Well, it is true that a bear might kill you. But so might a man, especially if he ever enjoyed, imagined, or lusted after an intimate relation with you. Still, the bear is reasonably likely to let you retreat unmolested, provided it is not a female and you are between it and its cubs. (Although, my opinion only, if it is a griz, putting your head between your knees and kissing your ass goodbye is not an entirely unreasonable thing to do.)

So, yeah, the bear is dangerous. It can definitely “unalive” you. But for all of that, you can always count on the bear to behave like a bear. And when a bear behaves “like an animal,” it is, in fact, behaving in a way that is natural, generally predictable, and almost invariably (if only “bear-ly”?) justifiable. It is actually unlikely to aggress you unless it views you as a threat. (As a rule, you are the wrong size and shape to be food. If you looked and smelled like a salmon, then that would be different and you’d be royally screwed.) And even if the bear decides to kill you, it won’t mock you in the process, it won’t attempt to strip you of your agency because that seems funny to do so, it won’t pretend like you asked for it, and it won’t pretend like you really “wanted it” and so was actually doing you a favor. I could extend this list, but ideally anyone who is not entirely insensate has, by this point, actually gotten the point. The bear won’t dehumanize a woman the way some men casually will; the kind of man who will then think himself better for having done so. (All of the above things about what the bear will not do, while expressed in my own words, are things that the women preferring the bear have themselves stated.)

Indeed, when a man “behaves like an animal,” the phrase is an insult to animality. Such a … “person” … isn’t a man at all, much less an animal. It has willfully devolved itself into a kind of monster that has gone beyond embracing the inhuman to embody the unhuman. Such willful cruelty is absent from nature per se, and yet it comes with an internalized expectation that he is the representative of a kind of exceptionalism (“manhood”) that merits universal acknowledgmentⁱⁱ.

So what is it about all of this that has left so many THBMs so profoundly triggered? I’ve no numbers or even estimates, and I do not wish to suggest it is a majority of men going full THBM (though, I suppose, it might be; the orbit of my social universe is small and filtered through a great deal of selection.) Within the narrow bounds of my own understanding, triggering is typically due to either trauma or guilt, categories that can clearly overlap. I do not propose this assessment be taken as an absolute – as Hector Barbosa memorably quipped, “It’s more what you might call a guideline than a rule.”ⁱⁱⁱ That said, I still believe it is a useful heuristic here.

There is a rather painful analogy to be drawn between bear-triggered THBMs and the racist-triggered persons who attacked the “Black Lives Matter” movement as being itself “racist.” “All lives matter!” these racists spewed, because they were triggered by the requirement to examine their often implicit, but still complicit acceptance of the inherent and institutionalized racism that licensed LEOs to slaughter racial minorities, and black persons especially, with promiscuous abandon and unhindered license. “It is only a few bad apples,” they sniveled, so as not to deal honestly with the reality on the ground and the street, and the entrenched social structures that allowed those supposedly “few” bad actors to act without effective let or hindrance. And, of course, the most telling factor about the race-triggered and the bear-triggered is their staggering refusal to pay attention to the actual experience of those being actually traumatized.

It is not denying the worth of white persons to demand that the worth of black persons be acknowledged. Only an intransigently racist person would ever suppose so. Nor is it asserting that all men are ineluctably evil to acknowledge the irrefutable FACT that men – as a group! – have an outsized role as predatory destroyers of women’s lives.

And, quite frankly, it does not take much of a man to recognize and acknowledge this fact. This in turn places a question mark next to the THBMs who feel so compelled, so triggered, to histrionically challenge it.

——

i We are always shocked to read of a teacher who rapes a student. The reason we hear about these events is precisely because they are so out of the ordinary. But they are also instances of significant differential of power between aggressor and victim.

ii I am entertaining the thought of writing a post on toxic masculinity, with some explicitly philosophical thoughts toward relational metaphysics. But I am not quite there yet.

iii I am, of course, making a not terribly subtle homage to Geoffrey Rush’s character from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.