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is the man or bear thing rhetorically or optically the perfect feminist meme that is beyond criticism? no.
but is it leaps and bounds better at getting men to understand the material consequences of patriarchy on the physical and emotional health of women than that stupid “kill all men” meme from last decade? definitely.
I was discussing this whole "safer with a bear" thing with my wife earlier, and she agreed that it was more about the bear will almost always just fuck off and leave you alone. Imo, the problem is the lack of social (third) spaces in the West, particularly anglo-North America. The only places left where you can encounter a potential romantic partner are in their home or in a place of business, and both are generally unacceptable for romantic solicitation. We've even managed to largely flush the Internet as a meaningful third space. So, folks are left with the choice of committing a social faux pas or being lonely, which is kind of a shit choice.
If we brought back third spaces whose sole purpose was socializing and community-building, we'd probably see stuff like the "safer with bear" sentiment disappate.
valid insight, maybe not the full picture, but still valid.
important to know that the vast majority of perpetrators of sexual violence are acquaintances of the victim, and aren’t strangers. so third spaces might certainly help, but don’t address the primary issue.
I would add though, that (a) those statistics do exclude non-violent sexual harassment (which is more likely from strangers), and (b) that sexual violence is massively underreported, especially when the perpetrator is unknown, since the chances of anything being able to be done about it are extremely low
I would agree but stipulate, unpaid third places. Third places still exist, they're just all monetized. Hang out at the movie theater, gotta buy a ticket, hang out at a concert, gotta buy a ticket, hang out anywhere around town, you're loitering and there's nothing really there, hang out at the mall, everyone's trying to sell you stuff and there's only just stuff to buy. There's maybe the park and the library left, which aren't exactly the most hot of spots.
Agreed. We've built a society where you're largely only allowed to exist in public as a consumer.
Combine this with the expectation that one sex is expected to do nearly all such soliciting.
I actually find it amusing that Bumble recently announced that they are no longer going to require women to make the first move because many find having to do so a burden. It's something of an intractable problem - women don't want the burden of having to do the approaching and potentially facing rejection but also don't want to be approached by men they aren't interested in (and tend to have much lower tolerances regarding the behavior of said men - a lot of behaviors that are "flirting" when done by a man they're interested in are seen as something else entirely when done by the wrong man).
Then from the other direction you have men for who it's largely a numbers game - many men don't put much effort into the messages they send out on online dating services because the response rate is so low. If a large majority of your messages get no reply, it's less psychologically painful to think about the sheer number of times you've been considered not worth the effort to bother turning down if you aren't investing as much into each attempt, and if you aren't investing much into each attempt then you can make a lot more attempts for the same time investment. Response rates are low enough and the difference in odds of success between low effort and high effort messages small enough that it impacts the entire thing pretty heavily.