Beauty & The Bear?...
Because the worst a bear can do is kill me.
** TRIGGER WARNING : Violent Sexual Abuse, Torture, Physical abuse, Abuse of animals **
As children, those fairy tales designed to illuminate and inspire, introducing young girls to the world often concealed hidden truths about the nature of mankind. That old and repetitive ‘Prince Charming’ archetype would age terribly, quickly dissolving into nothing before our eyes as we realised how scarcely these tales were inspired by reality.
Except that I guess I’m wrong in a sense, about these fairy tales being unrealistic, because even those stories revealed male fantasies of inappropriate and unconsensual relations (if you read closely enough).
Next, we might ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that the prince kissed aurora whilst she was still asleep?’, because as the story goes in the original Italian version of Sleeping Beauty, known as ‘Sun, Moon, and Talia’, the princess is awakened by [not a kiss], but the repeated rape by the King, leading her to eventually give birth to two children while unconscious...But given that this is not the version of the story most of us were originally told, a familiar denial of mankind’s cruelty loudly echoes. On the contrary, stories like ‘The Gruffalo’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ told considerably more accurate tales. These would foreshadow the alliances made between women and bears as they would occur all over the world in the present day. Having accepted bears for their primal natures, instead of suffering the unfortunate consequences of assuming better, there was a silent comfort to be found in the predictability of an animal. Alternatively, the predictability of mankind was not at all comforting. Here, the certainty lay in an almost assured and more terrifying kind of violence.
So now, It’s disgust, not shock that she feels. When she makes her way through video after video online trivialising the fear felt by herself alongside too many others.
The question, “Ladies, would you rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear”, asked repeatedly as part of a current TikTok trend feels more like an invitation in to try and repeat past cries for justice than a question warranting debate or discussion.
Unfortunately though she found herself caught right in the middle of the ‘Man v Bear’ debate. She peers over her right shoulder to see real feminists fighting for her most basic rights to autonomy. To her left she finds entitled men wedged uncomfortably into the conversation. Here, both evidently cruel and self-righteous men alike stood side by side in the fight for… (I’m not sure what exactly). There are those aiming to make it clear to women everywhere that (once again) it’s not ‘all men’ or alternatively posing a weird ‘Gotcha!’/’UNO reverso'!’ moment where they try to make comparisons between women and bears where there aren’t any. Then there are those more ‘rational’ men, who are after all ‘only trying to explain the reasons why technically being trapped alone in the woods with a bear would be substantially worse because of it’s innately barbaric nature’.
You know, in the same way that ‘the jokes write themselves’, I find that irony has a tendency for doing the same. How often it is that animals get mischaracterised for being too cruel. The judgement we cast upon them is supposedly fair, given that we can predict nothing but their savagery. But people, (men) are supposed to be something different altogether – far smarter, and far more merciful. And yet as it happens, we know that this isn’t nor will ever likely be the case.
Junko Farata.
Junko Furuta was born in Misato, Saitama, Japan in 1971, experiencing a relatively normal life until her kidnapping at 17. Formerly, she had been described as a bright, high achiever at Yashio-Minami High School. But in November of 1988, Hiroshi Miyano, known as a school bully with Yakuza connections, abducted her. This story tragically begins in the same way as so many other stories of attacks made against women. Miyano, who had a crush on Furuta, became enraged when she rejected him, leading to what would occur next. At Around 8:30 p.m that evening, both Miyano and a friend Shinji Minato encountered Junko Furuta on her way home from work, where Minato knocked her off her bike in order to create a distraction. Masking himself as a helpful bystander, Miyano offered to escort her home, marking the last time she would have been heard from by loved ones. Junko would then endure a 44-day long torture.
Over this prolonged period, she endured over 400 rapes by the captors and others, suffering unimaginable torture like insertion of objects into her body, causing irreparable internal injuries. Besides the sexual assaults, she was subjected to disgusting acts such as consuming live cockroaches, and drinking urine, while enduring physical abuse like being hung, beaten, and burned until her tragic death.
Despite being alerted twice to Furuta's situation, the authorities failed to act, once being assured by Minato's family that no girl was present in the house. When Furuta tried to call the police herself, the boys stopped her, and the authorities never followed up on the call, leading to further punishment for her. Ultimately, on January 4, 1989, the captors murdered Junko Furuta after a game of mahjong, her body disposed in a 55-gallon drum filled with concrete. The police, mistakenly informed during Miyano's interrogation about Furuta's murder, arrested all four boys. Despite compelling evidence of their brutal acts, they received surprisingly light sentences, attributed partly to their ‘youth’ and alleged Yakuza connections, leaving many worldwide feeling as though justice was not served.
