The Bear
On the 2nd of January 1981, probationary constable Robert Hydes stopped a van in Sheffield, South Yorkshire containing two passengers; a young woman who Hydes suspected of being a ‘prostitute’, and the driver of the vehicle, who was a bear.
Whilst Hydes was radioing in the van’s registration number, the bear asked if he could go for a piss, because he was ‘bursting’ and, because he was a bear, and bears were ‘alright’, Hydes let him.
When it subsequently turned out that the registration plates on the van were false, Hydes arrested the bear and, probably, the woman, who had a name, Olivia, but that doesn’t really matter because she was a woman and therefore not ‘alright’ and a prostitute which meant she didn’t matter at all.
At the police station, the bear asked again to go for a piss, and they let him, because he was a bear, and he was alright and he’d probably had a few pints and that was ok because that’s what bears do. The bear probably liked football, too. He was alright.
The bear took this opportunity to stash a kitchen knife, which he had stuffed down his trousers, in the cistern of the police station toilet.
When the bear was subsequently strip searched, it was discovered that he was wearing an inverted V-neck jumper under his trousers. The open neck of the jumper was positioned so that the bear’s genitals could easily be exposed, and the elbows of the jumper had been padded to act as knee protection as the bear knelt over something on the ground with his dick out.
Acting on a hunch that perhaps something might be awry, the police returned to the scene of the arrest and discovered that when the bear had slipped off for a piss, he had hidden another knife, a hammer and a length of rope behind an oil drum.
Confronted with all this information back at the station, the bear suddenly admitted to the being the serial murderer that for years had eluded police and terrified women and prostitutes (who, apparently, were not the same thing) as ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’.
Except, of course, and with apologies for seeming rather exhaustedly facetious about this, it wasn’t a bear.
It was a man.
Because men kill women.
Bears also sometimes kill women, but they don’t do so with V-neck jumpers under their trousers so they can wank off while they do it. And they don’t spend years terrifying the female population of South Yorkshire.
Men do that.
“Not all men!” cry the sort of people, normally men, who don’t get the point. And that’s true.
But not all men drive around in vans with false number plates on them, either and yet if I said, ‘Men drive around in vans with false number plates on them’, those same people, who should know better, wouldn’t go around crying ‘Not all men!’ about that.
No. When the men, who should know better, cry “Not all men do that!”, what they mean is “I don’t do that!” and that’s also, probably, true.
But women don’t know that.
What they do know is that, largely, other women don’t do that, trans people don’t do that, and bears don’t do that.
Men do.
If you are the kind of man that thinks, when someone says, ‘men kill women’, that they are referring expressly and specifically to you in person, or if you think that when a woman says that she would rather meet a bear in the woods than a strange man and that by saying this, the strange man in question is, again, you, then they are absolutely, 100% talking about you.
And these phenomena are not new. Unlike ‘woke’, or being trans, or immigration, all of which were invented in 2017 specifically to ruin the lives of a certain type of person, even though that certain type of person has gone, and will go through, the whole of their lives without any of those issues ever affecting them, women being wary of men has been around since forever.
It would be easy to point at the Yorkshire Ripper and claim that men like him are the reason that women choose the bear, and whilst that is also true, it’s a little too obvious. Instead, the events surrounding those gruesome murders were also indicative of the way that society treats women. Sometimes it’s not as obvious as the madman hunting women at night. Sometimes it’s in the attitudes of those trying to catch him, or even in those that he lived among.
So, whilst this story is not purely about the crimes he committed, it’s hard to see the point in feeding him any more fuel, even if he is now dead. I’m not even going to name him, although his name is infamous, and you can Google it in seconds. His victims deserve to be remembered. He doesn’t.
Over the space of five years between 1975 and 1980, he murdered at least 13 women in ways that bought to mind the infamous Jack the Ripper cases of 100 years earlier. He more than likely killed other women and he attacked several more who survived.
