The Bear and a Hard Place

Why Choose the Bear?

The ‘Choose the Bear’ social experiment on social media, where specifically women were asked whether they would rather come across a bear in the woods or a man, caused such a reaction on the internet that it reached the news.

The question, farcical to begin with, places the hypothetical victim between two potential predators, one from the animal world and the other from one’s own world, that is, human civilisation, with its unwritten and legal rules for behaviour. However, in spite of that, most women chose the bear. One has to see it in its context to make sense of it.

Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1911

The metaphor of the predator representing a man, primarily a wolf, first came along in fairy and folk tales as an example of men with ill intent towards young girls and warned that as long as they didn’t stray from the path or allow themselves to be fooled, they would be safe and preserve their purity. If not, they would be eaten.

Now, to examine why the question was asked in the first place, which many of the women answered with little hesitation, we have to consider the role of the predator in our collective consciousness, which is why the women’s familiarity with the choice itself becomes important. Many of the stories give the young woman going out into the world alone the so-called choice to not stray from the beaten path and the promise that one will remain safe as a result of making the right one. Modern feminists, with retellings of the most prominent story of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, have figured out that even if the young adventuress makes the right choice, there is no guarantee of safety or rescue. She must take matters into her own hands.

Fairy tales are more relevant to the way we’ve been taught to think than we know. Even if children’s books no longer count fairy tales as our first introduction to literature, they are rewritten for movies, animation films and popular fantasy tales. For as far back as families have existed, in every culture, folk tales have been passed on generationally. The only difference is that after the invention of the printing press, these folk tales that used to grow organically and change according to the times were now cut in stone. The feminist retellings that we read now are a recent phenomenon.

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, they became not only methods to pass on the wisdom of the ancients, but also patriarchal propaganda, particularly as a way to control young girls, teaching them behaviour codes and lessons that boiled down to making the right choices. They reinforced what’s now known as the ‘just-world fallacy’, that if one makes the right choices, bad things will not happen. Good girls will have nothing to fear, and by extension bad things will happen to greedy, vain and foolish ones. One is likely to choose to avoid the Wolf if one is a vulnerable adventuress, but the Woodcutter is a safe option. The Wolf, to remind the reader, is a lecherous man out to seduce and consume the adventuress.

The rewritten fairy tale, a good example of which would be in The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter, and also the poem Little Red-Cap by Carol Ann Duffy, where the protagonist bests the Wolf, is a metaphor for the girl who has the potential to remain pure but chooses to embrace the predator, which represents her shadow or her wild side, the impure side. The grandmother whose "old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering", in the case of Carter’s story, represents society’s warning to keep oneself pure, to make the right choice, when the choice itself rarely represents safety. This cognitive bias extends to victim blaming even in current times.

This illusion of safety, of having any choice at all, has been broken.

Therefore, both the man and the animal predator are seen as an unsafe choice. It’s like being stuck between a rock and a hard place, and many of the women who’re asked this question know what that’s like, even at a young age.

Now consider a role reversal. If a man were to choose to come across another man or a bear if he were alone in the woods—the choice would be relatively easy. If the man was replaced with a woman, the bear would likely be the riskier option, and there is no question of the double bind—the damned if you do/damned if you don’t conundrum---coming into play if you're a human male.

Now the bear can easily be replaced by any predator, like a wolf or a shark or a tiger, but the logic behind the choice is that even if you are horribly attacked by an apex predator, the probability of being sexually assaulted by them is zero. An animal eats when it is hungry, and you were ignorant or unlucky enough to cross its path or encroached on its territory and should have known better. If it is not hungry, you might have a chance of getting away.

Human predators, on the other hand, rape and murder for pleasure. They also hoard trophies in order to reenact their victims' indignity. Nature’s predator, on the other hand, only acts out of its behavioural map when the age-old system designed to support it is compromised, usually by human interference or some catastrophe. Free from illusions or mysticism, nature does as nature will. To quote Werner Herzog in the documentary Grizzly Man, on the found footage of the unfortunate Timothy Treadwell, a man who was literally eaten by a bear-----“[…] what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a saviour.”

Which puts the onus on the anonymous man in the woods for having insidious intent. Which also, statistically, predicts that the woman is a potential victim of sexual violence and likely to be blamed for being there in the first place. Which, honestly, could happen anywhere. The women who chose the bear are well and truly aware of the double bind, and still chose the bear, which prompted me to write my blog post on the cases of women and children experiencing sexual assault when they had their drinks spiked or, in some cases, were under medically induced anaesthesia. In such cases the question of a choice does not even arise, turning the victim into inert prey.

Perhaps there was never a choice in the first place.