Thoughts on the Bear
Or why the only thing in danger of being mauled is our humanity.
1. No, not that Bear.
Not the TV show, but rather, the meme of the moment. And no, not this moment, but rather, some moment past wherein the internet hive mind ran itself in circles before exhausting and moving on to the next terminally unimportant thing. But time is a flat circle. So, it’s only a matter of time before something like it comes ‘round again.
I’m referring to the bear meme, the viral question of whether women would rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a strange man. You can read more about it here. But let me say up front that I’m not interested in debating the issue. There is no issue. There is no debate. This is engagement farming, an internet meme centered around a bogus thought experiment, which won’t yield any interesting or enlightening thoughts. That’s not what it’s meant to do.
But what is it meant to do? And more importantly, how ought we respond? I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s consider the form.
The bear question takes the form of a thought experiment. These are popular in Analytic philosophy, which makes sense as Analytic philosophy is grounded in the relationship between language, language users, and the world. Analytic philosophy spends a lot of time thinking about taxonomy, about whether certain actions or ideas belong in this or that category. This obsession with taxonomy is why I joke that analytic philosophy will eat the world. The discourse around the bear meme is exactly the sort of thing I mean. Only the bear meme much much worse.
In philosophical discourse, thought experiments have a purpose; they’re helpful in thinking about edge cases and may bring a novel point of view to an opaque topic. Perhaps most importantly, philosophical thought experiments help to labeling arguments, allowing us to see more clearly the implications of those arguments.1 By their canned nature, thought experiments are extremely limited in revealing truth, but they can be useful in categorizing our thoughts.
But what about the bear meme? What is its purpose?
My contention: it serves a similar purpose to philosophical thought experiments, only it is you and I who are being categorized.
2. Why are we OK with this?
As stated, the question itself is meaningless, but do bear with me a moment as I quickly cover why the bear question is stupid on its face: one, it’s too hypothetical to have a bearing on reality, and two, it’s too out of context to be ethically or morally meaningful.
There are surveys that ask people whether they think they can beat various animals in a fight. A small but not insignificant number of men (yes, they seem to be men) think they could best a bear or a gorilla. What do we make of such claims? Me, not much. Go fight a gorilla. Until then, it’s shit talking.
Similarly, can anyone say how they’d react to a bear in the woods? I simply don’t believe all of these women would rush towards a grizzly just to get away from one of the dudes pictured above. And it’s not that these women are lying or being disingenuous. There’s just no honest way to answer this question. How we respond to threatening or stressful situations is a function of our instincts, our fight-or-flight response. Our real-life reactions don’t come from talking points we picked up in a gender studies elective or on Tumblr.
Of course, the meme isn’t really about the surface level question. Is it?
As I mentioned above, this is about putting us into categories. To choose the bear is to voice your frustration with too much male violence and too little male support. To push back against choosing the bear is to voice your frustration with glib stereotypes. These are both reasonable positions, but the form of the internet meme turns it into something unreasonable. It demands that you pick a side.
One of the sad truths of our age is, no matter how much we tell ourselves the opposite, broad demographic categorizations remain incredibly popular. In an alternate universe, some rightwing edgelord tweets the question of whether you’d walk down a city street towards a pack of snarling stray dogs or a towards a group of brown migrants. In that universe, everything flip-flops. The people loudly rejecting the idea of lumping all men together, the other edgelords, the LARPing tradwives, they’re all happy to lump together those men. And conversely, the folks with no sympathy for men as a category suddenly find the moral character to reject stereotypes.
Why does this happen? Because under the ethics of the internet, it’s always permissible to deny the humanity of the person on the other team. Because the internet has no ethics aside from the ethics of engagement and nothing drives engagement like phony culture war.
3. Is there a way out?
As with most internet games, the only way to win is to refuse to play.
But I get it, refusing to play isn’t always easy. Being part of a group that has historically been marginalized, maligned or mistreated breeds a desire for reciprocation. It’s your turn to know what it feels like to not be believed, to be reduced to your gender, ethnicity, sexuality… I know the feeling.
My whole life, I’ve encountered some version of the “black crime” conversation, some person who has the statistics and the reasoning to justify avoiding black people in uncertain situations and who really wants to talk about it. For a long time, I engaged in these conversations. I pushed back with the correct understanding of statistics and more sophisticated understanding of risk management.
Ultimately, I decided to opt out of these discussions. There just wasn’t much for me and it turns out, the way out was simple. I just took the issue out of the hypothetical and grounded it in reality. I asked myself an alternate question: how do black people who live in black neighborhoods and have to negotiate black spaces keep themselves safe? Obviously, “avoid black people” is not an option.
The answer is context. Context is how we keep ourselves safe.
Let me pose a thought experiment of my own. Let’s say there’s a video posted online of a man interviewing a woman. He asks her, “as a woman, how does it feel to have to negotiate the possibility of male violence?” And let’s imagine her answer were this, “sometimes, I think if I were walking through the woods and I saw a random man in one direction and a bear in the other, I’d take my chances and walk in the direction of the bear.”
Would such an exchange go viral? Maybe, but it would be a different sort of virality, because the framing is different. The take is less controversial, less adversarial. It’s a peak into one woman’s thoughts. It doesn’t pretend to be some clear-eyed consideration of the issue. It doesn’t attempt to hide behind questionable statistics and specious logic. Put another way, it’s grounded in human experience and therefore, it calls for a human response.2 In this alternate version, the form of the question doesn’t automatically push you into one team or the other.
Truth is, I don’t even care if you use broad demographic characteristics to stay safe. Be scared of men. Fuck, be scared of black men. I can admit that I’m a little scared of white women. So, use stereotypes. Just don’t be absolutely fucking stupid about it. Would you really run from the 135-lb man, wearing zip-off hiking pants, and holding a bag of trail mix, towards a mother grizzly and her cubs? Probably not.
In real life, you’d probably assess the situation as best you can. You’d make a judgment call about the specific man in front of you. In that moment, you’re concerned about your own survival and not which ideological team you’re supporting. In that moment, you’re being a human being and not performing for the internet.
The internet abounds with “the view from nowhere.” It speaks in a way that obliterates perspective and replaces it with a bogus universality. Put another way, the internet is a machine for crushing context, because context gets in the way of engagement. But context matters. Context is how we turn back from the abyss. Restoring context is how we restore our humanity.
One of the better-known thought experiments is the Trolley Problem. Consideration of the trolley problem is meant to elucidate the relative moral worth of different types of action. Is it better to take an action that directly kills one person but spares five or better to take no harmful action, but be indirectly responsible for the death of five people?
Yes, there are men who’d find a way to be offended by something even this innocuous, but these days try to find a sentence at which someone won’t claim offense.