Responsibility #ForAllMen: Stop Being The Bear!

 [We join mid-conversation, as I, Roboseyo, discuss the implications of the Bear In The Woods meme with a Fictional Person Who Argues With Me.]

FPWAWM: “Okay. I get it. [See explanation in previous blog post] But I’d just like to point out that any persuadable person would have already been persuaded 400 words ago, Rob.”

So you admit you don’t want to be persuaded?

FPWAWM: “I admit no such thing. I just want to know why you are really still going on about this?”

I’m glad you asked.

FPWAWM: “Oh, no. That’s your ‘pontification’ face.”

It is.

FPWAWM: “What have I done?”

Let's travel back in time a bit, to look at the bigger picture:

When #MeToo went super-viral in 2017, part of the conversation went underplayed. We got distracted by gleefully watching a few horrible men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein finally get their long-delayed desserts (both now walk free, but that’s a different rant). However, one thread of the conversation kind of fell to the wayside: the threads discussing what part ordinary, non-rapist, well-meaning men could play.

The lone facebook post I saw on the topic had some choice words:

“Now that it has been successfully impressed upon us how common and far-reaching harassment and assault are, the next step is to reflect on the ways our society has … failed to notice or correct the attitudes and actions that led to [metoo].

But real talk: using "as a society" and collective language is dangerous too. It is yet another way of absconding personal responsibility, of distancing myself from what is happening. No mincing words: I individually have participated in excusing, ignoring, tolerating, enabling, and otherwise failing to notice or correct attitudes and actions of sexual harassment and assault.

I want you to know that I don't just believe you, I'm acknowledging that I've exhibited some pretty unsavory behavior in my past. I've been looking at this for a long time now, and I've definitely been the guy who…

Here the poster lists some ways that he’s added to the environment where so much bad stuff is ignored, brushed off, or tolerated, that worse stuff happens too, and he finishes with this line, which I want to pull out of 2017 and bring it back to 2024.

“It does us no good if all the men think that every "me too" was somebody else's fault.”

In class, when I teach the “self serving bias,” by which we torture the logic of a situation in order to let ourselves off the hook, making up special exceptions for ourselves, I use #Notallmen as an example. Also bad driving. I’ve met two people in my life who acknowledged they were bad drivers.

But one more time with emphasis: “It does us no good if all the men think that every "me too" was somebody else's fault.” ...and what are the protestations against the bear in the woods thought experiment, except men continuing to point fingers, and say that #MeToo was #NotMeThough, and seeing that it was #DefinitelySomeoneElse, #WhatDoYouThinkICanDoAboutItAnyway? Well, lots.

FPWAWM: #NotAllMen, amirite?

Me: (buries face in both hands for a bit)

This challenging sentiment didn't gain much traction, because given a choice between pointing a floodlight at our own bad behavior in order to have some really really uncomfortable, probing, high-stakes conversations with an indeterminate number of the women around us, and pointing fingers at  a few obvious villains getting their just desserts, we predictably went the easy way, and schadenfreuded it up over Weinstein and Cosby having to do perp-walks. And later, R. Kelly, and Diddy, and so forth.

Bill Cosby's Perp Walk, in case you haven't watched it in a while.

Harvey Weinstein's perp walk.

Don't get me wrong, it was satisfying, and pointing fingers at monsters can be fun, but focusing on the atom-bomb-level awfulness of "America's Dad" serving women spiked drinks and an Oscar-winning bully in a bathrobe forcing himself on starlets drew attention away from a much harder, more nuanced topic.

And now, years later, The Bear Discourse is as good a time as any to circle back to that, and talk about the way even well-meaning men who Hold the Right Opinions can still contribute to the background radiation of sexist pain-in-the-assery that makes women feel a tiny bit unsafe all the time. Sure, there’s no-brainer bad stuff going on: there'll always be somewhere to point fingers if that's my game, but beyond the "call the cops or alert HR" stuff, there’s the “death by a thousand paper cuts” stuff. Discussions about racism invented the term “micro-aggressions” for these.

You know what I'm talking about. Mechanic shops assuming a woman knows nothing about cars. Asking only the female coworkers if they’ve thought about marrying, or starting a family. Paying extra attention to the most attractive woman in a group, while ignoring older or unattractive women. That kind of stuff can be corrected with a little work. There’s even smaller stuff  (call them "nano-aggressions"?) that could be a micro-aggression, but might not even be noticed — either by the woman it targeted, or by the man who might have done it unconsciously. Stuff like giving women the up-and-down with the eyes as she walks by. Not catcalling, not whistling... but still eyeballing. Stuff that the culture just does, that we take for granted, might fit here -- like movie trailers and ads putting women's bodies on display. Movies pairing up a man over fifty with a woman under thirty. Maybe a particular woman doesn't consciously notice it all, but if she does, such tiny things all send the same message: “being a woman is the most important thing about you,” “being young and attractive is more important than any other thing about being a woman,” and, ultimately, “This is a man’s world.”

But that still doesn’t cover it, because it’s not even just the tiny things we do, the micro-aggressions. There are also what I’m calling micro-elisions -- the tiny things we don't do -- that make women unsure if a guy, even that guy who loudly announces he's a feminist and wears the t-shirt and writes multi-part blog posts, would believe her if she told him something.

Here’s a little text image meme that made the rounds a while ago that encapsulates the idea of micro-elisions better than pages of explanation, in a simple story: 

Six men at the table, meaning five men who heard Chad’s lewd comment could have said, “That was disgusting, bro. Don’t ever talk to women like that around me again. Especially minors.” Five men, who probably all think of themselves as good men, said nothing. “Well, it wasn’t ME making the comment.” If one of them had, Chad might think twice before being so disrespectful again. And next time, a second guy might agree that Chad was out of line. That would change the color of the entire social group. Doing nothing IS a moral choice when something wrong is happening, and that’s why we need to talk about micro-elisions. Most of our lives don’t have moments where the time to take a moral stand is obvious, cut-and-dried, clear and signposted. If you wait for your August Landmesser moment, life will pass you by.

