Honestly, I think you’re spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it’s not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.
I think that was inherently my problem with the whole thing. It may have had good intentions originally - using metaphor to draw attention to a problem in a way that might have gotten through to people who don’t understand or reject more straight-forward discussion - and that’s great when it works, but because of the absurdity of the premise, it ended up being a magnet for scrutiny and objections. As a result, there were three main kind of responses:
Accepting the premise at face value, and agreeing that a woman should choose the bear.
Objecting to the premise, because it is patently ridiculous if taken at face value.
Objecting to the underlying message.
Group 3 were the truly toxic responses, and they did a good job at highlighting the underlying message (or perhaps at highlighting a specific kind of person, who will just object to anything a woman says no matter what, or who refuses to believe that women are justified in their fear of men, or who are incels, or whatever else), but they, and the responses to them, kind of took over the entirety of the discourse surrounding it… it became about those people objecting and others objecting to their objections. At that point, it felt like the whole point was to shine a spotlight on toxic individuals, and the real message was lost to that.
Honestly, I think you’re spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it’s not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.
I think that was inherently my problem with the whole thing. It may have had good intentions originally - using metaphor to draw attention to a problem in a way that might have gotten through to people who don’t understand or reject more straight-forward discussion - and that’s great when it works, but because of the absurdity of the premise, it ended up being a magnet for scrutiny and objections. As a result, there were three main kind of responses:
Group 3 were the truly toxic responses, and they did a good job at highlighting the underlying message (or perhaps at highlighting a specific kind of person, who will just object to anything a woman says no matter what, or who refuses to believe that women are justified in their fear of men, or who are incels, or whatever else), but they, and the responses to them, kind of took over the entirety of the discourse surrounding it… it became about those people objecting and others objecting to their objections. At that point, it felt like the whole point was to shine a spotlight on toxic individuals, and the real message was lost to that.