I Don't Choose the Bear Because it Might Not Kill Me. I Choose it Because it Won't Do Worse.

Yesterday I wrote a #notAllMen Post about how it isn’t all men. Some men turned up to argue that it’s #NotAllMen. If you’re confused, let me break this down.

Me: Not All Men.
Men: I disagree because it’s not all men.

If a woman says ‘not all men’ in a forest and there are men to hear her, is she still wrong? The answer, folks, is yes. She is always, always wrong. Yes, we’re back here. Welcome. You can fetch the popcorn. I’ll take butter.

I took the grave risk of putting the word “bear” in my post, so a lot of men informed me I was insane to choose the bear.

You might have heard an old quotation that goes, “There are fates worse than death.” It was written to reflect on the rape of virgins during the fall of the Roman Empire, and it’s exceedingly relevant to the man vs. bear debate.

I don’t choose the bear merely because it might not kill me.
If I knew the bear was going to eat me, I’d still choose it.
There are fates worse than physical torture, too. I know. I have been there.

I would choose a violent death over 20 years of rape trauma. My rape no longer traumatizes me, but my recollection of that time remains.

I remember clawing my way through 20 years of PTSD. I remember pieces of myself leaving my body. I remember not knowing how I’d ever get them back. I remember the very essence of my being dissolving, and I remember trying to live when I was really just pieces floating in the ether beneath the shadow of a great horror.

I remember the flashbacks because few of us are just raped once. Trauma has a way of repeating on itself, so I endured that experience daily at first, then weekly for years. You see, rape doesn’t just destroy you once. It destroys you for years, even decades. I didn’t think I’d make it out alive, and I was very nearly right.

The man vs. bear complainers are intolerably affected by women’s stories, but there is a great body of knowledge they’ve yet to collect. They don’t know the sticky disgust of sexual trauma. They don’t know how it feels to be smothered in shame. They don’t know the depression, the suicidality, the persistent torture that just won’t stop.

I choose the bear even if it kills me. I would prefer to be killed. I don’t have another rape in me. I don’t have 20 more years to spare on recovery. I’m not even willing to go through that again, so the bear is the better choice for me.

Before you try to argue, this is not open to discussion. You don’t get to decide whether I should choose the bear or the man. That’s my decision as an autonomous being. You don’t have to like it. Your offense is irrelevant to me and will not change my preference. This is not an arguable point. It is an autonomous evaluation of what I would choose for my life.

You do not get to debate my experiences or my choices. I probably haven’t even met you, but if you feel entitled to an opinion on women’s lived experiences, I would definitely choose the bear.