• Z3k3@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Even as a dude I’d rather pick the bear over any human. Bears are somewhat predictable humans not so much

      Also they can hit me up with some coke

      • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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        5 months ago

        The thing is, they’re not. Even those self proclaimed bear experts who say this eventually get mauled to death by them. Bears are wild animals, they’re inherently a dangerous predator. A random guy could be a predator, but even then he’d be less dangerous than a bear. The chance that he IS a predator however, are much lower. People who chose the bear are simply delusional and just help rage baiters with the social divide.

        • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I note you did not dispute my cocane claim.

          There hasn’t been a wild bear sighting in my country for hundreds of years, so my fear of people is way higher than my fear of bears

          • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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            5 months ago

            The question of the bait however isn’t worded in a way that takes your local fauna into consideration. It’s just you, in a forest, with either a random man or a wild bear.

            • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Like I said my frlear levels of people I don’t know male or female and everyone in-between is way higher than my fear levels of a bear.

              • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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                5 months ago

                Same, but I still don’t think everyone is a predator based on their gender or sex, despite a lot of anecdotal evidence gathered throughout my life.

        • FluffyPotato@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          How dangerous a bear is is pretty much irrelevant to the whole discourse but I want to talk about bears.

          Black bears are absolute cowards and aren’t that dangerous unless you are an idiot

          Brown bears will fuck you up if you threaten it or if it has cubs but will in most cases not attack.

          Polar bears will kill you because they are bored.

          My country has the highest amount of bear per person but we only have brown bears and most people have encountered a bear in the forest, it’s not as scary as the idea of getting roofied and rapes. Also getting attacked by a bear is more unlikely even here than getting roofied and raped. You don’t have to worried about a bear attack while you do need to guard your drink.

        • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          1.2 deaths by black bears a year in the US. 400,000 black bears. So 3.0x10^-6 chance of being murdered by a bear adjusted per capita.

          26,000 homicides a year (2021, I think it’s slightly lower now but these were the first I saw whatever) for 330M puts you at 7.9x10^-5 chance of being murdered by a human adjusted per capita.

          Sorry, bears win. Plus seeing a bear is cool as hell and seeing another human while hiking is annoying at best.

          • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            I’m genuinely curious on what the math works out to, but I think you’d need to account for time spent around each, or a “per encounter” statistic or something.

            Otherwise there could be a scenario where the bear encounter is 100% deadly for example, but if most bears are never encountered it’d make them seem safer.

            Of course, this scenario is specifically an encounter in the woods, so it’d need to be something like: total encounters between women and bears in the woods vs total encounters with women and men in the woods, and then factor in non-deadly encounters, other forms of assault, etc. That probably has next to no useful data though so good luck…

            • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              I mean, yeah I A: have no real fucks to give about this argument. B: Bears are cooler than humans men can get over it. C: used the stats I could get from a quick google, not gonna do an entire scientific study just to tell men to get fucked, as funny as it would be.

          • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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            5 months ago

            A lot of homicides happen within an inner circle of family & friends. You’re not that close around bears to the point where they are a threat to you. Also, the US is a terrible example for homicide statistics since it is already such an outlier. But I’m sure you know all those facts already and just try to push an agenda here.

            • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              Nah man if I wanted to push an agenda I would’ve adjusted the homicide rates to men instead of just humans. Lol. My only agenda is that bears are objectively cooler than humans and you should probably get over it.

          • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            You also need to adjust for amount of time spent in bear territory vs human territory, or bear encounters vs attacks to get a more accurate statistic.

            • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              But I don’t have to. It’s about perception. Fear is not based in reality. It doesn’t matter what is actually true but what is perceived to be true. People see people being murdered 30x more often by people than by bears per capita. Ignoring per capita, and it’s 23,000x more than bears. It makes plenty of sense to fear humans more than bears based on that alone. Fear is not going to go “oh but actually statistically speaking in order to be afraid I really should do a scientific study to see who in a “alone in the woods at night” scenario is more likely to kill me before I am afraid!” It’s gonna go with the fact that you see and experience humans killing other humans a LOT more than you experience bears killing humans. Also, I’ve conveniently ignored plenty of stats other than literal homicide you have to worry about from men.

