The Bear vs. Man Meme is a Big Deal

This episode delves into the cultural and societal implications of the "bear vs. man" meme, examining public perceptions of men compared to literal bears and broader issues of systemic bigotry.

1. The meme reflects a significant cultural bias against men, equating them with a higher threat level than wild bears.
2. Public reactions to the meme reveal deep-seated fears and stereotypes that may contribute to systemic bigotry.
3. The episode discusses the role of media in shaping and reinforcing these biases against men.
4. Comparisons are made between the demonization of men and historical bigotry, such as racism and antisemitism.
5. The hosts challenge the audience to consider the real-world implications of such societal attitudes.

1: Introduction to the Bear vs. Man Meme

The hosts introduce the meme and set the stage for a discussion on societal perceptions of danger associated with men versus bears. Malcolm Collins: "Question, what kind of bear is best? That's a ridiculous question. False. Black bear."

2: Cultural Impact of the Meme

Exploration of how the meme reflects broader societal biases and the implications of such a narrative. Simone Collins: "What this really indicates is what media has done to female audiences."

3: Historical Parallels and Bigotry

Discussion on how similar patterns of dehumanization have historical precedents and the dangers they pose. Malcolm Collins: "This is always the first step in the proliferation of systemic bigotry."

4: Societal Reactions and Discussions

Analysis of public and personal reactions to the meme and their broader cultural significance. Unknown: "Would you rather me encounter a bear or a black man? I feel more like bear."

5: Conclusions and Reflections

The hosts summarize their thoughts on the episode's discussions and reflect on the need for societal change. Simone Collins: "It's hard for me to parse out how much of this is part of progressive culture."

1. Evaluate Media Critically: Be aware of how media shapes perceptions of different social groups and strive for a balanced view.
2. Challenge Stereotypes: Actively question and confront stereotypes within personal and professional environments.
3. Educate Others: Share insights from this episode to foster discussions on gender biases and their impacts.
4. Support Inclusive Narratives: Promote and engage with media that offers diverse and inclusive representations of all social groups.
5. Reflect on Personal Biases: Consider your own biases and how they might influence your perceptions and actions.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the recent "bear or man" meme, which revealed a disturbing level of normalized bigotry against men in contemporary society. The hosts analyze the responses to the question "Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man?" and compare them to hypothetical scenarios involving other marginalized groups to highlight the double standards at play. They explore the roots of this bigotry, its manifestation in various aspects of life, such as college admissions and fertility choices, and the potential consequences for society as a whole. The conversation also touches on the importance of recognizing and addressing misandry, even when it has become so pervasive that it is often overlooked or dismissed.

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
Question, what kind of bear is best? That's a ridiculous question. False. Black bear. This is why it's so important that I elevate this.

And I'm also elevate your reaction to this, okay. Because it's a reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gotten. If you lived in a society, like if in America today, people were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people, would you be like, holy. We have a big problem in this country and we need to do something about it immediately. Yeah, you would be raising every alarm bell you could raise.

Simone Collins
This is true fact. Bears eat beets. Nope. Bears beets. Battlestar galactica.

Bears do not. What is going on? Would you like to know more? You look good. Are you ready to go?

I'm ready to go. Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be chatting with you again today. There has been a meme, and whenever we try to do timely episodes, we are always going to be late to the subject because that's just not how we produce our videos, but the bear meme. First, I'll ask you the question.

Malcolm Collins
Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man? Yeah, as long as it's a genuinely random man. Obviously a man. Okay. So a lot of women and I've seen this done on shows and stuff like that, it seems to be like 50% of women or more.

Maybe within these more progressive environments like college campuses, you're getting like 70% to 80% of women are saying a bear. And the standard, have they not been, like, camping ever? Okay, so that's not the issue. And what I'll say is the standard minded take on this is are they either not aware of how dangerous bears are or the standard take on this is, oh, women these days, aren't they silly? And hasn't feminism gone an extreme degree?

And if we weren't based camp, if we were some basic podcast, that's the. Take we'd be having. But I actually think that what can be gleamed from this particular meme is much deeper. And that's why I wanted to make sure to do an episode on it, even if it's not appearing while this is still in the zeitgeist of the topic. Because I think that this was actually a great sort of natural experiment to see where our culture is heading and to predict where things will go downstream of here.

Simone Collins
What this really indicates is what media has done to female audiences, which is that when they hear the word average or random guy, they assume some kind of aggressor some kind of dangerous person. Their evoked set for random guy rather than your brother, an uncle, a family member, a co worker. No. They further ask this, if it was your dad, would you say no? They'll say they would choose a bear over their dad.

