memes

I think this kind of misses the point. Women have given us their feelings on the man/bear topic. Which are implicitly valid as all feelings are (from men or women). Telling them that they have done an incorrect assessment of the situation is invalidating their feelings. This of course adds weight against the man category especially how a large group of people got personally offended by a data point. The interesting piece of information here is that women feel less safe with a man than a bear. Not that their feelings are rooted in reality, because they don’t have to be.

oh absolutely, my problem is less with the example, and what people think about it, because it's impossible for me to understand another persons position on account of not being that person. But the way that it's being portrayed. Like you said, it's about the meta conversation, not the literal statement. Which is why i initially found it really weird that people kept re-iterating that initial statement, expecting people to somehow understand the underlying meaning behind it, even though that was never elaborated on.

Also it's not that their feelings aren't rooted in reality, it's more so a hyper reality, where the potential for something to happen goes from potentially, to almost certainly. Which is understandable given their experiences, but again, misleading which is important to keep in mind when talking literally about the subject. (which is not what we're doing here to begin with so meh)

The signal the women are getting is that yeah, their feeling don’t matter. If their feelings don’t matter, what else doesn’t matter? Are they going to get “um, actually-ed” when they try to set personal boundaries. Can you see that if a lot of men don’t respect women’s feeling and personal boundaries that it can turn into a physical saftey issue?

where is this signal coming from? My thread specifically, this post more broadly, the topic at hand, or in a societal fashion? If we're talking on a individual level, just one person, you or me, feelings mean literally nothing, they are magic. We do not understand them. You put two people in a room together and suddenly those feelings allow an incredibly in depth level of communication and interaction between two people. They seem to be specifically for the use case of people interacting, you put a group of people in a room, and cliques will form, people will break off, and sub group with each other. In this case feelings seem to drive a functional cohesion between groups of people, while enabling conflict resolution. My question here is that these things are complicated, i need more specifics to properly understand what you mean here.

To answer your paragraph about what is likely to happen or if the assessment is correct. I don’t care. It’s a roll of the dice. The bear will kill the woman sometime and the man will kill the woman sometimes and other times nothing will happen. I am not a bear scientist nor a sociologist, I don’t have the numbers in front of me. The question of what actually would happen is uninteresting to me as it is a hypothetical. We don’t need to accurately prepare for the man/woman/bare/woods situation, it’s not likely to happen.

yeah this is what i'm kind of stuck on here, why are people using the hypothetical then? Wouldn't it be vastly more productive to talk about the underlying problem? Yet some people seem/seemed deadset on solidifying the conceptualization of the hypothetical, even though people clearly didn't understand what the purpose of it was.

did a quick (probably bad) google and I got this: “1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted).”. from https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem.

i understand that it's high, the interesting stat to me here is how many unique men a single woman will interact with throughout her life, because pairing those two stats together gives you a very detailed understanding of both how these things work together, and how we can conceptualize the stats for this specific hypothetical, as well as more broadly, since yknow, we interact with people, it's kind of a requirement for living. I imagine that specific stat is probably going to be much much lower than one would think. Given how many people you pass by on any given day.