He was found guilty in 1981 and sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in prison with the judge recommending that he never be released. In 2010, his sentence was changed to a ‘whole life tariff’ meaning that he would never leave prison alive, and he died in custody in 2020, aged 74.
What transpired during the investigation into the murders revealed some astonishing attitudes towards women that go some way towards illustrating why, when you get on a bus, if you’re a man, and the only other person on that bus is a woman, and it’s late at night, that she is scared of you.
The Ripper began his crimes by attacking women who he saw as prostitutes and the police worked the case based on the idea that a hatred of prostitutes was his driving motive. It appeared to be a solid idea, too, as his early victims were all described by the police as ‘prostitutes’.
At first, the public attitude towards the murder of prostitutes was one of shock and horror that such a crime could be happening in their midst and, of course, a desire to see the man guilty bought to justice. But there was also an undercurrent of dismissing the victims because of their perceived status as prostitutes. As if the murders weren’t happening to ‘normal’ people but to a subclass that sat aside from normal society.
It was easier to compartmentalize the horror of the crimes if they were happening to a different sort of people than the ordinary, working-class people of Yorkshire and easier to feel safe oneself if one thought that the hunter was preying on those ‘other’ people.
This attitude towards prostitutes has always been prevalent in society. In Roman times prostitutes were the lowest in society, below even slaves in the pecking order. So low in the order that if some of them should fall foul of a madman, then that was an awful thing to be happening, but then at least it wasn’t one of ‘us’ and anyway, what do they expect? If you’re going to live the dangerous life of a prostitute, you run the risks associated with it.
Society has always denigrated women, commodified them, and then, when they get murdered as a result, shrugs its shoulders and says, ‘They were prostitutes after all’. To knock women down to the lowest rung of society and then blame them for being there when they get slaughtered is a train that is never late.
Some of them were prostitutes because of choice, some because of circumstance and some, like one 42-year-old mother, because the family had fallen on hard times and her husband made her do it.
Others were women who barely even qualified as ‘prostitutes’ at all. There were women who liked to go out and have fun at the weekend and might accept a ride home after a party and, if the guy they got a ride with wanted a blowjob and he had five quid in his pocket, why not? That was day’s wages to some of them. None of them had any money. Some of them couldn’t afford to turn those 5 pounds down.
Others were described as ‘working as a prostitute’, which meant they were women with day jobs who, if they needed a little extra money once every few months, knew where they could get some.
What he did to them was awful. Everyone agreed. But he was doing it to them, not to us, and as long as he stuck to killing prostitutes, he certainly needed catching, but it wasn’t enough to cause panic.
But then he did something that caused chaos and disgust. It caused panic and horror to sweep through all the women in Yorkshire and further afield.
It wasn’t what he did to the women that caused such revulsion. His crimes were brutal, and savage and the treatment of his victims was inhuman. But it wasn’t the desecration of the bodies of the women he murdered that caused such terror.
Instead, the thing that drove such fear was who he started to murder. He didn’t just stick to murdering prostitutes.
He began to murder ‘ordinary’ women.
Once he started to murder victims who were very clearly not ‘prostitutes’, and instead homely, well-educated women from middle-class backgrounds, the police response was staggering in its sexism and misogyny.
They seemed genuinely outraged that a ‘step-up’ from simply murdering prostitutes had occurred, as if the ritualistic and barbaric slaughter of, not to put too fine a point on it, women that society saw as ‘scum’ was one thing, but crossing a line into the safe, cozy world of ‘decent’ folk was going too far.
The police and society could almost understand why he was killing prostitutes. Everyone hated prostitutes. If they didn’t deserve to get murdered, they certainly didn’t deserve much sympathy when they were.
That might sound far-fetched until you look at some of the extraordinary things that were said.
