My Bear And Man Thing
Years ago I wrote about the bear and the man, sans the bear. (But there was a dog.) I thought it might be a good time to reprise.
[A bear in an elevator. AI generated.]
Bold Assertions
Do you know me? Yes? How well and for how long, and how good is your memory? If you’ve known me for a while you might remember that in 2009, as chief proprietor of a widely read science blog, I shocked many people in the skeptics/science world (aka Friends of Big Bang) by coming out firmly against rape. Within a year or so I came out with another shocker: I suggested that under certain circumstances men out alone at night, when encountering a women also out alone at night, might give her a wide berth in order to not engender fear. Cross the street instead of bearing down (as it were) on the person you don’t even know.
These bold assertions overlapped in time with Elevatorgate. Remember that? My position — no on rape, and also no on being a dick — were sufficiently shocking in the world of self styled intellectuals (and actual intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins himself) that I and all the others who were saying similar things at the time were attacked relentlessly by a then growing MRA movement (Men’s Rights Activism). In fact, I’m pretty sure that Rebecca Watson and the women of Skepchick, PZ Myers, Myself, and a couple of others fueled the growth of that movement without intending to do so. As recently as several months ago, one of the MRAs threatened to harass one of my family members “until the day he dies” out of spite.
Things come in cycles, they say. Or at least, every now and then you can count on someone to say that. About every 18 months or so. And the bear vs man story is a cyclic restatement of the street crossing conundrum and elevatorgate of the first decade or so of this century. I thought about simply reposting in this substack the original two posts, but when I re-read them I realised that I had taken full advantage of the power of blogging (no editors) and the fact that I had a faithful audience (a few still remain), resulting in those posts being three times longer than they should have been. I also realized that there were so many references to specific things going on at the time that the text would be incomprehensible to all but the most serious scholars of the age (ancient times in Internet terms).
So instead of a reprint, I’ll give you a shortened and much edited of my original bear v man story. The current bear vs man story is outlined in this meme:
Elevator gate summary
Skepchick (a group of skeptical, as in science supportive, women) founder and leader Rebecca Watson was at a conference overseas, it was late at night after the day’s activities were done and things were winding down, Rebecca stood among the group she was hanging with and said, “I’m beat, I’m going to bed, see you tomorrow.” She left the bar to take the elevator up to her room. One of the guys in the group, someone she did not know, followed her into the elevator, and on the way up, asked her to his room for a cup of coffee. She declined. They each got off on their own floor and that was the end of it.
The next day, Rebecca, who had just started a vlog (video blog) mentioned at the end of a longer piece on something else that this has happened, and in a jocular tone, said something like, "Guys, don’t do that. I was a single woman, in a foreign country, in a hotel elevator with you -- just you and I. Don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner."
That blew up the internet. The MRAs bred and multiplied. Large scale harassment ensued. People’s lives were threatened, and some people lost their livelihoods. Clearly, it would have been better had there been a bear on the elevator (and the guy, sans Rebecca, she takes the stairs in my little fantasy).
Insult was added to Injury when the famous Richard Dawkins publicly denounced Rebecca for her comments and instructed women who felt uncomfortable on elevators to just press the button for the next floor, and, what? I guess think of England.
Guys crossing the street, rabid dogs, and elevators (abridged edition)
I am not afraid of dogs, and most women are probably not “afraid of men.”
Except I’m actually afraid of dogs and most women are afraid of men.
One day I walked outside and found myself utterly alone, surrounded by garage doors and closed windows in a cul-du-sac. I could sense the loneliness and remoteness of the place as I closed the garage door behind me, heading for the mail box, with the intent of hopping in my car (which was not in the garage) to head off and pick up my kid from daycare.
That’s when the dog showed up. It was a big dog — tall, almost as tall as a Great Dane, but had the pit-bull head and a boxer-like body. Some sort of Frankendogish mastiff derivative, perhaps.
It was highly frenetic. The first thing it did was to run at me and bump its head into my leg. Then it ran around in the cul-de-sac, running up to doorways and then turning instantly away each time. The dog was bounding into the air now and then. It came towards me a couple of times but almost as though I wasn’t there, it would just pass me. Instinctively, I employed the usual voice and hand gestures one employs to bring a dog to a spot and have it sit, so I could look for ID on its collar, but it would have none of that. This dog was not receiving any of my signals.
That, and the fact that it was foaming at the mouth a little, gave me pause.
Different instincts suddenly kicked in. I’ve had encounters with dangerous dogs, and if you’ve read the Lost Congo Memoirs you’ll know that I’ve had dealings with rabid dogs as well. After the fourth or fifth time that the frenetic zombie-like (but fast-style zombie, not slow-style zombie) frothing beast passed by, having made my way to the car, I quickly hopped in, and slammed it shut.
That is when I noticed that my heart was racing and my adrenalin was pumping. I had just encountered a rabid dog that, once it freed itself from whatever trance state the brain-eating disease hat put it in, was going to turn on me and bite me in the face (last place you want to get bit by a rabid dog).
