American ones, the likes of which invite the attentions and energies of all citizens who'd like to leave our descendants with a slightly saner world than the one we enjoyed)is either intellectually honest, nor politically wise
"Environmentalism has been around for longer than the 60s..."
Modern historians have retroactively labelled events like Edward I outlawing the burning of sea coal as "Environmentalism". The movement we think of today arose in The 1960s. John Muir and folks like that conceptualized their approach as "conservationism"
7:05-7:13 We here at The MRM have been operating under the (uninterrogated)belief that Intersectional Feminism’s proponents are nigh-omnipotent sorcereresses(occasionally sorcerers), who turn docile plebs into blood thirsty misandrists, just by uttering magic lies from behind their microphones. Turns out, the explanation for their success at winning public influence may be simultaneously more prosaic AND more profound:
Intersectionalists provide their prospective converts with not simply one, but SEVERAL roles to play, within the framework of what appears to be, at first glance, a heroic saga… Powerhouse career women and their male allies, who successfully balance lucrative corporate careers with bravely campaigning for social justice, and thwarting the bigots’s schemes to establishing world domination. Bombastic, yet highly seductive and exciting
By contrast, The MRM really only provided our potential converts with one role, in an extremely dreary, unusually unattractive tale… Societal dropout, who’s idea of fun is endlessly griping over all the shit in modern life he disapproves of, yet rarely if ever discussing his/they’re goals and desires. Or a vision of the world they’d like to see
9:50ish-12:00 We’ve been, dare I say, Blue Pill in our understanding of the way many Intersectionalists operate, especially in their speeches and writings. To a large degree, they’re acting whilst doing so. We know this because the Susan Danuta Walters’s of the world(An admitted angry lesbian slithering through the halls of academia, who leads a highly bohemian lifestyle, even when she’s off the clock)really are a microsliver of the human race. The vast majority of Intersectionalists are themselves mostly upper middle class-all points beyond, leading highly “traditional lives”. Including marriages to people of the opposite sex, and raising kids of their own. At first glance, these folks are indistinguishable from those who comprise The Heritage Foyndation’s executive board
Those gigantic crowds who erupt in orgies of virulent rage during Intersectionalist soeeches? They’re almost certainly playing a role also. That Woke sympathizing grads of The New School like this chick https://youtu.be/lZs-Eb6H5BU?si=Gkq5Pj8IphUjWfBH 5:20-7:00 still yearn for a white picket fence house, kids(Plural), and a loving husband of her own is testament to this
This misreading poisoned fatally the way most MRAs conceptualized the extrenal world. That in turn tanslated into their/us pursuing a strategy which failed to convince The 80% of the public who’s still on the fence-and thus amenable to persuasion-to support us
26:19-26:43 It may behoove those of us who are Post-MRM to imagine ourselves having similar conversations with our descendants, at some future date:
-“Daddy, Mummy says you were an activist back in the day. Does that mean you were kinda like Iron Man or a Jedi Knight”
-"No, sweetness: I was pretty much a real life equivalent to The Continental Op. Go Wiki that name, and pay close attention to this paragraph: “The Continental Op is a master of deceit in the exercise of his occupation. In his 1927 Black Mask story “$106,000 Blood Money” the Op is confronted with a dilemma: should he expose a corrupt fellow detective, thereby hurting the reputation of his agency; and should he also allow an informant to collect the $106,000 reward in a big case even though he is morally certain—but cannot prove—that the informant has murdered one of his agency’s clients? The Op resolves his two problems neatly by manipulating events so that the corrupt detective and the informant get into an armed confrontation in which both are killed”
That’s how I and most of my peers rolled… We used highly innovative tactics in the neverending quest that is enhancing and safeguarding the cause of liberty for one and all. Both you and every other child today enjoys a richer, freer life than those of who’ve lived prior, largely thanks to your predecessors’s iron commitment to pragmatism and the pursuit of concrete, tangible objectives"
29:56-30:43 The current iteration of The MRM similarly has, since it’s inception, operated under an assumption which goes something like: “We need to provoke a psychosocial revolution in the human species, the likes of which rids Normie society of all it’s prejudices and biases towards men. THEN, when can go about not simply changing laws and policies, but building A Red Pill Kingdom Of Heaven on Earth, free of all tragedy and pain”. Such an assumption fails to take cognizance of at least one inconvenient reality though… System Justification https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-21802-017 Or, as Morris Fiorana has observed: “We humans are hardwired to be politically liberal, and socially conservative. That is: We want to live our lives and pursue our desires without being hassled or impeded, AND we’re also not automatically inclined for life to change drastically, in a very short period of time”
Thus, it’s not surprising that The MRM’s dream of awakening The Revolutionary they believed to be asleep within an alleged silent majority found itself shattered beyond all salvation by 2019, just as The BBC’s attempt to trigger a liberal democratic revolut against The 3rd Reich in Nazi Germany fell flat on it’s face, never to get back up
Severely diminishing the influence of not just Feminisism, but that of Illiberal Wokeness over the public is a far wiser and more achievable goal for those of us who are Post-MRM to pursue
31:00-31:46 There’s nonetheless a deep commitment to the principles of textbook liberalism(Equality before the law, unimpeded access to opportunity, and prosperity for one and all. Regardless of skin color, ethnicity, gender, creed,or sexual orientation)at the core of The Post-MRM. We just realize that continuing to screech “Feminisism/Gynocentrism/Hypergamy bad!!” hasn’t been especially effective at winning widespread public support
And that the way to do so is quite simple, even if not easy: Start hammering home all the ways in which many current laws and policies(Quite a few of them brainchildren of lawmakers and lobbyists who are under the influence of Intersectionalisism)aren’t just harmful to men, but actually hamstring the most basic ambitions of the majority of the female population:
-Snagging solid, reliable husbands
-Having kids of their own
-Accessing a career which grants her the flexibility to split motherhood and work, 70/30
-Acquiring affordable housing in a pristine neighborhood for her to raise her children in
I dunno, the problem with saying that protecting the environment is “apolitical” is that it runs in direct opposition to the idea of maximum profits and less oversight.
