The Internet can be a hellspace for women. Sometimes it’s as simple as a shitty comment by some male edgelord incel who is trying to be the next Andrew Tate. Sometimes it’s a specific online event, like the Bear or Man video.

If you are blissfully unaware of what I am talking about, last week a video was shared on Tik Tok of eight women being asked on the street a hypothetical question: If you are alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a male stranger?

Seven of the eight women went with “bear.” Full of empathy and understanding of the reality of violence towards women, the men of the Internet responded to this with “Sure, some of us are not great people and causes women to have legitimate concerns about being alone with a strange man so your answer makes a lot of sense.”

Ha ha, just kidding, given this is the Internet we are talking about here, where The Worst gather to tell the world just how awful they are. For example, a lot of Net bros proved how wrong women were to select the bear by sharing violent imagery involving women.

One common type of response from women about the Man or Bear question was basically this, from Tik-Tokker @anaidmargo:

“I was asking my sister-in-law about this. I asked her the question, you know, just for giggles,” she explained in part of her post. “She was like, ‘You know, I would rather be a bear because if the bear attacks me, and I make it out of the woods, everybody’s gonna believe me and have sympathy for me. But if a man attacks me and I make it out, I’m gonna spend my whole life trying to get people to believe me and have sympathy for me.’ And that left me speechless.”

To sum it up, way too many men got suspiciously enraged at the responses from women who said they would rather encounter a bear than a man because they have good reason not to trust strange men. And one of the reasons women prefer to encounter a bear is people would believe they were attacked by a bear, unlike what often happens when a human male attacks a woman.

Wikipedia has a list of fatal bear attacks on humans in North America in recorded history. There are years without a fatal bear attack. If you made a list of women killed by men (or raped for that matter), it would be much longer and there would not be any empty years.

While the Internet can often be a real shit show, sometimes it simply holds up a mirror and reveals what we are as a society. In this case, the reflection is quite ugly.

The last word goes to My Morning Jacket.