And that doesn’t just go for saluting genocidal madmen. Being at that rally, ready to salute a genocidal madman is one knot in a long long string of choices the other people in that photo made, in order to be where they are, willing to do what they did. That string went on from the time the photo was taken in 1936, to all the horrors that followed. People don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I’d like to take part in a genocide today.” People make little decisions, over and over, and tell themselves they haven’t reached the point of no return yet, that they can turn back if they want. Like smoking. Like frogs in a kettle. That’s the danger of micro-elisions, of choosing to be a bystander: those choices add up.

Micro-elisions aren’t the crime itself, but because of them, the crime becomes less improbable. Less unthinkable. Think about shark attacks. Shark attacks happen. They happen under certain conditions, but all those other conditions depend on this: there needs to be salt-water, because sharks can’t survive in fresh water. Imagine these micro-aggressions and micro-elisions are the salt that turns fresh water into salt water. After there’s salt water instead of fresh, those other conditions for shark attacks start to appear, and from there it’s a game of odds. That is the effect micro-aggressions and micro-elisions have. They aren’t the crimes, they don’t directly cause the crimes, they're so pervasive it's hard to measure them, and on its own, each one is far too insignificant to report, but added up together, well, now we’re swimming in water where shark attacks are possible, instead of water where they’re impossible. It’s the same color, but the water is no longer safe to drink. A little whisper says, "I bet you could get away with it." The unthinkable becomes thinkable. 

This is another way of explaining a phrase that always gets people’s backs up… the way fresh water becomes water that can sustain the creatures responsible for shark attacks? That’s what people are trying to describe when they talk about “rape culture.” The R word is pretty shocking (which is the point for some people who use it), and that leads to a lot of defensive responses, but when someone starts talking about rape culture, fellas... try to cool it, and just think about Shark Week, ok? People who use that phrase want to talk about that process that takes something unthinkable, and makes it thinkable, that’s all.

I’m not a rapist. Far from it, but the whole point of having this conversation is to reckon with the fact all of us (even women) are tossing salt in the water, contributing to that atmosphere that makes the unthinkable thinkable. 

So… rape attempts? Nah. I’m not responsible for that one in six. But I’ve done my share of micro-aggressions - staring when I thought she didn't notice (maybe she didn't notice, but maybe she did), trying to make eye contact with someone who clearly wanted to be left alone, trying to turn a conversation into a flirtation, or a flirtation into whatever comes after a flirtation… that time at the club when we were dancing and I accidentally brushed a body part, and she might not have even noticed, or she might have taken it as flirting, so I tried to accidentally brush that body part again. Micro-aggressions, and some stuff that was bigger than micro, too, if you come right down to it.

I’ve certainly done my share of micro-elisions, too. I should have said, “That’s disrespectful, dude,” but instead I laughed at the joke. Didn’t want to be a stick in the mud. But my laugh might have sent a message to someone else who was also uncomfortable, “don’t be a stick in the mud; nobody else minds.” That micro-elision turned us both into bystanders. The time the couple was arguing, and the boyfriend — taller and much heavier — started looming. You know the way big boys sometimes loom, put their hand on their girlfriend’s neck with that faux-tenderness that is part threat. I moved down the subway platform, instead of staying close enough that the girlfriend knew there were witnesses nearby. “Don’t get involved.” Micro-elision. 

For my micro-aggressions and regular aggressions, for my micro-elisions and regular elisions, I have my excuses lined up: “I was young, I was in a bad place at the time, I thought I was being funny, we were both drunk, or tired, or both. We started out just being playful! I thought she was into it!” The excuses come to mind effortlessly, even years later. I’ve pushed a few lines when I knew better, or said nothing as someone around me pushed lines. I’ve gotten into situations I shouldn’t have, or stood by while someone engineered an unsafe situation, and instead of getting someone out of an unsafe situation, I lined up my excuses, putting my own conscience above someone’s safety. By ignoring, or never teaching myself to notice certain things, I could maintain my self-image as a good guy, while still getting away with some stuff, never suffering the discomfort or paying the social cost of being the stick in the mud. Did anyone else notice my action, or inaction? I'm not sure. Would anyone blame me? Probably not. There were other bystanders, too. Were there other incidents where I didn't even notice what I'd done, or what was going on? I'm absolutely sure of that. There were times I went far enough that I have made some apologies to some people. I've played my part.

It was easy to focus on the Weinsteins and the Cosbys. But that much subtler, much harder and more inward-looking work has to happen too if we want a real cultural change. Stuff like the bear meme will keep going around until one of them brings home the fact everyone plays a part, however small, and even well-meaning good guys who showed up at the rally can probably find ways to become better.

And it’d be a better world if part of some men doing better was by challenging other men to become better, too. Because if all we get is pick-me posturing, without self-reflection and accountability from man to man, the fact “one of the good ones” is doing less than he could is the other thing that makes women feel like no man is entirely safe, and the bear is a better pick.

“If the bear attacked me, people would believe me.” That women feel they won’t be believed shows that ALL of us have failed, not just the predators. 

When #MeToo first broke, a friend suggested I write something like what I just wrote above — about the part men need to play now that women have pulled the worst moments of their lives out and set them on display in order to plead with us to finally, at long last, believe them. It’s sad, and kind of gross, the scale of display that it took to get some men to snap out of denial and gaslighting, even for a short time. My friend suggested I talk about the little stuff, and the stuff even #GoodGuys do when they think noone’s looking, stuff I did, which she knew about, as a call for everyone to do better, not just to externalize the finger-pointing and claim a moral high-ground over the Cosbys of the world.

My friend suggested the hashtag, “#ItWasMe” – I was part of the background radiation that sets women slightly on edge about their safety at all times. To my shame, I didn’t have the courage to stand out with such a challenging thought at the time, because I was worried about confessing some of my own actions and failures, those things I apologized for in the past, those apologies I made to others, and promises I made to myself.

When I look back on my life? 

I’ve held and expressed opinions that didn’t respect women. I might still be wrong about some stuff.

