Have you ever stopped mid hike to listen to an ominous lumbering sound populating the deep brush and, in that moment of terror before a cheeky squirrel is revealed, thought, “Would I rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” This hypothetical, popularized recently on TikTok, has made its way to downstream social media, with women answering in forums and videos that they’d rather be alone in a forest with a bear than a man. As one might expect, more than a few men (and women) find this knee-jerk preference for sharing a bit of arboreal real estate with wild Ursus rather than Frank from Lac du Flambeau incredibly dense and downright offensive.

AJ Willingham reports on the debate of our time (another vapid and unserious one) for CNN:

In one TikTok video, viewed more than 16.7 million times, an interviewer asks eight women on the street whether they’d rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear. Seven out of the eight answer, with very little hesitation, the latter.

There are innumerable variants of this video, with the question asked among groups of friends, to family members and partners and strangers on the street. When asked why they would pick the bear, women all give some iteration of the same answer: With a bear, they know what the dangers are. They know, at least in theory, how to survive the encounter.

The comments on the previously mentioned video make that painfully clear:

“You know what to expect from a bear.”

“Absolutely a bear humans are capable of so so much worse.”

“Bear, because If I got attacked by a bear people would believe me.”

A few things to work through here.

First, there’s dishonesty in the premise: The creator of the initial video admitted to assuming that men are more dangerous than bears and published interviews that said as much. This guy with a phone who accosts women on the street for interviews while calling himself a “TikTok creator and anti-misogynist educator” might be right if every man were like him.

Second, the women interviewed appear to be British city dwellers — predatory men are real for them (even a guy walking around the city has to be on his guard), whereas bears haven’t been a serious threat to Brits since well before the Norman invasion. That city officials are unwilling to prosecute street-level vagrancy and harassment speaks more of political failure than of males. One jerk can harass hundreds of women a day if seated on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Throw him in jail.

Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh come somewhat short of communicating the size and ferocity of a half-ton brown bear. Even a black bear — considered a skittish species compared with its brown brethren — is more than capable of killing.

See here:

A black-bear boar can weigh up to 400 pounds and can run 30 mph — faster than a bicyclist, golf cart, many quad bikes (when taking into account turns and trail debris), and sprinters. A city girl with a frappe would be a wrap if a bear attacked; her best bet would be to throw the sugary homogenized liquid at the bear and beat feet while the bear develops diabetes, dyes its hair, and develops opinions about late-stage capitalism (see AI’s rendering here). The answers to the tilted question imply that there is an assumption of conflict between the woman and the man or bear; if conflict is inevitable, it should be noted that men have many more soft bits and weaknesses than a bear.

However, if one subtracts the political baggage from the question, it becomes extremely interesting. “Would you rather be stuck” means that the answerer and the other party are permanent residents of an indeterminate-sized forest.

The U.S. Forest Service’s definition of “forest” is “a land area of at least 1 acre in size, with at least 10 percent tree canopy cover, or can grow such canopy cover, and is not managed for other uses.” At its smallest, a forest is your average semi-rural Midwestern backyard. In that case, give me the man and we can build a sick tree house and send a neighbor for some Hamm’s and brats. But if outside contact were forbidden, we’d need one another to maximize the vegetable-dense farming operation. Me and a bear in a mere acre of forest means I’m likely the only thing the bear has for calories, and he requires up to 60,000 calories a day. A human corpse offers about 125,000 (some gratitude, please, for placing myself on the “too interested in consuming humans” watchlist), so bear and I are in a Hell’s Eden cage match.

Bears will kill if given the opportunity; we’re not only calorically dense but intellectually so if we think otherwise about a bear’s prey drive.

If, however, the forest were something more akin to Upper Michigan’s Hiawatha National Forest (approximately 898,000 acres of mosquitoes, midges, and unbelievable beauty bordering Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior), the bear has to be an assumed resident (if there’s only one, it’d be a miracle). So choosing the bear over the man would limit potential threats. The young women answering this way have a point, though not as absolute as they seem to think, that men are dangerous.

Because of competition for resources, original sin (the hatred of seeing God’s reflection in another), and capacity for duplicity, no one would be wrong to pick the relatively known quantity of the bear. But it’s a fatalistic choice. Recall that old bon mot: If a bear defecates while you die in a forest, no one hears it (or something like that). A young woman, confined for the rest of her days to a forest, might reconsider when she needs a strong back and an inclination for manual labor that men can offer — not to mention companionship and the formation of a family to enliven her days and care for her in old age.

But the point of the question isn’t to provoke thought. Rather, it’s a gross tactic to play up the battle of the sexes and virtue-signal. The chances of getting a decent guy are many, many times higher than being stuck with a rapacious criminal. That individuals like this misandrist interviewer and his kissing-cousin peer, the misogynist Andrew Tate, find such success on apps like TikTok and Instagram is proof enough that these algorithms and their business model offer very little of value to the public.

A humble suggestion: Stop hanging around losers and convincing yourself the world sucks. If you routinely feel threatened, get a force equalizer — a concealed-carry permit and a piece, for instance. Vote for politicians and sheriffs who are serious about enforcing laws.

The course of human progress is to do less harm than good to one another. From the Ten Commandments onward, societies (and the West specifically) have sought to improve the lives of men and women. The only bear that isn’t a threat is a Chicago Bear. Choose humanity and reality over the hateful, fractious bilge that your phone serves you.