Man vs. Bear? TikTok as a Platform for Contemporary Feminist Consciousness Raising

Trigger Warning: Mention of gender-based violence

In the spring of 2024, millions of TikTok users weighed in on a seemingly straightforward question: Would you rather be in the woods with a man you don’t know or a bear? With the goal of making men think about gender violence against women, TikTok user @calmebkbk encouraged men to think about themselves as apex predators for women: “If you were alone in the woods, seeing a man is ten times scarier than seeing a bear.”^[1]

Responses to this TikTok query culminated in a global debate about gender-based violence and misandry. Forbes, MSNBC, and countless other news agencies featured women reporting and composing opinion pieces on women’s nearly unanimous pro-bear vote, yet most men who responded on TikTok balked at women choosing bears. In an LA Times op-ed, author Julia Phillips explained the debate as an example of the gendered risks women face every day: “The question is a chance for women to compare fears, to figure out which danger looms larger.”^[2] A bear is appealing, women argued, precisely because it is not a man. The outpouring of women’s stories turned faceless statistics on violence against women and girls into humanized realities. Like the #MeToo outpouring, women recounted stories of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other violent attacks by men as a form of delayed, interactive, digital dialogue about gender-based violence. As user @speechprof stated, “We (men) don’t have to live thinking about the danger of us every day.” He listed some of the most gut-wrenching responses from women: “The worst that can happen with the bear is that it kills you.” “If I survive a bear attack, I don’t have to see him at family reunions.” “Bear, because if I got attacked by a bear people would believe me.”^[3]

The question and the discussions it provoked on TikTok illuminate a contemporary form of feminist consciousness-raising (CR) that originated in the postwar women’s liberation movement. Coined in 1967 by Civil Rights Movement veteran-turned-radical feminist Kathie Sarachild, CR usually signified groups of roughly 5 to 15 participants who met to compare answers to lists of personal questions related to a politicized topic like sexism. Sarachild rooted CR’s framework in a long history of political organizing that focused on voicing shared oppressions to generate solidarity: the Civil Rights Movement encouraged activists to “tell it like it is,” while the Chinese Cultural Revolution organized Speak Bitterness groups in which peasants “‘spoke pains to recall pains’ to build collective support for change.”^[4] CR groups emerged when women of all races within the anti-war and civil rights movements were frustrated at being limited to “food-making, typing, mimeographing, general assistance work, and as a sexual supply for their male comrades after hours.” ^[5] By discussing their shared experiences with sexism in small private groups, women like feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin argued that CR enabled participants to see their struggles as one common to womanhood: “Like a convert to the female sex, I became ‘us,’” in ways that could potentially fuel collective direct action.^[6]

The practice quickly became a powerful recruitment and discussion tool for feminist organizing and identity politics including Black feminism, high school feminism, lesbian feminism, profeminist men’s groups, and more.^[7] A few small CR groups in New York City in 1967 quickly grew to “some 100,000 women” by 1973, as hearing how other women shared similar problems resulted in what feminists called a “Click!” or the realization that one’s personal problems were political.^[8] Feminist consciousness-raising was not without its critics especially from within women’s liberation organizing. For many women, CR’s emphasis on leaderless groups led to what feminist Jo Freeman called “the tyranny of structurelessness” that reinforced hidden power structures that privileged white heterosexual middle-class domination over the movement. A wide range of feminists critiqued CR for numerous reasons, but most importantly because CR groups often excluded marginalized groups like working-class women, Black women, lesbians, and trans women.

CR topic lists—even those created for the National Black Feminist Organization—frequently included bodies, motherhood, gendered violence, or work without ever mentioning race, sexuality, or other aspects of identity, topics that promoted discussions of diversity without explicitly structuring discussions around women’s differences as a foundation for an intersectional analysis of sexism. For the working class, women of color, lesbians, and women whose “bodies bridged these contradictions,” their differences could not be ignored but were vital to understanding the complexity of women’s intersectional experiences.^[9] Instead of rejecting consciousness-raising, women sought to rethink it by pushing women who bridged a range of contradictions from margin to center—and in doing so, a more diverse and inclusive feminism was born. These disagreements over CR produced guidelines that situated gender oppression as part of a matrix of domination targeting workers, African Americans, men, and different queer identities, and more.^[10]