Pony.
Pony, an orangutan in Borneo, was used as a sex slave in a brothel for six years before being rescued. Having been deemed a valuable asset by the madam who kept her captive, she was repeatedly shaved, causing her to suffer from abscesses and skin irritations, as well as being made to wear makeup and jewellery, and taught to perform sex acts, given that hundreds of men found a twisted ‘novelty’ in the idea of having sex with an Orangutan.
Pony, now 21, was rescued and rehabilitated by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation but remains unable to live independently due to her traumatic past.
Despite her recovery, Pony's past trauma continues to impact her life, and efforts are made to provide her with a comfortable and enriched environment. According to Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, the illegal ape trafficking trade remains a significant issue, with orangutans facing extinction due to factors like deforestation and wildlife trafficking through social media.
Having only relatively recently discovered these cases, I sit here, waiting for the wave of shock to wash over me. Instead, past initial feelings of horror and melancholy, I stare at the screen completely and utterly unsurprised.
Compared to the 40 bear attacks on humans that take place per year, the UN reports that across up to 65 countries, more than 250,000 cases of rape or attempted rape occur on a yearly basis
Note : Of course there’s the consideration that people are far more likely to encounter a man in their everyday lives than a bear, but this still wouldn’t explain why this many violent sexual assaults take place.
What isn’t being understood.
As the legion of men either offended or guilty gather to defend themselves against women’s decision to risk seclusion with a wild animal rather than being stuck alone with them, I’d urge them to consider the ways in which this choice isn’t fuelled by the ‘anti-men’ agenda that women are constantly being accused of having nowadays. Mankind, who boasts so often about being oh so rational should instead recognise where this decision is supported by both statistical and empirical evidence. The data, facts and figures urge women to choose the bear too and given the ways in which men around the world have resorted to deprave acts of violence against animals like Pony, I’m sure the bear, even in it’s most hungry, beastly and aggressive state, would urge women to choose it as well, after likely witnessing the instances of gender-based violence that actually do take place in woods... Of course, most people aren’t literally going to find themselves in a situation where they’re forced to choose between bear or man, but whether we like it or not this thought experiment provided devastating results. Women in addition to other men everywhere almost instinctively say bear because perhaps it is their very primitiveness that serves as reassurance here. The lack of imagination animals have because of their lack of intelligence provides some kind of comfort for those who have heard, seen, experienced the horrors taking place everywhere, every day at the hands of our intelligent and alarmingly creative male counterparts.
- The worst thing a bear can do is kill you.
And even then, I’m not sure we’re comprehending just what it is implied when we’re actively choosing death? Why isn’t it that people choose man over bear, estimating that the choice is either to be killed by a bear or to co-exist peacefully with him? In truth, women aren’t answering the question ‘Would you rather be stuck alone in the woods with a man or a bear?’. They’re answering the question ‘Would you rather be killed or potentially face violent assault, humiliation and torture… and then be killed?’ In answering this question on its own and objectively, the answer seems so simple. So, then I wonder why when presented under slightly different circumstances, the choice is so inconceivable for so many. I suppose it’s because most men would distinguish themselves from the dangerous man depicted in the man/ bear scenario. But what about this man’s fellow forest friends? After all, Minato didn’t act alone, and nor did Pony’s captor. The continued perpetuation of gender-based sexual violence wouldn’t survive on its own if not supported (at least to some extent) by an overwhelming proportion of society, feeding into a culture which substantiates crimes of this very description.
Now I could follow what has almost become protocol in trying to get people to understand the devastating impact of female unsafety and ask questions like ‘What if it was your daughter/sister/mother alone in the woods? What then?’. Still, I think questions like these merely distract from the overarching point here, and it shouldn’t take knowing a woman and loving a woman to call for protection against her abuse.
Believe me when I say I do so WISH to stop thinking and writing about these kinds of issues. But so long as they take place, I’ll always find it necessary to re-enforce such a simple yet crucial message. My hope is that instead of being offended that woman don’t think they’re better than the bear, that men will make steps to actually be the preferable option, our ‘Prince Charming’.
Until then, I think it’s safe to say that we’re with Belle...
Asisa.
Sources
https://allthatsinteresting.com/junko-furuta All That’s Interesting - Junko Furata
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10 VICE- Pony The Orangutan