Malcolm Collins
For example, look at this woman's caption. I choose the bear every time. If it's my boyfriend, the bear, a friend, the bear, my dad, the bear life. And men have given me enough reason to choose the bear anytime over any of them. I don't trust them.

I don't think I ever will. Whether they're family or friends or stranger, I choose the bear. Yeah, I think you always, and a lot of people do this, they're like, malcolm, you go too hard against the monoculture and stuff like that, because they assume that the monoculture is their perception of the monoculture when they've been associated with it. Okay. Not the like, they don't know how brainwashed and culty some individuals have gotten.

But what I would say is the first thing to understand what we're really learning from this is I'm gonna play a clip of somebody interviewing a bunch of women. But first I'm going to slightly change the question that's being asked. Okay. Would you prefer to be in the woods with a bear or a random black man? It's black man is scary.

Simone Collins
Um, with a bear. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear. Probably a bear. 100% a bear, which is like, terrifying.

To say, but definitely a bear. Some black men are very scary out there. A bear. Even some men are saying bear. Although we could predict that this man's opinion will be whatever makes women approve of him.

Unknown
If I were alone in the woods. Would you rather me encounter a bear or a black man? I feel more like bear. I don't know because I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear. And I think when you hear this now, you get really uncomfortable when you hear the way people are responding to the initial question.

Malcolm Collins
But I have changed the context slightly. You get really uncomfortable. Yeah. Or I could change it a bit. I could say, would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a jew?

Oh, wow. This would be really offensive if they had asked one of these other questions. Yeah. And this is because what you are actually seeing within this meme is just pure uncut bigotry. And you are seeing the extreme levels of bigotry that that have become normalized in our society.

And this gets really interested, because now you get into, how does bigotry spread? How did. And so first, it's something that's useful to note whenever bigotry spreads. Because when I say this, if you're in the cult, you're like, men don't count as a class that is worthy of any protection. They're not worthy of the same level of human dignity of other classes.

This is always the first step in the proliferation of systemic bigotry. The first thing the Nazis did was to compare the Jews to animals. The same thing we see happening again within the Palestine protests and stuff like that with the, we've talked about this in another episode, actually, one that might go live after this one. But yes, you first need to like racism never is, oh, we hate this group. Just in particular, it's, no, this group is genuinely lesser, genuinely deserving of lesser protections.

Before you go on, and people can be like, come on, men have all the power in our society. And I'm like, have you looked at like college admissions rates recently? Like, men are being systemically pulled out of our economy right now? Yeah. And anyone who doesn't, if you look at like the number of scholarships for men versus the number of scholarship for women, that's ten to one.

Even with the higher rates of men. One of the things that shocked me was I was recently walking around the Stanford campus for my research union and there was an entire building dedicated to helping women. It was the old firehouse had been converted to an entire building just for increasing the enfranchisement of women within. What did they do? What do they do?

What's odd is, but women are the majority of students coming into campus now. They are the privileged group. To have an entire department dedicated to servicing the needs of the privileged group within a campus environment is genuinely obscene. The typical woke female college student would respond to you saying, that's exactly what colleges were like for men. For all of history.

Simone Collins
You'd go, and then there'd be some exclusive male fraternity to further enfranchise the men who went there. And this is just our version of correcting societal's ills. And that they would say that. But those fraternities often weren't directly integrated. It was the university, right?

Funded by it, etcetera. Even if you take the direction that says, okay, well, women used to be discriminated against, and that's why these were originally built, because there were counter institutions on campus to them. Well, those counter institutions don't work anymore. So these things that were built to counter systemic sexism on campus are now institutionally furthering the very type of sexism that they were built to dismantle. What's interesting is just the extent to which we're making men into bears.

We're making men into things that can and should be scarier than bears because we're forcing them to become stronger and better, like by. By subjecting men, especially, like we'll say, cis, otherwise privileged men, to higher selective pressures, you are forcing them to become the best and the brightest and to build their own institutions. Objectively not true, really. If you look at the statistics of men today versus men in the past, they are lower testosterone, lower strength, lower. You can just look at pictures.

Well, do you think it's an 80 20 thing, though? Do you think that basically most men indeed are experiencing that disenfranchisement, but then the 20% that are ultimately going to matter, that historically always were the ones who ultimately built everything, are the ones who are ultimately being pushed to thrive even further. I don't understand. It's just not a thing. It's a fantasy.