              Also, again, none of this matters what does is that bears are objectively cooler than humans, the end.

              • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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                5 months ago

                I mostly agree, but you’re still trying to use inaccurate statistics to justify fear

                • beardown@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  Hm I wonder if any right wing political parties have ever done this to dehumanize outgroups and promote fascism? 🤔

                  I wonder if anyone who is Muslim, Black, or Jewish has any thoughts on this history of such dehumanization and inaccurate perceptions 🤔

        • Trafficone@slrpnk.net
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          5 months ago

          snakes are wild animals, they’re inherently a dangerous predator

          That’s how you sound. Have you been outside?

        • Kachilde@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Consider what you just said about bears.

          Now consider that any woman you tell that to is still likely to pick the bear than the strange man who spouts statistics about bear attacks in order to be picked to spend time alone with her in the woods.

          This discussion isn’t about statistics. The fact that a woman can tell you directly what she wants, and you can tell her she’s wrong because of xyz, is why it will always and forever be the bear.

          • beardown@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Consider what you just said about bears.

            Now consider that any Evangelical Christian you tell that to is still likely to pick the bear than the strange Muslim who spouts statistics about bear attacks in order to be picked to spend time alone with her in the airport.

            This discussion isn’t about statistics. The fact that an Evangelical Christian can tell you directly what she wants, and you can tell her she’s wrong because of xyz, is why it will always and forever be the bear.

            The point is that women can also be bigots - including sexists. It’s benevolent misogyny to presume that they’re too weak and naive to do so

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          This was never meant to be taken that literally. All it ever was supposed to be was a metaphor for violence perpetuated against women by showcasing how those numbers far exceed the numbers for injuries inflicted by a known danger to humans. Anyone seriously discussing the real-world dangers of bear encounters vs men has already entirely lost the plot from the very start.

          • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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            5 months ago

            The ones who entirely lost the plot are those who are supporting this completely moronic claim, as they’re an accomplice to how our societies become more and more divided, which is exactly the whole point of this rage bait & spread through meme formats like this.

            Remember when the IRA did literally the same fucking thing with BLM? The only reason this works is because people like you become emotionally irrational, dying on this very hill of utter stupidity, because it makes you think it gives you some sort of moral high ground.

            • Vespair@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              which is exactly the whole point of this rage bait & spread through meme formats like this

              Do you truly believe this meme was intentionally crafted and released as part of some coordinated effort with specific intent of stewing division between the sexes?

              • beardown@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                No one can prove who created this meme - at least as far as I’m aware.

                However, after it was created, it certainly has been boosted and magnified by right wing organizations and intelligence operations to cause the working class to turn on itself and dehumanize one another. Which is always what fascism does to distract from oligarchic wealth and societal decay.

                This meme is evil. It isn’t funny or cute. It’s intentionally cancerous and we need to stop spreading such hate.

                Because it isn’t white men in wealthy suburban communities who will suffer from this. Rather, it will be the black, brown, and migrant men who are already dehumanized and seen as superpredators.

                After all, why was it so wrong for the police to murder George Floyd - he was more dangerous than a bear and (white) women were afraid of him. Given that, it seems that those hero cops acted in accordance with our society’s values, doesn’t it? Or, if we reject that notion, then we must also reject “memes” like this that further the dehumanization that leads to his murder

                • Vespair@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  My friend, I genuinely think you are expressing paranoid and delusion behavior. I’m not trying to be funny, I’m not trying to win any arguments, I genuinely believe that is an unhealthy amount of very specific narrative subtext to read into this. Trying to equate this mild trend making almost milquetoast commentary on real violence trends against women with the state-sanction murder by police of George Floyd is borderline unhinged thinking.

