Internet phenomena are rather like campfire fuel: Some are like wet logs, you can sit there until your butt gets tired trying magnifying glasses, matches, Bic lighters, whatever have you, putting unlimited effort into it — and some people do! Nothing happens. They end up embarrassing themselves and tiring out their butts. Other things are like gasoline, the white variety, burning so fast that there’s no time for the flame to take to the wood and the accelerant can’t do anything but forcefully explode.

Most are in between the two extremes. This dumb bear thing is more like the latter. Match, toss, kaboom. I think it can be truthfully said, in all my Internet years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I first became aware of it by way of this Daily Mail article, which leans hard on the social-activist lever, struggling to raise awareness of the perceived dangers of strange men. Women, given the choice, would rather be stranded in the woods with a bear! Oh noes! What’s wrong with the men? There must be something wrong with the men.

That’s not where the phenomenon took off, though. At least it doesn’t look that way to me.

Just like with the little boy and the Emperor With No Clothes, it took just one solitary voice to point out the obvious, and an avalanche followed: Women shouldn’t be choosing the bear, and if they are making this choice, they need to smarten up and it isn’t a male problem.

I have noticed these women who’d prefer a bear over a (strange) man, where they are sounding off in video clips and text messages, don’t have husbands or at least don’t have any worth mentioning. So okay. You ask women who haven’t yet figured out how to co-exist with men, if they would choose to co-exist with a strange man, you’ll get back a negative. I choose the bear! Yes of course. Urban chicks, compelled by circumstances to be around these “strange” men they don’t get to choose…when, being urban women, they get to choose just about everything else. I’m sure they’ve racked up lots of encounters, close & distant, with these substandard men around town, at social events, in the subway. But they haven’t been around bears. Yeah, I’d probably pick the bear too. If I were female, single, young, inexperienced…and extraordinarily un-curious. Haven’t seen a bear before. They’re probably okay.

Some have come out and said it: If I don’t harass the bear, it’ll probably leave me alone.

Oh, Honey…no. Sweetheart! Stick to the city.

Yeah the bear will probably leave you alone…IF…there’s nothing going on with its hibernation schedule, its apetite, its cubs, the weather, an imminent storm or earthquake or who knows what else in nature can agitate a bear. Or maybe it just likes the way you smell. That time of the month? There are reasons why, in agrarian constructs, for thousands of years hunting was left up to the men. Or are you wearing perfume that might smell like steak sauce in an ursine sinus cavity?

Probability plays a gender role. I’ve noticed some of the bear-choosing females are ready, willing and able to acknowledge even a strange creepy guy is unlikely to actually hurt you. Saw a man peg it at 2-3%, and the bear-choosing woman acknowledged this is in the ballpark. Whereas the bear mauling you is a near certainty. She acknowledged that too, then…stuck to her feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feelings. But I feel! So she continued to choose the bear.

At this point we need to pause and remember all women aren’t like this. So if you’re hiring or taking volunteers for a job that needs doing and it’s a critical job demanding good decision-making, you should go ahead and consider females for it. Just not females like this one.

There are lots of layers and permutations to this, but the core of what matters is neatly covered in this screenie right here:

Right-O. The wounded, incomplete, toxic females imagine this is some kind of learning experience for someone else — specifically, males, familiar & otherwise, who have failed to meet their approval. We’re to go off-line, perhaps collaborate among ourselves, and work to improve.

Sometimes the message is not so subtle:

Simp!

To a real man, two obvious questions emerge: What exactly is it we’re supposed to be fixing?

And when we get it fixed, can we have some of that sweet, sweet, mommy-approval from the females that is being so deliberately and so theatrically denied to us?

Easiest questions in the world. Nothing…and…no. It is an occasion for The Morgan Rule: If I’m gonna be accused anyway, I wanna be guilty. Toxic women who are just shells of what they’re supposed to be, don’t want us. We’re supposed to change something so they’d prefer us to bears. Well some of us are decades and decades ahead of that. We realized early on there are certain women who we don’t want wanting us, we’d rather keep our distance from them. And you’re it, sweetie.

That, too, is often displayed in Internet-land none-too-subtly:

Now, about that. Something I’m seeing over and over again, is this continuing reference to “incels” and other males who are reacting to the “I choose the bear” verdict with anger. Grrrr! And the rejoinder to the reaction to the answer to the question, is repeated cookie-cutter style, without so much as a single word of variance: “That’s why I choose the bear.” The male anger.

Anger? I myself haven’t seen any. And I’ve been looking.

I suppose, if you’re looking too, and you’re a thin-skinned drama queen seeing whatever it is in the world around you that you want to see, ready to invent it when it’s not there…some of the reactions might come sufficiently close.

Yeah…no. There’s no desire here for men to change or improve in any way. That’s the dirty little unspoken secret here. “Bear-choosing women” do not want to choose the bear. They want to be seen choosing the bear. That’s an entirely different thing.

And if they knew how they looked to normal people as they choose the bear, they probably wouldn’t want to be seen quite so fervently.

But these are not real women. Try as they might, they don’t represent all women. A lot of women have common sense about them, and understand that a bear is very likely to maul you to death for one reason or another. It will incapacitate you and start eating you, face first, while you’re still alive. This isn’t Teddy Ruxpin or Winnie The Pooh.

A real woman has either learned how to live with a man, or has the capability of learning to do that after she’s been around men. She’s not spoiling for a fight like these bints. And real women, I daresay, or at least I like to think, outnumber the bints. It’s a possibility. After all, they’re much, much quieter. Nobody anywhere is saying “I choose the man”…because it’s just common sense. Nobody says “Water is wet” either. It isn’t necessary.

