WomensStuff

yes, I think this is part of why the question's answer so obvious to so many women (and why it's so confusing to men).

A man doesn't generally have the same experience women do with other men. Some men certainly will fear other men and experience male violence, but the cultural attitude is to teach men to expect this and to arise to that violence with their own competitive violence, part of patriarchal normative masculinity is the constant vying for power that happens between men.

I would fully expect some men if asked man or bear would answer the same as many women do (i.e. choose the bear as well), even if that's maybe a minority of men (who knows!).

Regardless, I think women think bears are already out in the wilderness and if they have encountered one on a hike they know it can be dangerous, but it's anomalous for them to really be a threat. Meanwhile, the threat of men is more real and constantly enforced in daily living (usually through romantic partners or family), so based on that daily lived experience it makes sense to choose bear.

But some men hear this and think narrowly about the physical capacity of a bear to do harm compared to a man, as though somehow the question were a match-up: who would you rather fight, a man or a bear? As though the question is one of lethality or force, not situational. And in that reading I could see how men might feel dehumanized by the response - are men really worse predators than a hulking giant terrifying animal with claws and teeth, are those terrifying creatures really safer than them?

This question drives a wedge between men and women because men and women have different lived experiences, and it's difficult for men to understand the way women experience the world and why they answer the way they do. If men had to live in the world as women and feel that level of vulnerability (let alone actually be victimized as women), they might understand it better - but those experiences are literally inaccessible to them.

So the problem here is really that men aren't listening and use the opportunity to flip it around and make it about how actually they are the victim here. (Which isn't entirely false, but is distorted and applied unfairly when not validating women's experiences - the reality is that we can accommodate both perspectives, we can acknowledge the way patriarchy victimizes both men and women - it's not an either or.)