this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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It doesn't make me angry, but it does make me a little bit sad that "this is why we choose the bear" became this glib statement that was being casually tossed around. It implies that there's a kind of gender-based fatalism at work. A bear is a bear, and a man is a man, and one must assume that the danger from the platonic concept of a bear is lesser than from the platonic concept of a man. But this isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a natural, inevitable state of affairs.
Men should make themselves more trustworthy than bears, and if we are being told that we aren't, then we should be trying to think about why that is the case, and what we can do to get there.
"We choose the bear" makes it sound as if men are no more changeable than bears. It has the same feeling as "boys will be boys," which is virtually a permission structure. When Timothy Treadwell gets devoured by bears, we can't fault the bears; devouring people out in the wild is a normal thing for them to do. But men committing acts of unforgivable violence isn't normal or natural, and we shouldn't treat it as such.