This cartoon is by me and Nadine Scholtes.
As some of you know, a couple of weeks ago – which is approximately forty centuries in internet time – a question went viral on the web: Asking women if they’d rather be in the woods with an unknown bear or an unknown man?
A majority of women are choosing the bear. In one TikTok video, which was viewed 17 million times, 7 out of 8 women said they’d pick the bear.
When asked to explain their decision, many women responded that they know a bear would either leave them alone or kill them, whereas they fear the details of exactly what a man could do to them.
Many men in the internet were loudly angry with this.
Nadine emailed me, asking if I was going to do a cartoon about “the bear thing.” I hadn’t considered it, and my first thought was “nah.” As I told Nadine, “I’d only do a bear or man cartoon if it could be done in a way so that the strip will still make sense long after this current moment passes.”
But then on my walk to work (by “work” I mean, the coffee shop I do most of my drawing in), the idea for this strip jumped into my mind. And I realized that it explained itself – in fact, I think this strip will probably work better in a couple of years than it does now, because right now the reaction from many readers will be “wait, that was so last week,” whereas in a couple of years people will have forgotten the whole thing.
My sense of humor is very whimsical, which isn’t the traditional approach political cartoons take. One thing that makes working with Nadine fun for me is that she shares that love of whimsy, and this cartoon proved to be a perfect vehicle for whimsy from both me and Nadine.
In the original script, I had the two office workers magically transported to a forest for panels two and three (with a bear there, of course), returning to the office in panel four. That didn’t work for Nadine, and she suggested instead having a bear come up to a window and steal the honey, which I loved.
I love it when a cartoon develops that way, through collaborative back and forth.
I asked Nadine if she had any thoughts she’d like me to include here. She wryly admitted that part of the reason she suggested this cartoon is that she wanted to draw a bear. :-p But she also wrote:
I chose the bear too and I saw how badly people react to this question. And how those people react is proof of why I chose the bear.
If you are attacked by a bear (surviving or not) people will believe you, if you are attacked by a man, people will question you.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has five panels, arranged as a four-panel strip, and then an “extra” panel below the bottom of the strip.
PANEL 1
We’re in the break room in an office building. There’s a poster on the wall, a counter, a coffee maker. There are two people who both look to be in their 20s or early 30s, both wearing office-appropriate clothing. There’s a woman with pink hair, wearing a white blouse and a dark gray suit, and a man wearing a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a dark gray tie. Both are holding coffee mugs.
There’s a bottle of honey on the windowsill.
The man is asking a question, just making small talk; the woman is looking a little surprised by his question.
MAN: So if you were alone in a forest, would you rather run into a strange man… or a bear?
PANEL 2
The woman, looking a little pensive, speaks. The man replies to her with an angry expression and body language.
In the window behind them, unnoticed by either of them, a large brown bear is stealing the jar of honey, and watching the humans with a slightly surprised expression.
WOMAN: Oh, hmm… I think, the bear.
MAN: How can you SAY that?
PANEL 3
The man is now full on yelling, waving his coffee mug. The woman winces back, holding her hands protectively over her chest. In the window, the bear looks frightened, and ducks away.
MAN: You’re demonizing men! It’s MISANDRY!!
PANEL 4
The women walks away, her back to the man, an irritated expression on her face. The man doesn’t seem to catch that she’s being sarcastic; he’s smiling and calm, happy to have (in his mind) won the argument. The bear, and the honey pot, are both gone.
WOMAN: Good point. Why would I ever fear men’s reactions?
MAN: Exactly!
MAN: …where did the honey go?
EXTRA PANEL BELOW THE BOTTOM OF THE STRIP
The bear and the woman are talking. The woman holds out her coffee mug for the bear to put some honey in.
WOMAN: At least if you maul me, people won’t say I made it up or I’m misinterpreting.
BEAR: I hear you.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is a long-dead cartoonists term for unimportant but hopefully amusing details.
PANEL 1: A workplace-motivation style poster on the wall shows a cartoon raccoon wearing a striped shirt like a cartoon criminal. It’s holding a coffee mug in one hand, giving us a thumbs up with the other, and winking. The caption on the poster says “Long coffee breaks rob the company.”
The man’s coffee mug has “Nice Guy” printed on it.
PANEL 2: The motivational poster has changed It now shows The White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland glaring at us and pointing to his oversized pocket watch. A large caption at the top says “WORK!” and a subcaption at the bottom says “don’t waste time reading posters.”
