The Bear vs. Man Meme is a Big Deal

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the recent "bear or man" meme, which revealed a disturbing level of normalized bigotry against men in contemporary society. The hosts analyze the responses to the question "Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man?" and compare them to hypothetical scenarios involving other marginalized groups to highlight the double standards at play. They explore the roots of this bigotry, its manifestation in various aspects of life, such as college admissions and fertility choices, and the potential consequences for society as a whole. The conversation also touches on the importance of recognizing and addressing misandry, even when it has become so pervasive that it is often overlooked or dismissed.

[00:00:00] Question. What kind of bear is best? That's a ridiculous question. False. Black bear.

Malcolm Collins: This is why it's so important that I elevate this and I'm also elevate your reaction to this Okay, because it's the reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gotten

If you lived in a society like if in America today People were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people.

Would you be like, holy? You We have a big problem in this country and we need to do something about it immediately.

Yeah. You would be raising every alarm bell you could raise. This is true.

Fact. Bears eat beets. Oh. Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. Bears do not What is going on?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: You

Malcolm Collins: look good.

Simone Collins: Are you ready to go? I'm ready to go.

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I am so excited to be chatting with you again today. There has been a meme, and whenever we try to do [00:01:00] timely episodes, we are always going to be late to the subject, because that's just not how we produce our videos. But the bear meme! First I'll ask you the question.

Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man?

Simone Collins: Yeah. As long as it's a genuinely random man, obviously a man.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So a lot of women, and then I've seen this done on shows and stuff like that. It seems to be like 50 percent of women or more, maybe within these more progressive environments, like college campuses, you're getting like 70 to 80 percent of women.

Okay. Are saying a bear and the standard have they not been like camping ever? Okay. So that's not the issue And what i'll say is the standard mind dead Take on this is are they either not aware of how dangerous bears are or the standard take on this is [00:02:00] Oh women these days, aren't they silly and hasn't feminism gone an extreme degree?

And if we weren't based camp if we were some basic podcast That's the take we'd be having but I actually think that what can be Gleamed from this particular meme is much deeper and that's why I wanted to make sure to do an episode on it even if it's not appearing while this is still in the zeitgeist of the topic because I think that this was actually a great sort of natural experiment to see where our culture is heading and to predict where things will go downstream of here.

Simone Collins: The, what this really indicates is what media has done to female audiences, which is that when they hear the word average or random guy, they assume some kind of aggressor or some kind of dangerous person. They're evoked set for random guy, rather than [00:03:00] Your brother, an uncle, a family member, a co worker.

Malcolm Collins: No. They've further asked this. If it was your dad, would you say, no, they'll say. They would choose to bear over their dad.

For example, look at this woman's caption. I choose the bear every time. If it's my boyfriend the bear, a friend the bear. My dad, the bear. Life and men have given me enough reason to choose the bear any time over any of them. I don't trust them. I don't think I ever will. Whether they're family or friends or stranger, I choose the bear.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think you always, and a lot of people do this. They're like Malcolm, you go too hard against the monoculture and stuff like that. Because they assume that the monoculture is their perception of the monoculture when they've been associated with it.

Not the, like they don't know how brainwashed and culty some individuals have gotten. But what I would say is the first thing to understand what we're really learning from this is I'm going to play a clip of somebody interviewing a bunch of women, but first I'm going to slightly change the question that's being asked.

Would you prefer [00:04:00] to be in the woods? with a bear or a random black man

black

Man is scary. Um, with a bear. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.

Probably a bear. 100 percent a bear, which is like, terrifying to say, but Definitely a bear. Some

Malcolm Collins: black

men are very scary out there. I bet. Even some men are saying bear, although we could predict that this man's opinion will be whatever makes women approve of him. If I were alone in the woods, would you rather me encounter a bear or a

Malcolm Collins: black

man?

I feel more like bear. I don't know, cause I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear.

Malcolm Collins: and I think when you hear this, now you get really uncomfortable when you hear the way people are responding to the initial question,

Simone Collins: but I have

Malcolm Collins: changed the context slightly.

You get really uncomfortable.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or I could change it a bit. I could say, would you rather [00:05:00] be in the woods with a bear or a Jew?

