this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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IDK, I'm not sold.
Neither Man nor Bear isn't presented as an option, the choices were Man or Bear so anybody who chooses Bear is CHOOSING THE BEAR. Bears are not kind to humans in their territory, if you run into a mother then you're going to be torn apart.
But she's getting both. Big brown bear and insufferably smug, demonstrably useless, petty and vindictive man.
Bears generally leave you alone unless you've got food and they're hungry... at which point, just give them your food and you'll be fine. Despite millions of humans living in historical bear territory, you get only 2-5 actual attacks reported per year.
Men can't make this claim.
How many thousands of men have you interacted with and yet are still alive? Are you seriously suggesting you could interact with thousands of bears and have the same success rate? You're manipulating the numbers in a very dishonest way.
Nobody is scared of vending machines even though they kill more people than sharks, not because sharks are safer, but because almost nobody interacts with a shark but almost everyone has many safe interactions with a vending machine.
Have you never seen any report of how many women experience some form of sexual assault from men in their life? Because that's higher than you think.
Lol, are you literally thinking the hypothetical includes all men? They aren't going to run away from their father, brother, cousin, or the nice old man who runs the laundremat.
It's about predatory men. Men that want something from them - sex, a relationship, companionship. The way mamy men pursue this is often very sketchy and/or dangerous. Domestic violence against woman is extremely common.
There have been 3 black bear attacks in the USA this year, all three fatal, and one brown bear attack, also fatal. I might also be missing some nonfatal attacks since theres not a well maintained list for those. Humans also generally leave you alone if you're not in their immediate vicinity, I think it warrants assuming you're not just on the same mountain as the bear.
Now do men.
There were 3,849 women murdered in the US in 2023. But it does not list who killed them.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388777/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-gender/
https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/07/04/census-details-how-often-men-kill-women
using the lower number from 2021, and the bear fatalities from the same year (6 total, only 4 were women), women are 36.5 times more likely to be killed by a man than a bear... and this is not counting rape.
Bear attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America
You didn't figure in factors like number of men total or number of bears total, and the amount of exposure to either.
You are such an asshole.
I'm not the first to say that, not the last, but you need to be reminded of that constantly.
Fuck you, fuck your bad faith arguments, and go away.
You are also the reason why people choose bears.
That was my thought reading every single one of their replies.
I don't know who this guy is, nor do I want to read their history... But I agree, they do seem like an asshole.
You didn't factor in the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.
Murder isn't the only way to be killed. Case in point, 2,958 women's deaths are classified as "passenger vehicle accidents", plus another 2,126 pedestrian deaths.
By gender, the overwhelming majority of accident drivers are men (13,085 : 5,212). So if you're worried specifically about dying and you exclude all murderers, just getting in a car makes other male drivers vastly more dangerous than bears.
Holy shit, that's nuts! This should be in the top comments for this silly hypothetical lol. I think you just checkmated nearly everyone trying to argue against the bear.
Your mind is going to be blown when you find out about the number of man attacks this year.
"Humans also generally leave you alone if you're not in their immediate vicinity"
You should talk to a women one day.
I bet even male toddlers killed more people in the us
I can't tell if this a serious comment. There were only three in the entire United States? God damn dude, maybe I'll take the bear as well... And I'm a guy.
I guess you've sold us all on how much better the bear is. For the record, I encountered a bear earlier this year and yelled at it. It walked away.
And is 3 + 1 within the range [2, 5]? I know it's a tough question, but I have faith you can manage to figure it out!
It's important that people understand this. I literally just earlier this year yelled at a 500 pound bear eating trash out of a garbage can. It walked away when I did this.
Too lazy to look through my post history but iirc men are MUCH more likely to kill someone than a bear, adjusted for population. You can search through it if you’d like. Men are much more violent than bears.
See that's actually not true, because there are more men total than bears total and people are generally much more exposed to men than bears. Let's say you go to a city and walk past a hundred people. Bears are safer, so you'd be perfectly justified to walk past a hundred bears?
I don’t think you understand what adjusted for population means. Bears kill like 2.6 people a year.
