I think we should call out women's misogyny more often. My mom was the most misogynistic person I had ever encountered growing up. At herself, at other people. like she's better now, but woman left me some deep scars.
"but women need protecting from men! bear in the woods etc" no I will BITE YOU. I'm biting you so hard right now. I'm femininely beating your ass. I don't need "protecting" from men. i'm not a child. Or a dog or something, I'm a grown ass biting you machine. The amount of women who just said stuff like that still makes me sick.
See, this is also bad actually. The whole concept is flawed. Instead of seeing a random man and treating him as an individual who makes his own decisions, It's a biased assumption that says "this guy is a man, and there for I am unable to trust him to act good." instead of biessentialism, you just switched it out for gender essentialism. It was flawed concept to begin with. It's still terf ideology. It's based on the misogynistic idea that women are weaker and should be weary of strange men, that women are safer with other women. It makes it easier for women to be abused and abuse other people. These ideas at their very core are bunk. If you are in the woods and you would rather meet a bear than a strange man, seeing him as more of a threat instead of a positional ally, you are the problem. Mainly, okay, you're saying a human man is more dangerous than a wild animal. Are we not seeing this? we're saying that a black bear, or idk polar bear, a bear that has and will eat humans, is better than some guy. it's.. are we not seeing this
That hypothetical always baffled me because I run into strange men all the time. It's called living in a society. Bears are terrifying; if there were bears walking around my town as frequently as strange men I would never leave the house. "I'd be more scared of running into a strange man alone than running into a bear alone" oh so you don't ever go shopping? You don't ever go for a walk around the block? You don't ever get on a bus early in the morning when there's no other passengers yet? There's strange men there. If you say you'd be more scared of a strange man than a bear, and you walk your dog in the morning, then either you're way too chill about bears (maybe you're only thinking about those lil black bears that get into bins?) or you are fucking lying. Men are literally just people and if I ran into one while hiking or something then that would in no way be any kind of crisis. He's probably also hiking. Men are allowed to exist in public, they're not some imposition.
Also EXTREMELY unfriendly reminder that the whole man vs. bear thing was also inherently very twisted up in the purity culture idea that rape is “a fate worse than death” (ie. that rape survivors are “tainted” and that it would have been better if they had simply been killed). It may be true that one of the arguments people were making on that post was “bears will often ignore you and mind their own business,” but the original argument was “the worst thing a bear can do is kill you,” which is far and away more indefensible than that. MANY sexual assault survivors have explicitly stated that man vs. bear and memes like it are a major part of the rape culture which continues to traumatize them even after the fact, and it’s absolutely wild that people are still defending it given that. We do not owe a post that treats survivors like they’re worth less as people a good faith discussion on the merits. I literally do not care if you can stand on your head and find a useful nugget in the man vs. bear post – I don’t debate that sort of garbage; I burn it.
To that last point though, it's not just that men will kill rape you, and if that's how it's been interpreted then I wish I was living in that happy little bubble too. The reason a man (or human for that matter, the point stands) is worse than a bear, is that people are capable of sadism.
We're taught not to let kidnappers take us to a second location not because rape inherently devalues your worth, (although that is very much a real aspect of rape culture and a major problem, I'm not denying that) but because your chances of survival decrease dramatically when you're taken somewhere else. If a stranger is willing to rape you, especially to kidnap and rape, or to rape in a secluded place, they're probably a lot more likely to be capable of killing you so you can't tell.. Especially in the heat of the moment when they panic at what they've just done.
I always understood the man and bear thing as, you're going to die either way. At least from a bear, it's only intent is to eat you. There's no morality and it isn't trying to make you suffer. Human beings are capable of torture. You run into a stranger alone in the woods, you might be repeatedly raped, and then cut into, and get beaten or humiliated just for their enjoyment. They might decide to see how a person reacts to having a finger cut off, just because they can. And then, after all of that, they'll kill you anyway.
As I understood it, the fear has never been solely about the rape, which of course is horrific, it's about all of the other depraved ways they could make you suffer before also killing you.
At least with a bear, if you're REALLY unlucky, you'll be dead in 12 or 24 hours. A bear can't keep you in a basement for years and force you to have children or slowly drive you insane.
The vast majority of men are in fact not going to imprison you for years in a basement. You are not going to "die either way" if you meet a man or bear in the woods. A great many people encounter bears and survive. Far, far more people encounter men and survive.
Sometimes you get a story of a woman poisoning people. Does that mean that if I'm starving I should rather eat rancid garbage than a meal cooked by a woman? Theoretically, she could put way more painful or dangerous poisons in food than what the garbage would do to me.
Also like. "The risk from men isn't just the rape it's the rape and torture because men do that and bears don't" ok yea sure whatever bears aren't gonna keep you in your basement but you know what will that isn't a bear? Women. You don't hear about it super frequently but kidnappers that are female do exist and they do exactly what was described. But you're not complaining about them because you're not worried about the suffering and the torture and the rape you're worried about it being a man. I mean christ. The whole point of this thread is "Men aren't uniquely capable of pain and torture and women aren't exclusively weak victims of men's pain and torture." and you spent 3 paragraphs basically saying "Actually men would drag you off and do terrible things so it's ok for me to be scared <3"