At a press conference in 1979, a senior detective on the case, Jim Hobson, said the following:
“[He]....has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls. That indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Give yourself up before another innocent woman dies”
In her 1989 book Misogynies, the journalist Joan Smith wrote:
“even [the Ripper], at his trial, did not go quite this far; he did at least claim he was demented at the time"
‘Give yourself up’ now you have started to murder our women. Before, we were just trying to catch you. Now we’re trying to appeal to your better nature. Before, we didn’t doubt you. Before you were somebody we could understand.
Before, when you were reasonable, the murder of women could be understood as something that was just part of the way things were. Prostitutes walked the streets; normal men murdered them because they hated them and that was understandable.
Not only this, but those prostitutes he has already murdered are not ‘innocent women’.
They are guilty.
And as any policemen will tell you, the guilty always get what’s coming to them in the end.
In his opening statement at the trial, the prosecutor, Sir Michael Havers, QC said of the Ripper’s victims that:
"Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women".
The inference in these statements is mind-blowing.
That ‘normal’ men kill prostitutes.
Not that killing prostitutes is normal, or that it is right, but that it is a crime that is perpetrated by people who are not in a mental state that needs ‘urgent attention’. It’s not even particularly sad.
If you are a normal man, then it is fine to hate prostitutes because ‘many people do’, including the police, and normal men kill them when they hate them, to make a point.
‘Not all normal men!’ comes the cry and, again, they’re right.
But normal men just the same.
How are women meant to know which man is normal and which man is not? And does it even matter when normal men do ‘understandable’ things like murder women they hate?
And, what’s more, how are they supposed to know that the normal man who just sat next to them on an otherwise empty night bus, or who just walked into a clearing in the woods, isn’t looking at them and wandering whether she is a ‘totally respectable woman’?
Other attitudes towards the case were equally as telling. In asking the public for help, the police reminded them that the Ripper was someone who walked among them and that they should be on the lookout for him. This is sensible policing because, at the end of the day, someone, somewhere will know something small or have noticed something amiss or would have raised an eyebrow at someone’s behavior.
Someone did notice, of course. Trevor Birdsall wrote an anonymous letter to the police in 1980:
“I have good reason to now the man you are looking for in the Ripper case. This man has dealings with prostitutes and always had a thing about them ... His name and address is..”
And he gave the details of the man who would later be found guilty. Police dragged him in a total of nine times and let him go. They dragged in a lot of men. They cast the net far and wide. Anyone male of somewhere around the right age and going on what descriptions they had from people he attacked but had survived was bought in for questioning. Evidence from the crime scenes linked him to the murders but he was able to produce solid alibis.
All men were suspects.
‘Not all men!’ I hear some people cry.
Yes. All of them. The police may have made some monumental mistakes and had some terrible attitudes, but they knew one thing for sure.
All men were capable of doing this.
The police couldn’t tell them apart just by looking. How are women supposed to?
“This is someone’s husband, someone’s son..” was the famously quoted line. But here, again, this shows an attitude that gives the game away.
He was someone’s husband and someone’s son. But he was also someone’s mate. Or work colleague. He was the bloke you went to watch the footy with or hung around with down the pub talking about cars or darts. He was the bloke who helped you mend your garden wall, or you borrowed a drill from.
He was a man just like all the other men. But they weren’t the ones who were being asked to look out for him. Mothers and wives were.
Not content with being the victims, now they also had to be the ones to help find him.
One can look at it as simply the police deciding that women might be more vigilant to the subtleties of behavior that would give him away. Another way of seeing it is as the common misconception among the male population that this bloke cannot possibly be one of them. Instead, he had to be weird, an outsider, a grotesque figure; the shadowy, caped, Jack the Ripper of myth, hiding in the darkness, dripping blood, evil and corrupt. Not the bloke who liked Mott the Hoople and told jokes about his mother-in-law and supported Leeds United, just like you.
He couldn’t be just like you.
He couldn’t be just any man.
But if you couldn’t tell which of your mates down the pub, or in the crowd at the football match, or walking down the street at midnight on a Saturday the monster among you was, then how are women supposed to?
If he could be any man, he could be all of them.
