Why Was Man vs. Bear So Controversial?
Insights from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
One of the defining controversies of 2024 has been Man vs. Bear. The general idea is that if you ask a woman who she’d rather be in a dark forest with, she’d prefer the bear because of her fear of male violence. This video today is not about which side is right, and it won’t assess the correctness of reasons given by Team Bear or Team Man. Instead, I want to look at one possible explanation for why each side misunderstood the other, because really, each side seemed so incredulous that the other couldn’t understand them.
For example, one of the common things I heard Team Man say is, basically, “not all men.” Not all men commit assault, which is true, but this fell on Team Bear’s deaf ears. Their response was simply, “you are completely the missing the point”. No matter what argument was given by who, each side accused the other side of missing their own point. So, again, the question I want to address is why they misunderstood each other. How can each team view the world in such a different way that they seem to be speaking passed each other?
The lens I want to use for this video is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.1 Most of the theory is completely irrelevant, so I won’t cover that here. However, the key point is that human beings have different types of needs, and depending on which need hasn’t been satisfied, you’re going to weigh that need as being more important.
If you haven’t had any food for a couple days, food now becomes extraordinarily important for you. Your entire mind is going to be hyper-focused on doing whatever it takes to get food. If you found some food, you’d run toward it and gorge yourself on it until you vomited, and then you’d keep eating. That’s how powerful unsatisfied needs can become.
Importantly, if you’re that hyper-fixated on one need, every other need becomes less important. If you’re starving, you don’t care about what your co-workers think of you. The boss you were bending over backwards to impress an entire week before is now pushed to the side on your way to get that food. The more unsatisfied a need becomes, the more it excludes satisfied needs, or even mildly less unsatisfied needs. If you were starving and being attacked by a bear, you’d probably forget about the ravenous hunger and be focused on escaping the bear.
So, which needs are not being satisfied by Team Bear vs. Team Man?
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Physical Safety vs. Belongingness
What I hear from Team Bear is that they lack safety. They are so concerned about whether or not a man will respect their physical safety that they choose the bear. Again, the point isn’t to logically deconstruct whether or not that is a legitimate fear to have, using statistics on bear attacks and whatever argument you want to use. There are countless videos doing that exact thing on Tiktok and I don’t think they convinced many of Team Bear. Instead, we have to recognize that this is a fear Team Bear actually has. When it comes to making decisions they are going to be prioritizing their fear for their safety over other more satisfied needs.
What I hear from Team Man is that they lack belongingness. Again, we can logically deconstruct whether their reasons are legitimate, but that’s beside the point. Team Man feels as if satisfying belongingness is more difficult for men. The idea goes that if you draw a random woman and a random man from the population, that woman will have an easier time than the man finding ANY romantic attention. Depending on the man, he might just be after sex or he might want a relationship. The point is though, that men feel as if it’s harder for them to get any romantic attention whatsoever.
Back before they became a Red Pill podcast, Whatever had a series of videos where they had a man and woman approach the opposite sex to ask bluntly, “would you like to have sex with me?” I don’t think it’s surprising for most people that the woman got a lot more yeses than the man, who got exactly 0.2,3,4,5 This is also based on a real study that found the exact same response.6 Even if it’s not true for every woman as compared to every men, I think it’s true enough and more importantly, believed to be true enough, that that’s the perspective Team Man will take.
Now, we can all say at that point that women are obviously going to say no to a guy being that blunt. Obviously…but the point still stands that if a man and a woman are both starved for ANY belongingness with another human being, it just seems to be the case that the woman is more likely to get even a base level of attention through sex. Remember, if you’re starving for food, you’re not demanding a gourmet meal that hits all of your micro- and macronutrients for a delicious, well-balanced meal. You’ll literally eat rotting food and be grateful for it.
Even if it’s bad belonging, the fact that it is belonging of some kind will be viewed as preferable by the man who sees things through the lens of belonging-starvation. From his perspective, even mindless, mechanical, emotionless sex will be seen as an exquisite meal of deep, affectionate intimacy. From the safety lens, a woman won’t focus on belonging, because that’s the need she has at least relatively more satisfied. She’ll focus on the need that isn’t satisfied, which in this case and generally speaking, is her physical safety.