                  • beardown@lemm.ee
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                    5 months ago

                    The superstructure of society encourages dehumanization of black and brown and “foreign” men because they are seen as dangerous violent animals. This is a centuries old rhetorical ploy by the ruling class to subordinate the masses through fear. This meme contributes to and furthers such ideology

                    Did a single individual anti Semitic poster in 1934 Germany cause Dachau? Of course not. But that single individual poster was one of millions of contributing factors that caused the conditions that allowed for the Holocaust

                    We should recognize and denounce such hatred when we see it

        • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I would feel just as nervous but I do admit my history plays I big part of that

        • Box@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          If I was in the middle of a large and dense forest and saw a random woman, I’d assume she was either a witch or it was a trap

        • Aniki 🌱🌿@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          That’s because even a weak man can still easily overpower a woman. A single woman is not nearly as big a threat to my physical well-being like a man would be to a woman. She would need some kind of weapon or suprise attack or some kind of thoughtful planning to get the better of me while a man can just have a change of mood and boom – woman is in trouble.

          • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Wow, that’s… really sexist against both men and women. I hope you don’t really think that any man can suddenly have a mood change and then overpower any woman.

            That’s disrespectful both to the man’s humanity and the woman’s strength

          • beardown@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            She would need some kind of weapon

            Fortunately it’s not like we live in a country where there are more guns than people

            Because if that were the case then it wouldn’t make sense to only fear certain people

            • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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              5 months ago

              Fortunately it’s not like we live in a country where there are more guns than people

              You might, but we don’t.

              • beardown@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                American is the norm here. Not everyone is American. But most are.

                Weird that you take offense to that but don’t take offense to dehumanizing 50% of humanity

                • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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                  5 months ago

                  Recognizing that people have different experiences than you, something to appear to struggle with, is not dehumanizing 50% of humanity.

                  • beardown@lemm.ee
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                    5 months ago

                    Plenty of white Christians are afraid of people who are black and/or Muslim. Accordingly they likely would prefer to encounter a bear rather than a person who is black or Muslim

                    Is that acceptable? After all, those white Christians likely just “have different experiences” than you or I. We should respect that, right?

                    Also, if men are scary and bad, then immigrant men are scary and bad. If immigrant men are scary and bad then we should stop “letting them in.” Aka, this entire rage bait is a right wing scheme to stigmatize immigrants and national minority groups by using “feminism” as a pretext

      • Phrodo_00@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Being alone with humans on a forest happens all the time. Hiking is a thing. And while I do grant you that rarely fucked up people do fucked up shit, most of the time absolutely nothing happens. At most there’s some nodding.

        • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Hiking is a thing I do ir all the time away from people I don’t know.

      • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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        5 months ago

        We have enough statistics to know that it isn’t. It’s just that assholes always stand out among others, and the pool of good people is generally lower because when people try to date they will fish in a pond full of people who got rejected for obvious reasons, while all the good fish are already on a platter. Or something like this, I got lost in the analogy.

      • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        It’s not true it’s just a way people argue in bad faith. If you are worse than a bear you are a threat to be managed and it’s a motive to exclude you from society.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          motive to exclude you from society.

          Except society doesn’t do that.

          Source: almost every woman you know has been assaulted. Almost none of their assaulters are in jail.

          • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I’ve spent three days in jail because I broke up with my ex and she went to the police and told them I hit her.

            • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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              5 months ago

              A person who bragged about barging into women’s change rooms and “grabbing them by the pussy” was elected president.

            • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That sucks. I hope you never have to deal with that again.

              Of the fifty guys i know well, none have had that happen. Of the fifty girls I know well, there’s 49 who have been molested. (Fake numbers because I’m not going to bother counting, but it’s pretty much right)

              If I knew you better, I could add you to the pile of stories.

            • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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              5 months ago

              Show them the original post. If they go “Yup” then they get to stay. If they feel the need to write a NOTALLMEN rant they get shown the door.

              • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                So you only want men that are OK with being insulted in the face? That’s a pretty small margin you got there.

                • TheTetrapod@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  How is it an insult? Newsflash, you’re not “all men” so you have the power to set yourself apart from the ones who are worse than bears. Men who get worked up about this stuff just need to shift their perspective. I know, I used to be one.