This wasn’t all the police could muster in the way of misogyny. Next, they suggested a curfew at night.
The killer only ever seemed to strike under the cover of darkness, so what better way to stop his spree than to introduce a curfew? By now, years into the murders and with no immediate hope in sight of ever catching him, stopping him seemed the better idea in the short term.
The stated curfew did not, of course, extend to those men who they had determined fitted the profile of the killer; all men between 18-65, say.
No. The curfew was aimed at women.
Instead of asking the men - all men - to stay at home and thus provide a safer environment for women to go about their business in the evening, they told women to stay at home instead so the men wouldn’t kill them.
A classic example of victim blaming.
The reaction of the men of West Yorkshire, when it was put to them that perhaps they should be the ones who are not allowed out at night was laughably predictable.
Why should they be disadvantaged for the actions of one man?
Quite. But why should all women be disadvantaged for the actions of one man?
Men complained - not all men, of course - that they had been working hard all week and they wanted to go out for a few pints with the lads. The same group of lads that contained the Ripper, of course, and who they had not been asked to look out for.
The Ripper never had it so good. Prostitutes were still around because they didn’t matter and they couldn’t stay home at night or their husbands and kids wouldn’t eat the next day, and now he could wander around freely at night not sticking out like a sore thumb. He could hide as much as he liked, among his peers.
Men could feel safer knowing that they could saunter the streets in gangs of pals, who they all knew for sure weren’t involved in any murdering, safe in numbers should they meet the demon lurking in a corner and happy that the women were tucked up safely in bed, apart from the prostitutes who probably deserved it anyway.
From this outrage sprang an anger. It was an anger that I’ve since seen many times, and had existed before, but to my young eyes this was the first realization that such a thing existed. Women decided that they’d had enough. And it was a revelation to me.
In November of 1977, in direct response to the police instructions that women stay out of public places after dark, a group called the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group organized the first of what became known as the Reclaim the Night marches. Two marches moved across the city, a hundred women in total, converging on the City Square. But elsewhere across the country, a dozen more marches were taking place. In York, London, Bristol, Brighton, Manchester and other major cities, women marched in anger, not just as the clumsy attempts of the police to stop this man, but of the attitudes that saw them being blamed for his crimes.
The English Collective of Prostitutes which campaigns for the rights of sex workers and the decriminalization of prostitution held protests, including outside the Ripper’s eventual trial.
The marches became more militant. In 1979 a match in London ended in a clash with police which saw 13 women injured. Innocent male bystanders complained of being verbally abused as the marchers shouted, ‘death to rapists!’ and ‘castrate all men!’
This, naturally, had the knock-on effect of making these radical feminists seem like they were a danger to society. Women weren’t meant to be angry, and they certainly weren’t meant to demonstrate that anger via assertive or passionate measures.
Now society had a new bugbear. Women who are refusing to do what they are told for their own good. Men didn’t need to be told what was in their own best interests because they were men, and they already knew what everyone’s best interests were.
Clashes with the police when women are rightly angry about being murdered are still happening today, shockingly. The 2021 kidnap of Sarah Everard by, of all people, an off-duty Metropolitan police officer who used his position to convince her she was under arrest and then kidnapped and murdered her was followed by an entirely peaceful night-time vigil.
A group of several hundred angry, but peaceful, people, mostly women attended the event, staying on to hear speeches by the feminist group ‘Sisters uncut’. The police - the same police force that the murderer of Sarah Everard had worked for and used his position in to kill her - decided to forcefully break up the vigil and arrest several of the women.
Public outrage followed and the next day thousands marched in protest. The police response, faced with public scrutiny and a march that didn’t seem to consist solely of women, kept their distance.
Unbelievably, they then tried to prosecute the women they had arrested until, finally, the prosecution dropped the cases and, in 2023, the police were forced to award damages to the women.
Murdered by the police and then arrested and prosecuted for being angry about it. If women cannot even trust men when they are police officers, how can they trust any men?