PANEL 3: In the first two panels, the man was holding a spoon in one hand (to stir his coffee). In this panel, we can see that in his anger he bends the spoon in his hand.
I’m not going to argue that you don’t think this, but I think it takes privilege to be able to think like this, and it creates a disconnect between your experience and the average experience.
Perhaps a similar kind of disconnect as was between the progressives who wanted to defund the police while the vast majority of the minorities who lived in the neighborhoods that would be effected said they would like either the same amount of, or even more, policing in their neighborhood going forward.
Because I think that if you asked the same question to the average woman, I don’t think that’s the answer you would get.
But all of that is kind of irrelevant… Because I didn’t ask for your take on which was more dangerous, or for the color commentary or justifications, I asked whether you would assume the question was racist if one of the choices was a black man. If someone asked women on the street that question, would you be ok with it?
And then… Because I can kind of squint and see how someone might be able to agree to that, if the overwhelming number of women said they’d prefer the alternative to the black man, would you see that as racist?
Corso, who would you rather meet in the woods:
a) A bear
b) A black man who might call you racist and get you cancel-cultured
c) A white woman who might call you sexist and get you cancel-cultured
d A black woman who might call you racist AND sexist and get you cancel-cultured?
The bear, obviously. /s
I’m not suggesting that women must enthusiastically affirm the kindness and safety of men. I’m saying that to actively state the opposite and then to justify that prejudice by stating that some percentage of men are either emotionally exhausting or physically dangerous is probably sexist, at least from the standards as have been discussed here previously.
Which isn’t to say that it’s not true. I’m sure that some number of men have spoiled the outlook on the gender for a great number of people, and their experiences are valid. Ideas like this aren’t foreign to me… I recognize all kinds of ideas I have that are prejudicial, but I’m not going to start taking personal risks to my safety because the alternative is an accusation of bigotry. I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable for a person concerned about their safety to cross the street if they see someone they’re worried about on the side they’re on. The exercise, from my point of view, was an attempt to ask you to re-evaluate your Overton window, because obviously some amount of prejudice is not only tolerable, but worthy of a robust justification and defense. My question was: “Where is the line?”
And it seems like, although if anyone wants to correct me I’m open to it, but I’m really not sure what other enunciable standard I can take away from this. And this isn’t the first time I’ve asked something like this, and my impression of the response, which has largely avoided the question, is that people aren’t really willing to nail that down. I think that there’s an amount of purposeful vagueness in play here, in favour of a more I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it approach, as if there’s an unspoken agreement to keep all options open.
Regardless, I found the conversation fascinating. I think that unless someone takes a direct swing at it or asks something specific, I’m done.
Corso, yes I would think both the question and answer are racist.
I have said this at various points in the thread, but it’s been a long and complex discussion so let me reiterate.
I don’t think that men (or any other group) are more likely to be jerks, creeps, assholes. I don’t think men are intrinsically more likely to be inconsiderate, or to want to make people feel uncomfortable, or to want to do violent acts. I think that all those impulses, to take advantage of a socially powerful position relative to another person, are extremely human impulses.
If you look at studies of young men sexually assaulted by women their own age, you will see that our society’s narratives downplaying the importance of consent are absorbed by people of all genders. And if you look at studies of men being raped and sexually assaulted while incarcerated, an enormous proportion of that sexual violence is perpetrated by women guards, and you will see that dehumanizing and violating those with less power than yourself is a matter of the human condition, not the male condition whatsoever.
I do think that the social conditions and context in which people operate are hugely influential in their risk/reward analysis of doing all this very human and very inhumane behaviour, though. And our society grants greater social power to men, to white people, to able-bodied people, to slender and mid-weight people, to rich people, and so on and so forth.
I don’t think a man is any more likely than a woman to *want* to make me uncomfortable with a provocative gesture — but I do think any given man wanting to do so, is more likely to think he will be able to get away with it, and thus more likely to act on these urges. (And I think that estimation of potential consequences by the hypothetical man proceeding and hypothetical woman refraining is accurate.)
So people hypothetically saying they would be more afraid of a Black person than a bear are, to my mind, entirely misunderstanding the relative amounts of social power held by each party. They would be displaying ignorance about how the world works and that they care more about stereotypes than about reality, which is racist.