When I was in uni, a girl I attended a couple of classes with was raped walking home alone from a party.
She was never the same again. None of us were.
The female students were given talks on “staying safe” and advised to travel in groups and avoid being on our own at night. We exchanged notes on protocols like informing friends of our whereabouts and screaming “fire!” to attract attention during an assault, but it felt painfully futile.
Being alone could get you killed, however, so too could taking your eyes off your drink at a crowded party, or attempting to leave a controlling boyfriend. You could be sexually assaulted by a stranger appearing from behind a bush at night, and also in your own bed, by a partner or date.
The common denominator in these scenarios isn’t a lack of creative safety hacks; it’s men assaulting women, regardless of what we do or don’t do.
But acknowledging this is the problem is more incendiary than the violence itself.
When pop culture site Screenshot took to the streets earlier this month to ask women: “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?”, the response – “a bear” – came resoundingly and without hesitation. And it quickly went viral on TikTok, where women agreed, citing reasons like, “if I was attacked by a bear, people would believe me”, “I’ve never heard of a bear holding anyone captive for decades” and “bears are easier to predict”.
This should have sparked an important conversation. Instead, what followed was the kind of gaslighting and deflection familiar to any woman who’s ever attempted to share an experience that conflicted with a man’s perception of reality.
“There’s no way you all would rather be trapped in the woods with a bear over a man … you’re either delusional or you’re just flat-out lying” one male TikTok user claimed.
“I’m not hearing about any mass movements of women moving out to the woods where the bears are at,” chimed in another.
“You all are acting like men are scarier than bears? You ain’t watched enough nature documentaries, baby,” argued a third.
The irony in these defences, is they reinforce the point women are putting forward here. Insisting a woman is insane simply because she has a different lived experience to you, and ridiculing her for it, thereby proving you’re unable to handle rejection (women choosing an option that doesn’t include men) feels deeply unsafe. Not to mention, a little like Groundhog Day for #MeToo, which has left most of us exhausted and dejected.
In the wake of one of Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction being overturned last week thanks to a bizarre loophole which found it was “unfair” for additional accusers’ testimonies to be included in the original trial, women are being reminded of how quickly the goalposts can shift when we speak up.
The problem isn’t just that men are hijacking movements aimed at elevating our stories, they’re reserving the right to author those stories for us.
“Women can’t grasp the magic of scale. Bring up the number of encounters of bears to those with men and we’ll see,” wrote a male commenter in response to a TikTok sharing alarming statistics on the prevalence of violence against women (according to the World Health Organisation, one in three of us will be assaulted in our lifetimes).
Other men have contended if the scenario were changed to a different location where it was more difficult to escape the bear, the answer would be different.
Except this isn’t a conversation about how safe the world would be if bears roamed freely among us. And even if it was, women have contested it’s unlikely to alter their responses.
“I used to live in the Panhandle in Florida, which has a kind of large population of black bears who would go into our trash … and if you approach them, they run away … My last ex broke down the bedroom door with his head because I said I needed some time to cool down after an argument,” shared another TikTok creator.
“I grew up in the mountains with bears in our yard all the time. I never feared the bears, just knew to avoid them. We still locked our doors every night so a man wouldn’t come in and hurt us,” another woman commented.
The men proposing different variables in the “bear or man” hypothetical aren’t actually interested in hearing women’s responses, though. Their goal is to shut down the discussion entirely. It’s the same tactic the “not all men” group defer to when they argue women are punishing them for the actions of a few bad eggs.
And it seems ridiculous to even have to say this, but most of us will never encounter a bear, anyway. However, in the rare case one shows up at the front door one day, we can fairly reliably predict their behaviour.
“Although there are thousands of human-bear encounters every year, only a very few result in personal injury. Most bears will actually retreat before you are even aware of their presence,” confirms the Get Bear Smart Society.
The same cannot be said for some men.
While it’s true not all men commit violence against women, there’s no discerning factor that will allow us to know who to let our guard down around and who to be wary of, nor is there any known method for predicting the way a man may react to us.
In 1988, when Junko Furuta, 17, rejected the advances of a boy who was rumoured to have a crush on her, he got together with three friends to abduct and torture her.
Over the next 40 days, they held Furuta captive, during which time they repeatedly raped her, lit objects on fire and inserted them into her body, burned her limbs, forced her to drink her own urine and beat her so brutally she became disfigured and crippled. After sustaining severe injuries and infected wounds that caused her to emit a rotting odour, the men finally lost interest in her and left her for dead.
Though they each served some time in prison after admitting to Furuta’s murder, all four men are currently free and living their lives independently.
While horrific, Furuta’s case isn’t an anomaly. Every year, women are violently raped and murdered by men they’ve turned down or attempted to leave relationships with. Twenty-seven women have already been killed by men in Australia so far this year alone, which has sparked rallies around the country this week demanding change.
Change that needs to begin in the way we speak about violence against women. And that’s that it’s men’s violence. Women aren’t “dying” after being attacked, as the headlines so often read. Men are murdering them.
It’s notable that, when some female TikTok creators asked their husbands “Would you prefer our daughter be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear?” men themselves overwhelmingly chose the bear.
When asked the follow-up question, “What if it was a woman or a bear?” they answered without pause for reflection, “the woman”.
Feminist author Marilyn Frye likens the way men view women’s reality to two people standing on either side of a statue in her book, The Politics Of Reality. She describes a woman detailing what she can see from her side of the statue, and the man correcting her with his own interpretation of what the statue looks like, because he cannot see what she’s seeing from where he’s situated.
This is a good analogy for the “bear vs. men” debate, which is really at the heart of the war of men’s violence against women.
Women’s answers don’t make sense to men because most of them have never had to endure the gut-wrenching anxiety of carefully rejecting a date in fear of harassment or retaliation.
They likely haven’t gone through with sex they didn’t want to have just so they could feel safe to leave someone’s house, worried their outfit might attract unwanted attention, or if it’ll lead to someone following them home.
Men don’t live with the knowledge one in four of them will be sexually assaulted at some point (according to a report by the CDC), and the very real possibility that, if they meet this fate, no one will believe them. Or they’ll be interrogated about what they were wearing, how much they had to drink, and whether they flirted with their attacker.
Men aren’t instructed to text their friends when they’re going somewhere alone, so someone knows the last place they were seen alive in case something happens to them.
They don’t tend to worry inviting a Tinder match back to their apartment could result in rape or murder, and that, even if nothing happens, they’ll be scolded by friends the next day, because that wasn’t “a safe thing to do”.
The majority of men will never know the constant low-level anxiety of never being able to fully relax in a bar or nightclub in case a single lapse in judgement around their drinks results in being drugged and raped.
And they aren’t murdered in landmark numbers every week around the world, in horrifyingly sadistic ways, often at the hands of their own partners.
I’ve personally never come across a bear out in the wild (and hope not to), but a few weeks after the sexual assault of the girl I attended university with, I was confronted by a snake that darted out in front of me during a hike.
Feeling the fear prickle through me, I recalled what I’d been told growing up in a rural area where snakes made a regular appearance; to remain totally still and let the snake continue on its way, even though everything in my body told me to run as it edged closer.
Sure enough, the snake wriggled right past my feet and was soon out of sight.
Had a man appeared on the path in front of me, this story might have been very different. And so if asked, I’d choose the snake again, every time.
Nadia Bokody is a queer sex columnist, YouTuber and professional over-sharer. Follow her on Instagram for more.