Women are also more likely to already have their belongingness needs satisfied by a support network of friends and family.7 Even if they have issues in dating, either finding a good partner or any partner, they are more likely than men to have a rich network of friends. This is why abusive men who rob a woman of safety, will also rob her of her support network.8 She has nowhere to run to and so depends on him for all of her belonging, despite the clear lack of safety.9 He is in effect putting her in the same position of Team Man where she no longer cares enough about her safety relative to her severe starvation for belonging. As such, she stays with the abuser.
I want to be clear though, I am not saying that most men are in the same position as a woman in an abusive relationship. That is not what I’m saying at all. Instead, I’m drawing an analogy to understand why someone who cares more about belonging would be so blind to a lack of safety, whether or not it’s their own or someone else’s safety. Most men probably aren’t concerned about their physical safety in dating. They’re going to be more concerned about their lack of belonging even when they’re in a relationship, because physical safety in dating is simply something men are less likely to worry about.
That doesn’t mean they never worry about their safety, but usually they are going to discount the weight of safety because of how their own needs are satisfied or not satisfied. So, when you have a man who isn’t in a relationship of any kind, he is going to be that much more concerned about belonging and that much more discounting of safety. They’re starved for belonging in the same way that women are starved for safety. And, it doesn’t matter if any of them are wrong to feel that way given rational analysis of the statistics. The fact of the matter is that they do feel that way.
So, with all of that being said, when Team Bear starts talking about physical safety, Team Man won’t be able to fully feel into the perspective a woman has. His perspective is based on discounting needs for safety relative to needs for belonging. The fact that Team Bear is literally saying they are rejecting men for a bear, is now directly attacking the need that men feel as if they are already starving for.
Now it’s not just “I’m starving and there is food on the other side of the room”, it’s, “I’m starving and someone is stopping me from getting to that food on the other side of the room.” The fact that a woman is actively discounting belonging because hers is satisfied, and is prioritizing safety because she is starved for it, means that she won’t see that she’s standing in the way of a belonging-starved man. Instead, she’ll see his belonging-starved attack as an attack on her safety. She is now that starved person being prevented from getting to the “safety food” on the other side of that room.
One of the things I often saw on tiktok was that a man would make a Team Man video. Then, a woman would come into the comments and say he was the reason she was Team Bear. The idea is that he was a dangerous man for not being on Team Bear. The Team Man response was that they were being falsely accused just for not being on Team Bear. Again, the point isn’t to dissect who is more right in that interaction. Instead, I want you to understand why each of them believes they are right.
The man is starved for belonging, and so he will interpret Team Bear as a direct attack on his belonging. As such, he’ll feel justified in accusing Team Bear of being unfairly distrustful of men. The woman is starved for safety, and so she will interpret his disagreement as a direct attack on her safety. As such, she’ll feel justified in accusing him of being dangerous.
So, two really important caveats I want to make before continuing. I am not saying that any of these are the reasons a man would assault a woman. I made a short tiktok about all of this a few months ago and a woman assumed I was saying that men commit assault because they lack belonging. That could be true, but I am not talking about that here. I am not talking about men who do assault. I am talking specifically about why men didn’t understand Team Bear.
I also am not talking about the legitimacy of fear of false accusations. That’s not the point. The point is that a false accusation is an attack on belonging. If a man is starved for belonging, he is going to prioritize the possibility of a false accusations that would attack his belonging way more highly than a woman who prioritizes safety. If I’m about to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, I’ll suddenly care more about crashed flights. Even if a man agrees that assaults are way more of a problem than false accusations, he may still think false accusations are a bigger problem than that woman would because of his belonging prioritization. And, of course, she will have the opposite perspective because of her safety prioritization relative to belong.
So I hope at this point you understand why each side seemed to have such difficulties in understanding one another. And to be clear, this is just one way we can look at this. We could also look at each of the other needs in Maslow’s theory, and then also look at how each need influences all of the other needs. We could also bring other theories that explain other causes that contribute to a lack of understanding or even an unwillingness to understand. The question though, is what we actually do with all of this.
Ice Cream Theory
As I’ve made annoyingly clear, my goal is not to pick sides in this video. This isn’t a milquetoast both sides argument. Many other people have done far better analyses. My goal is to understand where people are coming from so that we can improve our interactions with them. The fact of the matter is that if you want to convince somebody that they should care about your perspective, then it’s your responsibility to do so. If you don’t want that burden, then that’s okay. I’m not trying to put an obligation on you to do anything, but if you do want to take on that responsibility, then you have to understand that it can never be someone’s responsibility to convince themselves of a change you want them to make.