I’ve taken part in a few different kinds of slut shaming and body shaming. I’ve passed on stereotypes and sexist judgments about a few women I’ve known. I’ve worked on this a lot.

Around other men, I’ve definitely laughed at that joke, or said nothing when I should have called out a gross word or attitude.

For all I know, one of those times, I sent somebody the message that it was okay, or cool, or acceptable even for people like me to hold such views or laugh at such jokes. That guy had lots of his own choices to make on his own personal path toward misogyny, and he’s responsible for himself in the end, but on his path, I could have been a roadblock, and instead, I stepped aside. For all I know, my choice to go along nudged someone else into becoming a bystander, too. Even trying to be mindful, I probably still miss some tiny choices like this.

I’ve pushed lines where I knew better, and I’ve been pushed away, had a line drawn, and tried again anyway. I’ve done that. I lined up my excuses, I made some apologies, but I also did those things. The specifics are between me and a few specific people, but I know what I did was wrong. Twenty-plus years later, it’s hard even now to write this and hit “publish.”

But without flinching, every man needs to reckon with this. Men can’t fix sexism on their own, but there’s stuff men can do, and there’s even stuff men are best positioned to do — like find those men who can only be persuaded by another man, and explain things to them. Men can be there in the locker room to shut down “locker room talk” that creates the permission structure for further disrespect. To be less passive about that, men need to look in the mirror… be honest about why she chose the bear, and go about changing the conditions — one locker room and restaurant table at a time — that keep creating men who are scarier to women than a wild animal. The first step, men taking a look inside, accounting for their own thoughts, words, and behavior, and being honest about their own worst points and weakest moments, is pretty damn hard, but without it, all the other steps are just posturing.

My World Famous Friend's Podcast

For anyone who doesn't know (because I've told them), my closest brushes with fame are:

• I once cooked spaghetti for a Christian rock band
• My uncle loaned Avril Lavigne the guitar that she used to learn how to play, back when she was an ambitious little whelp in his church praise group.
• I once passed model/movie star Jeon Jihyun at a bakery, close enough to make accidental eye contact with her
• I shook the hand and snagged a selfie with a sitting president of Korea (who later spent time in jail)
• During school, my wife was in a club with a guy who is now a major Korean film star. He came over to our house after Babyseyo was born
• I randomly bumped into a one of Korea's greatest classical violinists at a cafe once, and she and my wife now regularly exchange holiday gifts and stuff
• I was on a TV show where I judged the cooking of Yu Jaeseok, the guy dancing in the canary yellow suit in parking garage section of the Gangnam Style music video (who has also been Korea's most loved celebrity for a very long time)
• Korean-American popstar Eric Kim once guest-hosted a radio show I was on
• My best male friend during university is now an acclaimed, world famous New York Times Bestselling Author (that's what the book jacket says, and I'm going with it)

Well, ever since I knew him, before podcasts were even invented, Mr. Jonathan Auxier has basically been born to run a podcast. He has a nice speaking voice, takes pride in having thoughtful views and expressing them articulately and clearly, looooves hashing out ideas, is very good at disagreeing with people nicely, doesn't take himself too seriously, and talks about the world in a way that is a pleasure to listen to, using idioms and vocabulary in interesting ways, always trying to get the ideas in his head to come out of his mouth precisely right.

Mr. Auxier is now hosting a podcast called "A Good Story Well Told" (and if I'm not mistaken, that looks like his artwork in the logo). In it, he and another world-famous super-successful acclaimed author discuss books and other stories, their strong and weak points, and what would-be writers can learn about storytelling from their examples. If you love stories, or if you're intrigued by what makes one story work, and another story fail, that's exactly what they talk about, and you'll enjoy it a lot.

For me, I love looking at stories, disassembling them into their component parts, and figuring out why they did or didn't send me on their intended journey. When we were in university together, along with other topics, he and I stayed up all hours of the night talking about the movie we'd seen or the story we were reading for a class, doing exactly what he's now doing with another friend in this podcast.

So, if you love stories, listen to the pod. If you are one of my friends and you used to hang out with Jon, these will take you right back, and if you just like hearing two guys talk about something they know a lot about, this podcast is one of those. For me, it really was like sitting with my old friend for an hour, and I'm grateful for that. I miss him sometimes.

Go forth and enjoy!!

Squid Game Season 2 Predictions: Before I Watch

 Okay. Here are a few thoughts before I start watching Squid Game Season 2:

First, on the scale from "Sequels that made the orignal better" to "Sequels that were either unnecessary, or disappointing" (from T2 to Matrix: Revolutions) I give it... 75-25 odds that it will be a Matrix 2, not a Terminator 2.

Because I'm Rob, and this is my dang blog, we've got to overthink things, naturally, so here are some recipes for a good sequel. For simplicity (HAH!) we're skipping reboots, spinoffs, second chapters that had always been part of the plan, and prequels here, with apologies to Fury Road, Lightyear, Dune Two: Dunin' Time and Exorcist: When Pazuzu met Father Merrin.

1. The T2 template.

We saw a little of a world, but the film didn't explain everything, and at the end of the first movie, we still had Questions, or there were themes rich enough to warrant Further Investigation.

The T2 template takes the first film, and creates a sequel that fleshes things out. It answers some questions, and might look at the same/similar issues from a slightly different angle. There will be some new stuff -- characters, ideas, or wrinkles, and it might even introduce new themes, but everything is still of a piece with the original. At its best, it makes a world feel bigger, and more lived-in. The conflict or the Thing the Protagonist Wants might have grown in scale, complexity or nuance, and we understand more about how things work in that world, what tools the hero has to solve the problem, and what kind of person the hero is, or what kind of world they live in.

Successful examples: Terminator 2 and Empire Strikes Back are the high points of this template. John Wick 2 fits here, and the first two How To Train Your Dragon sequels.