Malcolm Collins
It's a fantasy that there is this. This dangerous male group that they are concerned about is not particularly more dangerous than any other group that they could be exposed to. They have chosen because of bigotry, because of assumptions about groups to make these biases about men. If you look at male violence statistics, right. I'm not referring to dangerous in terms of violence, by the way.

Simone Collins
I'm trying to change. I'm referring to dangerous in terms of having all the agency in power. But that's not what they're talking about. You're reframing the question to try to. And I think this is useful because this is a way that many progressives or people who grow up in this environment intrinsically attempt to reframe the issue in their own minds when they're engaging with it.

Malcolm Collins
So they don't understand how genuinely horrifying the normalized bigotry within progressive circles has become. And this is why I think for a while as a society, we didn't understand why we needed to treat racism with such an immediate and angry response, why we needed to treat anti semitism with such an immediate and severe angry response. Because if you don't, if you allow it to begin to fester within a population, you then have it become a status hierarchy signaling mechanism. And if it becomes a status hierarchy signaling mechanism, then it self extremizes like we have already had happen within women in our society today. Sure.

To the extent where they would say something that is the equivalent of saying, would you rather be around, be exposed to a random male in the woods or a random black male in the. Woods through IVF just so they could be sure that they don't have any male children. We're going to talk about that in a second. And I would point out here as well, if they're like, look at x statistics, right? Any statistics that a woman is going to find that indicates that coming across a random male in the woods might be a scary thing for her is going to apply extra to black males, any statistic they're looking at.

And so why is it that they are not allowed to ask this question about black males? Right. If they're framing it this way, right. It is because they have learned that by taking stances like this publicly, they can achieve higher status. And so it signals to the public what group they're in.

And so now we're going to talk about how extreme this has gotten because it's really quite terrifying. So there was an article recently in Slate called it's illegal in most of the world. In America, new parents are embracing it, for better or worse, and it is gender selection within IVF, which, of course, we support. But here are some quotes from the article, which I think shows you the level of dehumanization and bigotry that has become normalized within the urban monoculture. Grace, a 31 year old woman who, who works in human resources, told me, when I think about having a child that's a boy, it's almost a repulsion.

Oh, my God, no. Grace and her fang, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google engineer fiance are freezing embryos to preserve their fertility and to ensure that they avoid that. Oh my God, no. Scenario. After she turned 30, her fiance wanted to make embryos the right way.

Wanted to make embryos right away. Grace wasn't particularly eager to kick off the kid having process. I don't like kids. I don't want kids anytime soon, especially one that's a boy. But she also thinks that her feelings around kids may change, and she wants to be able to dodge the possibility of becoming a quote unquote, boy mom if they do.

Boy becoming a boy mom. What's so bad about boys? Quote, toxic masculinity, end quote, said many women I spoke to, even those who were sadly already boy moms. For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good. Amy's partner, Gurthru Guthrie.

Guthrie believes that because oldest children tend to be more successful, if everyone did sex selection, we could quash inequality by manipulating birth order. Quote, maybe one of our best chances at trying to destroy the glass ceiling is to have women first, said Girthy. Among the moms I spoke to who already have boys, many want to give their sons sisters to make them better men. They believe that girls can do anything. A conviction that often comes with a subtext that boys are incapable of doing their own laundry, calling their moms, expressing empathy, or really being part of the family as they get older.

I don't know a guy who has a strong relationship with his mother or his family, end quote. Grace told me. And this is. And whose fault is that? Oh, my God.

Hold on.

So there was also a case of a couple who sued a fertility clinic after having a male embryo instead of a female embryo. And they annoying you pay for services. And they. They probably told them they were able to choose a gender and they were lied to. But still, the fact that they.

Yeah, but you've got to hear the way that they talk about it and think about it. I looked, I'll pull quotes from this after the recording. And she explained, I had wanted skin to skin connection, but I ended up wearing things so he wouldn't touch my chest. When he did, it sent electric shockwaves through me. I started experiencing extreme anxiety, and I would look at the baby, and it would contort into the faces of all these grown men that I know.

It was so creepy. Whenever that happened, I had to give the baby to Robbie. But you hear a lot of talk from this couple that really is. Compares carrying a child that is a male as grape, because they have a male inside them involuntarily. And they're just.

Simone Collins
They have a part. Like they married a partner. No, they're usually lesbians. Ah, okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins
So they are extremist anti males. But you also get these in. I think the other couple that was talking, the first couple was a heterosexual. Well, they probably wouldn't call themselves heterosexual, but it was what we would call a man and a woman being married to each other and to the people. Who want to be like, well, she was a assault survivor, you know.

