Loaded for Bear

On the bear vs. man debate and the failures of feminism

Would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear? was a question that recently went viral on TikTok after many women answered “bear.” When pressed, some offered talking points about male violence, rape, and everyday sexism. They said men don’t have the lived experience to understand why a woman would rather be alone in the woods with a wild animal than with a member of her own species. To be fair, there is a sort of half-truth to this. In the United States, 14.8% of women have been raped and 81% experience some form of sexual harassment in their lifetime. But ladies, we already had this conversation. It was called MeToo and it gained the overwhelming support of the nation despite operating as a lynch mob with no presumption of innocence and despite the fact that up to 10% of sexual assault allegations are false.

Honestly, who convinced MeToo plaintiffs that they didn’t hold the burden of proof? Are they the same counselors who convinced these bear plaintiffs they had a case? I chose the bear because the bear sees me as a human being. I chose the bear because I won’t have to see the bear at family reunions. This is a form of idiot confession. And while it may seem like just another silly online debate, it reveals something sinister about Western society and the way in which feminism has turned to rot. In my recent essay for

Konstantin Kisin

, “How Marxism Subverted America,” or the video format if you prefer, I detail the history of how Marxist philosophy has overtaken many of our most cherished institutions, including our media outlets and universities. But Marxism has also engulfed whole ideologies, none more so than feminism.

As an undergraduate, I took every gender studies and feminist course available. My grandmother and mother had raised me in the feminist faith, you could say, but theirs was a decidedly different breed of feminism. What we often talk about as a coherent movement is actually a series of individual movements known as “waves.” First-wave feminism began in the late 19th century and fought to secure the right to attend school, work outside the home, and vote. This is why I say that every decent person ought to be a feminist, because that’s how low the bar is set, or how far we’ve come. Do you think women should have the right to vote? Do you think women should have the right to attend school? Congratulations, you’re a first-wave feminist. This was the feminism of my grandmother.

Second-wave feminism began with the invention of the Pill in 1960 and the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which explored the unspoken ennui of the American housewife. While the battlefields of the first wave had been the office, the classroom, and the polling booth, the second wave turned its attention on the home, focusing on reproductive rights, domestic violence, and marital rape. This was the feminism of my mother. But by the time I had entered university, the cracks were beginning to show. Feminism had always included the voices of black women such as Sojourner Truth, Frances E.W. Harper, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, but in the wake of the civil rights movement, black feminists began to emphasize their skin color and make increased use of Marxist racial analysis.

This led to the exclusionary and often supremacist identity politics we see among wokes today, and third-wave feminism was the catalyst. Indeed, the first use of the phrase “identity politics” was in the famous 1977 statement by the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian socialist organization that claimed the feminist movement was too white and the civil rights movement was too male to address their concerns. As I explain in my essay for Kisin, Marxism began to subvert American society when it took a racial turn, substituting the esoteric concept of the proletariat for the ultimate victim of capitalism, the slave, and by extension, the black American. But there was also a gender turn, with the “global patriarchy” filling in for capitalism and woman as “the nigger of the world,” as Yoko Ono shockingly declared in 1968.

Whereas first-wave feminism was built around the suffragist movement, followed by the housewife feminism of the second wave, the third wave represented the social power of racial and gendered Marxism in the American political vocabulary. Now we find ourselves in the fourth wave. Like second-wave feminism, this one emerged as the result of a technological development, namely the internet. As the British writer Kira Cochrane has observed, fourth-wave feminism is “defined by technology,” which brings us back to our social media debate over bears. Feminism arrived to this debate in the fourth wave of its existence, after having pinned masculinity on the dartboard where capitalism used to hang. Women of our generation understand concepts such as “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture” to be taken as read.

This is analogous to the brain damage that Marxism has done to black Americans who believe it is “open season” on blacks in America or that a literal genocide is taking place in which police massacre unarmed black youth. In fact, the lawyer Benjamin Crump, who has represented the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake, and who has been nicknamed “Black America’s attorney general,” wrote a book in 2019 titled “Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s police shootings database records that in that same year, police killed 12 unarmed black people out of a population of 48.2 million. Not only is this not genocide, or “open season,” but we should be celebrating that the number is so incredibly low.

Similarly, our sense of the threat posed by men is wildly distorted by Marxist framing and a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics. Most murderers are men but most men are not therefore murderers. Every year in the United States, there are about 16,000 homicides. In 2019, there were 16,425. About 63.6% of the offenders were men, and if we assume 63.6% of the unknowns were also men, that totals 81.2% or 13,337 homicides. Of the victims, 1,795 were women. Assuming each victim had a unique killer, that means 0.08% of American men will kill a woman at some point in their life.