Humans kill ~11,000 times as many, and have 100 times the population. So humans are 110x more likely to kill you than a bear. (Note this is humans, not men. Men are responsible for 87.5% of known murders, but 50% of the population.) Adjusting for this, men are ~145 to 200x more likely to kill a human than a bear (like a quarter of murders are unknown so I gave it a wide range) You also have to take into account humans are generally bound by society and thus most human interaction won’t be as dangerous where as it’s not like a bears gonna be like “uh oh there are cameras here or other people might see me kill this person” so like… yeah you can’t perfectly account for everything but uh, point being bears really aren’t that dangerous if you see one alone in the woods.
Also sorry if I didn’t provide links and math might be slightly whatever I was taking and shit and honestly don’t care that much.
Edit: and before you try and say anything else please note this is me being nice and only looking at literal murder. Ignoring assault and sexual assault and etc, which all bear attacks are about 35 a year total and… yeah human numbers are uh, MUCH higher.
This ignores exposure time though which is a huge factor, and makes the comparison disingenuous.
It absolutely doesn't. The original question is about if you would prefer to be alone in a forest with a bear vs. with a man - it's not would you like to interact with a bear vs. a man. People are alone in the forest with bears all the time - neither the bear nor the person knowing the other is there beyond an abstract concept. Heck, I'm alone in a forest with several bears every time I take my recycling out. I wouldn't choose to interact with a bear, but I do know that there's no circumstance in which the bear is going to come and seek me out (barring obnoxiously tedious rare exceptions like rabies or famine or something equally too uncommon to be relevant).
People do seek out other people, all the time. If it knows I'm there, the average bear wants nothing more than to avoid me as much as it can - the average man wants to do that significantly less, if only because they're seeking the company of another human.
OK but what would the numbers be if humans start going to work with bears, have a party with bear guests invited, go to clubs with bears, live with bears, have a game night with bears...
What in the fuck is your point?
Who are these assholes defending this line of thinking?
Strawmaning like nutjobs trying to defend men? Fuck you.
This thread is hilarious, guys in here talking about going to work with bears
Anything to avoid the concept that men are actually dangerous to women
So an individual bear kills how many humans on average and an individual human kills how many humans on average a year. You're almost there!
I wonder how many female bears kill people vs male bears.
This week on another episode of "Missing the Forest for the Trees"!
And I will always choose the bear I will always choose the wolves No matter what they do, they wouldn't blame my clothes I would rather choose to die Let my body decompose Cause even when you're ash, thеy will never let you go
So, certain death is preferable to meeting the average male randomly in the woods, in other words, the average woman believes the average man will rape and kill her. That's all we need to say about male/female relations in 2026.
I know it's a novelty account but you're still just being obnoxious and spreading hate under the guise of satire.
The entire argument of a woman meeting a bear or a random man in the woods is dumb from the start.
Most bears would run away from a human in the woods, a normal human is not seen as prey in most situations.
So this makes the argument more like asking:
Which makes far more sense both logically and emotionally, especially when people pick the bear over the man.
As a man, the original question about meeting a man or a bear in the woods, initially triggered a feeling of being compared to a lethal animal or certain death, and coming up short.
This obviously feels unfair to most men (and to be completely fair, it IS completely unfair to most men).
However, looking at the more realistic outcome of "meeting" a bear, i.e. catching a glimpse of it, it makes far more sense.
Sorry for the ramble, I am just annoyed at the stupid question and got caught up overanalyzing it.
Also, men who feel the need to argue about why choosing the bear is "wrong" are the reason that most women choose the bear in the first place.
Don't forget the part where the meeting was anonymous and without consequences. The men would basically act like they would online.
Tell us you haven't lived in a place with black bears without telling us.
800 lbs of pure "i'm sorry, i didn't mean it, please don't hurt me, i'm someone's little boy"
To be fair, I don't think the meme question ever specified what kind of bear they're going to meet in the woods. I know my answer would change drastically based on the type of bear.
Tell me you know nothing about bears without telling me you know nothing about bears.