The entire question itself I don’t think was ever meant to hold up to any analysis. It’s more about making a statement on how threatened women feel in public. Bear attacks are rare while women are acutely aware of how dangerous being out in public feels. Roughly 20% will be sexually assaulted at least once, half of them before the age of 18, and that number jumps up to somewhere around 40% for trans women specifically, but the stats don’t account for the cultural pressure that’s exerted on every other woman outside of the victims by things like victim blaming and the way that men act in regards to women and their bodies. A simple look at current American politics is a perfect example of why women would “choose the bear.”
The whole thing kind of reminds me of the question about the walrus and the fairy that went around Tumblr earlier this year. It doesn’t matter what the stats say about the likelihood of a fairy being the one knocking at your door. More people would be surprised to find the walrus on their doorstep because at least with a fairy, you just have to accept that magic exists and not figure out how the walrus got there or learned how to knock on your door.
Sure, and that’s fine - but if that’s the case, why do we get long-winded explanations with stats and math like the one linked to earlier? Maybe not everyone got the memo that it wasn’t supposed to hold up to scrutiny, but when someone writes something like that, apparently with the intention of it looking like an actual statistical analysis of an actual situation, they’re opening themself up to analysis and criticism.
Honestly, I think you’re spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it’s not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.
I think that was inherently my problem with the whole thing. It may have had good intentions originally - using metaphor to draw attention to a problem in a way that might have gotten through to people who don’t understand or reject more straight-forward discussion - and that’s great when it works, but because of the absurdity of the premise, it ended up being a magnet for scrutiny and objections. As a result, there were three main kind of responses:
Accepting the premise at face value, and agreeing that a woman should choose the bear.
Objecting to the premise, because it is patently ridiculous if taken at face value.
Objecting to the underlying message.
Group 3 were the truly toxic responses, and they did a good job at highlighting the underlying message (or perhaps at highlighting a specific kind of person, who will just object to anything a woman says no matter what, or who refuses to believe that women are justified in their fear of men, or who are incels, or whatever else), but they, and the responses to them, kind of took over the entirety of the discourse surrounding it… it became about those people objecting and others objecting to their objections. At that point, it felt like the whole point was to shine a spotlight on toxic individuals, and the real message was lost to that.
The entire question itself I don’t think was ever meant to hold up to any analysis. It’s more about making a statement on how threatened women feel in public. Bear attacks are rare while women are acutely aware of how dangerous being out in public feels. Roughly 20% will be sexually assaulted at least once, half of them before the age of 18, and that number jumps up to somewhere around 40% for trans women specifically, but the stats don’t account for the cultural pressure that’s exerted on every other woman outside of the victims by things like victim blaming and the way that men act in regards to women and their bodies. A simple look at current American politics is a perfect example of why women would “choose the bear.”
The whole thing kind of reminds me of the question about the walrus and the fairy that went around Tumblr earlier this year. It doesn’t matter what the stats say about the likelihood of a fairy being the one knocking at your door. More people would be surprised to find the walrus on their doorstep because at least with a fairy, you just have to accept that magic exists and not figure out how the walrus got there or learned how to knock on your door.
Sure, and that’s fine - but if that’s the case, why do we get long-winded explanations with stats and math like the one linked to earlier? Maybe not everyone got the memo that it wasn’t supposed to hold up to scrutiny, but when someone writes something like that, apparently with the intention of it looking like an actual statistical analysis of an actual situation, they’re opening themself up to analysis and criticism.
Honestly, I think you’re spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it’s not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.
I think that was inherently my problem with the whole thing. It may have had good intentions originally - using metaphor to draw attention to a problem in a way that might have gotten through to people who don’t understand or reject more straight-forward discussion - and that’s great when it works, but because of the absurdity of the premise, it ended up being a magnet for scrutiny and objections. As a result, there were three main kind of responses:
Group 3 were the truly toxic responses, and they did a good job at highlighting the underlying message (or perhaps at highlighting a specific kind of person, who will just object to anything a woman says no matter what, or who refuses to believe that women are justified in their fear of men, or who are incels, or whatever else), but they, and the responses to them, kind of took over the entirety of the discourse surrounding it… it became about those people objecting and others objecting to their objections. At that point, it felt like the whole point was to shine a spotlight on toxic individuals, and the real message was lost to that.