I’m definitely a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to put down some thoughts. For the last week or so, the man vs bear question has been a staple of internet discourse. For any that are, somehow, unfamiliar, the basic question is would a women rather run into a bear or an unknown man in the woods. Overwhelmingly, the response has been the bear.* Predictably, the response of men to learning about this has been to criticize women for their choice. Some will make claims about the many virtues of men, most will wax on about the real dangers that the bear poses that men don’t, and disturbingly, some seem to revel in the idea of women being mauled for making a putatively dumb choice.**
There’s been a lot of excellent rejoinders to this, which have shown in a number of ways that men’s criticism of women on this question are inevitably misogynistic. I wanted to add another. Here, I aim to show that these men are demonstrating their misogyny using tools adapted from social epistemology. The critical notion that I’m going to rely on here is antireliability. So, when we say that a group is reliable, epistemically, that means that we think that their beliefs usually track the truth. If we say they’re unreliable, we can say that they neither track the truth nor fail to. But if we say that they’re antireliable, it means that we think that they usually get things wrong. I’m borrowing this concept from Hrishikesh Joshi’s really excellent 2020 paper “What Are the Chances You’re Right About Everything?” In this paper, Joshi challenges political partisanship, trying to show that in a partisan society one has to believe that one’s political opponents are not merely unreliable, but antireliable. I don’t want to get to far afield here, so I’ll leave it at that, but highly recommend giving it a read.
Let’s apply this concept to the man vs. bear conversation. Take an instance where a man criticizes a woman who chooses bear. Usually, this is targeting an individual woman, and saying that *she* is getting the answer wrong. It’s disguised as not being a criticism of women in general, but just one woman. Even if it is a criticism of women in general, it’s taken to be a limited criticism, applicable to this question only. But this is where the concept of antireliability comes in. If women’s answers were mixed on this question, say, 50/50, or even maybe 55/45 in one way or another, we could say that women are unreliable here. If most women should pick bear, half are getting it right, half are getting it wrong. Likewise if most women should pick man. But that’s not how the numbers shake out. There anywhere from a majority to an overwhelming majority. That means that either women are reliable, most of them getting the answer right, or antireliable, most of them getting the answer wrong.
This places any man leveling a criticism here into a pickle—they have to explain why women are antireliable with regard to this question. They don’t just have to explain why choosing man is the better or correct or logical or whathaveyou answer, they have to also explain why women, taken as a group, almost always get it wrong. Suppose that a man thinks that the individual woman he’s criticizing gets the answer wrong because of a logical failure. He then has two optional explanantia. Most women are making a logical error, or this woman is making a logical error, and most women are getting the answer for some other, unknown reason. Why should almost all women make the same logical error? Why should most women make some other error of reasoning? We can ask the same questions regardless of the profferred reason why the criticized women is erring. In any case, the masculine critic here must be attributing to women, taken as a whole, a defect of reasoning. This is misogyny. Moreoever, it’s part of a broad, well documented pattern of misogyny criticizing the rational faculties of women. Of course, the critic could try to say that women are just getting this question wrong, but that doesn’t help. A further explanation would be needed for why women, who have full rational faculties, just seem to get this question wrong.
I’ll grant that there’s one possible explanation that such a critic might take that doesn’t imply a misogynistic view. It might be that the critic thinks that most women are getting the answer wrong, but that so are most non-women. Now, from what I’ve seen of this discourse, this doesn’t hold up. It seems that women and nonbinary folk overwhelmingly pick bear, while men are pretty mixed. To use the language so far, women and non binary folk are antireliable (from this critic’s perspective) while men are unreliable (from this critic’s perspective). This is enough to produce the problem above. But suppose that the critic here believes that most people, men, women, and nonbinary, all think that bear is the correct choice, and that he has it right, and they all have it wrong. This does allow him to claim that he’s not misogynistic; he’s not saying women are poor reasoners, he’s saying most people are! But here, he is himself being irrational. Because rationality should compel him to ask the question, “what’s the probability that I’m right while the vast majority of people are wrong? What explains that?” He should, in the face of that question, at least moderate his credence in his answer, if not abandoning it altogether. In short, he’s either a misogynist, or a fool.
*I don’t have firm numbers for this; 9 out of 10 and 7 out of 10 are widely claimed, but I’ve not found any good data. 9 out of 10 seems closer to my perception. If anyone has a source for this, I’d love something else to wave in front of the “facts and logic” crowd’s faces. In any case, it’s obviously a large majority.
**It’s worth noting, that despite being inundated with discussion of this topic, I’ve yet to see a single apologist for men here produce actual evidence that most bears are particularly dangerous. I’ve seen some women provide evidence to the contrary, though nothing particularly strong. My own wilderness education has always been that if you leave bears alone, they leave you alone, in most circumstances, unlike moose, which will fuck you up.
***edited to fix a typo--at one point I originally said unreliable where it should have read antireliable.