Oh, wow! This would be really offensive if they had asked one of these other questions.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And this is because what you are actually seeing within this meme is just pure, uncut bigotry. And you are seeing the extreme levels of bigotry that have become normalized in our society. And this gets really interested because now you get into how does bigotry spread? How did, and so first, something that's useful to note whenever bigotry spreads, because when I say this, if you're, in the cult, you're like men, Don't count as a class that is worthy of any protection.

They do they're not worthy at the same level of human dignity of other classes. This is always the first step in the proliferation [00:06:00] of systemic bigotry. The first thing the Nazis did was to compare the Jews to animals, the same thing we see

happening again within the Palestine protests and stuff like that with the, we've talked about this in another episode actually one that might go live after this one but yeah you First need to like racism never is Oh, we hate this group just in particular.

It's no, this group is genuinely lesser, genuinely deserving of lesser protections before you go on. And people can be like come on, men have all the power in our society. And I'm like have you looked at like college admissions rates recently? Like men are being systemically pulled out of our economy right now.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: Anyone who does, if you look at like the number of scholarships for men versus the number of scholarship for women, that's 10 to 1, even with the higher rates of men. One of the things that shocked me was I was recently walking around the Stanford campus for my reunion and there was an entire building dedicated to helping women.

It was the old firehouse. It had been converted to an [00:07:00] entire building just for increasing the enfranchisement of women. What did they

Simone Collins: do? It What do they do?

Malcolm Collins: What's odd is, but women are the majority of students coming into campus now. They are the privileged group. To have an entire department dedicated to servicing the needs of the privileged group within a campus environment is genuinely obscene.

Oh,

Simone Collins: the typical woke female college student would respond to you saying That's exactly what colleges were like for men for all of history you'd go and then there'd be some exclusive male fraternity to Further enfranchise the men who went there and this is just our version of correcting societal skills And they

Malcolm Collins: would say that but those fraternities often weren't directly integrated.

It was the university right

Simone Collins: Funded by it, etc.

Even if you take the direction that says, okay, well, women used to be discriminated against, and that's why these were originally built. [00:08:00] Because there were counter institutions on campus to them. Well, those counter institutions don't work anymore. So.

These things that were built to counter systemic sexism on campus are now institutionally furthering the very type of sexism that they were built to dismantle.

Simone Collins: What's interesting is You The extent to which we're making men into bears. We're making men into things that can and should be scarier than bears because we're forcing them to become stronger and better. Like by, by subjecting men, especially like we'll say, CIS otherwise privileged men to higher selective pressures, you are forcing them to become the best and the brightest and to build their own institutions.

That's objectively not

Malcolm Collins: true. Really? If you look at the statistics of men today versus men in the past, they are lower testosterone, lower strength, lower. You can just look at pictures. Do you think

Simone Collins: it's an 80 20 thing though? Do you think that basically Most men [00:09:00] indeed are experiencing that disenfranchisement, but then the 20 percent that are ultimately going to matter that historically always were the ones who ultimately built everything are the ones who are ultimately being pushed to thrive even further.

Malcolm Collins: I don't understand. It's just not a thing. It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy that there is this this dangerous male group that they are concerned about is not particularly more dangerous than any other group that they could be exposed to. They have chosen, because of bigotry, because of assumptions about groups, To make these biases about men.

If you look at male violence statistics, right?

Simone Collins: I'm not referring to dangerous in terms of violence, by the way. I'm referring to dangerous in terms of having all the agency and power.

Malcolm Collins: But that's not what they're talking about. Yeah. You're reframing the question to try to, and I think this is useful because this is a way that many progressives or people who grow up in this environment intrinsically attempt to reframe the issue in their own minds when they're engaging with it [00:10:00] so they don't understand how genuinely horrifying the normalized bigotry within progressive circles has become.

And this is why I think for a while as a society we didn't understand why we needed to treat racism with such an immediate and angry response. Why we needed to treat anti semitism with such an immediate and severe angry response. Because if you don't, if you allow it to begin to fester within a population, you then have it become a status hierarchy signaling mechanism.

And if it becomes a status hierarchy signaling mechanism, then it self extremizes like we have already had happen within women in our society today. Sure. To the extent where they would say something that is the equivalent of saying would you rather be around, be exposed to a random male in the woods or a random black male in the woods?

Simone Collins: Through IVF, just so they could be sure that they don't have any male children.

Malcolm Collins: [00:11:00] We're going to talk about that in a second. And I would point out here as well, if they're like look at X statistics, right? Any statistics that a woman is going to find that indicates that coming across a random male in the woods might be a scary thing for her is going to apply extra.

