The Bear or the Man: Why Women's Fear Is Real

You may have seen the man versus bear conversation across social media.

Whilst this may seem on the surface to be a lighthearted conversation, it is actually quite disturbing.

The question asked of women is this: Picture yourself alone and unarmed in the woods. Would you rather encounter a bear or a man?

Almost all women (I have seen a figure of 97% mentioned) choose the bear.

And men are going wild on social media, trying to explain precisely why bears are more threatening than men.

Put simply, men don’t get it; they still don’t understand why women are scared of them.

The truth is that men do women harm every single day. On average, in the UK, a woman is killed by a man every 2.6 days.​

This is something ingrained in us from birth.

We are taught to stick together, not walk alone at night, not jog alone in the morning, and not drink too much.

We are taught to lock our car doors as soon as we get in, not put our headphones on too loud when we’re out and about, and to text saying we’re safe when we get home.

We are taught to carry our keys in our hands with the sharp part pointing out, ready to fight off an attacker.

We go to self-defence classes, avoid dark alleyways, and take a longer route home.

We speed up when we sense a man behind us and cross the street to make it harder for them to get close to us.

Nearly every woman I know was given a rape alarm in their teenage years.

I gave some to my daughters, just as I was given one myself by my mother.

Women inherently know that the most dangerous thing they can do is to forget to think like a woman and start thinking like a man.

Because the most dangerous thing in the world for women is men.

Sadly, whenever things like this are discussed, the typical response from men is “not all men”.

They fail to understand that, yes, it is all men.

It will always be all men until all men take responsibility for the harm some men do to women and work to make women safer in the world and free from male violence.

Until men accept that the responsibility lies with men and not women, then women will choose the bear, and men will keep mansplaining why they think the bear is more dangerous because they just don't get it.

And I don't know how that changes.

One tweet I saw says it all for me: “I will choose the bear over a man because the bear sees me as human.”