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-====== Man or Bear? ======
+~~Title:Man or Bear?~~
-The "man or bear" is a longstanding social media trend that took off after a viral tweet asked women who they'd rather encounter alone in the woods—a random man or a bear. It sparked widespread debate, with many women saying they'd choose the bear, pointing to how unsafe they often feel around unfamiliar men. The trend quickly morphed into commentary on gender-based fears, safety, and societal norms.
+<WRAP centeralign>Misogyny/Feminism/\\
-\\
+<fs xx-large>Man or Bear?</fs></WRAP>
-\\
-The quick answer to this question: It depends on [[words|interpretation]].\\
-The general premise of this question is the tradeoff between certain death (bear) and less likely, but much more traumatizing death (if at all)(man). Women are afraid of being subjected rape and sexual assault/abuse and risking that is not always worth it if the alternative is a simple, quick, unprejudiced death to the local neighborhood bear. The idea is that far off of civilization, a woman is completely defenseless against a stronger male and therefore much more likely to get assaulted (or worse).\\
-\\
-From here on, this question becomes a matter of probabilities, and that set of probabilities depends on how we define some key terms of our equation.\\
-I will take the most direct example that can be inferred: We use the word "encounter" and we define civilization //strictly//. If you are genuinely far off of civilization then that means you are not on hiking trails. These trails are manmade and therefore an extension of civilization. Additionally, we define "encounter" as a genuine real-life event as it could genuinely unfold. What I mean with that is that, on the hiking trail, the most likely male person to "encounter" is just another hiker. If we took the question as "anywhere into a forest a woman would reasonably go", that would mean a hiking trail and there you are going to meet men all the time. To talk about this, we need to talk about men:
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+"Man or Bear" is a longstanding social media trend that got popular after a viral tweet asked women who they'd rather encounter alone in the woods—a random man or a bear. It sparked widespread debate, with many women saying they'd choose the bear, pointing to how unsafe they often feel around unfamiliar men. The trend quickly morphed into commentary on gender-based fears, safety, and societal norms. There are two primary methods this question can be answered, and I will deal the boring, statistically informed answer first.
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+{{page>Templates:Accuracy}}
-<fs xx-large>//**"**//</fs>
+====== Statistics ======
+I will go through a few examples to try to find, with you the reader, some of the limits that are involved here. You have to decide which of the two options you'd prefer. The numbers in the first few examples are not approximations of real odds. They are thought experiments. Some better approximations come later.
+===== Finding the Limit =====
+<WRAP round box>
+<fs x-large>1.</fs> 100% chance to die, mauled to death by bear <wrap em>OR</wrap> 100% chance to die, raped, humiliated and traumatized
+**Which one would you prefer?**\\
+I can say for myself that, in this example, I would definitely rather be mauled by a bear and I'd assume 99% of humans will agree with me on this. Let's move forward from here and see what we can learn.
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-A strange man is undeniably a threat.
+<WRAP round box>
+<fs x-large>2.</fs> 100% to get bear'd <wrap em>OR</wrap> 100% to get raped, but left alive
+**Which one would you prefer?**\\
+Now this one is a lot more difficult to answer because in one you'd at least get to continue to live. Would that be a worthwhile life? You will continue to be shamed and victim blamed after the incident. I could see both sides here and personally I hope I'll never have to make such a decision myself.
 </WRAP>
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-<fs xx-large>//**"**//</fs>
+<WRAP round box>
+<fs x-large>3.</fs> 50% chance to get bear'd <wrap em>OR</wrap> 25% to get raped, but left alive
+**Which one would you prefer?**\\
+We're now getting into the territory of what the "Man or Bear?" question is trying to get at. Relatively certain death is better than a //comparatively// unlikely, but absolutely possible rape. Women, so the argument, would rather just throw in the towel than risk the rape, and I can understand them. Taking the bear here is very reasonable. Now we get to the statistical part and the question that is being asked by the "statistical response" to Man or Bear: Where is the limit?