Now decades later, as our relationships to political and social issues guide our digital social media presence, TikTok resembles both the strengths and weaknesses of feminist consciousness-raising more broadly. As a tool for generating constructive critical discussion, TikTok’s formatting guidelines encourage listening and responding to current topics (now through hashtag or song linking and mirror capture video responses) in ways that connect videos of an individual’s “Click!” or self-realization of a shared experience with a larger conversation. However, like CR guidelines, TikTok’s algorithm largely does not cross partisan lines further exacerbating political siloization.^[11] Individual video responses are often mediated in ways that can encourage content creation for the purposes of emotional reaction rather than contributing to a digital dialogue as a tool for collective systemic critique—a marked similarity to Betty Friedan’s critique of CR as “navel gazing.”^[12] By 1970, sexist critics denigrated women’s CR groups as “kaffeeklatsches,” “hen parties,” or simply “bitch sessions” because they encouraged sharing personal stories before direct action.^[13]

While women’s responses expressing fear of straight men in the “Man versus Bear” debate angered many men, more than 80 million responses were recorded in the spring of 2024 as part of this conversation on TikTok, with women’s pro-bear voices taking a far lead. Like the “Man versus Bear” question, many feminist CR questions ignored an intersectional analysis of race and gender. By the early 1970s, many Black feminist groups like the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) began publishing their own CR guidelines that centered Black women while also creating space for incorporating Black men into CR discussions. In another Black feminist organization, the Combahee River Collective, members used “life-sharing,” which “began to recognize the commonality of [their] experiences” that could help them validate and combat “their feelings of craziness,” or gaslighting.^[14] Early in the #manvsbear debate, Black users like @white_woman_whisperer were quick to jump in and remind white women how their gendered racial privilege can be dangerous for Black people. She rephrased the question as one set in a common workplace experience: “You’re at work, you’re alone in a room, who would you rather walk in right now? You don’t know who it is, a white man or a white woman. You’re in a conference room alone. You have to be with one or the other. Which one is it going to be? [long silence, stares at camera].”^[15] When users simultaneously tagged their #manvsbear videos with #blacktiktok, poignant examples emerged of how Black Americans of all genders are simultaneously struggling with systemic racism and hypermasculinity.

In contrast to men’s videos insulting women who choose the bear, @FatalProse shared a video response arguing that as a Black man, he also would choose the bear in any race/gender demographic scenario unless the person were a Black or Indigenous woman due to toxic masculinity.^[16] Users viewed his response tens of thousands of times, further shared through video responses by dozens of other accounts—many by Black women who felt validated about their intersectional experiences with racism and sexism. When @FatalProse identified women of color as the safest demographic due to his own experiences, that moment similarly paralleled the experiences of many feminists within women’s liberation-era CR groups. Like with CR groups, it is difficult to determine if these consciousness-raising discussions generated significant change in perceptions about systemic violence. Regardless, the debate reflects how TikTok remains a space where young people with diverse bodies and backgrounds can share their experiences with one another across the world, and in doing so, push consciousness-raising as a tool of political organizing.

TikTok’s focus on active participation has helped users engage with “activist initiatives for global awareness, social change, and civil politics” in ways that are more personal and direct than on other leading social media platforms.^[17] From prisoners to factory workers in Bangladesh, TikTok allows a wide range of users a voice through trackable and archivable hashtag-driven conversations. Yet TikTok, like CR, is far from a perfect tool when galvanizing intersectional feminist groups. With the clock ticking closer to Biden’s deadline for a national ban against TikTok to take effect if its Chinese parent company ByteDance does not sell, the #manvsbear debate begs the question of what might happen if a national ban on the app takes place. How will the core principles of CR—that knowledge is both socially lived and emotionally rooted and that self-realization requires both listeners and speakers—take shape within a new digital medium if TikTok is banned?

Featured image caption: Photo by Janko Ferlic.

Kera Lovell

Dr. Kera Lovell (any pronouns) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah, Asia Campus where they teach courses on US history, women’s history, and global citizenship. Lovell earned their PhD in American Studies at Purdue University in 2017 and is currently working on a book project that traces an undocumented method of postwar urban protest in which activists challenged police brutality and urban renewal by insurgently converting vacant lots into parks. This research has been recognized with numerous awards including the Dumbarton Oaks Research Fellowship, a Graham Foundation research fellowship, a Hoover Institution research fellowship, and Purdue University’s Research Grant Foundation fellowship. You can find their research in a variety of outlets, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, American Studies Journal, Black Perspectives, and Gender Issues.

• Kera Lovell

  https://nursingclio.org/author/kera-lovell/

  Queer Teenage Feminists on the Printed Page, 1973 to 2023