Firstly: I’m reasonably sure these women are just kvetching. I often say ‘I’d rather drink piss’ to express that I don’t like something. Obviously I’m not actually going to drink piss.
Secondly…I do agree it’s a bit much to compare men to a deadly 1200 pound predator. I would be a bit fed up of hearing that too if I were a guy.
Thirdly…that said…I understand WHY women say that even if it’s a bit ridiculous. I’ve had a male friend completely turn on a dime and send me rape threats while drunk. I pleaded and tried to reason with him for about 20 minutes before I completely snapped and threatened to do things to him with a hunting knife that I won’t detail because there’s no need to make people vomit. Only then did he back off and switch to making excuses and blaming his autism. It was terrifying because there was no reasoning with him. He LIKED that I was frightened and freaked out. It gave him a pleasurable power rush. The only reason he backed off was the threat of said hunting knife.
A bear isn’t malicious. A bear just wants to eat. A bear can be redirected or avoided. You can do things such as wear a bell or carry mace or put up an electric fence around a tent. A man isn’t necessarily malicious but IF he is…those precautions won’t do jack poopsies because he consciously knows the woman doesn’t want it and LIKES the act of stomping on boundaries.
Hadn’t heard of this until just now…
I’m a cis het white guy.
I think 99% of the time a random guy is safe, there’s a lot of guys out there, maybe I have tinted glasses, I’ll say 75% of the time a random guy is safe, maybe I’m sheltered in my California comfort, 50% of the time a random guy is safe.
I wouldn’t think myself safe in more than 2% of encounters with a bear, no sarcasm. Take a walk in a park in Alaska, it doesn’t matter how many people are around you’re always questioning every noise.
And for that comparison I understand survivors concerns with random people, but bears are not a comparable thing in Bear country (much like I haven’t been in vulnerable women’s shoes) (maybe sun bears or small black bears… Not the big ones…)
Yes. YES YOU DO. 99% of men are not a threat TO YOU. But how could you know any different?
To women though? It’s way way WAY higher. For me it’s not even a question between bear or man. Men are the reason I am scared to walk by myself at night.
Like, just go by the numbers if you are skeptical
https://vpc.org/press/nearly-1800-women-murdered-by-men-in-one-year-new-violence-policy-center-study-finds/
https://animal-world.com/bear-attack-statistics/
You need to step out of your own perspective and really understand the world that women are forced to live in before answering this question. I can respect that you think you might be biased, but I can not stress enough how “biased” is an understatement.
This is something that I am embarrassed but took me 30 years to… Notice? I don’t want to say understand because I don’t think I will truly be able too.
It took getting married and my ex wife being sexually assaulted TWICE. WTF is wrong with us.
For further reading for anyone interested:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv20sst.pdf
Right?? Even I as a small gay man know that cis straight men are not to be trusted. They don’t have to threaten me with sexual violence, but I know for a fact that when they mutter shit about me, they have the very real possibility of trying it.
Some of us are, in a very palpable sense, walking in the woods in Bear Country constantly. But he doesn’t see it because it’s not him in our shoes. And so the same defensive rhetoric comes out on Lemmy and Reddit and all the other bullshit social media every single time. Because it’s not them living next door to a delinquent who has publicly yelled obscenities and threats at them directly for existing.
E: Downvote all you want if you feel identified. It’s not gonna change what we live through.
Wait, the FBI reports nearly 14k homicides in the US in 2019 and only 1.8k were a man killing a woman? That’s a smaller proportion than I expected.
I got the FBI data here, it only breaks things down by method: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls
Well, if we’re being pedantic you could check to see how many of those homicides were being committed by men vs women…
But also, it’s isn’t just murder that makes women fear men. It’s harassment. It’s rape.
I’m sure those numbers are much higher, I just felt weird looking at the linked study because it felt unnaturally void of context and when I found the context it made the study feel incredibly disingenuous.
I was trying to look up statistics on how many perpetrators of homicides, assault, etc. there were but I didn’t manage to find anything. I was curious to what degree it was a “loud minority” kind of situation, which is the frame my brain goes into when I consider this hypothetical.
According to the CDC, as of 2010 nearly one in five women in the US has been raped. And 1 in 6 have been stalked.
That’s one heck of a loud minority, just saying.
Yes