‘Men are very scary out there’: Reflections on rape culture, misogyny, and #metoo in the bear vs. man social media trend

This article argues that the viral 2024 Bear vs. Man social media phenomenon that trended across TikTok, Instagram, and X offers significant insights into the post #MeToo landscape, elucidating the continued sociopolitical and technocultural uncertainties around rape culture. As digital technologies change, the means through which marginalised genders resist, retaliate, refuse, and rebuke misogyny and its intersecting oppressions concomitantly change. Methodologically, this article uses digital dwelling to map the media matrices of our social media platforms, focusing on small, curated data sets. Theoretically, we ground our work in digital activist feminist media approaches to critically question both the reliance on big data in scholarly research and the kinds of power relations that big data can reify. Through dwelling, the article suggests that Bear vs. Man memes reveal three themes: tensions of bodily safety, the prevalence of toxic masculinity, and the reliance on colonial ideologies of man vs. nature. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how the misogynistic backlash to Bear vs. Man memes reveal the ways that rape culture continues to thrive, in partnership with white supremacy, ableism, classism, and colonialism.