    • Kachilde@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The men who are insulted are making the statement about them. They are too small-minded to consider that the analogy is about how women feel in our world today, not about picking on men. You watch movies and smugly pick out plot holes, while the symbolism and meaning fly miles over your head. We don’t need to know bear attack statistics to wonder why women are choosing the bear.

      If you feel attacked by the bear talk, you either lack empathy, or are the strange man in the woods. Either way I don’t need you repping my gender thanks.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      I imagine, a lot of the controversy also comes from how people imagine the situation, e.g.:

      • Is the person a stranger or an acquaintance?
      • Are you “stuck with them”, in the sense that your car broke down, or in the sense that they’re actively hunting you?
      • beardown@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Also if they’re white and domestically born, or are they black and foreign born.

        Which is what this question is actually about - generating support for xenophobic and anti black policies

          • beardown@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Race is already part of it. When you dehumanize men you make it easier for cops to kill black men, and for Fox News to scare monger about men in migrant caravans, and for Israel to murder male children and claim they are Hamas terrorists.

            Men are not weapons or superpredators. They are human beings. And this dehumanizing rhetoric furthers the goals of conservative and fascist actors - and will disproportionately harm men of color and immigrant men

      • beardown@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        “Why would a man who is black/Muslim/immigrant be insulted over women claiming they would rather be with a dangerous wild animal than with him? How could that have any national policy implications?”

          • beardown@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            It is not only men of color and immigrant men who are insulted, but they are the ones who will disproportionately suffer real life consequences from dehumanizing rhetoric such as this

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      I understand why they’re insulted, but an explanation doesn’t really make it any more rational

    • DessertStorms@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      I also understand why men are insulted.

      It is literally the rage they express when rejected that is WHY we would be more scared to run in to one in the woods than we would a bear.

      The fact that they’re getting “insulted” at all, derailing the entire conversation and making it about them and how they are really the victims, is more proof that they don’t give a shit about the actual experiences of violence and abuse that we are subjected to by them, only about their own egos.

      Literally all they have to do is fucking listen, they are not the ones being harmed in any way shape or form (the reputation of men is already in the shit and it won’t improve unless they work to improve it amongst themselves, but if anything, their reactions are only making it worse), and them being able to frame and prioritise themselves as the ones being being harmed (by ignoring or minimising the legitimate fears and traumatic experiences of millions of women) is just another of many demonstrations of just how privileged they are.

      You’re wrong.

    • theareciboincident@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      The problem is for those of us who go out of our way to make women feel more comfortable and safe in male dominated environments, hearing women treat you with the same disdain as a sex pest just makes you stop giving a shit.

      Which again, I’m sure has happened with other “women when x occurs” memes as well.

      Overall very eye opening. I’ll hold my own doors and stop moderating conversations I guess. Just keeping to my own business.

      This entire issue is clearly just another culture war wedge being pushed by right wing think tanks except the target audience absolutely ate this one up as well as the victims.

      • AquaTofana@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Bro, honestly, you shouldn’t let a few people arguing about a meme online stop you from respecting the women who are actually in your life.

        Door holding for the people behind you is respectful no matter if they’re a man or a woman. I think most people hold the door if they’re paying attention.

        But stopping a conversation from going off the rails in a sexist/derogatory manner? Bruh you could be the difference in one woman’s life from her feeling the full relatability to this meme.

      • growsomethinggood ()@reddthat.com
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        5 months ago

        Bro are you doing these things to actually make women comfortable and safe around you, or are you doing them so that women treat you nicely? The former is feminist, and the latter is disguised chivalry where women still owe you things for treating them like people. Withholding your support of women unless they tell you what a big strong man good ally you are is not a way to a more equal future, and you can apply this to virtually any minority rights movement.

        And if you think women being wary of unknown men is a personal critique, I don’t know what to tell you except that it doesn’t reflect well on you. But it seems like there’s a lot of folks here who missed the point hard and are stepping in it, so you’re in company at least.

      • TheTetrapod@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        You should “go out of your way” to be a good person, not because of what random people will say about the 50% of the population you happen to fall into.