Meanwhile, 14.8% of women in the United States will be raped in their lifetime. Let’s assume all rapists are male, and let’s adjust for unreported cases with a multiplier of 5 since 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported. Let’s also include all sexual assaults as rape. Studies have found that rapists have an average of seven to 11 victims each, but let’s be conservative and say seven. That means about 2.8% of American men are rapists. Let’s also assume murderers never rape and rapists never murder. That gives us a total of 2.88% of men who will kill or rape a woman in his lifetime. Finally, let’s round that up to 2.9%. Despite multiple gross overestimations of the threat, we can still say that more than 97% of men will not kill or rape a woman if he ends up alone with her in the woods.

But perhaps women simply lack the lived experience to understand the alternative. Perhaps there’s something in our evolutionary programming that gives men an advantage when it comes to assessing certain types of risk. Whether or not that’s true, I can’t find a single man dumb enough to get this question wrong. So allow me to mansplain this, as someone who grew up camping in bear country. If you do ever see a bear in the woods, you had better hope it’s not a mother with her cubs. Or just the cubs. Or a male who mistakes you for a sub-adult male, which can happen because their eyesight isn’t great. Or a male who has wandered far from base and may be hungry and stressed. Or a male who has not wandered far from base and is in his “critical range,” which is like a wolf’s den in that he will kill you to defend it.

Perhaps many women these days simply have no idea what most animals are actually like outside of a Disney movie. Hunting and camping are, generally speaking, more common among men. But they’re also more common among conservatives, men and women, and I suspect your average Republican woman has a better sense of the danger posed by a 1,000-pound beast. This is an animal that weighs as much as two tigers, has a jaw full of canines as big as a lion’s, and 20 claws each as long as steak knives. A bear can separate your head from your body with a single swipe of its paw. The average American woman weighs 167 pounds and a big bear can lift 10 such women. Even if you have a gun, you’re dead.

You see, there’s a reason we have the phrase “loaded for bear,” which means prepared for any eventually, especially an enormous challenge. It’s because you have to load your guns with special ammunition if you’re shooting bear. Why do you need special ammo? Because a bear’s skull is so thick that most bullets won’t penetrate the bone. That’s right, a bear’s skull is mostly bulletproof. You need something like a 12-gauge slug especially designed for dangerous game, or a .45-70 Government rifle cartridge. This is the degree to which women who answer “bear” have been brainwashed by a combination of anti-male Marxist thinking and children’s cartoons depicting bears as adorable and cuddly. I promise you, fewer women would fail the test if you asked, would you rather be alone in the ocean with a shark or a man?

Maybe Matt Walsh needs to make a new documentary titled “What Is a Bear?”

You can also test the degree to which this is the result of internalized Marxist sexism, or whether conservative women indeed fare better, by asking, would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a black man? After all, black men are statistically over-represented among murderers and rapists, so this should only reinforce the “bear” answer, but if you ask a progressive, as I have done, be prepared to watch them change their answer. But do not misunderstand. I’m not saying that any of this is inherent. Men may have some evolutionary edge in assessing risk, but as I have said regarding Palestinians, oppression alone will not convince people to overwhelmingly support genocidal violence, nor is it enough to explain why so many women would get this question wrong. In both cases, you also need a bit of what the Chinese communists used to call xǐnǎo (洗腦) or “washing of the brain.”

We should be outraged that the noble crusade of women’s liberation has become victim to Marxist subversion, or that so much of the legacy of fourth-wave feminism appears to be sexist tropes and social media noise. But admittedly, it’s difficult to find one’s anger when the problem manifests itself in such self-mockingly hilarious ways. Consider my response to a recent opinion piece on the topic:

Seattle Times DEI columnist Naomi Ishikawa weighs in on the man vs. bear debate, saying that her niece answered “bear” because “a bear has never harassed her, catcalled her, followed her...”

A great white shark has never done any such thing either, so by this logic, Ishikawa and her niece would rather jump in the water with a white shark than a black man. Wow, Ishikawa. Really?

Ishikawa then offers a few quotes from women, presumably intended to help make her case:

“If I survive the bear attack, I won’t have to see the bear at family reunions.”

You mean because you won’t have a face?

“The worst thing the bear can do is kill me.”

Or eat you alive. At least cannibalistic serial killers have the decency to murder you before they tuck in.

“The bear sees me as a human being.”

Good lord, this one makes fun of itself.

In his incredible tragedy about the legendary female warrior Joan of Arc, Die Jungfrau von Orleans or The Maid of Orleans, Germany’s greatest classical playwright Friedrich Schiller pours as much of his attention on our heroine’s betrayal by the French as he puts on the English for burning her at the stake. And it’s crushing to see our warrior lead such a noble crusade, only to be brought down by members of her own rank. But as Schiller famously writes in the play, “against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.”