It isn’t that the right hates the environment but rather they hate the associated costs with not being able to dump chemical waste straight into the local groundwater supply and they definitely hate the fact that it’s the government who’ll stop them with laws and fines even if consumers can’t stay on too of all the shitty things the company does.
7:05-7:13 We here at The MRM have been operating under the (uninterrogated)belief that Intersectional Feminism's proponents are nigh-omnipotent sorcereresses(occasionally sorcerers), who turn docile plebs into blood thirsty misandrists, just by uttering magic lies from behind their microphones. Turns out, the explanation for their success at winning public influence may be simultaneously more prosaic AND more profound:
Intersectionalists provide their prospective converts with not simply one, but SEVERAL roles to play, within the framework of what appears to be, at first glance, a heroic saga.... Powerhouse career women and their male allies, who successfully balance lucrative corporate careers with bravely campaigning for social justice, and thwarting the bigots's schemes to establishing world domination. Bombastic, yet highly seductive and exciting
By contrast, The MRM really only provided our potential converts with one role, in an extremely dreary, unusually unattractive tale... Societal dropout, who's idea of fun is endlessly griping over all the shit in modern life he disapproves of, yet rarely if ever discussing his/they're goals and desires. Or a vision of the world they'd like to see
9:50ish-12:00 We've been, dare I say, Blue Pill in our understanding of the way many Intersectionalists operate, especially in their speeches and writings. To a large degree, they're acting whilst doing so. We know this because the Susan Danuta Walters's of the world(An admitted angry lesbian slithering through the halls of academia, who leads a highly bohemian lifestyle, even when she's off the clock)really are a microsliver of the human race. The vast majority of Intersectionalists are themselves mostly upper middle class-all points beyond, leading highly "traditional lives". Including marriages to people of the opposite sex, and raising kids of their own. At first glance, these folks are indistinguishable from those who comprise The Heritage Foyndation's executive board
Those gigantic crowds who erupt in orgies of virulent rage during Intersectionalist soeeches? They're almost certainly playing a role also. That Woke sympathizing grads of The New School like this chick https://youtu.be/lZs-Eb6H5BU?si=Gkq5Pj8IphUjWfBH 5:20-7:00 still yearn for a white picket fence house, kids(Plural), and a loving husband of her own is testament to this
This misreading poisoned fatally the way most MRAs conceptualized the extrenal world. That in turn tanslated into their/us pursuing a strategy which failed to convince The 80% of the public who's still on the fence-and thus amenable to persuasion-to support us
26:19-26:43 It may behoove those of us who are Post-MRM to imagine ourselves having similar conversations with our descendants, at some future date:
-"Daddy, Mummy says you were an activist back in the day. Does that mean you were kinda like Iron Man or a Jedi Knight"
-"No, sweetness: I was pretty much a real life equivalent to The Continental Op. Go Wiki that name, and pay close attention to this paragraph: "The Continental Op is a master of deceit in the exercise of his occupation. In his 1927 Black Mask story "$106,000 Blood Money" the Op is confronted with a dilemma: should he expose a corrupt fellow detective, thereby hurting the reputation of his agency; and should he also allow an informant to collect the $106,000 reward in a big case even though he is morally certain—but cannot prove—that the informant has murdered one of his agency's clients? The Op resolves his two problems neatly by manipulating events so that the corrupt detective and the informant get into an armed confrontation in which both are killed"
That's how I and most of my peers rolled... We used highly innovative tactics in the neverending quest that is enhancing and safeguarding the cause of liberty for one and all. Both you and every other child today enjoys a richer, freer life than those of who've lived prior, largely thanks to your predecessors's iron commitment to pragmatism and the pursuit of concrete, tangible objectives"
29:56-30:43 The current iteration of The MRM similarly has, since it's inception, operated under an assumption which goes something like: "We need to provoke a psychosocial revolution in the human species, the likes of which rids Normie society of all it's prejudices and biases towards men. THEN, when can go about not simply changing laws and policies, but building A Red Pill Kingdom Of Heaven on Earth, free of all tragedy and pain". Such an assumption fails to take cognizance of at least one inconvenient reality though.... System Justification https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-21802-017 Or, as Morris Fiorana has observed: "We humans are hardwired to be politically liberal, and socially conservative. That is: We want to live our lives and pursue our desires without being hassled or impeded, AND we're also not automatically inclined for life to change drastically, in a very short period of time"
