The Revenant won three Academy Awards, including Best Director for Alejandro Iñárritu and Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio. It is based on the true story of Hugh Glass and his fight to survive the American wilderness in the early nineteenth century. In what is by far the most memorable scene of this movie, Glass gets repeatedly violated by a bear in the woods.
That was a movie after all. Do bears really want to rape people? Or is that just movie magic and suspension of disbelief? Would a bear find me attractive? That is quite a few questions to ponder. What is the word for being violated by a bear? Well, I looked it up and couldn’t get a definitive answer. I tried all sorts of search terms:
- “bear rape man”
- “how can bear rape man consent”
- “jeremy allen white shirtless pics”
I got all kinds of weird, weird things and went down all sorts of disturbing rabbit holes, but no luck on finding conclusive terminology. Also I need to clear my browser history more frequently. Seems like if I raped a bear it would be “ursophilia”, so maybe the term I’ll use is “reverse ursophilia”.
To say that I fear reverse ursophilia somewhere in the woods of Appalachia would seem obvious. I believe every single person on the planet would choose not to experience this if given any other option. But how likely is this to happen? Are there big, burly bears along the Appalachian Trail and are they on the prowl for fresh meat? To clarify, when I talk about “burly bears” in this post, I mean the family Ursidae.
American black bears exist along most of the Appalachian Trail. My research indicates that they are more interested in my improperly stored and disposed of food than my improperly protected orifices. You can’t put a bear canister around your bunghole, but you probably don’t need to. Safe to say that the odds of reverse ursophilia are vanishingly small. But how about a non-sexual encounter with a burly bear?
There are very few encounters of any kind between black bears and humans each year. Fewer than one person is killed by a black bear every two years since 1900, according to sources. But an incident doesn’t need to be fatal to end in reverse ursophilia. There has been an almost 100% increase in bear incidents since last year.
Why is that? It seems like droughts and scorching temperatures everywhere are putting pressure on the food resources bears depend upon. This pressure causes them to venture out of their comfort zones and into more contact and conflict with people. More people doing more outdoor activities in ever-decreasing wilderness spaces exacerbates the problem.
Still, by and large, bears don’t want to have anything to do with us. Sexually or otherwise. The reason for that seems to be the old standby “they are just as scared of us as we are of them”. They must have access to my search history. As long as you don’t feed bears or poke bears, stay on designated routes, and practice meticulous litter discipline they will probably leave you all alone. But bring bear canisters and bear spray just in case.
Being raped by a bear? Horrifying result, imperceptibly low likelihood. Having an incident with a bear? Troubling to possibly injurious result, very low likelihood if appropriate steps are taken.
To finish up I want to revisit The Revenant and my favorite fact about it. In that movie a young Will Poulter portrays Jim Bridger. Bridger wound up becoming one of the most influential explorers in the American West. He has multiple towns and schools named in his honor. Coolest of all, in my opinion, he is immortalized along with John Calvin McCoy and Alexander Majors in a statue at Pioneer Park in Kansas City.
No bears or people were harmed in the making of this blog post.