Of course, there is the classic idiom, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink,” that tries to warn people that you can’t force somebody to change. What I’m saying doesn’t contradict that. What I am saying is that you can, at the very least, lead the horse to the water. That’s the part I think people are making mistakes at. If you’re trying to lead a horse to water and they start bucking like crazy, then you can reflect on your method. If you want someone to change in a certain way, you have to be the one to demonstrate to them why they should make that change. Once that’s done, it is now up to them to actually change, to actually drink the water.
So, let’s unpack that a little more by way of analogy. I used to do porn addiction coaching. One of the questions I often got was from people who were trying to convince a friend or a partner that they had a problem with porn. My answer to them was Ice Cream Theory.
Imagine you’re sitting there enjoying a really beautiful day in the summer, the sun is shining, you have a bowl of your favourite ice cream, and some stranger comes running over and knocks the bowl out of your hand. They start shouting, “you shouldn’t eat that, it’s unhealthy, if you eat gallons of it a day it’ll cause you healthy problems, you have to stop eating that.”
Will you be happy that they did that? Or would you say, “firstly, I’m having a bowl of ice cream not gallons. I’ll be fine. Secondly, what the actual fuck?”
You have to understand, that when you are trying to change someone you are knocking the bowl of ice cream out of their hands. You can’t expect someone to be happy when you demand that they change something that they have never considered a problem, that they may even benefit from in some ways. Again, it doesn’t matter if it really is a problem. The point is they don’t believe it’s as big of a problem as you do, and they directly experience benefits you likely don’t, and so your statements will seem like hyperbole that hurt your attempts to help.
The person who’s concerned about their partner’s porn use is trying to help, but the potential addict is not going to view it that way at first. The harder the concerned partner tries to change their mind, the more the addict will shut down and view themselves as a victim being attacked by an irrational villain. Is that not exactly how Man vs. Bear went? Again, on either side.
From each side’s perspective, the other person was knocking the bowl of ice cream out of their hand. And on top of that, the person who knocked the bowl then got mad when the person didn’t change. Like really consider that. If I knock a bowl of ice cream out of your hand, you are naturally going to get mad, but imagine if I had the audacity to get mad at you for not being grateful that I knocked the bowl out of your hands!
I hope you understand my point. If you’ve alienated someone you seek to change, you have failed, at the very least, with that specific person. Again if you’ve decided to take on the burden of changing someone’s mind, then that is on you. It’s your responsibility to listen and ask questions in order for them to be convinced to consider changing. I just don’t think there is a way around that because until they’re convinced to consider a change, they won’t decide to change. If your approach to convincing them to consider a change locks them down, then you have to change your approach.
I think the obvious question I should ask of you is, “have I knocked the bowl out of your hand by making this video?”
If I have, I apologize. My intention was not to do so. My intention was to try to find solutions to the problem of communicating with people we disagree with, but if I knocked the bowl, then I have failed to do so. That violation matters. So, let’s talk about it. Help me understand your perspective. Not so I can deconstruct it and prove you wrong, but so that I can get in touch with your unsatisfied needs, and help you see that I genuinely care about them. If each of us is committed to that, then we’re far, far better able to actually come to a mutually satisfying solution.10
Now an obvious rebuttal to this is addressed in Ibram X Kendi’s book How to Be Antiracist, and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.11,12 They both basically make the case that Black people have had to take the burden of kowtowing to White people, it’s like “oh I’ll tiptoe around you, not get your back up, and you know maybe you’ll give me some equal rights.”
I think that’s a very important point and that’s kind of what I meant before when I said that you’re not obligated to change someone’s mind. That’s not a burden you have to bear. My channel is focused more on self-development than systemic change, so I think one of the things we can always take responsibility for is our communication. Some ways of communicating are better than others. If you can communicate better that’s not just important for social issues like Man vs. Bear, but it’s also important just for living a good life. You have to deal with people and so how you communicate with those people is something you can take responsibility for.
For example, in my two videos “Psychology of the Succubus” and “Psychology of the Divine Feminine” I referenced Bernard Loomer’s distinction between unilateral and relational power.13 Unilateral power is basically just power over others. I am more powerful if I can influence you without being influenced by you. Unilateral power says my perspective is the right perspective, your perspective is wrong, so I have to calmly decimate you with logic and reason in the name of the truth!