To black males, any statistics they're looking at. And so why is it that they are not allowed to ask this question about black males, right? If they're framing it this way, right? It is because they have learned that by taking stances like this publicly, they can achieve higher status.

And so it signals to the public what route they're in. And so now we're going to talk about how extreme this has gotten because it's really quite. Terrifying. So there was an article recently in slate called it's illegal in most of the world in America, new parents are embracing it for better or worse.

And it is gender selection was in IVF, which of course we support, but here are some quotes from the [00:12:00] article, which I think shows you the level of dehumanization and bigotry that has become normalized within the urban monoculture. Grace, a 31 year old woman who works in human resources. Told me, when I think about having a child that's a boy, it's almost a repulsion.

Oh my god, no. Grace, and her fang, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, engineer fiancé, are freezing embryos to preserve their fertility.

And to ensure that they avoid that, Oh my god, no. Scenario. After she turned 30, her fiancé wanted to make embryos the right way. Wanted to make embryos right away. Grace wasn't particularly eager to kick off the kid having process. I don't like kids. I don't want kids anytime soon, especially one that's a boy.

But, she also thinks that her feelings around kids may change, and she wants to be able to dodge the possibility of becoming a quote unquote boy mom if they [00:13:00] do. Boy becoming a boy mom. What's so bad about boys? Quote, toxic masculinity. End quote. Said many women I spoke to. Even those who were, sadly, already boy moms.

For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good. Amy's partner, Gurthru. Guthry? Guthry. Believes that because oldest children tend to be more successful, if everyone did sex selection, we could quash inequality by manipulating birth order. Quote. Maybe one of our best chances at trying to destroy the glass ceiling is to have women first, end quote, said Gerthy.

Among the moms I spoke to who already have boys, many want to give their sons sisters to make them better men. They believe that girls can do anything, a conviction that often comes with a subtext that boys are incapable of doing their own laundry. Calling their moms expressing empathy [00:14:00] a really bad thing.

Being part of the family as they get older. Quote, I don't know a guy who has a strong relationship with his mother or his family. End quote. Grace told me, and this is, and whose

Simone Collins: fault is that? Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. The hold on one second.

So there was also a case of a couple who sued a fertility clinic after having a male embryo instead of a female embryo. And they I mean, that's

Simone Collins: annoying.

Malcolm Collins: You pay for services

Simone Collins: and, they, they probably told them they were able to choose a gender and they were lied to but still the fact that they

Malcolm Collins: Yeah but you've got to hear the way that they talk about it and think about it

Simone Collins: Ah, I looked

Malcolm Collins: i'll pull quotes from this after the recording

She explained I had wanted skin to skin connection, but I ended up wearing sings.

So he wouldn't touch my chest when he did it sent electric shock waves through me. I started experiencing extreme anxiety and I would look at the baby and it would [00:15:00] contort into the faces of all these grown men that I know it was so creepy. Whenever that happened. I had to give the baby to Robbie.

Malcolm Collins: But you hear a lot of talk from this couple that really Is, compares carrying a child that is a male as grape. Because they have a male inside them involuntarily. And they're just They have a partner, like they married a partner.

No, they're usually lesbians. Ah. Okay. Okay.

So they are extremist, anti males but you also get these in I think the other couple that was talking, the first couple was a heterosexual where they probably wouldn't call themselves heterosexual, but it was what we would call a man and a woman being married to each other.

And to the people who want to be like, well, she was a. . Assault survivor. You know, therefore her reaction to males is justified. And I would counter Wiz. If somebody was a survivor and the assault, it was a black male and they reacted that way [00:16:00] to black males specifically. Would that be allowed in our society?

Would we really be like, oh yeah, it's okay. Because one black person did something to them, for them to now react extremely negatively whenever they are touched by or around or talk to by a black man. No, of course not. You cannot carve out specific subgroups is being less deserving of human decency than other subgroups. That is the core element of bigotry. More than all other elements, that core element.

Malcolm Collins: And this, so like when you hear this, are you beginning to Understand or contextualize just the amount of genuine bigotry that's being normalized. It is not that they are, I think, genuinely more afraid of a man. Like when you hear man, you think a male person because you're still thinking like a human.

When they hear man, they hear monsters.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's hard for me to [00:17:00] parse out how much of this is part of progressive culture and how much of this is people with very strange phobias. There are people who are only capable of eating macaroni and cheese every day. There are people who are terrified of respondents.

