As a once-angry young man who mellowed out somewhat (I am now an angry 30-year-old man), I do understand some of the prickliness involved, even if it doesn’t apply to me anymore. I was always pretty liberal and anti-manosphere, but there is an element here that isn’t “Men always have to butt in on subjects where we should be listening to women” (that definitely IS a problem, mind).

We, as men, are socialized to deal with othering in the most dogshit ways, and like rubbing salt in a wound, inevitably aggravate it. You don’t talk about getting othered, unless you’re getting angry about it, otherwise you’re ‘weak’ and need to ‘nut up’ and ‘stop being a pussy’. You can’t work to solve it, because then you’re a ‘tryhard’ and ‘pathetic’. It’s a kind of helplessness by being stripped of the natural tools that should be available to us, but generations of toxic masculinity have rendered anathema.

It’s like being trapped in a cage, where you can see every piece of what is tormenting you, but do nothing about it except grind your teeth into dust trying fruitlessly to chew through the bars until some power, through no influence of your own, releases you. No one wants to be othered, no one wants to be seen as fundamentally contrary to participation in a common community - but many men have no way of dealing with that, and it terrifies them. The wounds never heal, but you become increasingly defensive and neurotic about it. It becomes a hair-trigger.

A lot of young men right now are probably reading the bear metaphor as more an incident of othering rather than an expression of the risk inherent to women when dealing with our current society. They aren’t hearing “Jesus Christ, be a little receptive to the concerns of women, the risk calculus here is not the same risk calculus you are using”, they’re hearing “Women don’t see us as equals, they see us as dangerous animals. We’re not of a common community; we’ve been (or are being, or are realizing we’ve always been) cast out.”

Obviously this gets the dander up on misogynists, but even many otherwise-feminist-leaning men will feel hurt by seeing it this way. And the reactions of some individuals - using that same ‘nut up, pussy’ toxic masculinity dialogue, but in ‘defense’ of a feminist metaphor - is twisting the knife, putting those who understand toxic masculinity back into the intensely frustrating position of trying to explain why that’s a dogshit response, and making those who don’t understand toxic masculinity double down in the natural, automatic reaction that they’ve been conditioned to embrace in response to being othered - pain. And from pain, anger.

tl;dr; The reactions of many men to the metaphor are problematic, but it’s not as simple as “Bunch of sexists are unhappy that they have to consider other people” for all of them. A lot of is “Bunch of broken men are being given the exact scenario they are used to exercising their society-approved maladaptive coping skills in, with both sides effectively cheering their response on as it serves their own prejudices and preconceptions.”

I think that part of the problem is that people tie their identities to labels.

When someone says “I’d rather encounter the bear than a man”, some people will say “I’m a man, and that means she’s afraid of me (personally)”…and go on to have their feelings hurt by it because it’s interpreted as a judgment of who they are as an individual.

Honestly, I think a big part of it is ignorance of women’s experiences and a difficulty with perspective-taking.

Maybe men aren’t as statistically dangerous as bears. If they aren’t, why are women afraid? There are reasons for that.

I can imagine some men extrapolating from this and wondering “How can I ever approach a woman if they’re all afraid of me?”…but the answer is “NOT alone when she’s alone in a secluded spot in the woods”…

If the question was “Would you rather encounter a bear or a man at a board game café?”, you’d find a lot fewer women hoping to encounter a bear.

Context matters.

Honestly, when I was a young male teen on reddit, I internalized a whole bunch of stuff like this, and it’s made me uncomfortable around women. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, scared, or feel unsafe and combined with a whole lot of self hatred/loathing/negativity in general over a long time basically indelibly etched into my mind that anything remotely romantic with women is not ok.

Please, please, please understand that I’m not being like “woke feminism made me hate women and fucked my life up!” It’s just when I was young and my brain was more malleable, it hurt being male when people would talk about men being predators, etc. I wanted to distance myself from that as much as possible, and went so far the other way for so long that it honestly fucked me up mentally. I have other trauma around women that makes it uncomfortable, namely a lot of being asked out as a prank. (There is no good response, if you said yes, then hahaha you fucking loser you actually thought someone would interested in you? If you said no, then you’re gay and you should go kill yourself)

I’m no longer male, and now know I’m not straight, but that shit has stuck with me. Sometimes I fear that I’m not actually attracted to men, that I’m just desperate for affection and my brain is broken where dating/intimacy/relationships with women is concerned. (Then a man starts kissing me and it dispells my doubts for a while.)

I don’t really know why I’m sharing this. I guess I just wanted to say that while men who are upset at women about women choosing the bear don’t get it and are part of the problem, the messaging can have serious impact on people for the worse. Certainly not saying that women shouldn’t speak up about it. I think it’s natural to be upset about how men are seen in this context, and that that anger is frequently directed at the women speaking up, shooting the messenger so to speak, when it should be directed at the system and society that allows such treatment of women to be commonplace.

Fuck it’s too early in the morning and I’m rambling and oversharing. I hope someone finds some value in this word vomit.

Story time…

On the way home from work I stepped off a bus and turned in the direction of home. A young woman who was a few steps ahead of me was being verbally harassed with overtly sexual language by a man. I stepped between them, facing the dude, and told him to fuck off and walk away. Some words were exchanged, and eventually he turned around and walked away. I watch him for a minute or two, then turned around and walked home. The woman he was harassing was long gone.

When I got home and relayed this story to my girlfriend, she said this sort of interaction was COMMON. She’d never mentioned it in the nearly 10 years we’d been dating. It was normal to her. My response was “What the actual fuck? That’s bullshit.” But it was her reality, and the reality of the woman I saw, and probably dozens or hundreds more, every day.

We collectively need to do better. We need to stop doing it ourselves, and stop our friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, and even strangers from doing it. We need to raise the average and be better.

I think a positive step can also be to think back and reflect a bit. Why did I react the way I did? When I first heard the hypothetical, it made me feel bad about myself. After that came a feeling of defeat. I was thinking “why even bother, whatever I do I’m the villain.” I’m very afraid of bears, which may have played into this.
The main thing I’ve been thinking since then is that I find it easier to have empathy with people who show empathy to me. It’s easy to think “well then, when they start showing empathy, so will I.”, but it goes both ways, doesn’t it? That made me want to influence this loop of causality, or what to call it.
I’ll set my negative emotions to the side, and try to not contribute to the division between people. Maybe even manage to be a part in the positive direction. As I get older, the more I realize that I can’t change the world, but I have a very deep wish to be a net positive somehow.
As for acting on the things I have learned, I don’t really know what to do, and I hope this is a safe space for anyone who needs support.

Can you fix your links so they’re not absolute links, but are the way Lemmy wants them so you stay on your instance when you click them, please?

You’ve created an echo chamber where you simply “❌ removed by moderator” every dissenting opinion.

Way to call yourselves understanding lmao. You just want to spread propaganda.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

“Creating a Safe Space”

Luckily, we’re on a website and not in Gaza whilst The IDF carpet bombs the piss out of that poor corner of the globe yet again, or in the MS-13 controlled slums of El Salvador, where physical safety really is more non-existent than clothes on the body of Sydney Sweeney. Words we’re reading off a screen ain’t sticks nor stones, thus it’s physically impossible for them to shatter our bones into a gazillion fragments

We couldn’t be safer