I don’t go on social media so I don’t really get it but I have seen memes here and there of women getting mauled by bears presented in a “heh, serves her right” kind of way.
So weird that dudes complain that they can’t get women when the message they put out there is they hate women and make images of them being brutally mauled. 
EDIT: I did not expect to see people I trust minimise SA here. I’m disappointed, that’s something I expect from a random chud blowing in from another instance, not you guys. Most of you were extremely cool in your answers, but to the one or two that weren’t. Do fucking better.
Does pepper spray help vs bears?
yes! there are literally bear sprays but iirc most of the deal with those is they’re setup for wider dispersal because bears are tall
More distance on the squirt also. Human pepper spray assumes you’re pretty close to the person you’re spraying. Bear spray has a range of more like 20’. It sprays out more like a line.
Yes, in fact, bear spray is one of the things you’re supposed to bring to national parks.
Well known path: man; assume he’s just another hiker
Obscure/empty path: bear; he will likely leave me alone if I leave him alone
i would choose a bear over a hexbear user
What about the actual hexbear?
i would go wow what a dopeass bear before getting brutally mauled
Fair enough tbh. Most of us are feds.
i solely know of this from a vaush fan in my vague social circle talking about it and me having no clue what they were talking about so i went to r/vaushv and searched up bear to try and get what they meant bcs it was so obviously just some dumb shit they’d gotten from there and there’s like half a dozen threads of “”“progressive”“” men going full
ranting about leftist misandry and comparing being afraid of sexual harrasment to systemic racism against black men.
here’s the start of the current thread they’ve got going:
vaush fan
not some chud
There was a hypothetical about women’s safety, leading to women explaining why they would feel safer encountering a bear in the forest than a man they didn’t know.
it does seem like it would be true, the numberd seem to back it up too
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The vast majority of men wouldn’t attack a random stranger woman lmao. This is just straight up misandry
The vast majority of bears wouldn’t attack a random human lmao. This is just straight up speciesism
I’m a guy and I’d prefer the bear, and think everyone should choose the bear.
I’ve seen several bears back when I lived in China, they’re docile as fuck. I don’t think they’d ever attack a person since, y’know, they’re herbivores. They just sit around eating bamboo all day. It’d be like asking “Oh would you rather encounter a man in the forest or a wombat?”
I think you’re joking here, but pandas are absolutely not safe animals to be around. They can get very territorial and WILL fuck you up. Beautiful, yes. Safe? Absolutely not.
Source? Growing up in China we were taught they were afraid of humans and flee if they catch our scent, which is why footage of wild pandas was near impossible to get. Males get aggressive around a short breeding season but even then they have never killed a human in recorded history.
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Pandas probably since he mentioned them eating bamboo
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I dunno, I’d say go wander around where they live but you probably shouldn’t go bushwhacking through a panda preserve
In the woods.
Wild? I saw the dumb fucks at a zoo/breeding preserve. They were falling all over the place. Extremely clumsy animals.
Pandas are deeply unserious animals
I think my list of least dangerous to most dangerous is Blackbear, fellow hiker man, Grizzly Bear, man in woods not hiking, and man who owns property next to said hiking trail.
I’d just like to add that as a regular ol’ cis dude, I’d much rather encounter a black bear than a random guy in the woods. I know how to deal with a black bear 99% of the time, I know how to deal with the random guy 85% of the time. I’m not particularly afraid of either scenario but I’d definitely take the bear.
Make it a grizzly bear and idk, I’ve never been anywhere that has wild grizzlies so I don’t know the proper protocol for dealing with them. Also in the 1% of cases where I can’t defuse the situation I think a grizzly just wins that fight. I feel like I can make a black bear give up on killing me.
I still think I’d rather take the grizzly bear that inexplicably hates me than the random guy that inexplicably hates me though. At least the grizzly will tell me how it really feels in very unambiguous terms.
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well, first of all, i did say “random guy.” as in, a completely random draw of any guy out there. idk how the category of “hikers” self-selects for being more or less violent/unpredictable. but if it’s a totally random guy, from what I’ve personally experienced in my day-to-day life, 15% seems like a pretty reasonable number for “guys who might just snap and kill me for any or no reason”
Obviously not all guys in that category will snap and kill me for any or no reason, if they were that unstable they wouldn’t still be out there. But any of them could decide I’m the first at any time. I’ve had strangers try to kill me for imagined slights before. Only men, at that. Like just to be clear, because I’ve seen a little more discussion about this, my comment is not of the “well I choose bear only because bears are pretty safe to encounter” variety. If it’s a bear vs a random woman I choose the woman any day. No woman ever tried to murder me in broad daylight on busy streets for no reason.
I’ve never been anywhere that has wild grizzlies so I don’t know the proper protocol for dealing with them
Play dead until you aren’t playing anymore, basically
For a polar bear or mountain lion, however, by the time you see it, you’re already dead. It already knew you were there, and specifically decided that it wanted to be in your presence.
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He was a bear of a man, 6’2" and uncut
-Ben Shapiro
There was a guy who responded to this.
