As a woman, would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear? Which one would you feel safer with? 

This question is trending on the app “TikTok” and without hesitation most girls and women are answering “bears” but why is this? After doing a deeper dive into the trend and why they are giving this answer to this question, I discovered that it actually has to do with the assault and harassment that women receive at the hands of men.

Now yes, of course it is not ALL men but it is enough for females, when asked this question, to answer “bear” instead of a man. 

I did some research as to the specifics for the answer because this is a question that if you are going to answer, you need to answer logically. 

There are a total of roughly 667,000 bears in North America alone, 600,000 black bears, 60,000 grizzly bears, and 7,000 polar bears. There have been a total of 183 fatal bear attacks that have actually led to the death of someone since the year 1784. That is 237 years.

The United States male population ages 25-64 years of age is 171,713,747. In the last 25 years, 45,817 women have been killed by men in the United States. The amount of women who have been sexually assaulted by a man or a man has attempted to sexually assault them in the last 25 years is 17,700,000, and those are just the reported cases, there are a lot of women who do not report these instances because they fear that no one will believe them. The reason most women are afraid to be alone with men is because of the fear of being sexually assaulted and with numbers like these, it’s not hard to see why. 

When doing the math you, based off of these numbers, come to the conclusion that men kill 7.2 women per year and sexually assault/rape 2,750 women per year. Meanwhile, the bear kills 0.7 people per year. 

Without knowing these numbers Katelyn Roddey and Analeah Ochs stated, “bear 100%” and “without a doubt a bear.”

Then they found out the statistics and their answers remained and its safe to say that they were shocked. “I knew it was going to be high but I didn’t think it would be that much.” 

So knowing these statistics would you feel safer in the woods alone with a man or a bear?