Therefore, her reaction to males is justified. And I would counter whiz. If somebody was a survivor and the assault was a black male and they reacted that way to black males specifically, would that be allowed in our society? Would we really be like, oh, yeah, it's okay, because one black person did something to them. For them to now react extremely negatively whenever they are touched by or around or talked to by a black man?

No, of course not. You cannot carve out specific subgroups as being less deserving of human decency than other subgroups. That is the core element of bigotry. More than all other elements that the core element. And this.

So, like, when you hear this, are you beginning to understand or contextualize just the amount of genuine bigotry that's being normalized? It is not that they are, I think, genuinely more afraid of a man. Like when you hear man, you think a male person because you're still thinking like a human. When they hear man, they hear monster. Yeah.

Simone Collins
It's hard for me to parse out how much of this is part of progressive culture and how much of this is people with very strange phobias. There are people who are only capable of eating macaroni and cheese every day. There are people who are just respondents. Come on. Yeah.

To the bear thing. But I also think that that's like an issue of availability heuristic with male figures. What explain how this is availability heuristic? Because interact with males every. Yeah, but I don't think they think about that.

I don't think they think of the males that they interact with as males. And then when they're evoked, set for a man is still like an evil aggressor in the patriarchy and terrible people who are. Let's unpack what you just said, because this is important. It helps you understand how racism, anti semitism and other types of hate evolved. Right, right.

Malcolm Collins
Because it allows you to discategorize all disconforming evidence of actually being related to that gender group.

Simone Collins
As many people who are racist or anti whatever group have plenty of people in those groups in their lives that they just don't think about as being in those groups because they, like, I don't know, they don't fit the stereotype. Then it's obviously a big problem. This is obviously heartbreaking. My heart especially breaks for this baby that was born via IVF that the couple didn't want. And a lot of the sons, even that are being raised by mothers who chose to have sons or not select for gender, but have just decided that I'm gonna teach my son just how terrible men are because that's.

Malcolm Collins
Let's just teach the guy to hate themselves. And then a lot of them can just gender transition. When you hear about kids questioning their gender at three or something, a kid is not questioning his gender at three. We have kids who are three. Not one of them had the faintest clue what gender is.

Simone Collins
Yeah, everything is. All pronouns mix. It does not matter. Yeah. So they're just going to transition them.

Malcolm Collins
And I'll play a short video clip here. This from something I played in another show, which it's supposed to be a trans piece of media that they're discussing here. And they're trying to explain the consequences, lying to this young person about the consequences of the surgery, saying that it's pretty much assured that they'll be able to orgasm afterwards when that's not really what we've seen. But then in like larger data sets, you're generally giving up the ability to trick to orgasm if you're transitioning in this way, especially with heavy amounts of puberty blockers, which this individual is on, but this individual is in admitting that they don't even understand why they're talking to them about this, because they've never experienced an orgasms. I haven't experienced any sexual sensations.

Unknown
So when the doctors are saying an orgasm is like a sneeze, I don't know. I don't even know what she's talking about. What girl wants their penis to grow? Not this girl and not any girl. If only I was born with a vagina.

Simone Collins
Solve that problem. Amen, sister. So they can't even think or know or contextualize what's being talked about. And what this highlights to me is how early this individual went on puberty blockers. Yeah.

Yeah. I just.

I don't know. It's very clear to me that for quite a while now, there has been an intense bias against men, especially in developed nations, predominated by the urban monoculture. The fact that men are hearing again and again from potential employers, for example. Oh, you're great. But I'm sorry, we can't hire another man.

Like, we're not really. Like, we're not allowed to, or we can't. The optics would be too bad. That's just a normalized thing that pretty much everyone we know who's male and who's on the job market has experienced at this point is insane and the sign of very severe bias. And I think the fact that even people like me, I hear this bear thing and I try to shrug it off is an indication of the extent to which we've normalized this misandry in society.

Because now it's just so obvious to me that I don't think twice when we see new examples of it. It's just. Of course, that's how it is. And new infractions would have to be so extreme that by that pointing people. Up, it's a boiling of frog scenario.

Malcolm Collins
Like, for you, if you heard, and you have even in this podcast, tried to dismiss this, maybe they're missing. Maybe if you. Because you'll hear answers. Like one of the girls who gave an answer said, bears don't attack every time. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you.

Simone Collins
Right? So maybe a bear. Imagine thinking men attack every time. Yeah. And then there's another group where they were like, what's the probability that the man will attack you?

Malcolm Collins
And people were giving answers like 80%, 50%. And they're standing on the street where theoretically 50% of those also out on the streets, walking on sidewalks, are male. It's very. This was actually a panel. A panel.