His mom was attacked by a bear and wrote a book about it. He said that she felt safer around men than around bears in response to this trend.
Thing is though, she did an AMA on Reddit a few years back and someone trawled through the answers and found a question where she was basically asked her this exact thing. She said that she feels safer around bears than men and that she carries a gun when she goes hiking but not because of the risk of running into a bear again.
There have been some really good responses from women defending choosing a bear. Here’s a few that stuck out to me that I remember:
[CW: assault/SA]
“At least a bear sees me as human”
“Nobody would ask me what I was wearing if I got attacked by a bear”
“The worst that a bear can do is kill me”
“If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me”
“When I got attacked by a bear I screamed at it and it ran away, when I got attacked by a man he smiled, covered my mouth, and said that he was just going to enjoy it more”
“A bear would only take 5 minutes”
“A bear wouldn’t kill me for pleasure”
A lot of “defensive” men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it’s a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they’d rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust.
The question is very specifically worded to ask women if they would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man.
I saw one really good response from a man who clearly wasn’t quite over the line with regards to women’s liberation and feminist values - think a middle of the road kinda guy - and his partner asked him if his daughter was in the woods alone would he rather there be a bear or a woman in the woods. He immediately said “With a woman” almost reflexively.
When he got posed the same question except with a bear or a man you could see him really wrestling with the question as he considered the implications and the risks. I think he settled on the bear but the point wasn’t about getting him to agree with women, it was getting him to understand some of the risks that women, trans people, and femme people weigh up on a near constant basis due to the risk that men pose.
In a similar vein, on a wild tangent, because I’m amab/masc presenting when the opportunity is right (either when there aren’t women around or when a guy has escalated a discussion) I will often drop the question on them and ask what their rape plan is. Generally they squirm and have to, for the first time, think through what they would do to mitigate their risk of being raped and what they would do if they were in that situation.
Often the answers are really poorly thought through, such as “I’d fight back” or “I wouldn’t get myself into that situation” 🙄
Sometimes it cuts through though and you can get a man to reflect on how pretty much any woman/trans person/femme person is going to have a very well developed rape plan with all sorts of strategies for mitigating the risk and how they carry these plans with them and enact them all of the time.
Which leads into my next tangent. An autistic femme presenting person talked about their experience trying to mask to fit in due to growing up undiagnosed and how it’s a response to a constant pattern of being ostracised, judged, and harassed for not fitting in but the moment that you drop the mask, people tend to respond really poorly to that so it’s a real double-bind where you either compromise your needs (and often your health) to get treated badly fairly often or you don’t make that compromise and you get treated badly for it.
I jumped in the comments and said “Y’know there’s a parallel here - women often report a similar double-bind where when a guy hits on them they either have to very gently and politely try to decline without coming off as being coy or they can be blunt and straight-up refuse but a blunt rejection very often gets an abusive response whereas a polite rejection gets ignored and compromises her own needs.”
That wasn’t anything widly political to say. I was just trying to invite allistic women to be like “Hey yeah! I understand that kind of experience where you are confronted with the choice of being treated like shit for just expressing yourself directly or you have to placate someone else’s needs and expend all of this energy just trying to get them to not treat you badly (and often they end up treating you badly after all that effort anyway). That sucks. I didn’t realise that’s what it was like for autistic people for most of their social interactions.”
But of course some ex-military jerkwad guy who was late self-identifying as autistic had to charge headlong into the replies to turn it into being all about men, all about him, and all about his own experience (and ableist perception) of autism to the exclusion of others. It was a perfect example of male fragility and it was yet-another example of guys doing that thing where they think they’re defending men by arguing that they aren’t capable of determining whether someone consents and that they cannot help but sexually harass women. Imagine how monstrous I am to argue that men are very much capable of knowing better and they can do things like “controlling their impulses like a mature human” being rather than being like wild animals that need to be physically restrained in order to protect the people around them. These dorks think the absolute worst of men and my hunch is that this kind of reply is mostly a self-report.
Dudes rock /s
“If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me”
That one really hits close to home, as a victim of SA and as someone who has several friends, I’ve personally witnessed several SAs that went unbelieved, many men opened the conversation with damage control and downplaying for a dude they’ve never even met, but if a bear/snake/black guy was so much as spotted, you’d bet your ass 5-10 males are going to get off their assessment and do something about it.
A lot of “defensive” men have been missing the point (shocker, I know) and they seem to think that it’s a question about whether women would prefer to be attacked by one or the other, or that they are saying they’d rather be alone with a bear than any man including ones they know and trust
I have no clue why men are so regularly offended when women talk about being unsafe in relevant conditions. I especially do not understand that when they themselves want to push the ‘real men must be dangerous/strong/etc.’ sort of BS.
A bear buys a new motorcycle and he wants to show it off to his friend rabbit. They get on and slowly go up a big hill. Then on the way down they go 80, 90, 100, 110, 120 km/h! The bear then asks the rabbit:
”Are you scared?”
“Nope”, says the rabbit, so they finish the ride and get off the bike.
“May I try driving now?”, asks the rabbit.
“Sure, why not”.