Thus, it's not surprising that The MRM's dream of awakening The Revolutionary they believed to be asleep within an alleged silent majority found itself shattered beyond all salvation by 2019, just as The BBC's attempt to trigger a liberal democratic revolut against The 3rd Reich in Nazi Germany fell flat on it's face, never to get back up
Severely diminishing the influence of not just Feminisism, but that of Illiberal Wokeness over the public is a far wiser and more achievable goal for those of us who are Post-MRM to pursue
31:00-31:46 There's nonetheless a deep commitment to the principles of textbook liberalism(Equality before the law, unimpeded access to opportunity, and prosperity for one and all. Regardless of skin color, ethnicity, gender, creed,or sexual orientation)at the core of The Post-MRM. We just realize that continuing to screech "Feminisism/Gynocentrism/Hypergamy bad!!" hasn't been especially effective at winning widespread public support
And that the way to do so is quite simple, even if not easy: Start hammering home all the ways in which many current laws and policies(Quite a few of them brainchildren of lawmakers and lobbyists who are under the influence of Intersectionalisism)aren't just harmful to men, but actually hamstring the most basic ambitions of the majority of the female population:
-Snagging solid, reliable husbands
-Having kids of their own
-Accessing a career which grants her the flexibility to split motherhood and work, 70/30
-Acquiring affordable housing in a pristine neighborhood for her to raise her children in
Eh, once people come to understand better that it’s ok for their children to be their own people and that not conforming to (sometimes fairly recently created) gendered stereotypes isn’t a big deal we won’t see this “neural activity” quite as much I’ll bet.
And when they said that they had a greater reaction to their own children…well yea, obviously. I guess it’s good that we confirmed it, science confirming “obvious” answers is half the point of it, but yea of course they’re suddenly think about greater implications and what that might mean for how they should treat their child than if it were another kid.
It sucks that they found so many negative reactions but we’re getting better about it, at least, so that’s something to look forward to.
Well you're tagged as a tankie for some reason, so that means you've been gargling some dictator's cock. I'm only calling it like I see it. Which was it, Stalin? Putin?
On the way home from work I stepped off a bus and turned in the direction of home. A young woman who was a few steps ahead of me was being verbally harassed with overtly sexual language by a man. I stepped between them, facing the dude, and told him to fuck off and walk away. Some words were exchanged, and eventually he turned around and walked away. I watch him for a minute or two, then turned around and walked home. The woman he was harassing was long gone.
When I got home and relayed this story to my girlfriend, she said this sort of interaction was COMMON. She'd never mentioned it in the nearly 10 years we'd been dating. It was normal to her. My response was "What the actual fuck? That's bullshit." But it was her reality, and the reality of the woman I saw, and probably dozens or hundreds more, every day.
We collectively need to do better. We need to stop doing it ourselves, and stop our friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, and even strangers from doing it. We need to raise the average and be better.
I think that part of the problem is that people tie their identities to labels.
When someone says "I'd rather encounter the bear than a man", some people will say "I'm a man, and that means she's afraid of me (personally)"...and go on to have their feelings hurt by it because it's interpreted as a judgment of who they are as an individual.
Honestly, I think a big part of it is ignorance of women's experiences and a difficulty with perspective-taking.
Maybe men aren't as statistically dangerous as bears. If they aren't, why are women afraid? There are reasons for that.
I can imagine some men extrapolating from this and wondering "How can I ever approach a woman if they're all afraid of me?"...but the answer is "NOT alone when she's alone in a secluded spot in the woods"...
If the question was "Would you rather encounter a bear or a man at a board game café?", you'd find a lot fewer women hoping to encounter a bear.
I said ok, her choice and moved into the next meme/story.
I must admit to not understanding the furore that then arose and don't know why men (am a man) were getting butt hurt. Why would I care if women prefer the company of bears in the woods.
Men's Liberation
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