When the women in 1979 took to the streets shouting, ‘castrate all men’, maybe they didn’t mean that. Maybe they did.
Maybe they were tired of being raped and murdered and then told to stay at home while the murderers and rapists went out to get drunk at the pub with you?
Maybe if you looked around you and saw those men, or saw actions that your mates were happy to engage in, or jokes they told, or things they said about women; the names they called them, the way they spoke to each other- to you - about them and you said something there and then; maybe then you wouldn’t have these angry women, who had had enough, standing in front of you saying you’re all the same?
Because they can’t tell which of you isn’t like that.
You can.
You notice it. You notice the smirks and the sneers and the laughter and the disrespect.
And not all of your mates will turn out to be the Ripper. We know that. It’s not all men. But all men can do something about it.
Not all men do.
What you’re supposed to take from the meme about the bear is not that women blame you for everything. Or that they think you are more dangerous than a bear. Or even that women don’t know how dangerous a bear is. Women know perfectly well just how dangerous a bear is. The bear’s behavior, although known, is not really all that predictable. It might sit there. It might wander off. It might eat your head.
The reason they’d rather meet the bear is because the behavior of the man is absolutely predictable. The man is known quantity. The women know what the man is going to do.
And they choose the bear.
It’s a sobering thought.
You’re not meant to turn yourself into the victim in this hypothetical situation, just like the men of West Yorkshire weren’t supposed to turn themselves in to the victims when it was suggested they not go to the pub for a while.
What you’re meant to do is to reflect on the choices women make in reaction to the way men behave. And then go away and hold other men, and yourself, accountable.
You’re not going to stop future Rippers and you’re not going to stop evil men from doing evil things, but you can make small changes to the way you and your fellow men conduct themselves in public and by doing so you can help to make a world in which women feel safer.
Not a world in which you think they will feel safer. It’s not just your world. It’s their world too and everyone has the right to feel safer in it.
Not all men!
And I’m a man, so I know it doesn’t mean all men. It has never meant all men.
There’s nothing wrong with being a man. Men are wonderful people with the same ability to be kind, compassionate and empathetic just like any gender. But toxic masculinity teaches men to identify their masculinity in ways that are associated with being powerful and controlling. Being dominant and strong, or assertive and ambitious are all seen as inherently ‘male’ traits.
And these traits sometimes spill over into subconscious actions. A man who walks into a room, or onto a bus, will be viewed, however inadvertently, in an entirely different way than if a woman walks onto a bus or into a room. And that’s because, with the help of some of the examples I’ve talked about, people have come to expect men to behave in certain ways, even if they don’t then behave in them.
The majority of men are not responsible for this, but they can do something about it. What ‘the bear’ meme is describing is women’s fear of male violence and one of the telling things about it was the way that some men responded with a backlash of anger and disdain for women’s experiences.
One of the most important ways that men can respond to things like ‘the bear’ is to listen to what women are saying. Not just hear what they are saying, listen and try to understand what the reason for the fear is.
And then act on that fear. Can you get the next elevator if the one you are getting on has a single woman on it too? It’s no great sacrifice at the end of the day. Are you alone on a night bus with a woman? Sit at the other end of the bus from her.
Have you just met a woman, alone, in a clearing in the woods while hiking? Say hello and keep walking. If she stops to talk to you, by all means engage in conversation. But don’t close the space between you and her.
At the end of the day, the conversation about ‘man or bear’ isn’t about bears at all. You don’t need to wade into it with your knowledge of bears and why a bear isn’t safe, or how to survive a bear attack, or how you’d fight off the bear for her, or ‘enjoy your new bear friend, you’ll die alone’.
Instead, the conversation is just a way of asking ‘Are you afraid of men?’
And the answer to that is, probably, not all men.
I said right at the start that I wasn’t going to name the Ripper because he doesn’t deserve to be remembered. And I won’t.
But his victims do deserve to be remembered. They were:
Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne McDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls and Jacqueline Hill.