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+<fs x-large>4.</fs> 20% chance to get bear'd <wrap em>OR</wrap> 5% chance to get raped, but left alive
+**Which one would you prefer?**\\
+This is now the ultimate question and where we will move from to find some kind of conclusion. I hope these are some estimates that everyone can at least work with. Bears aren't all that interested in humans and we also know that most men wouldn't rape women even if they could get away with it without consequences. Are the odds 5%? No, probably not, but that's exactly the point of the next few comparisons:
 </WRAP>
-<WRAP centeralign>~Stephanie McNeal on [[https://www.glamour.com/story/what-does-choosing-the-bear-mean-all-about-this-simple-yet-profound-trend|Glamour - Choosing the Bear: All About This Simple Yet Profound TikTok Trend]]</WRAP>
+<WRAP round box>
+<fs x-large>5.</fs> 20% <wrap em>OR</wrap> 1%\\
+<fs x-large>6.</fs> 20% <wrap em>OR</wrap> 0.5%\\
+<fs x-large>7.</fs> 20% <wrap em>OR</wrap> 0.1%\\
+<fs x-large>8.</fs> 20% <wrap em>OR</wrap> 0.01%\\
+<fs x-large>9.</fs> 20% <wrap em>OR</wrap> 0.001%\\
+Number <fs x-large>9.</fs>, 0.001%, is interesting. Using the following two assumptions I am going to arrive at the conclusion that 0.001% is the average daily chance of a woman to get raped on any given day:
+  - On average, 1 out of 3 women get raped in their lifetime
+  - On average, women live 80 years
+<wrap lo>Statistically 1/4 or 1/5 women get raped in their lifetime depending on who you believe, so accounting for non-reports - because sexual crime often goes unreported - I think 1/3 is quite acceptable as a number.
+</wrap>
+From this, I derive that women experience, on average 240 years <wrap lo>(3 * 80)</wrap>, or 87,600 days <wrap lo>(240 * 365)</wrap>, of life before being raped. 100% divided by 87,600 is 0.0011415525114155 or 0.001%. Yes, almost all women are raped earlier than their 80th year of life, but in most cases they don't get raped again until they die, so it doesn't really matter //when// they get raped as the timing of it averages out to "once every 240 years" anyway.
+The point here is that somewhere here, most women would definitely stop taking the bear. I know this because at 0.001% - as calculated above - you'd be insane to still take the bear. If 0.001% was too high of a chance for a person, they wouldn't be able to exist at all.((Obviously 0.001% is still "too high" and needs to be reduced, but it's not "too high" in the sense that people would rather die to bears, as proven by the fact that people don't just spontaneously throw themselves at bears all day every day.))
 </WRAP>
-It's a words question, this one. How do we define threat? **Strictly speaking** we would have to define it as "a thing or person likely to cause harm". The problem with this is that men //are// more likely than others to cause harm, but they're still unlikely to do it. Because of that increased risk they may be //scary// or, if you want to, //threatening//, but not a //threat//. **Strictly speaking**, a non-venomous, herbivorous snake is not a threat even if we generally consider all snakes we don't know to be a threat. You could say that the snake is a "potential threat", in the same way that a man is more likely than others to be a "potential threat", but - **strictly speaking** - that isn't quite the same as being a threat.\\
+So...
