Bear or Man - Gone viral
Waking up to a culture of fear of men
I guess by now you have heard of the “Bear or Man” question that went viral. Millions of people have posted videos online about one question!
The question posed is: “If you are a woman alone in a forest would you rather run into a bear or a man?” The answer, sadly for most of the women who replied, is a bear! They would rather face a bear than a random man! Note: The debate is well worth watching because of the beautiful, honest deep responses.
How is this relevant to waking up?
The fact that this was a HUGE trigger for BOTH men and women tells you that something BIG is amiss. For starters, how on earth could women and men hold such different perspectives? How could so many women be so afraid of men? Worse, how could so many men not know that so many women fear men?
The answer is this: Our whole society has kept this hidden. For hundreds of years. We actually live in whole society where women do not feel safe and we have hidden this fact. Worse yet, we created this society and we rarely question it. And that’s a problem.
What’s really going on?
For me, the comments were a HUGE RELIEF because I wrote three books about THIS! My books describe how our society treats women and men differently – at home (Motherhood is Madness), at work (Lean Out) and in all of society (Occupy Women). I have been writing about this for over 15 years.
In summary, my books and in my TEDx talk explain how, as a society, we do two things:
We raise “boys to be boys” and “girls to be girls,” Boys are told to be tough and stoic. Girls are told to be nice and pretty. We reinforce this programing throughout our entire lives. Especially through media and music.
Then we construct an entire society around this “pink and blue” coding. We tell women to play certain roles and men to play others. We tell everyone that “masculine” is more valuable than “feminine” and males are more valuable than females. We allow the use of dominance and even violence. It is all part of our outdated patriarchal culture.
The good news is that many women and men are realizing that they have been socialized and conditioned and it’s not conducive to truly loving relationships. They are creating more equality at home and at work and rejecting things like the billion-dollar pornography industry.
So what to do?
As for the Bear and the Man question, if you truly want to change society you need only do three things:
First, notice what is going on. Notice the programming and the systems that keep you imprisoned.
Second, reject the strict limits that have been placed on you as a male or female. Be YOU.
Third, start to re-build a society (home, work and community) that supports women and men working as truly loving partners.
It really all starts with you.
And if you want to learn more please read my books or just stay tuned here on Substack. I plan to post excerpts from all my books!
Welcome to the journey of waking up!