A merican and Canadian social-media users just experienced an interesting mass hysteria, which helps to illustrate several of the trends I discuss for National Review and in my academic writing: the idea of “my truth,” common problems with risk assessment, the tendency of empathic people to “simp” for photogenic but crazy ones, the base-rate and per capita fallacies, and more!

Prompted by a one-off post from a feminist X user (now gone forever in the e-mists), dozens of Twitter/X and Facebook accounts began asking their largely female audiences whether — while walking alone in the woods — they would rather encounter a man (say a solo male hiker) or a wild bear. Collegiate and professional women hurried to announce that, for Very Serious Logical Reasons, they would gladly pick the grizzly over Mr. REI.

According to well-known comedienne Leslie Jones, of all-female-cast Ghostbusters fame: “I choose the bear!! HEY MEN, you have now become so dangerous to us we would rather take our chances with a wild bear!! Wow yall really need to start listening. This is sad to me!! Again anyone who say not all men is exactly the men we are talking about!” Referring to a childhood confrontation with a weird male, “Miss Andrist” chimed in: “He shot me with a BB gun in my ass. Just one reason I chose the bear.”

Solita Sims chose the giant ursine killer because “a bear will look at you and see a human,” while a man apparently will not. And so forth: It really just went on and on. There were original viral memes. Some contributors to Bear Discourse dropped hard numbers, with Atheist Girl citing the National Park Service data to argue that an American’s “chances of being injured (or killed) by a bear are approximately one in 2.1 million,” which would break down to slightly more than 100 hostile bear encounters annually.

So, are the feminists of TikTok and beyond correct: Does it make more sense to be scared of a typical human male than of a typical wild bear? Well, of course not, Dear Reader. Almost nothing that upper-middle-class leftists say online is ever true, and this particular idea is obviously objectively insane.

The typical North American brown or grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), the species that people are generally referring to when discussing truly wild American bears, “is one of the largest sub-species of brown bear” and one of the largest land-dwelling mammalian carnivores in the world — weighing in at up to 850 pounds for males. Other big bears, such as polar bears and Kodiak bears, are even worse: All three breeds semi-regularly eat man when they get a real chance to, and a full-grown polar bear will also tackle walruses and small whales. In contrast, the archetypal American man is a 5’9,” 198 lb. fellow named “Jimmy.”

But, isn’t it empirically true that bears hurt many fewer people annually than men do? Sure, but this is one example of what’s known as a base-rate fallacy. First things first: There are a hell of a lot fewer bears — a total of about 2,000 wild grizzlies across all of North and South America, outside of Alaska and the boreal “taiga” forests of Northern Canada. And those big hosses live deep in the woods, even in the continental USA, with perhaps 1,000 of them resident in “the greater Yellowstone (Park) ecosystem in the tri-state area of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana,” according to a 2022 report by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team.

The fact that it is a lot harder to get to a wild bear than to a stockbroker puts the “man vs. nine-foot-tall carnivore” numbers in much-needed context. So, in a typical year, there are 300,000 to 500,000 rapes and serious sexual assaults — the crimes men tend to most often commit against women rather than other men: The “BJS-NCVS” national crime data report figure for 2021 was 324,500. This is, of course, a terrible figure, which American men need to reduce, ideally to zero. However, there are roughly 150,000,000 adult female human beings in the United States at any given time, counting illegal immigrants, tourists, etc. If we simply divide 150,000,000 by (say) 400,000, we find that the annual risk of prosecutable, sexual, sex-specific abuse of a woman by a man is approximately 1 out of 375.

And, women don’t talk to just one man in a year. The average person seems to engage in about 85 direct interactions per day (this figure has become inflated and harder to measure of late, owing to the prevalence of mobile devices). Let us simply assume that half of these are with men. And there are 365 days in a year. So your risk of any individual male being, at any individual time, a sex pest or other similar serious nutter is more on the order of 1/375 x 43 x 365, or (1/5,885,625). This, simply put, is why women — and unarmed men, for that matter — know that they can shop, and club, and party in public . . . and live.

How about the bears? Well, the average female NYC or Chi-city or D.C. resident doesn’t encounter a bear even once per year. She probably won’t encounter a bear once in her life. Even if we make the totally unfounded assumption that there are 40,000 close-proximity female-to-bear encounters per year — that every one of the 2,000 truly big and wild continental American bears has close run-ins with 20 different people each year and that these intrepid hikers are all women — a (100)/40,000 rate of bear attacks would be 14,714 times higher than the normal rate of risk when two humans meet each other. Even if we just assume 100 times as many bears in the USA as I do — not every online question specified “grizzly,” and rates of black-bear crime might be a lot lower than those for their lighter co-racialists — each individual bear is about 150 times as likely to be trouble as is each individual man.

Now, a final point here: I don’t care all that much about bears. I am not, really, and primarily, talking about bears here at all. In modern America, we constantly hear citizens making far more serious assertions that are at about the same level of quantitative accuracy as “man vs. bear” and then demanding to thunderous applause that “their truth be heard.” As I have noted for NRO and other outlets, the core argument of the Black Lives Matter movement was that hundreds or thousands of unarmed black men are murdered annually by police, and this constitutes a “genocide” or damned close. Why were taxpayers expected to take this staggering claim at face value? Well, largely because photogenic minorities said it was true.

Of course, it isn’t. Last year, the total number of unarmed African Americans who were fatally shot by police officers across the United States was twelve — which is quite typical. And this sort of extreme misrepresentation of reality is by no means confined to black activists or even to the Left. Midway through the Covid Year of 2020 — an era that the American hive-mind now seems to be frantically trying to forget — a well-done consulting project (from Kekst CNC) revealed that the average American believed that 9 percent of our population had already died from Covid.

Almost certainly, attitudes like this were the driving force behind support for lockdowns and mask mandates, as well as individual reports of altered behavior in response to Covid, all of which remained high, at least locally, well into 2022. Again, however, the mainstream perspective was simply incorrect. Covid was a deadly disease indeed, but the average age of pre-vaccination victims in the West hovered around 81 (the average age of death in the USA is 78), and the total American death toll after a four-year pandemic stands at 1.2 million (out of 334 million Americans total).

Overall: Real Numbers Matter. There is no such thing as “your truth,” and claims that men are more deadly than grizzly bears — like the equivalent real-life nonsense we see every night on the news — should be laughed at, not “taken as opportunities to learn about the very real pain that makes people think the things they do,” or whatnot.

Even a nine-foot-tall Alaskan carnivore should be able to understand that logic.