Less successful attempts at this template: The Matrix 2 -- you forget how much exposition Matrix 1 had, because the pacing was so good, and the concept was so fresh, but The Matrix 2 was really, really talky, too much even for peak Monica Bellucci overcome (noble attempt, though). Were Avatar: The Way Of Water and Terminator 3 different enough from the first one that we really feel like we learned more about the world, or the main characters? Did they expand on the themes of the original enough to feel satisfying and unique, or introduce new themes that fit the original, but took them somewhere new? Or was Avatar 2: The Way Of Water basically just Avatar, But Underwater, and Terminator 3 simply T2 Again, Except Now the Killer Robot Is A Smokin' Babe?

2. The Godfather 2 template.

Take a world that gave us a character we liked, and put that character into a new or different situation that reveals something new about the character, and/or about the world, and/or deepens the ideas or themes or characterizations. It might even question or complicate the initial premise of the series, forcing us to reexamine its themes, or add a "but at what cost?" to the hero getting what they want in the first movie.

Successful examples: Godfather 2 is very much the same world as 1, but Michael Corleone is in a very different situation now, and the film takes the themes that made made the original resonate: family, loyalty, ambition and power, and really puts them to the test through the big betrayal. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade took that same great Indiana Jones character... and gave him an impossible-to-please father. Suddenly the confident swashbuckling hero is just another kid trying to win his father's approval, at the same time as dad is trying to keep up with his son on the swashbuckling side. It's a different look at a great character... but still the same package: it's very much an Indiana Jones film in pacing, storytelling and tone, but Indy is more relatable than ever before. Spider-Man 2 (Tobey Maguire, 2004) had Spider-Man asking if it was worth being Spider-man when it put his loved ones in danger and complicated his life. Meanwhile we saw more heroes, more aspects of Peter's life, and more complexity in the relationships established in Spider-man 2002.

Iron Man 3 gave an interesting version of this when it gave us Tony Stark dealing with PTSD after saving the world -- we'd been accepting the idea of superheroes stepping up to save the world for a long time by then without anyone asking, "Would a person who became a superhero... be okay?" Captain America: Winter Soldier asked, "What if the ultimate loyal soldier lost the certainty that his commanders were the good guys?"

3. The Aliens template

Take a world we've seen, where we know the basics of how it works, and offer us more of everything. This is similar to the T2 template, but taken further. More characters, more settings, more action, more things the protagonist or antagonist can do. New powers, new spells, new places. On rare occasions, this type of sequel can even be a whole different genre: Alien is a slasher/horror film, and Aliens is a military propaganda shoot-em-up '80s action movie.

A lot of superhero and fantasy sequels do this one, with varying levels of success. Iron Man invents a  suit that does more stuff. The Chosen One character studies under a mentor and masters the five point exploding palm technique, or travels to a new country to find The Really Important Thing. Thor unlocks new powers and goes to a whole new planet. 

1 and 3 are both on the "take the original premise further" spectrum, and this is the tightrope many sequels must walk: take the original premise too much further, and it might not even be recognizable as part of the same world (Gremlins 2: The New Batch is absolutely bonkers, to the point that it approaches the sublime, and makes criticism irrelevant); don't take it far enough, and the sequel is just a rehash, stale leftovers that add nothing. (Taken 2-11, Austin Powers 3: The Spy Who Repeats Gags, all the Home Alone sequels, and Jurassic Something Or Other: How Many Of These Are There Now?)

4. The Mission: Die Harder Faster and More Furious Forever Template

Just keep cranking out copies of the original. Make the chases more expensive, make the explosions bigger, make the technobabble more bewildering, stack more hot celebrities into the cast like cordwood and put the characters into new settings, and a certain kind of audience will come back for second servings like an all you can eat sundae bar.

This is fine. It's fine. Nobody got mad at James Bond for offering... basically the same movie... twenty times in a row, resetting the premise like a sitcom episode, before Daniel Craig's Bond first demonstrated that he remembered what happened the film before. Tom Cruise's commitment to practical effects and his insanity in doing his own stunts in the Mission Impossible movies will continue to be compelling until his body gives out or he dies on set, which I think is ultimately his life goal. Just keep mixing the elements together in new ways, like shaking a snow globe, and give us more John Wick suits and pistols, more Halloween rubber masks and meat cleavers, more superhero wisecracks and brain-addled slurring pirates, and more sneaky velocirapors and xenomorphs in your Jurassic and Alien franchises. Our appetite turns out to be bottomless.

 

Offering the same themes, feelings, and characters again and again can still work,  even on critical and artistic terms. Somehow the Toy Story series keeps adding installments, and each time we think, "It's already perfect. No need for another!" but then the new one feels as essential as if it had always been part of the plan. They're not changing the industry with new ideas, but the Paddington movies are just as charming on the twentieth rewatch as the first. It's magic, what they do.

It's like a late night booty call: you know why I called, and I know why you answered the phone.  It's not exactly romantic to show up at a FWB's door half-drunk at 1:30am, but that was baked into the bargain from the start too. Nobody overpromised, and everybody got what they wanted. It's fine.

5. The Rambo II Template

Grab a few working parts from the original, patch them together, and run with it. Some filmmakers even tell their creative team NOT to read/watch/learn about the source material. Sometimes this works: Army Of Darkness turned a low-budget horror film and its high camp remake into a sublime supernatural time-travel horror-comedy. Rambo II had little connecting tissue with First Blood other than muscles and guns but it put bums in seats. Sometimes it doesn't work. Cars was a sports movie, Cars 2 was a spy movie, and other than the occasional "Kachow" and, you know, talking cars, they were so different I had whiplash. If you went into Gremlins: The New Batch expecting anything like what you got from the first Gremlins film, you didn't know what the hell you were watching. (You were watching a work of pure cinematic genius, that's what. The ultimate logical conclusion of the slogan, 'Every idea is a good idea.')

So... before I start watching episodes of Season 2 of Squid Game (and yes, I know that a new season of a TV show might work differently than a sequel to a movie... but the limited play time, and the long period between original and follow-up make me feel more like I'm watching extended movies or mini-series' than straight-up TV shows), I'm going to predict a few things, and then see if I'm right.