Malcolm Collins: Come on.

Simone Collins: Yeah, to the bare thing.

But I also think that's like a, an issue of availability heuristic with male figures in the media or something like that. What?

Malcolm Collins: Explain how this is availability heuristic. Because They interact with males every single day. I hate

Simone Collins: this. I don't think they think of the males that they interact with as males.

And then when they're evoked set for a man is still like an evil aggressor in the patriarchy and terrible people. Let's

Malcolm Collins: unpack what you just said. Cause this is important. It helps you understand how racism, anti Semitism and other types of hate evolve because it allows you to discategorize all disconforming evidence of actually being related to that gender group.

Simone Collins: [00:18:00] Yeah. Many people who are racist or anti whatever group have plenty of people in those groups in their lives that they just don't think about as being in those groups because they like, I don't know, they don't fit the stereotype. Then it's obviously a big problem. This is obviously heartbreaking.

My heart especially breaks for this baby that was born via IVF that the couple didn't want. And a lot of the sons even that are being raised by mothers who chose to have sons are not select for gender, but I've just decided that I'm going to teach my son just how terrible men are because that's,

Malcolm Collins: Those just teach the guy to hate themselves and then a lot of them can just gender transition.

When you hear about kids questioning their gender at three or something, a kid is not questioning his gender at three, but you have kids who are three. Not one of them had the faintest clue what gender is.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Everything is all pronouns mix. It does not matter.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so they're just going to transition them and I'll play a short video clip here.

This is from something I played in another [00:19:00] show, which it's supposed to be a trans piece of media that they're discussing here. And they're trying to explain the consequences, lying to this young person about the consequences of the surgery, saying that, it's pretty much assured that they'll be able to orgasm afterwards when that's not really what we've seen.

But then in, in like larger data sets, you're generally giving up the ability to trick. To orgasm if you're transitioning in this way.

Especially with heavy amounts of puberty blockers, which this individual is on, but this individual is in admitting that they don't even understand why they're talking to them about this because they've never experienced an orgasm.

I haven't experienced any sexual sensation, so when the doctors are saying an orgasm is like a sneeze, I don't even know what she's talking about

what girl wants their penis to grow? Not this girl, and not any girl.

if only I was born with a vagina. To solve that problem. Amen, sister.

Malcolm Collins: So they can't even think or know or contextualize what's being talked about. And what this highlights to me is how early this individual went on puberty blockers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. [00:20:00] Yeah. I just, I don't know. I. It's very clear to me that for quite a while now, there has been an intense bias against men, especially in developed nations, predominated by the urban monoculture.

The fact that men are hearing again and again from potential employers, for example, you're great, but I'm sorry, we can't hire another man. Like we're not really like we were not allowed to, or we can't, the optics would be too bad that's just a normalized thing that pretty much everyone we know who's male and who's on the job market has experienced at this point, um, is insane.

And the sign of very severe. Bias. And I think the fact that even people like me, I hear this bare thing and I try to shrug it off is an indication of the extent to which we've normalized this misandry in society because now it's just so obvious to me that. I don't think twice when we see new examples of it.

It's just, of course, [00:21:00] that's how it is. And, new infractions would have to be so extreme that, by that point we're just rounding people up.

Malcolm Collins: It's a boiling a frog scenario. Like for you, if you heard and you have even in this podcast, tried to dismiss this as maybe they're missing.

Maybe. If you because you'll hear answers, like one of the girls who gave an answer said bears don't attack every time.

What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.

Malcolm Collins: Imagine thinking men attack every time. Yeah. And then there's another group where they were like what's the probability that the man will attack you?

And people were giving answers like 80 percent, 50 percent. And they're

Simone Collins: standing on the street where theoretically 50 percent of those also out on the streets walking on sidewalks are male. It's very odd. This

Malcolm Collins: was actually a panel.

Simone Collins: A panel. I see. Was it an all female panel in a building full of all women?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I guess

Simone Collins: this is alone in the woods.

Let's say you were alone in the woods, and you walked past a man. What do you guys [00:22:00] think? Like, what do you think the probability is that just any random man would attack you.

I'd say 30 being he would assault me. There is a chance that a man would attack, but I don't know what the percentage is. 85. I'd say 50 50. Very low, like less than 10 percent.