Or not. Probably not. The foam was surely just drool. It was hot out. The frenetic behavior was probably just because it was lost. Its failure to understand my commands was probably … whatever. Still.
Rebeccapocalypse Duh
For of much of Rebeccapocalypse (with Elevator Guy, Rebecca Watson, and so on), my significant other was out of town while a friend of mine visiting from Canada and I huddled over our computers down in the blog cave, or visited the Convergence convention where, coincidentally, the Actual Rebecca Watson and other Skepchicks were hanging out, where the two of us fussed over the problem. So, she missed all of the run-up, hadn’t read any of the blog posts, and had gotten only the briefest overview of events from me after her return. The story of Rebecca and Elevator Guy was low priority for her at the moment and the story thus went to the back of her head (well, probably, actually the front, but that’s not how we refer to it) for processing. Then, one night, the whole thing rushed forward and she ran down to the blog cave to tell me something. I should say, this is a rare event. She was kinda freaked out.
“Do people get it?” she asked me, kinda freaked out (as noted).
“Get what?” I was distracted and unclear on the point she was making.
“Do people get what it is like for a woman to have a man join her on an elevator in the middle of the night? Do they understand that this is ALWAYS something that raises one’s stress level, even if just a little?”
“Huh?”
“Sometimes more, sometimes less, it depends on your state of mind, the time of day, all sorts of other factors, but if I’m in a hotel somewhere in the middle of the night and some guy I don’t know gets on the elevator, my stress level goes up and stays there until one of us gets off. If he says something to me other than ‘nice weather we’re having’ I get much more stressed. That’s true to some degree for all women.”
“Elevator? What?” She was going fast, almost upset.
“If the guy did what that guy did, asking me to his room, I’d totally Freak.”
Ah. She was talking about Elevator Guy. “Yeah. Desiree said she would punch him in the face.”
“Me too.”
“That guy’s gonna have a bloody nose. Hey, did I tell you about this dog the other day?”
“Huh?”
You see, she hadn’t really been thinking about the issue at all, and the moment she gave it any thought she immediately concluded that Elevator Guy did the wrong thing and that Rebecca Watson, in pointing this out to the clueless, was doing all women in the West, where there are elevators and a chance of some equality, a service. And every other woman that I’ve spoken to about this has said the same thing, more or less.
Guys: If you are in your 30s or older and you don’t know of any women who have had a sexual assault in their history, that means that there are certain conversations you are not having and that you exist in a state of cluelessness. Almost certainly.
Walk Across The Street
When I was about 14 through 17, hanging around in an inner-city crime ridden urban environment with no car and spending a lot of time at night on foot going places, I learned to do this trick. Say I’m walking down State Street and it’s 1:00 AM and there’s a woman walking in front of me in the same direction. With very few exceptions, I’ll overtake her, and there will then be this long, maybe one-third of a city block long period when I’m right behind her, then right next to her, then just in front of her.
This is obviously a problem.
So I learned this trick. Cross the street about a block back and “pass” that person at a distance. Same with a potential head-on encounter. If you see a woman walking towards you in the middle of the night on a lonely urban street bla bla bla, my practice in those days was to cross the street to not stress her out.
Interestingly I stopped doing that second move when I moved to South Minneapolis a number of years back because because the social context there was very different. It would have been considered very bad form. Instead, you make eye contact and say hello. To everybody. That’s how we rolled in that neighborhood. Context is important (a fact that many of those who have been harassing me on the Internet ever since I first wrote this post a year ago do not, and never will, understand.)
All men — ALL men — who have given sufficient consideration to women’s position in our society do something like this walking trick in the right context. If you are a man and you do not know about this then that’s a problem.
I was freakin’ afraid of that dog, even though I know how to handle big dogs. I was afraid of that dog even though I’ve smelled the breath of more than a few wild super-carnivores who were busy contemplating me as a meal or a rival, so a dog should be nothing to me. I was afraid of that dog even though I’m not afraid of dogs. I could not help myself from being afraid, and I have chosen to do the very unmanly thing of not lying to you about that. My heart was beating when I got into the car, into safety.*
And here’s the thing, the point you need to get: I can only tell you about the dog. I can’t tell you a story about a sexual assault. I don’t have one. I only have the dog story for you because I’m a 50-something year old man,** not a 50-something year old woman. If I was a 50-something year old woman, I’d be able to tell you stories on point for the current discussion, stories about men who cornered me, who touched me when I didn’t want that, who verbally threatened me, who woke me up in the middle of the night or tracked me down on some dark street or who freaked me out in an elevator. If I was typical, that is.
But I only have the dog story to help you empathize with Rebecca because I’m a man..
Footnotes:
*The dog was eventually handled, this is not the place to discuss that.
**I wrote this then years ago but vanity precludes me from editing the numbers. LOL.
I remember the Rebeccapocalypse incident and coverage of it at the time by you and others quite well. It made me start noticing the way women reacted while walking etc. and took heed of your cross the road suggestion where possible, and to this day will give women a wide berth, along with a smile and/or hello, when out walking.