‘A bear is at home in the woods. The man probably followed me there’: TikTok goes to war as women declare they’d feel safer with wild animals than men

Recently, the internet has played host to a now-viral video in which several women are asked the question of whether they would rather be alone in the woods with a man or with a bear, with all of the women in the video saying that they would prefer a bear.

With that gong sounded, TikTok quickly delved into a pretty severe debate, with a swath of mostly male TikTokkers arguing that it makes no sense to prefer being stuck in the woods with a bear over a man and ridiculing those who answered as such. Mostly women, meanwhile, have countered with statistics and personal accounts of how much more likely it is that a man will attack them over a bear, further pointing out that the worst a bear will do is kill them.

I’ll spare you the less-savory comments on the above videos; they’re exactly what you expect, and also entirely miss the point around why this video exists and has gone viral in the first place. Many such commenters, I presume, are looking at the question of “man or bear,” and hopping on a line of thought such as, “Well, anyone would stand a much better chance against a bear than a man, so why would anyone prefer the bear?” I direct you back to the second paragraph about how the worst a bear would do to a woman is kill them.

They may counter with, “But not all men would attack a woman, and how do you know the bear wouldn’t attack you?” From the woman’s point of view in this hypothetical situation, there’s no telling how likely it is that she’ll be attacked, regardless of whether the other party is a man or a bear. So once again, the deciding factor is that the worst a bear will to do a woman is kill them.

Further still, they may say something like, “I’m uncomfortable with my demographic getting generalized alongside serial rapists and murderers,” and while that’s a perfectly normal thing to feel discomfort over, it perhaps highlights the number one problem with these mostly male responses: they are taking the discomfort of women personally instead of asking themselves why women might feel this way.

Throughout these comments, you’ll find people telling the women in the above TikToks to go run to a bear and hug it, to go live with bears if they’re so much safer than men, and other such sentiments. The thing is, women don’t want to be stuck in the woods with either a man or a bear, hence the “hypothetical” part of this hypothetical situation wherein the woman is trapped in the woods and only has a say in who she’s trapped with.

And yet, the first response that those commenters seemed to have beyond interpreting female trauma as personal rejection is that the bears should be entitled to the women instead, not realizing that women don’t want anyone to feel entitled to them. This can be tied back to the fact that there is a 100% chance that a bear — any random bear — will not feel entitled to a woman either emotionally or physically; with any random man, that number is lower than 100.

Men, none of these women are saying that you, specifically, are a rapist. What they are saying is that history and personal experience has led them to be afraid of men, because at the end of the day, women have no way of knowing if they’re one rejection away from winding up dead in a ditch somewhere, or worse. It doesn’t matter how universally affable you may be as an individual, because it has nothing to do with you; it has to do with the experience that women have by just existing in this world, and they’re absolutely entitled to that fear just as much as you’re entitled to feeling uncomfortable about that aforementioned generalization (trust me, though, that generalization has existed in the minds of women decades, perhaps centuries longer than when you first learned of it, and with good, if tragic, reason).

So instead of taking women’s fear personally and feeling entitled to their comfort (be it comfort around you or receiving comfort from her), show compassion and empathy toward that fear, talk to the women in your life in the hopes that you’ll gain a better understanding of why they feel the way they do, and know that this has nothing to do with bears at all.