The Bear Series (It should have always been one)

Before I start — I’ve decided “We Choose the Bear” is officially a series now. God knows I’ll never run out of ways to comment on this, and men will never stop giving women reasons to comment. So buckle up for the second installment, and get comfortable, because there will be more.

I need to say something and I need you to let me finish before you decide how mad you are.

Men don’t really like women.

I’ve seen that sentence everywhere lately. Women, men, right, left, religious, atheist, every corner of the internet — same exact words. My gut reaction?

Duh.

Not because I think it’s universally, permanently, no-exceptions true. It isn’t. I’m looking at my husband right now, actually, and what I see on his face when he looks at me is not tolerance. It’s not access. It’s like. Real, uncomplicated, enjoys-my-company-even-when-nothing’s-in-it-for-him like.

So no. Not all men. Never all men. But I do think it’s time somebody said the rest of it out loud instead of just flinching at the headline.

Here’s the sentence underneath the sentence.

Women aren’t saying men don’t like women because we woke up one morning and decided to be bitter. We’re saying it because a lot of us spent our whole lives being wanted by men and mistaking it for being liked by them, and somewhere in our thirties, our divorces, our worst nights, the difference became impossible to ignore.

Wanting a woman requires nothing of you. You can want a body you’ve never had a real conversation with. You can want a wife to manage your house, raise your kids, remember your mother’s birthday, and warm your bed — and never once actually like her. Never enjoy her mind. Never seek out her laugh.

And a staggering number of women are standing in the wreckage of relationships, marriages, entire families, realizing they were wanted the whole time and never once actually liked. That’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition. Social media, for all its flaws, gave us the ability to compare notes out loud — and once we did, the pattern showed up too many times to be a coincidence.

So when a woman says “men don’t really like women,” hear what she’s actually saying:

That’s not an insult to the good ones. That’s a grief. Let her have it.

I think about every group chat where a woman says “he never asks me anything about myself,” or “he goes into the gas station and comes out with a snack — for himself,” or “we always watch what he wants,” and every other woman in the thread answers with the same tired laughing-crying emoji, like she just described the weather. I think about the men who can recite their fantasy football roster from three seasons ago but couldn’t tell you their wife’s favorite flower, or color, or drink. I think about the woman who realizes on a first date, a fifth date, a wedding day, an anniversary, that he has never once asked what she was afraid of, or what she thinks about when she can’t sleep. Not because he’s evil. Because it never occurred to him there was anything in there worth asking about.

That’s the sentence underneath the sentence. It’s not “men are monsters.” It’s that society built a world where women were taught they exist to serve a purpose, not that we’re a whole-ass person. So here we are — fucking exhausted from decades spent trying to be interesting enough, patient enough, easy enough to finally earn the curiosity that should have been free.

Now let’s talk about the part that should make your blood run cold.

Line up ten women you love — your sister, your mother, your best friend, your daughter, me — and eight of them would tell you, if they trusted you enough, that a man crossed a line with their body without permission. That’s not a statistic about strangers in dark alleys. That’s a statistic about your barbecues, your church pews, your family reunions.

And I’m not just talking about the things that make headlines. I’m talking about the unreported stuff — a man smelling a woman’s hair in an elevator, a catcall on the street, a husband who insists his wife’s vows were a permanent, blanket consent to her body. (That last one ignites a rage in me I can barely contain.)

And it is not getting better. It’s getting worse. Homicides of women at the hands of intimate partners have climbed sharply over the last decade, driven by the exact kind of men who talk about “loving” a woman right up until she tries to leave him. We are living through more public conversation about protecting women than any generation before us, and the violence is still rising underneath all that talk.

The math was never emotional — it was just math, and it keeps getting grimmer.

We teach our daughters to walk to their cars with their keys threaded through their fingers before we teach them to parallel park. We teach them to text “landed” the second they get home, no matter how late. Nobody taught me any of that at their age — not because the danger wasn’t there, but because we hadn’t started saying it out loud yet. We just quietly passed the rules down like a family recipe nobody wanted to have to cook.

And the response, now that women are finally saying all of this into microphones instead of just into each other’s kitchens? A shocking number of men got defensive instead of curious. They want to talk about false accusations instead of the eight out of ten. They want to remind us “not all men,” as if the disclaimer was ever the point instead of a tax we have to pay just to be allowed to speak at all. I am so tired of paying that tax. We all are.

And can we talk about children for a minute?

Women are backing away from motherhood in numbers we haven’t seen before, and men, largely, are not. Here’s why, in case anyone’s still confused: we finally know what the bill actually costs, and we’re the only ones who’ve ever had to pay it.

Men get to want children the way you want a good memory — abstractly, warmly, from a safe distance. Women know children the way you know a debt. We know what pregnancy does to a body that never fully comes back. We know what birth can take from you — sometimes your health, sometimes your life. We’re still the ones lying awake doing the mental inventory — the pediatrician appointment, the permission slip, the missing sock, the emotional weather of everyone in the house. We are the default parent in nearly every home in this country, including plenty of homes where the man would swear up and down that isn’t true.

So when a woman hesitates on motherhood now in a way her mother didn’t, it’s not because she’s selfish or broken or “doesn’t want to grow up.” It’s because she did the math her mother wasn’t allowed to do out loud, and she’s the only one in the relationship who was ever going to pay it in full.

I remember having to ask my ex-husband to sign a permission slip so I could have my tubes tied at 24. A PERMISSION SLIP. I remember getting fired from a job after too many “sick” days when my son was two and catching every bug he came in contact with. I remember every interview including some version of “so how are you managing childcare” — a question no man has ever had to answer in a job interview in the history of job interviews. None of that makes me bitter about having had children. It makes me furious that we still act shocked when a woman looks at all of it and says, quietly, maybe not.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say plainly, so I will.

Every time this conversation happens online, there’s a predictable chorus that shows up to explain to women why we’re wrong to feel this way — why the statistics are misleading, why we’re generalizing, why we need to be more careful with our language so we don’t hurt the feelings of men who’d never do any of this.

So we don’t hurt their feelings.

DA FUCK?

If you’ve ever wondered why women sound exhausted instead of hopeful when this topic comes back around, that’s why. We’re not tired of talking about it. We’re tired of it being received as a debate instead of being treated like the systemic societal problem that it is.

So here’s where I’ve landed, and it’s not comfortable, and I’m done pretending it should be.

I still love men. I love my husband with my whole chest. I’m raising a son I’m proud of. I have a father, a brother, uncles — proof this isn’t a lost cause. I’m not a man-hater and I never will be, because I’ve been loved too well by too many good ones.

But good men need to stop being offended by the sentence and start being curious about it. Stop reciting your resume of good behavior the second a woman says something that stings — advocate for her instead. Set the bar higher than at least I didn’t.

I mean that specifically, not generally. If your first instinct reading this was to think about the exceptions — the false accusations, the men who’ve been hurt too — before you thought about the eight out of ten women in your own life, that instinct is exactly what I’m asking you to notice and interrupt. Reflexively centering yourself the second a woman names her pain is precisely the pattern that convinced her you don’t actually like her in the first place.

Every man who stays quiet at the poker table when his friend says something vile about his girlfriend is doing something. He’s telling that friend it was fine to say. He’s telling every woman within earshot exactly how much protection to expect from him if it ever mattered.

None.

It’s not complicated. It just requires actually liking us — not managing us, not needing us, not wanting us. Liking us. That’s the whole ask. It always was.