Could 100 unarmed men win a fight with a silverback gorilla?

That question has been posed before — on Reddit in 2020, on TikTok in 2022 — but gained viral steam across platforms recently when mega YouTuber MrBeast joked about looking for volunteers to embrace the challenge. As the mom of a tween MrBeast fan, though, I know enough about him to wonder if he was joking.

Everyone from Shaquille O’Neal to primate experts have weighed in on the answer. Some think the gorilla would make short work of humans, while others believe the men could work together and strategize to take the beast down.

I have a more pressing question: Huh?

I consider myself a feminist who looks beyond expected gender roles and stereotypes. But after jumping into the internet rabbit hole — gorilla pit? — I have surmised that this is a guy thing. The kind of hypothetical scenarios I ponder are usually something like “What would I buy with $1,000 and 10 minutes in Neiman Marcus?” or “Could I outrun a bear?” I already know the answer to the latter is no, so I make it a point to not be where bears are.

But this gorilla thing, another hypothetical scenario I imagine most men will never encounter, has taken on a life of its own. Guys are literally spending time reasoning this out logistically, including making video simulators of the fight. It’s nothing they’re planning to test in real life, of course — knock it off, MrBeast! — but I don’t get why you’d even imagine beating up a gorilla in the first place. The poor primate would probably be like, “How did I get involved in this?”

I posed the question of men vs. gorilla to those who might be experts on the thinking behind it: some of my male friends. Even they were stumped. “Anything you could try to explain about this, I’d have the same response ... why?” said Mike Stucka, who lives outside West Palm Beach.

“If I had to explain it,” wrote Baltimore’s Travis Whiting on Facebook, it’s about “the idea that men are capable of conquering a more powerful ‘force of nature.’ Also, factoring in that it is 100 men vs. one gorilla gives the impression this is not a serious query or situation.”

Calvin Coates of Baltimore had a more succinct take on why the question arose in the first place: “Cause we are men!” he wrote. “We want to have the ability to beat up everything like the Avengers!”

This all makes sense to me, sort of, but I wanted to get a deeper take, so I asked Andrew Walen, a local former psychotherapist who worked with men struggling with body image and eating disorders.

When Walen first looked up the meme, his take was that the entire debate “speaks to the absurdity of our cultural discourse now. We look for competition and rivalry more than I can recall seeing in my lifetime. This ‘us versus them’ stuff just feels like it’s been put on steroids.”

Of course, having 100 men band together to ”find ways to truly build concepts of strength in cooperation the way my Granny taught me, that would be amazing,” he said. “She preached ‘you cannot break a stick in a bundle’ throughout my childhood. If that’s the case with this meme, cool, but that’s not the vibe check I got from the videos and articles.”

In the end, it’s probably all just the stereotypical male version of my Neiman’s shopping spree quandary. Hopefully.

“I think it’s mostly fairly harmless,” my friend Mark Tough of Baltimore said. “But is it a gateway drug at the margins — the kind of engagement chum that a maniverse influencer can throw to the broader waters to pull in ‘dudes’ comfortable speculating about what lots of ‘dudes’ — cuz it’s always dudes in these things — could do? Yeah, I think so.”

So would the gorilla win against 100 men? Based on sheer numbers, no. Does it matter? Also, no. But it won’t stop people from imagining the bloody outcome.

“After the first 20 to 30 men get their arms and legs ripped from their torsos,” said Michael Hall of Boca Raton, Florida, “an early favorite will become apparent.”