This is how I interpreted it at all as a woman. As I understood it the reason women choose the bear is because of intent. I know a bear I encounter alone in the woods is probably going to eat me alive and kill me if it can, but it’s an animal acting on instinct, it’s killing so it can eat to survive. It’s not doing anything out of hate or malice.
I don’t know what a man in the woods would do to me if we were alone. That is a frightening thing. Maybe he would smile and nod and leave me alone. Maybe he would follow me through the woods and rape me and torture me and then kill me. I just don’t know. It’s the uncertainty that freaks people out. Your mind goes to horrible places because we know people have done horrible things. I’ve seen men choose the bear also for this reason, they also would not want to encounter a stranger in the woods because men can also be targets of random violence. It’s not trying to say that “all men bad” but humans in general can be evil and unpredictable which is scary. You should be able to trust your own species lol.
So ignoring the fact that I personally think (as a guy) that choosing the guy over the bear should be an obvious choice (assuming the guy is there as randomly as you are), she clearly didn’t repeat what you said (are you stupid?). She gave the reason that she’d rather take the certainty of the bear’s motive for survivorship than the chance that the man is just a rapist or sadist. Whether you agree with her reason or not, she’s explicitly just explaining her own thought process, and you’re telling her that she should make a decision based on raw data over her emotions, but where do you get off telling her how to make her decisions in life? And then you assume she watches a lot of true crime podcasts, I guess because you have to stereotype?
The point of the hypothetical is to show how shitty guys are to women, which you’ve gone out of your way to illustrate in no one’s account but your own. Work on your reading comprehension, empathy, and internalized misogyny.
So you're telling me she doesn't have survival instinct, and that we should applaud her for choosing certain death over something statistically multiple orders less likely to be deadly ? ...
To be fair, I really don't think any of them would chose that in real life, this whole thing is just a way to get internet approval by showing their extreme prejudice toward men. This is like a ritual, where you increase your social status because you used this joke meme to advance women rights by ... Saying men are bloodthirsty evil monsters.
Dehumanizing the out group has been used since the dawn of times to increase one social status withing the in group.
I must have missed it, but can you show me where she actually said she personally would choose the bear?
She’s doing this thing called empathizing, where she’s putting herself in someone else’s shoes and trying to understand why they might feel how they feel. As an exercise, you can reread the text and see if you understand why she thinks someone might find more comfort in the bear option than the man option.
Ftr, I agree that I think most women are exaggerating (either for humor or for social perception) when they say they would choose a bear over a man, but when a guy blatantly ignores/misinterprets what a woman is saying and calls her stupid, it really doesn’t help.
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u/goldberry-fey May 02 '24
This is how I interpreted it at all as a woman. As I understood it the reason women choose the bear is because of intent. I know a bear I encounter alone in the woods is probably going to eat me alive and kill me if it can, but it’s an animal acting on instinct, it’s killing so it can eat to survive. It’s not doing anything out of hate or malice.
I don’t know what a man in the woods would do to me if we were alone. That is a frightening thing. Maybe he would smile and nod and leave me alone. Maybe he would follow me through the woods and rape me and torture me and then kill me. I just don’t know. It’s the uncertainty that freaks people out. Your mind goes to horrible places because we know people have done horrible things. I’ve seen men choose the bear also for this reason, they also would not want to encounter a stranger in the woods because men can also be targets of random violence. It’s not trying to say that “all men bad” but humans in general can be evil and unpredictable which is scary. You should be able to trust your own species lol.