Man or bear? The strongest opinions that should make some men think again

A simple, hypothetical question has gone viral on social media, stimulating much debate and, as some might argue, opening old wounds in the battle of the sexes. The reason? A short, vox pop video, uploaded on Tiktok by screenshothq, barely half a minute long in which eight women on the streets of London were stopped and asked: “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” Of the eight, all but one said the bear, with one arguing, “Men are scary” and another reasoning, “What I’ve heard about bears, is that they don’t always attack you right, unless you fuck with them, so maybe a bear!”

Women say they would feel safer around a wild bear than a man

More women concurred on other social media platforms, Instagram and X (Twitter) that they too would rather be alone with a wild bear than an adult member of the opposite sex. After some rational thinking, one female Tiktok user answered that if the bear were to attack them, it would be solely due to “animal instinct or for survival and not for personal pleasure or satisfaction”. Another woman reasoned, “If a bear did attack, at least I would be believed...” Another poster, noted, “In the worst case scenario, the bear would only kill me”.

The video has prompted a number of copycat ones, with the question put to friends, family members as well as strangers on the street. But the outcome has interestingly been the same across the board. According to the answers posted on social media, if they found themselves trapped in a forest, most women would prefer to be in the company of a bear than a man.

The debate also drew reaction from many men, who voiced their surprise - but not all. One poster wrote: “Man here, and I’d also rather be stuck in the forest with a bear. Humans are unpredictable. I know the bear will attack eventually so I’ll never trust it. A human might gain my trust and then attack”.

How many fatal bear attacks on humans have there been since 2020?

Taking all of that into account, let’s look at the figures to get an idea about who could be the biggest threat to a woman, alone in a forest. Bears are predatory animals - Grizzly and polar bears are the most dangerous for their size and strength but other species, including the American black bears and Eurasian brown bears have been known to attack, and kill humans - and there have been cases where their victims have been eaten alive.

That was the fate of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 years getting to know and documenting a sleuth of adult brown bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Treadwell believed he had forged a special, intimate bond with the bears - until they turned on him, attacking, killing and eating him and his girlfriend Amy in October 2003. His name started trending again with this new Tiktok debeate.

Environmentalists estimate that there are currently somewhere around 200,000 brown bears living in the wild across the world - more than half of them in Russia with colonies of approximately 58,000 in North America and 15,400 in Europe, respectively. There were 664 reported attacks on humans by bears between 2000 and 2015 - 183 of them in North America, 291 in Europe and 190 in the Eastern hemisphere. In almost all of those cases, the humans were involved in leisure activities - hiking, jogging, camping, mountaineering... etc. when they stumbled upon a female bear, protecting her cubs.

There have been 16 fatal attacks involving brown or black bears in North American during the 2020′s - the most recent in September last year when an adult grizzly bear killed couple Doug Inglis and Jenny Gusse, both 62 and their dog in Banff National Park, Alberta. Attacks are on the rise in Europe too. Earlier this year, a 31-year-old Belorussian women was attacked by a a young male brown bear weighing about 265 pounds while out hiking with her boyfriend in the Slovak national park, she fell and sustained fatal head injuries. Three years earlier, a 57-year-old man was killed by a bear in the same location.

Domestic violence and femicide figures from around the world

So what about the threat from men? According to the research paper, Gender-related killings of women and girls (femicide/feminicide), compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women, almost 89,000 women were intentionally killed worldwide in 2022. The paper notes that 55 percent (48,800) of all female homicides were committed by family members or intimate partners.

Femicides committed by intimate partners or family members in North America increased by 29 percent between 2017 and 2022 - much of that is down to improved recording practices. Similar, intentional killings also increased in the Caribbean by 8 percent over the same period, while decreasing in Central and South America by 10 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Europe also experienced a 21 percent average reduction in these kinds of femicides since 2010.

Social media has posed a hypothetical question which is impossible to answer but from the results and the array of comments we have seen so far, there is plenty of food for thought about how safe women feel in modern society.