First, I think Squid Game is in a difficult spot. The hardest sequel to make is for something that everybody loved because it was so fresh, so unique, so unlike anything we'd seen before. We'd seen "games to the death" shows and "making sport of human lives" shows before (Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Hunt, The Running Man, Escape Room, many inspired by a famous short story titled, "The Most Dangerous Game" --these films have been coming out since the 1930s), but the cognitive dissonance of using children's games, bright colors, grade-school musical instruments, and preschool production design created a mood that nobody had seen before, a mood where the contrast between the silliness of the games and the dread of the consequences grabbed the audience and added all kinds of layers about how the elites are treating the desperate class. It arrived in the middle of the first pandemic year, when everyone was sitting at home, inequalities had just been given a big old boost, and a lot of people were feeling fed up with... just .... things in general, as well as feeling jerked around by elites who didn't understand or care about them. It was the perfect set of themes, packaged in the perfect way, at the perfect time, to an audience perfectly prepared for it. It really was lightning in a bottle.

But how do you offer season two of something everybody loved because it was unlike anything they'd seen before?

It's not unlike anything they've seen anymore: at the very least it's like, you know, season one. And that's the problem. You can't be unlike anything we've seen before twice.

You can't make a Squid Game season that will cause the sensation that Season 1 caused. We're not shut in on lockdown anymore. We're still jerked around by the elites, but we have different outlets for that feeling now, whether that's the rantings of this or that politician, or this or that angry podcaster, or constant refreshing for updates on that story about that guy who shot that other guy. We've seen the primary colors and the kindergarten shapes and the childish games with deadly consequences all before. We've rooted for characters only to see them die in gut-punch twists. Nothing will ever land like the gut-punch of episode 6, the marbles episode, in season one, because we already saw that one, so now we know the showrunners are willing to do... that to the characters we care about. You can't kill Ned Stark twice. After the first time, you already know that anyone might be next, and that cat doesn't go back in the bag.

All that to say... for everyone expecting something as fresh and novel as Squid Game season one was... this season has its work cut out for it.

So which template should Season 2 follow?

The T2 template: add more, fill in more background, add new characters maybe, and expand on existing themes.

Well, I'd say that the final episode of Season 1 already filled in what background we needed. The conversation with the guy who invented the Squid Games basically made the statement the showrunners wanted to make about human nature. I don't see that adding backstory or depth would really add much to the characters here, and the only way to deepen the philosophical underpinnings would be... a ton of long, boring conversations. The characters in competition already had nuance and depth, and most of them died. The characters who weren't in competition -- The Salesman, and Front Man, and the guards and the VIPs -- work better if they are cardboard cutouts, I think: defining the parameters where the deadly games occur, and the basic inequality on which the games are premised. The cop who was undercover already revealed who he is, and dedicating an episode to his backstory isn't going to add much to the role he is playing in the story. The VIPs work better if they're cartoon caricature villains, mustache twirling bad guys with brazen vices and idiotic tendencies. I don't care which of them has a backstory that makes me pity his emotional vapidity... it doesn't strengthen the story for me to know that.

Can they expand the story into new settings and situations? Not really -- at least, not without Squid Game starting to look like other shows and films. Send them into nature and you've got Battle Royale. Send them into a booby-trapped nature or urban setting and you've got The Hunger Games. Send them into the city again (which they already did in Season 1, when everybody came back) and you run the risk of reminding viewers that... the desperation the characters felt in real life is the desperation we all feel already, and ... then Squid Game is a bummer, and yet another "life is hard" drama, instead of a fresh new view of that frustration and exploitation. I don't think Netflix is in the business of inciting revolutions.

It's really hard to think of ways for them to do something new within the premise, other than the totally, TOTALLY expected move of having the inmates revolt and try to blow up the games... just like they did in Hunger Games 2. Just like almost every hero in a "Humans hunting humans" story turn the tables on their hunters in the end. Oh. I guess not then. How else can you expand the premise?

I guess we'll see.

The Godfather 2 Template

Is there a place where there's room to subvert some of the characters or themes of season one? Not a whole lot, because most of the interesting characters died -- including the most interesting one, constestant #1, the old man. I'm not wild about the idea of dedicating part of a season to the motivations of a character who's gone. Maybe Front Man and his cop brother would have something interesting to add... maybe... but the themes of frustration, desperation and inequality? How do you poke at those or subvert them? The only way is by pointing out that we are watching these characters suffer just like the VIPs are... so why are we feeling empathy, or identifying with the contestants, comfortable in our living rooms with netflix on? ...there is some room for that, if the show finds a way to get that meta without being heavy handed, and even with very strong themes, Season 1 never struck me as being preachy, moralistic or heavy handed as it was.

Who would have second thoughts, anyway? One of the guards? How would that play out? The idea of seeing the games undermined... that could create some strong rooting interests. The theme of fair play -- "at least in these games, everybody has an actual shot" did run through last season, and breaking that trust might be interesting -- in Season 1, the doctor who was cheating suffered the consequences, reinforcing the feeling that fair play mattered. Also, that feeling of "That's not fair!" "He was cheated!" outrage... we HAVE already felt that in episode 1, at least once, and maybe more.

Other than that, which of the themes would bear being subverted? Your desperation isn't really that desparate? This inequality isn't really that exploitative? Nah. Those aren't working for me. Wouldn't go over well. Packaging similar themes in new, poignant ways is probably the best way for this season to run, and that will come down to bringing us a new set of characters we care about as much as we cared about the contestants in season 1, a tall order.

The Aliens template

This could be interesting -- offering more Squid Games, in bigger, broader and more impressive ways, and a lot of it could be achieved simply with which games they choose to play this time around, what contestants are asked to do. Maybe the compound where the contestants are kept can be shown, explained, and expanded. Maybe we can learn more about the guards... though that would take a lot of doing, a guard revolt could reveal interesting things about how the games work, except that it's pretty clear stepping out of line equals a bullet in the head for guards. A police raid? That would puncture the sense that this whole thing is enabled by collusion of the powerful. That wouldn't fit the themes at all. An escape attempt? Now we're getting warmer. That is my best bet for ways to expand and explain the Squid Games world while keeping its premise and main themes intact. Another would be further adventures of Hwang Jun-ho, the undercover police officer, perhaps exploring the compound and/or making contact with some of the contestants. That might be an interesting wrinkle, especially if his brother, Front Man's loyalties are put to the test. 