So they slowly go up the hill again, this time with the rabbit driving. And then they go down 80, 90, 100, 110, 120km/h! and the rabbit asks the bear:
“Are you scared?”
“Nope!”
“Well you should be, cause I can’t reach the brakes.”
My first encounter with this hypothetical was from a TERF, which strongly and no doubt incorrectly colored my impressions of it, so I am self-limiting to shitposts
I honestly wonder how much of it is like, men figuring if you see a bear your only option is to run up to it and start throwing punches.
I’d pay to see chuds do that. Bear will be fine.
Forgot, kinda already happened https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OFrnuWhLvQ
Bear was like “Did he really just do that?”
The bear is confused because they think it’s very clear they would win in a fight effortlessly and is wondering why this guy is picking a fight he’ll lose anyway
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
You’re seeing double. You’re drunk, bot.
Bear safety rant mode on.
Screaming at Americans who feel the need to assert their masculine prowess by carrying a giant gun everywhere in the back country to stop being a stupid ass and get some bear spray is one of my maladaptive hobbies. Like bro you’re not at the north pole or salmon fishing in the Alaskan interior. You’re in Wyoming. Put the giant six shooter away and get something that actually works in the very rare case that you’re charged by a bear. And they always want to take the dumbest guns. If you’re worried about defense from bears you should have a semi-automatic shotgun loaded with magnum slugs. That’s it. No rifles, certainly no pistols. In the extremely unlikely case that you’re actually attacked by a bear you’re going to be charged by a bear you probably didn’t see, the bear is going to be running at you at thirty miles an hour, and it’s going to be probably 100 feet away. You’re not going to get a second shot with your dorky giant revolver, you’re not going to drop it with your tacticool rifle. Assuming you can even get the gun on target in time, which is unlikely, and that you can hit a moving target, which is also unlikely, you’ve got a window of a very few seconds to put enough slugs in the bear to kill or incapacitate it.
And sometimes, that’s something you should consider. If you’re salmon fishing someone in the party should have a real big gun in case things go south. You almost certainly won’t need to shoot the bear, but sometimes yelling “hey bear!” And throwing rocks isn’t enough to dissuade a bold yearling and you might want to add some warning shots to keep it at a healthy distance.
But in any case where you don’t havea hundred pounds of delicious fish that you refuse to share you’re almost certainly better off using bear spray to make everyone in front of you miserable instead of trying to land enough shots in a very fast moving animal who just erupted out of the undergrowth to actually stop it.
Plus, like, lets be real - almost all charges are bluff charges so your party can just stand there, hold your arms up, and yell “hey bear” until the bear decies you’re not worth the trouble and ambles away.
Idk, this is a huge pet peeve. Bear safety rant mode off.
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when women
It’s because men are the fucking worst
Make it a “Alone with an African man or a bear” and these men will agree with the women instantly lmao.
edit: most of these men would prolly be against transwomen going into women bathrooms
This actually highlights my issue with it. Both this and racism feel the same to me. Even though I aknowledge that they clearly aren’t.
End of the day I’m still being judged for something i didn’t do and wouldn’t ever do. And that sucks.
But seriously fuck my feelings, do what you have to to stay safe
Can I add to this the “tell your male friends not to r*pe” bit too?
If I tell a rpist not to be a rpist, I doubt they’ll have an epiphany and change their ways. And telling someone that wouldn’t do it in the first place is obviously not gonna help against r*pists.
I don’t get it.
Well yeah, but you can curtail someone’s behaviour. I knew a guy who was creepy towards lots of my friends. I confronted him in a ‘bro’ way - like ‘hey man I know you’re not trying to be weird but I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the way you’re treating people.’ He was taken back, absolutely squirming in his skin. At first he denied it, so I doubled down that I don’t think they’d have lied to me and what they’d said does sound bad. He cracked under the pressure and started apologising - I was like ‘hey don’t apologise to me - apologise to them if you want.’
I don’t know if he truly apologised, but I do know that those friends never endured his creepiness ever again. After a while he stopped hanging out in our circles completely.
Perhaps it made him introspect about that moment. Perhaps he just went somewhere else to carry on creeping. But if there’s a person with convictions like me ‘somewhere else’, then ‘somewhere else’ will not be welcoming to him either. And if everyone could do their part in combatting it, he will struggle to find a place to be a creep.
The thing is, creeps creep far less if they know they’ll be caught. Sure, some psychopaths might just do it anyway, but most of the time they work within what they know they can get away with. And the sexist undercurrents in society are what allow them to get away with it.
It’s not 'hey guys, guys, before we go out tonight can we all just agree ‘No raping!’. It’s identifying times when your probably drunk friend is being overbearing towards a girl and telling him to cut it out. If your friend is talking about women as if they’re pieces of meat, he’s dehumanising them, and when people are dehumanised they’re more likely to be harassed/attacked and so on. That’s the part you cut out.
Maybe I’m taking the phrasing too literally, this makes sense to me and is absolutely the kind of thing I’d for someone and would want someone to do to me if I was coming off strong or giving off the wrong vibes.
Thanks for the insight.