-Why am I turning words like this? Well, I don't usually like chipping away at words but in this case it matters. In general we can agree that men are more likely than others to cause harm and this calculation for the Man or Bear question is about what pools of people we throw into the probability equations.\\
-\\
+**Where is your limit?**\\
-Back to the "anywhere a woman would reasonably go into a forest" and talking about encountering hikers - the problem with hikers is that they are still unlikely to do anything serious to a woman. So, on that hiking trail, the pool of people you could //reasonably real-life event that could genuinely unfold// "encounter" contains, to the overwhelmingly large extend, mostly hikers. The number of serious //threats//, ie. men with genuine intent to hurt a woman (which //can// include hikers), is going to be dwarved by just how much more likely you are to encounter a normal, peaceful hiker. Uncomfortable and perhaps scary encounter, still, but the odds are in your favor.((At least in a one-off as posed by the question. If the question was about encountering 20 men, individually, like you might do on a hike, now that would be much more scary.))\\
+It is now upon you to decide where your cutoff is. Even at 10x more likely than normal daily chance you'd probably still rather take that than the bear. But when does that stop? It might be useful to really think this through and think about where on the scale you'd go, and where too much is too much for you. Of course any of the rape chances above daily normal chance are too much if repeated multiple times, but this is a one-off thing. Whatever you choose happens once and then, if you didn't die, you go back to the rest of your life with normal daily rape chances.
-\\
-The much more serious problem is when we go back to the original: "Away from civilization."\\
+===== The Dangers of Men =====
-This means we are off the hiking trail and in the absolute wood of the wood. Now it becomes much harder to find people you could meet that are //not// threats. Maybe the ranger? A hunter maybe? And even they are still more likely than other men to be a genuine threat, so at this point I understand women who are beginning to calculate their odds and find their risk of getting violated is too high to justify.\\
+The other question is, how dangerous really is a man? Like, what's the actual statistic for the likelihood of a man just sexually abusing a woman if they happened to meet in a space devoid of help and witnesses, ie. devoid of accountability?
-\\
-\\
+All of us are going to find very different estimates here. Personally I think that a woman could probably go through at least 1000 men before finding someone who will actually sexually assault her. Of course many more men are going to be indecent or abusive towards her before that (which is shocking in its own right), but I think the overwhelming number of men won't do anything life-changing to a woman even in a space with no accountability. You might, and probably will, come up with your own calculations here, but I personally would put the chance at 0.1% and, while maybe not a good number, I would not think of it as utterly unreasonable either.
-\\
-===== Other Understandings =====
+===== Comparing Cutoffs =====
-An interesting bit about social media trend is that they are the equivalent of word by mouth and get jumbled up in transit. The way it was first brought to my attention was with the wording "who would you rather be alone with in the woods - a random man or a bear". "Encounter" is already kind of nebulous and leaves lots to interpretation about how the man got there, but this one doesn't make any effort to answer that question at all and lets you fill in those gaps all on your own. My initial understanding of that for many years was that they kind of just get teleported there? Like, if the wording doesn't mention this then in my brain it felt like the way the man gets there doesn't really matter, so my brain just filled it in with "something, doesn't matter, magic, they're just there - teleportation".\\
+What we do now from here to reach a conclusion is easy. Where is your cutoff, where is your expected chance, and is your expected chance above or below your cutoff? Now in my case, my calculation would go roughly like this: For me, 10% risk of getting raped is too much. I know that with a 10% (or less) chance of it happening, I'm comfortable enough with my odds. The previously established 0.1% are below 10%. So, if 10% is the highest amount of risk I'm willing to go with then I'm perfectly fine with 0.1% and the correct answer to the original question is indeed man.
-\\
-Now, in retrospect I can say this was quite a serious oversight and I just didn't think about it enough, but to be fair to me I also did not have the original wording of the question. So, if a woman is alone in the woods, away from civilization and a random man drawn randomly from all of the world's population is teleported in front of her, this is a much better bet than having a bear teleported in front of her.\\
+For some extra flavor we can also use the bear chance as a coefficient. Since I'm not guaranteed to die to the bear I can be cocky and reduce the limit of what I'm willing to take. If I take a 20% bear chance (ie. 1 in 5) then I can divide my limit like this: 10ppt / 5 = 2%.\\
-\\
+I think this is reasonable because the bear chance matters in the chance calculation. If I am willing to accept risks with the bear then I can afford to accept less risk with men. In my case, 0.1% is still well below 2%, but this might change something for you.