The Die Harder Faster and More Furious Forever Template

This might happen. We might see another well-crafted season of engaging characters, devious games, stomach-punch twists and devastating conclusions with unsatisfying answers to existential questions... leaving us ready for a third season of the same. And... I think I'd be okay with that, if the story unfurls beautifully. Sure. Give me another season of that. And another.

The Rambo II Template

No thank you. Could they make Season 2 the story of Gi-Hun, now with his hair dyed cherry red, training himself into a killing machine, tracking down and hunting the VIPs and the guards and every person involved with making the Squid Games possible, spouting 80s movie catchphrases and perhaps even walking away from some explosions? Oh, they could. And it might even be satisfying. But it wouldn't be devious and gut-churning the way season one was. It would be hard to offer a new cast of characters we cared about and identified with as much as we did with the contestants in season one, rooting for them to live or die, if instead we're watching Gi-Hun running through his Kill List like The Bride in Kill Bill. Could they find other ways for Season 2 to completely eschew Season 1's themes, genre and tone? Sure they could. But it wouldn't be the same show, so I'm not going to go into the possiblities here, because, I mean, if it's not going to stay the same show, anything could happen, so I'm rooting for aliens.

I think formally, the franchise Squid Game resembles the most is the Alien films, with primary colors and kids' games instead of shadows and spaceships -- most of the characters are just scenery for the monster to chew, except here the monster is The Game + human avarice + desperation + exploitation of the powerful instead of a black beast that hides in walls and spits acid. At most you can have a tiny handful of characters appear from one film/season to the next -- maybe Gi-hun, maybe a VIP or two, and a Front Man here and there, like the recurring androids in Alien, who mostly function to set the stage and set up the themes and conflicts and remind us that big superconglomerate company is evil AF. Then, if the writing's good, we care about a set of characters, and hate a different set of characters, and aren't sure whether to hate, pity or love two or three characters, as they figure out what will help them get through the Squid Games and win the top prize. And if it's done well, it'll be another season of compelling, sinfully watchable drama, and I'll be ready for season three as soon as I finish season 2.

Anyway, that's what I expect to see before I have started watching. Do I expect it to be popcorn-candy watchable? Hell yeah. Do I expect a few good characters and a few stomach punch twists? Hell yeah. Do I expect the VIPs to be better cast with higher quality actors? Hell yeah, now that the first one made a billion dollars for Netflix. I would actually love to see some stunt casting here. Bring in... Meryl Streep acting like the President of the USA from Don't Look Up, or Leonardo DiCaprio as a version of his evil plantation owner from Django Unchained, or... one of those groups of comedians who are always in each other's shows and movies, the Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, David Cross, Ed Helms, Jason Sudekis set, or the Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Danny Green, Bill Hader set. Go bananas here!  

I think they'll try to take bigger swings, but season one was such a big swing it's going to be hard to follow-up, much less top, while still seeming like the same thing it was in season 1.

But... to impress me? To make me feel like they really did top Season one? that'd take something risky... not just 'We're going to have aliens or other twists that make no story sense' but 'we're really going to bring the satire home now' risky. How to do that? 

Give me a set of VIPs who are deep-faked with the faces of our actual world's VIPs. Have them take off their masks, and it's ... Mark goddamn Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, and maybe a Vladimir Putin, and JD Vance or a Viktor Orban. Now THAT would take some brass ones, and really make sure the themes land, even for those who haven't been paying attention so far.

OK. Those are my thoughts and predictions about season 2 of Squid Game, without having watched or read a single thing about them, except season 1 and a few IMDB pages. I will definitely be watching it, and probably binging it, and honestly, I'm trying to keep my mind as open as I can for the show to impress me on its own terms, because that's how I enjoy TV. No spoilers in the comments, please, at least until... oh... February 2025, and if you don't want the show spoiled, and it isn't Feb. 2025 yet... don't read the comments.

I said what I said. Now off to actually watch them.

Martial Law FAQ: Why/How Did Korea Give Martial Law the big Nope?

So in my previous post I wrote about how and why Pres. Yoon Seok-yeol set his political career on fire.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the first of two big questions that have been on my mind ever since.

Question one: Why/How did South Korea put the Kibosh on Martial Law so Quickly?

I think there are a few factors feeding into this that are relevant to Pres. Yoon’s situation, and also to the next big question. 

The first thing, I think, is that President Yoon really, badly miscalculated what South Korea’s people would put up with, badly misreading South Korean peoples’ desire for a thriving democracy. And honestly, this is the headsmacking strange part for me. It should have been easy for him to properly calculate this. Like, really really, REALLY easy. 

Ya see, go right back to when my dad was born in the 1940s and earlier and every election in Canada has been free and fair. We haven’t been invaded or colonized. There have been ups and downs, and sure, the political process has gotten sticky and even raucous a few times (President Pierre Trudeau once declared martial law because a terrorist group was kidnapping politicians and threatening more), but every Prime Minister has more or less respected the will of Canada’s voters, at least insofar as giving up power when defeated at the ballot box, and acting as if their legitimacy as a leader was given to him by the people. That is a remarkable track record of stability that might even be called boring, and yeah, stability can breed complacency. People can forget how much it means, and how rare it has been historically, to have a stable democracy with a long unbroken string of free and fair elections, and ruling parties who have at least nominally been concerned with using the state’s power to try and make life better for the citizens.

But in South Korea, our first free and fair democratic election is within living memory. Within MY living memory, and I’m not that old, even if kids today can’t rap the intro to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 1987, a year I remember, was the first time South Koreans voted for their president without enough corruption, cheating or other shenanigans to doubt the outcome. 