Simone Collins: So they just think, maybe they think that once isolated, men will.

Malcolm Collins: The woman who said the least number on the panel said 10%. She said I'm going to be very conservative here and say only 10%. That 10 percent of men would attack you on sight. So now, I will

Simone Collins: say there are parts of the world in which I could be dropped into a random street that is abandoned with one other randomly selected male from that city.

And my odds of being attacked could be pretty high as well.

Malcolm Collins: I guess I'm thinking American men here.

Simone Collins: I know, but I, that, my point to you is that I think that the evoked set of these women [00:23:00] is those sets. No,

Malcolm Collins: it's not!

Simone Collins: No?

Malcolm Collins: No, it's not! They're talking about American men. It is very clear.

They're talking about the men they interact with. And this is the thing and this is why I

Simone Collins: don't know if they think of the men they interact with as men

Malcolm Collins: This is why it's so important that I elevate this and I'm also elevate your reaction to this Okay, because it's the reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gotten

If you lived in a society like if in America today People were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people.

Would you be like, holy? You We have a big problem in this country and we need to do something about it immediately.

Yeah. You would be raising every alarm bell you could raise. This is true. And yet, because it's men, you have said they must have been misunderstanding the question or it couldn't really be that bad or it couldn't, but it really is that bad.

And It's also, you'll see [00:24:00] women say things even on my own Facebook page, I've seen posts recently Women are the only animal that needs to mate with its own natural predator.

As if.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: First, I'm like, do you not have the barest grasp of biology? What about praying mantises?

Simone Collins: Yeah, hello.

Malcolm Collins: Grow up. You, you clearly are uneducated.

Also, I'd like to point out here from a biological perspective, males of a species almost never would kill a female of a species to eat. That makes no sense. , whereas females, a species frequently kill males of species to eat when they're not interested in reproducing. Because if a male has inseminated you from a biological perspective, literally the last thing he would want to do.

Is have you killed?

Malcolm Collins: Even if women are like you as men don't understand what it's like to be a woman in our society today, how disempowered you feel, how in danger you are. And I'm like or you could look at the statistics and see that men in America are much [00:25:00] more at risk.

I think it's two times more at risk or maybe even three times more at risk of being attacked by a man than a woman in America. So no, you as a woman are not experiencing more attacks by men than men.

So as I note here, I looked it up. And men make up 79% of homicide victims worldwide.

So you're literally five times more likely to be murdered by someone if you're a man than a woman. And we'll assume that most of those doing murders are men for the sake of misogyny, but it's also true.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So when you look at statistics like that it's one of the things where it's holy moly.

This is not because of their lived experiences. It is because of. A reality that they have constructed for themselves around themselves based on a fabricated reality of bigotry. Now the fortunate thing is that this group is breeding very little. And so the key is to just not [00:26:00] really engage with them.

Or actively

Simone Collins: disengage

Malcolm Collins: cut it off. If you have a spouse, it's very important. Like it was my spouse now that I'm talking to you about this, because what can happen in relationships is guys who live that standard lifestyle, where they go off to work, their wife goes off to a different job, they're apart.

A lot of the time can start consuming content like this on Tik TOK or something like that. And become brainwashed into this position of extreme misogyny.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. And I think we've even met couples recently. I'm not going to name names, but we. We're at a dinner the other day where one couple that we'd known from the beginning, actually, even before they were engaged had reached this point where the wife kept saying these insane things.

That the husband just had to like nod to. Yeah. And you and I were like pushing back, she's getting increasingly pissed at us. And her husband's just sitting there and he has this help me look on his face, but he can't say anything to her. [00:27:00] And like he, he, at one point said something that defended like a reasonable point.

And she's like, how could you say that? Are you serious? And he's Oh and then he started hedging and it was really clear that this is one of those relationships where she had become radicalized. He remained fairly centrist and yet because they, they have children together.

They, he's not in a position where he gets to like, what do you do? But that's a different conversation

Malcolm Collins: a lot of people will say, I couldn't have philosophical conversations like you do with your wife.

And what I would say is you better learn how to, because if you are not influencing her philosophical position, other people can be, and it can lead to these sorts of outcomes.

Simone Collins: That's a good point. Yeah. Like undoing this, I think is going to be a hell of a lot harder than, finding a way to have an open dialogue and to inoculate people against insanity.

So I'm glad I love you and

Malcolm Collins: I appreciate you.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Gorgeous.

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