Someone is missing the point. The bear girls, and the simps who align with them, seem awfully sure it’s the fellas missing the point; the fellas like me, who are reacting with snotty derision, or disagreement, or anything outside of fawning color-within-the-lines compliance and obeisance. We’re not getting it, they say. And sometimes the male simps are more outspoken about it than the bear girls:

A lot of my fellow men have really misunderstood the assignment with the whole man vs bear thing.

Your job wasn’t to come charging in to manaplain [sic] to women why they were wrong for choosing the bear.

Your job was to listen to them about WHY they would choose the bear.

And THEN to hold our fellow men accountable so that in the future women would not feel inclined to choose the bear.

That was the assignment fellas.

Job? Assignment?

Fellow men?

This is a case of the blind leading the not-blind. A real man knows some psychologically fractured cow on the Internet has no business giving him “assignments.” And he understands perfectly well that, within the Internet and outside of it, most of the disapproval aimed at males is pre-fabricated and pre-packaged. It’s there for its own sake. Someone is climbing the social ladder. It has nothing to do with what the singular or plural male entity has been doing, or failing to do. Nothing at all.

It’s all about scolding males. Scolding males is quick, easy, fun, socially rewarding and doesn’t cost anything. It’s simply what you do when you don’t know what else to say. So…hold my fellow men accountable? Against what? Women who want to choose the bear, wouldn’t choose the bear? Silly boy.

The bear-lady who “hope[s] this pisses you off” nailed it on behalf of everybody else, I think. This male reaction of pure anger, far from exceeding in supply what is spelled out in demand, is quite the reverse. The dumb bints are spoiling for a fight. I mean, it’s so obvious it’s just right out there in front of us, like the elephant in the room. Can we just admit that this motivation is there? It’s silly to deny it. You end up having to pretend, and that sort of pretending is unhealthy.

And if they’re trying to make us angry, that’s important. The narrative is that they’d prefer the bear because we’re just so unpredictable and scary, introducing unstable elements to a protagonist who would strongly prefer the stability we’re dislodging. Obviously, if that’s the narrative, there are problems with it if someone’s pissing us off on purpose. It doesn’t matter if they’re successful or not.

If there’s disharmony between the sexes, they’re the ones bringing it.

Some of them might not be aware. There is a type of thinking going on here, and it may be female-dominant but it’s likely not female-monopolized…it says the whole point of discussion is to emphasize agreements, not to reconcile disagreements. If you’re a man married or thinking of getting married, you’ve no doubt heard it said that when a woman brings a problem to you, you’re just going to confuse, bore or frustrate her if you do what comes naturally to a man — leapfrog to the possible solutions. That she just wants to vent. She doesn’t want to hear your opinion, she wants to hear her own opinion, with a male voice behind it.

Now, being a man, I don’t often have such conversations with men unless there’s a time sheet and a paycheck involved. Problem-solving on my own time, I tend to do by myself. Like Batman. If I’m collaborating with someone and no one is paying me to do it, I’m usually collaborating with a woman, and better than even odds I’m running into that ancient, ancient issue where I’m torquing off the woman because I’m offering solutions when she just wants empathy or whatever. But I daresay, based on my admittedly limited knowledge: Men don’t do this.

We don’t script out in our heads, how the other person is supposed to validate our feelings about the problem, and then get “sad” when the other person veers off into some other direction, offering further analyses or — heaven forbid — the makings of a possible remedy. I’ve noticed even healthy, whole women who know how to co-exist with men, sometimes do this, and it seems to me to be a female thing.

But the damaged, broken, toxic “bear girls” do it even more.

They say they have experience, with the men “attacking” them and they anticipate the bear won’t be doing this. They make it sound like rape. But I know from #MeToo that a lot of people get high on making lots of things sound like rape. They made dirty jokes sound like rape. They make “He walked into the room and it made me feel uncomfortable” sound like rape.

I’m wondering: Mere disagreement, or “are you sure?” challenges, or any other behavior outside the tightly-scripted this-is-where-you-say-this-line stuff…could that be the “attack”?

I learned something about this last time I was available as a single man: A lot of women who are available as single women, are available for a reason. They don’t want, or need, a man at all. Any thoughts they want out of you, they’ll figure it out on your behalf. And then give you signals to peg down exactly what it is you’re supposed to say. What they really need and want, are stuffed animals. They simply haven’t matured to the point where they can share their lives with another thinking person with thoughts and reactions all his own. Being First World Females, and thus the most privileged demographic that has ever walked the surface of the planet, they’ve never had a reason to develop this need or the skills that would have to come with it.

No, not all women. Not even all the single women, or all of the single women I dated. Just a big chunk, out of the available ones. It was a recurring pattern I couldn’t help noticing.

I recognize the people who need to hear it, don’t want my opinion or any male opinion for that matter (except for the simps I suppose). But to me, that’s what this “I choose the bear” thing has manifested. There is a problem brewing within the female half of our population, or I should say mostly within the female half — “My choice is the final word.” She makes a choice. What more is there to be said? It’s the be-all end-all argument-ender. She’s handed down her decision as final arbiter.

But the bear will kill yo–

Omigaw!! You’re still talking! Why are you still talking? I made my choice!

Now…how did this mindset come to be so ingrained? I’m given to understand that we’ve been living, knowingly or not, in a “patriarchy.” Women have supposedly been subjugated and oppressed, just like the subjugated and oppressed classes that have been better recognized: Slaves, Jews, Jewish slaves, Catholics, Protestants, trade unionists, homosexuals, other various pariah classes…

The question that is left standing is, How does a pariah class come to take it as a given that its members should have the final word on things? To such an extent that any rejoinder to a nonsensical opinion like “I prefer the bear because it will leave me alone” is nothing more than annoying buzz?

And I’ll just leave that question there. Pull pin, walk away.

Update: Fellas…no. It is not going to work for you.

Props for trying, though.