Put another way: South Koreans who are alive today remember choking on tear gas, facing down firehoses and truncheons and worse, in demanding their own democracy. South Koreans who are alive today ran from bullets in 1980 Gwangju, when shitstain president Chun Doo-hwan pointed the military’s guns at his own people. Oh, by the way, Chun Doo-hwan’s military coup? That was the last time a Korean president declared martial law. South Koreans who are alive today can tell their kids and grandkids what democracy means, why it matters, and warn them about signs of leaders losing respect for the will of the people, because they saw it with their own eyes, and bore the bruises on their own arms and legs. In fact, if the average age of South Korea’s elected representatives are in line with most countries’, many of today’s elected representatives are about the right age to have been there themselves in 1987, adding their voices to the democracy protests that finally turned the tied. They know firsthand how hard you have to fight to get democracy back once it’s lost, because they were called upon to fight it!

Dear readers, that is NOT a generation to mess with. That is a fuck around and find out generation, and they will show you what they are made of again and again. 

Yoon fucked around, and he is nowhere near finished finding out. 

And that is the main point of this blog post.

There’s more, but it isn’t as important.

Why else did Yoon’s coup fail? If you want to undermine democracy, you need one of two things, and probably both: you need the people (or at least a large enough segment of the people to effectively bully, browbeat, intimidate or gaslight the rest), or you need the military on your side. Yoon did not have the people: he is/was never a highly charismatic leader who drew people to his side, or caused people to feel more loyalty to him than they felt to their democratic institutions. He’s so uncharismatic that even now, after weeks of scandal, I can’t picture his face in my head.

As far as I know (and please correct me if I’m wrong, readers,) Yoon didn’t even had some meaningfully influential sector on his side — all the buddhists, all the christians, all the union members, everyone in the southeast, everyone above age fifty or some such group— the kind of group that might rally to his side and try to drag along the rest. One or two demographics solidly on his side would have given him… not quite a fighting chance on its own, but it would have given him a puncher’s chance maybe, if everything broke exactly right for him. But Yoon? His popularity dropped within a month of becoming president, and his approval rating has been in the toilet for the entire 2 1/2 years of his presidency so far. This made it easier for opposition politicians to defy him, and it also meant that he’d never have enough people on his side to annoy/bully/badger the rest of the population into submission/resignation. There was nobody willing to break into a government building for him, and even when the police did it on direct orders, they weren’t happy about it. They did as little as they could while holding the positions they’d been assigned, not putting up a vigorous or well-organized defense as Korea’s people and politicians surrounded the National Assembly buildings and got the lawmakers over the fence so they could vote to repeal the martial law order. 

In general, Korea’s people were surprised by his move, against it from the drop, and showed where they stood. Compare with 1980, when Chun Doo-hwan successfully repressed a protest movement: in 1980, Chun Doo-hwan had friends highly placed all across the Korean military, and he was a military man himself. He know he could count on the generals coming to his side over president Choi Kyu-hah. Yoon didn’t have the military or the people. 

There was no way this coup-attempt succeeds. Not from this president, in this country, at this time, against this opposition.

Martial Law FAQ: setting a political career on fire, why it didn't happen in Korea, but it still might in America

 Okay… this one’ll probably be short.

So yes, South Korea’s (for now) President Yoon Seok-yeol declared Martial Law a few weeks ago, in a spasm of frustration about being blocked from his agenda by the opposition party (hey there buddy… politics get you down? Then don’t go into… politics.) The first impeachment vote failed for various political wrangling reasons, but public pressure grew, more politicians from Yoon’s party flipped, or decided it was politically advantageous to distance themselves from Yoon, and on December 14th, the National Assembly voted to impeach him.

As far as I can gather, declaring martial law this way was a pretty harebrained scheme, poorly developed, and clumsily delivered, and as soon as he did it, the backlash was swift, furious, and unambiguous. Korea’s political scene, and Korea’s people responded with a big, emphatic, “Nuh uh.” In the middle of the night, no less!

There have been tons of summaries, reviews and takes on this, it’s been a few weeks, and it’s all been very dramatic, so I don’t have a huge amount to add about Pres. (for now) Yoon’s move.

1. It was half-baked and poorly planned.

2. It could only have been half-baked and poorly planned, because, put very simply, any advisor with enough sense to develop a better plan, would also have enough sense to tell Yoon this was the stupidest idea from a world leader since Trump floated the idea of bombing hurricanes. Or injecting bleach to fight covid. Whichever of those you think is stupider. If you are limited to the advisors who don’t have much sense to begin with, this is what you get.

3. Some dipshits on youtube were talking about Korean politicians who broadcast their efforts to get into the Korean national assembly buildings live online, as if this was some hilarious attention-grabbing stunt that was totally epic (or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Fleek. No cap. Dab. Sus. Brat.) It was not. Keep in mind, youtube doofuses (Youtufuses), that under Martial Law, people can be arrested without reason… but it becomes a lot harder to arrest a prominent politician if he can say ‘See that camera? 15000 viewers are watching you arrest me right now. Some of them are recording the clip. Are you sure this is how you want to become famous?” There was a very, very, very good reason for him to be live streaming his effort to climb the fence and get into the National Assembly buildings.

4. Since Martial Law was overturned, protests have been growing in size, and the first effort to impeach him failed in the National Assembly when nearly all the representatives in the same party as Pres. Yoon left the National Assembly, so that they couldn’t vote, meaning the vote to impeach didn’t reach a quorum (a certain percentage of all representatives have to be present for some kinds of votes, or the vote isn’t valid — or else you could pass laws by saying ‘Everybody from my party, let’s meet at the legislative building at 3am, and we’ll pass these laws unanimously. Mwahaha!”) On December 14, as public pressure continued to grow, including street protests that have sustained impressive numbers, a movement to impeach passed.

5. This means the impeachment will be referred to Korea’s Constitutional Court — kind of like USA’s Supreme Court, with less corruption and politicization (low bar to clear). They will investigate the case, and ultimately either uphold the impeachment, removing Yoon from office, or overturn it, and return him to power.

6. How shameful if Korea’s conservative party has two conservative presidents impeached in a row! How embarrassing that after being utterly humiliated by the Park Geun-hye scandal, they have apparently learned nothing.

