I hope you don't mind me jumping on to this, but I'd like to tell a story about my gap year that I've been reminded of a lot recently, what with the whole "man or bear" discourse going around.
When I was 19 I went to a small village a couple hours up the mountains from Darjeeling. I had been placed as an English teacher in a small Tiberian medical centre/convent up there. When I arrived it turned out there had been a miscommunication and all the nuns had gone off to celebrate the Buddha's birthday in Dharamshala, and for some reason I couldn't stay with the other gap year girlies in the local school so I had to go off to the medical centre to stay there alone till the nuns came back.
I was given 4 guides, four men who all knew each other and didn't speak much English, to lead me through the jungle/forest from the school to the medical centre. It was the middle of the night, I had been travelling for over 24 hrs, I was tired, sore and incredibly scared. All of the thoughts and fears one would expect were going through my mind; of sexual assault and violence and my complete inability to protect myself. It was a very real fear as all I could do was follow these men deeper into the forest, hoping they had no ill intent.
BUT the truth was I was not in danger from these men. All of the conditions for me to end up in my own 80s Video Nasty were met EXCEPT for the fact that these men were just some ordinary blokes doing a favour for their mate who was the headmaster of the school. They weren't spectacularly good men who had restrained themselves from their most despicable desires, they were just normal, dime a dozen men, who wanted to get me to where I needed to be so they could go home. I was never in any danger from them at all, despite my fears.
There were dangers in that forest, though. There were snakes and venomous creepy crawlies (and supposedly tigers, but I'm not sure about that). There were false paths and sheer drops and trees at risk of falling and without the knowledge and advice and life experience of those men who were guiding me, I would have been in far more actual danger than the false threat I perceived from them. I would not have known the way out, I would not have been able to see the paths, I would not have known what to look out for and what creatures to particularly avoid. I was a thousand times more likely to die in those forests alone than I was with a group of strange men, regardless of whether there were any bears (or tigers) in there with me.
When I arrived at the medical centre, there were no nuns there. The only people there were some builders who were renovating the temple and building some new indoor lavatories and showers. At night they liked to drink rice wine and do karaoke in the dining area below my bedroom. And again, I was full of all of those fears of the inherent threat men pose to women and would push my desk against the door each night until the nuns returned. I shut myself in my room and tortured myself with imaginations of the carnage to come.
But it didn't come. Because, again, these were just a load of blokes. Just men from the village who had been paid to get some building work done and were staying on site until they'd done it. Men who were probably also very uncomfortable about the fact that there was a young white woman they couldn't easily communicate with barricaded in a room above them. The fear was real, the threat was not, and again the real danger was that if there was a fire or mud slide I would not be able to get out of my room to safety because of the "precautions" I had taken to "protect" myself. And if it had come to that, it would no doubt have been those men who would put themselves in danger to try and rescue me.
After the nuns came back, I took to taking a daily walk through the clearer paths of the forest, in a nice big loop so I could have a sneaky smoke. Every so often the nuns would express concern about me doing this. Not because I might meet a strange man, because they knew the strangest man in that forest was a monk coming up on the end of his 10 year isolated meditation and anyone would be a little strange after doing that. They were scared of me meeting a tiger. And more immediately they were scared that I didn't know how to safely remove the little grass leeches from my feet.
So here's my take on the whole man v bear discourse. Having been in a forest with strange men and (the potential threat of) tigers, I would always pick the men. Because, just like the vast majority of bears are not interested in randomly attacking vulnerable women, neither are the overwhelming majority of men. But, while bears may not be inclined towards attacking me, they are not inclined towards helping me out of the forest either. I can ask a man for help, I cannot ask the same of a bear.
ellievsbear
kaledo-art
janainaart
areudirty
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