Simone Collins
I see. Was it a female panel in a building full of all women? I guess this is alone in the woods. Let's say you were alone in the woods and you walked past a man. What do you guys think?

Unknown
Like, what do you think the probability is that just any random man would attack you? I'd say 50 50, 30, 70, being he would assault me. There is a chance that a man would attack, but I don't know what the percentage is. 85. I'd say 50 50.

Very low. Like less than 10%. So they just think. Maybe they think that once isolated men will. The woman who said the least number on the panel said 10%.

Malcolm Collins
She said, I'm going to be very conservative here and say only 10%, that 10% of men would attack you on site. So now I will say there are parts of the world in which I could be dropped into a random street that is abandoned with one other randomly selected male from that city. And my odds of being attacked could be pretty high as well. Right. I guess I'm thinking american men here.

Simone Collins
I know, but I. That my point to you is that I think that the evoked set of these women is those. No, it's not. No, no, it's not. They're talking about american men.

Malcolm Collins
It is very clear they're talking about the men they interact with. And this is the thing, and this. Is why I don't know if they think of the men they interact with as men. This is why it's so important that I elevate this. And I'm also elevate your reaction to this because it's a reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gotten.

If you lived in a society like even America today, people were responding the same way to a question about jews or black people, would you be like, holy, we have a big problem in this country, and we need to do something about it immediately. Yeah, you would be raising every alarm bell you could raise. This is true. And yet, because it's men, you have said they must have been misunderstanding the question, or it couldn't really be that bad. Or it couldn't, but it really is that bad.

And it's also, you'll see women say things. Even on my own facebook page, I've seen posts recently, women are the only animal that needs to mate with its own natural predator. As if. Oh, my gosh. First I'm like, do you not have the barest grasp of biology?

What about praying mantises? Yeah, hello. Grow up. You clearly are uneducated. Also, I'd like to point out here, from a biological perspective, males of a species almost never would kill a female of a species to eat.

That makes no sense. Whereas females of species frequently kill males of species to eat when they're not interested in reproducing. Because if a male has inseminated you from a biological perspective, literally the last thing he would want to do is have you killed. Even if women are like you as men, don't understand what it's like to be a woman in narcissistic today, how empowered you feel, how in danger you are. And I'm like, or you could look at the statistics and see that men in America are much more risky.

I think it's two times more at risk, or maybe even three times more at risk of being attacked by a man than a woman in America. So, no, you as a woman are not experiencing more attacks by men than men. So as a note here, I looked it up, and men make up 79% of homicide victims worldwide. So you're literally five times more likely to be murdered by someone if you're a man than a woman. And we'll assume that most of those doing murders are men for the sake of misogyny.

But it's also true. Okay, so when you look at statistics like that, it's one of these things where it's holy moly. This is not because of their lived experiences. It is because of a reality that they have constructed for themselves around themselves, based on a fabricated reality of. Now, the fortunate thing is that this group is breeding very little.

And so the key is to just not really engage with them or actively disengage. Cut it all. Have a spouse. It's very important, like with my spouse, now that I'm talking to you about this, because what can happen in relationships is guys who live that standard lifestyle where they go off to work, their wife goes off to a different job, they're apart a lot of the time, can start consuming content like this on TikTok or something like that, and become brainwashed into this position of extreme misogyny. That's a good point.

Simone Collins
Yeah. And I think we've even met couples recently. I'm not going to name names, but we were at a dinner the other day where one couple that we'd known from the beginning, actually, even before they were engaged, had reached this point where the wife kept saying these insane things that the husband just had to, like, nod to. Yeah, you and I were, like, pushing back. She's getting increasingly pissed at us, and her husband's just sitting there and he has this help me look on his face, but he can't say anything to her.

And, like, he at one point said something that defended, like, a reasonable point. And she's like, how could you say that? Are you serious? And he's, oh. And then he started hedging and it was really clear.

This is one of those relationships where she had become radicalized. He remained fairly centrist, and yet because they. They have children together, he's not in a position where he gets to like, what do you do? But that's different conversation. A lot of people will say, I couldn't have philosophical conversations like you do with your wife.

Malcolm Collins
And what I would say is, you better learn how to, because if you are not influencing her philosophical position, other people can be, and it can lead to these sorts of outcomes. That's a good point. Yeah. Like, undoing this, I think, is going to be a hell of a lot harder than finding a way to have an open dialogue and to inoculate people against insanity. So I'm glad.

I love you. And I appreciate you. I love you too, gorgeous. Bye.

Simone Collins
Bye.