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 <fs xx-large>Man or Bear?</fs></WRAP>
-"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.
+"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}}
-There are two primary methods this question can be answered, and I will deal the boring, statistically informed answer first. 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.
 ====== 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.
+</WRAP>
+<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>
+<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?
+</WRAP>
+<WRAP round box>
 <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 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%\\
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 <fs x-large>9.</fs> 20% <wrap em>OR</wrap> 0.001%\\
-With a conservative((Or genereous? Depending on how you want to see it.)) estimate I assume that one third of all women do get raped. If the average woman lives 80 years, 3 women live 240 years.\\
+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:
-You would need 0.001% some 100,000 times to fill 100%. If we think of this as days, 100,000 days are 273 years. So I think that a woman, per day, has a chance of roughly 0.001% to get raped. Give or take. The numbers here are wildly off anyway, but this is good enough((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.)).
+  - 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>
-The point here is that somewhere here, most women would definitely stop taking the bear. I know this because at 0.001% this stops being a "choose one", and it's now more of a "you live a normal day, but you can choose to also have a 20% chance of dying to a bear". If the rape chance was any less likely then it would actually //improve// (ie. reduce) one's daily chance of getting raped and it would be kinda dumb to choose anything else. So...
+So...
 **Where is your limit?**\\
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 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. Personally I would put the chance at 0.1% and be good with it.
+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.
 ===== Comparing Cutoffs =====
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 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.
-This limit is, to a degree, informed mathematically, but for many (//especially// women) it will be an 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.
+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.
 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.
 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.)