We choose bears over men for safety

1) The underlying claim and why its logic is fundamentally flawed

A popular feminist meme argues that “being alone with a man is like being alone with a bear—treat every man as a potential predator.”  Three basic reasoning errors sink the analogy:

• Base-rate fallacy — Women interact with thousands of men every year; almost no one ever meets a wild bear. Failing to factor in those vastly different exposure rates inflates perceived male danger. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govthetravel.com

• Category error — Bears are instinct-driven carnivores with no moral agency, while men can choose to cooperate, protect, or harm. Conflating the two erases the ethical distinction between deliberate violence and animal predation.

• Collective guilt & perverse incentives — Equating half the human race with wildlife punishes innocents, corrodes social trust, and diverts attention from real behavioural red flags.

Result: the meme is rhetorically catchy but statistically and philosophically hollow.

2) Women surrounded by men in zoos never vault into bear pits “for safety”

• Crowds prove the point.  The San Diego Zoo draws roughly 4 million visitors a year—about two million of them male—yet there is no pattern of women leaping over barriers to huddle beside the bears. en.wikipedia.org

• When breaches do happen, fear of men isn’t the motive.  Documented fence-jumpers are thrill-seekers, the intoxicated, or the mentally ill:

  • Drunk man wrestles a brown bear in Warsaw Zoo (2020). unilad.com

  • Woman climbs into Berlin’s polar-bear pool during feeding time (2009). abcnews.go.com

• Observed visitor misbehaviour studies covering four international zoos record banging on glass, feeding, and leaning—but no cases of women entering enclosures for self-defence. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Everyday reality in the world’s busiest zoos directly contradicts the meme’s hypothetical scenario.

3) Realistic threat: random man vs. random bear (per-encounter analysis)

	Male encounter*	Bear encounter (Yellowstone benchmark)
Annual encounters a woman has	≈ 2 537 male contacts (13.9 total contacts/day × 50 % male) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov	≈ 1 838 bear sightings recorded in 2019 thetravel.com
Injuries per year	2 118 160 violent incidents where the offender was male / 168.8 M females → 0.01255 incidents per woman bjs.ojp.govwww2.census.gov	Long-term average ≈ 1 visitor injured per year nps.govnps.gov
Risk per single encounter	0.01255 ÷ 2 537 ≈ 5 × 10⁻⁶ → 1 in ≈ 202 000	1 ÷ 1 838 ≈ 5.4 × 10⁻⁴ → 1 in ≈ 1 800

*Encounters include all men: family, friends, colleagues, strangers. Encounters include seeing bears from miles away. There is no statistics on close encounters only but such events constitute a tiny proportion of total encounters.

Per-encounter, a bear is at least 110 times more likely to injure you than a man, and counting close encounters only would likely add another zero or two to this ratio. Yet because women meet thousands of men but virtually no bears each year, the annual probability of male violence (~1.3 %) still dwarfs their chance of a bear mauling (~0.00006 %). Context—not ideology—determines real-world danger.

Bottom line

The “men = bears” meme collapses under data:

1. It ignores base rates and moral agency.

2. Real-world behaviour in zoos shows women feel perfectly safe among crowds of men and prudently avoid bear enclosures.

3. Even when you inflate the denominator to include every male interaction, bears remain vastly more dangerous per encounter.

Practical safety comes from situational awareness and judging individuals by actions, not from recasting half of humanity as dangerous wildlife.