I felt that the story of Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man contains some rather interesting parallels with the dualism within the third wave of feminism. Something that immediately jumped out at me was the underlying perspective that seemed to unearth in Timothy as the documentary went on. The perspective that I’m talking about seems like it’s almost unconscious understanding that Timothy seemed to possess is that the force which dominated his life was doing the same thing to animals. It seemed almost as if they (Timothy and the bears/animals) in his mind were captives to the same colony, it’s just he was shackled by his inability to conform to the culture/customs of the dominate group (human civilization), while the bears weren’t able to conform to the dominate class because they are a separate species.

In Timothy’s mind there appears to be this dualism remaining; on the one side is civilization, on the other is him and the animals. In his “victory” clip toward the end, he talks about how he protected the bears (that are so important to him) and “beat” those trying to hurt them. A confluence in struggles, at least in Timothy’s perspective seemed to have formed sometime along his journey. While I’d like to believe that Timothy’s relationship with the bears does contain a non-instrumental element to, I think that he falls short of the third wave, especially in the holistic/pluralistic perspective that DesJardins talks about in the chapter. Timothy seems to have this universal look on things, filled with ultimatums and rejections of the complexity of situations and people, something not characteristic of the third feminism.