The entire Man vs. Bear debate is a textbook case of unilateral power. Relational power, on the other hand, says that I am more powerful if I can influence you and be influenced by you. So, to make it a textbook case of relational power, we’d ask ourselves, “without violating my own needs, boundaries, and goals, how might I understand what this person is trying to say so that we can both move forward together?”
By opening ourselves to be influenced by the perspective of the other, without losing ourselves, we are able to do that. So, ask yourself, “what need do I have here? What need do they have here? How can I better express my own needs? How can I honour their needs without dishonouring my own?”
Again, like I’ve been saying, each of us can do our best to take this perspective, and to help others do better at taking this perspective knowing that we’re all imperfect humans who are going to sometimes get heated. If each of us is committed to being more empathetic, understanding, and assertive of our own needs and boundaries, then we can all work together on the problems of both safety and belonging.
I know this sounds idealistic. Really I do, but I think the far more idealistic view, is thinking that we can somehow come to a satisfying conclusion without trying to communicate with a relational power approach. In an article on good faith communication from the Consilience Project, the authors say something I’ve heard many times before:14
“in the absence of good faith communication the last resort is some form of violence.”
The gender wars already have enough violence. We have to commit to communicating in good faith, and understanding where the other side is coming from so that we can better find solutions together. This does not have to come at the expense of your needs and boundaries. Good faith communication is not about being a people pleaser. Sometimes it can be over a vehement disagreement, but we can still disagree in good faith. All it requires is that we both make that commitment. So a very important point, if you engage with someone who is operating in bad faith, cut that person off. The boundary of good faith communication is one that must be honoured, for your own sanity, but also for coming to a satisfying conclusion.
But, that is all I wanted to say on Man vs. Bear. It really was a textbook case in the contemporary gender wars. Endemic bad faith manifested in pointless debate that just ends up making everyone involved more pissed off, more divided, and more unwilling to work together to make the world a better place. If that’s what we allow ourselves to engage in, then we can’t be surprised that things don’t get better. We simply can’t, and we need collaboration now more than ever.
Either way, that’s enough for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
If you like this essay, please find the recommended order here. Scroll to the bottom.
References:
1 – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. (2024, January 24). https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
2 – Whatever. (Director). (2013a, July 29). Asking 100 Girls For Sex (Social Experiment) [Video recording].
https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=gxyySRgrYsU
3 – Whatever. (Director). (2013b, July 29). Asking Guys For Sex (Social Experiment) [Video recording].
https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=5JJFBtHcBnM
4 – Whatever. (Director). (2015a, April 20). Asking 100 Guys For Sex (Social Experiment) [Video recording].
https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=QBtF3I7fDfU
5 – Whatever. (Director). (2015b, November 30). Asking 100 Girls For Sex (Social Experiment) [Video recording].
https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=jjR9F9tPNhc
6 – Clark, R. D., & Hatfield, E. (1989). Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 2(1), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1300/J056v02n01_04
7 – Bedrov, A., & Gable, S. L. (2022). Thriving together: The benefits of women’s social ties for physical, psychological and relationship health. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 378(1868), 20210441. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0441
8 – 5 forms of intimate partner violence that target the victim’s social network. (n.d.). SOS Violence Conjugale. Retrieved November 4, 2024, from https://sosviolenceconjugale.ca/en/articles/5-forms-of-intimate-partner-violence-that-target-the-victim-s-social-network
9 – 8 tactics of psychological violence used by abusers in intimate relationships. (n.d.). SOS Violence Conjugale. Retrieved November 4, 2024, from https://sosviolenceconjugale.ca/en/articles/8-tactics-of-psychological-violence-used-by-abusers-in-intimate-relationships
10 – Rosenberg, M. B., & Chopra, D. (2015). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Third Edition, Third edition). PuddleDancer Press.
11 – Kendi, I. X. (2023). How to Be an Antiracist (Updated edition). One World.
12 – DiAngelo, D. R., & Dyson, M. E. (2018). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Reprint edition). Beacon Press.
13 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126m
14 – Project, T. C. (2022, February 23). The Endgames of Bad Faith Communication. The Consilience Project. https://consilienceproject.org/the-endgames-of-bad-faith-communication/