-The pool of people this roll can draw from is large and all but eliminates factors that would otherwise make you more likely to draw someone with hostile intent. The reason you would be less safe in woods is because it attracts predators looking for defenseless victims, therefore inside that pool people with hostile intent will be over- or at least more represented. If you draw from a completely random pool, this overrepresentation vanishes and you go back to the baseline, and the baseline is that most men do not have hostile intent to women ((Not like that, anyway. Obviously the patriarchy and misogyny exist and the intent to hurt women is there, just not in a way that is so much of a problem as to make my approach to the Man or Bear question problematic.)). In this setting where a random man is just teleported in front of the woman, it would be stochastically unwise to choose a bear instead.\\
-\\
+====== Fear ======
-\\
+The cool thing is that we can use the above-established framework to explain what women's //real// problem with men's justification of the Man or Bear question is. Some of the properties in this model are fixed. Whether you used the same numbers as me, the bear chance and the chance of getting raped //are// just fact numbers. Even if we estimate them differently, that is only because we all work with different information and have different guessing skills. But, the one thing that //will// be different between everyone's mental model of the formula is the //limit//, the amount of risk a person is willing to take before they'd rather take the bear.
-I worry that this misunderstanding may be what causes a significant portion of the drama around this question. Most men responding to this question think that they wouldn't hurt a woman in the forest, but they also wouldn't "encounter" a woman in the forest in the first place. If it comes down to "encountering", you and I and the majority of non-hostile male people are not going to be the kind of person a woman would encounter in a forest. This doesn't mean that - depending on where in the forest the woman is - the woman is still more likely to encounter the minority of non-hostile male people (hikers, rangers, hunters, etc.) than to encounter a hostile person, but it's still very, very different.\\
-\\
+This limit is, to a degree, informed mathematically, but for many (//especially// women) it will be an [[:fear_coefficient|expression of their fear]]. While there may truly be a rational, mathematical solution to the problem, people who are afraid of things will naturally try to avoid falling victim to it. Even within women, the reported limits will differ from one person to the next and they are exclusively a measure of how afraid they are of men. For some women this limit might be above the actual odds, for some it's below, for some it's right on.
-Uh, word of caution, actually: Rangers and hunters will probably be scary to many women because rangers and hunters may seem like perfect fits for (serial) murderers or rapists/etc., but I don't think this logic actually follows that well? Like, we know who and where our rangers and hunters are, and in case of a murder they will be the absolutely first people to get asked by police because they're the people we expect nearby the crime scene. This is why //truckers// are actually the ones overrepresented in murder statistics like that.\\
-\\
+It doesn't really matter. The online phenomenon here is the fact that many women, upon hearing the original question, were reminded of the fear that men cause in them and chose the bear because of it. Men do not know this fear, so for them this inevitably becomes a matter of statistics. As far as my understanding goes, for women this discussion is not about statistics, whether their assumptions are right or even that many women choose bear; this discussion is about the fact that, for men, unaware as they are, this discussion so often does end up in statistics. They do this because they do not know the fear, and they have no other way other than to tackle this question statistically.
-\\
-Interestingly, if we use the pool of all men on earth as the pool to draw from when randomly deciding who to teleport to a woman in the forest. This pool would include domestic partners and family who, incidentally, pose the greatest threat to any one woman. You'd rather be in the forest alone with a random man than with any one of your male family members. That's one to take home for consideration. Or not home in particular, maybe....
+In fact, that was my reflex too and it forever will be. Considering that men //do// in fact not have these experiences to draw from to inform their man or bear decisions, it will be very hard to try to use it to teach men that they //are// scary. Now personally I don't need to be told that I am conceptually capable of overpowering most women, I know that and I don't plan to actually do it. I also know that this means that most women unfamiliar with me won't trust me, because they //can't//. I guess the point of this question is that many men do not? And yes, most men are decent to women, but the point is that many men do not, a reality that is actually so common that unlike rape, male indecency towards women is a daily occurrence (I mean, women are raped every day, but not every woman is raped every day. //But// every woman does become victim of male indecency on a daily basis.)