We Asked Teen Boys to Weigh in on the TikTok Viral ‘Man vs. Bear’ Debate

Women: If you were alone in the woods, would you rather be confronted with a bear, or a man? It’s a silly hypothetical question, but if you’ve been on social media lately, you know that a TikTok video asking this simple query went viral, igniting a firestorm of debate when the women overwhelmingly chose “bear” — and opening up a larger discussion on why women fear men. The original post has almost 80,000 comments, has been shared by 160,000 people, and has 2.4 million likes.

One TikTok by user @dontceceme compiled some of the most gut-wrenching responses to the man vs. bear debate: “No one will say that I liked the bear attack.” “A bear wouldn’t film it and send it to all his friends.” “The bear sees me as a human being.” “The bear didn’t pretend to be my friend for months beforehand.”

UN figures indicate that globally, one out of every three women has experienced the trauma of intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence, such as domestic violence and rape. These figures capture physical and sexual violence but don’t encompass the wider spectrum of experiences — including sexual harassment and threats — that can make women feel unsafe.

Of course, the “man or bear” debate isn’t actually about the bears; it’s about the perception of men. As part of SheKnows’s “Be a Man” project, we asked five teenage boys to weigh in on the discussion — to explain why they thought women would choose the bear. Among their thoughts:

“I think men can definitely make women very uncomfortable … especially at night, when you’re alone.”

“I see why women are trying to make the comparison — I think they’re trying to put into perspective how scared of a man they could be. … It makes sense to me, but I think it’s kind of sad that it’s come to the point of, they’d rather be alone in the forest with a bear.”

“People think of men as kind of like brutes … they’re just always angry.”

The truth is, the goal of the man vs. bear debate was to foster empathy toward women placed in the frightening situations posed by the ones who would. Pushback to the meme decries the implication that men in general are malicious and untrustworthy, no safer than being confronted in the woods by a predatory animal. But as Toni Hargis pointed out in a 2022 article for The Good Men Project, “women are not ‘blaming men who have never committed violence towards women’, nor are we saying all men are guilty of gender inequality and violence.’ We are saying, ‘Our collective experience suggests you could all be capable of the above,'” she writes. “We know it’s #NotAllMen, we just haven’t figured out who it might be.”

Still, at a time when teen boys are forming their identities and figuring out what it means to be a man, what does bear vs. man tell them to believe about themselves? What we hope boys will truly grasp is that the man vs. bear debate doesn’t mean that they’re automatically bad just because they’re male — but they do need to understand why the debate exists, and why so many women say they’d choose the bear.

“I think the man vs. bear meme is a great opportunity to start important conversations with boys and to talk to them about why women are scared of men, and the fact that this fear is grounded in real data and a long history of male violence against women,” Ruth Whippman, author of Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, tells SheKnows. “The important thing is to do this in a non-shaming way, and not to suggest that they — as boys — are somehow inherently harmful. In all my interviews with boys, I found them to be really receptive to the feminist message and keen to get onside, as long as it is expressed in a positive way: that the important adults in their lives believe that they are good humans who are also invested in building a better future.”

The viral debate may have begun as a hypothetical question, but it unearthed a very real conversation about women’s safety and the perception of men — and beyond that, what messages about masculinity we’re giving to the next generation. Statistics highlight and help us understand the dangers women face, but the goal isn’t to demonize all men; rather, it’s to foster empathy and awareness for the anxieties women carry — and to encourage young men to understand these anxieties.