It’s kind of weird to me that two presidents in a row, from the same party, have proven so unfit… usually the kinds of politicians that survive long enough and rise high enough to become a party nominee have learned to be cagey, careful, and prudent by then. Politics is a meat grinder, sure, but the folks who reach the top tend to be survivors. And there are lots of ways politicians can be stupid, rash and corrupt in ways that won’t result in outright removal. Lots of scandals blow over.

It seems they didn’t after Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, but I really hope Korea’s conservative party will now have a serious rethink of how they choose candidates.

7. Part of the rhetoric Yoon used to justify declaring martial law was one of the old saws of the Korean right: claiming that politicians on the left were either in league with, or actually were North Korean agents, sent to destabilize South Korea. There is a very long tradition of hard right Korean politicians calling their opponents Norks (usually without evidence, or at least unconcerned whether there is evidence or not) to delegitimize them, to undermine the validity of their positions or the policies they argued for. When Chun Doo-hwan’s men gunned down student protesters in Gwangju, he arrested the leaders under allegations of them being North Korean spies (they weren’t) and future President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Daejung was arrested and nearly murdered under the same pretense. Waves of union-busting and protest suppression has been done under the same pretense. When Koreans demanded democracy in 1987, people accused the movement’s leaders of being in league with North Korea as a pretense to illegally arrest them. Every time someone suggests South Korea adopt any policy further to the left than “Perhaps it is the government’s job to rein in out-of-control corporate greed,” somebody calls them a North Korean commie pinko, either out loud in front of cameras, or in one of those viral chain text messages my Father-in-law receives.

And… you know what? Can the fact Yoon used that same stupid, ungrounded accusation as justification in his doomed coup attempt please be the dying breath of this move? Can we just accept that some people support progressive policies for their own sake, and not because they were compromised by North Korean spies? Pretty please could that stupid worn-out loser’s pot-shot now be retired from public use?

That would be nice.

8. Yoon Seok-yeol was a prosecutor before he became President. Before him, previous president Lee Myung-bak, the businessman, had trouble being president after being a CEO. And it strikes me that being a prosecutor is a really different type of leadership than being a politician. A prosecutor chooses their team, decides the parameters of their investigation, decides which investigations to pursue and which to abandon, and then builds the strongest case they can with their team, letting a judge or jury decide on the result. It’s a very one-sided approach to an issue, because the defense takes the other side, and you get a clear outcome with the judge and jury’s findings. Almost nothing about this process resembles the process politicians use to create and pass legislation.

The type of leadership you need to pass a law or a bill or a budget is completely different. It’s communication and compromise intensive, it requires listening and balancing different people and different groups’ wants, needs, and dealbreaker red lines. Being a CEO also looks nothing like politics, by the way — you can fire your opposition as a CEO, but you can’t fire the opposition leader in the national assembly. You can’t hire the team you want when some high-level government positions have to be approved by the house of representatives, who get to nix appointments they dislike. Every step of the political process is about persuading, negotiating, playing ball and adjusting to the needs of the other side, and calculating what result a move will get, but also how it will be perceived by the public, in ways that CEOs and prosecutors don’t really have to do in the course of their job.

Perhaps, just maybe… government would be more effective if parties nominated candidates for president… who actually had political experience?

Just thinking out loud here.

But here are the two big questions that have been bopping around in my head since I got text messages from my American friends (it was late in Korea: most people were sleeping) asking, “Hey Rob… just got the news. Everything OK there?” (I was watching a movie — I actually had to pause and google ‘Korea news’ to find out what it was)…

Question one: 

Why/How did South Korea put the Kibosh on Martial Law so Quickly?

I have a few answers, but I’m going to hit publish now and answer my two questions in future posts. So stay tuned!

On Meeting a Bear in the Woods

Social media has been buzzing with the news that if they were alone in the woods, many women would rather encounter a bear than a lone man. And the mens are MAD! Oh, they are in their feelings!

But before I engage further with the bear in the woods thing, I need to know: is the bear carrying a balloon and singing a song about hunny? Or wearing a raincoat, perhaps? Just want to check.

This meme is the exact opposite of mansplaining. Mansplaining is a man explaining something he might (might) understand, but definitely assumes the non-men around him do not understand. But here, we have non-men who understand something pleading with various men either to understand something they don’t understand, make a little more effort to understand something that shouldn’t be beyond their power of comprehension, stop pretending not to understand something they definitely do understand, or (and this is probably the real thing) to be a little less precious (perhaps even… man up) and show some dignity in the face of a truth that makes them uncomfortable. Whatever the words, there's a lot of gninialpsnam (plansmaining? Snailmanpin?) going on here.

What are men trying hard not to understand (or acting performatively offended to hear)? At its heart, a simple repackaging of the “all men are rapists,” discussion. If you get that idea, and why people deploy it in conversations, you can skip to part two of this blog post. You don't have to (maybe you like the way I write or something?) but you can.

There are some added paws, claws, marmalade and occasional ‘wakka wakka’s, but it boils down to the same reality: a lot, maybe most, perhaps even nearly all women feel unsafe around men they don’t know. We’re guilty until proven innocent. 

I probably deeply felt the injustice of being expected to prove my innocence, my good guy-ness, at some point in my life, but a lady friend really brought it home for me when she asked me, “how do you prepare for a date with someone you don’t know that well? For example a blind date?”

My checklist was pretty typical for my gender, I think: dress nice, shave, make sure there's cash in the wallet, gas in the car, tickets for the thing and reservations at the place. If things are hopeful and you weren’t raised in the “wait for marriage” community some of us were, condom in pocket, too. Check the trunk of the car for that duffel bag of fur handcuffs, riding crops, harnesses, fireman helmet and French maid costume, fresh batteries, consent forms, robe and wizard hat every sensible person keeps in the trunk of their car next to the spare tire. Nothing unusual for a garden variety man-on-a-date.

“Okay,” my lady friend said. “Here’s what I do…” 

-influence planning to ensure the date’s at a place and time that will be well-lit and busy enough to have witnesses

-locate her self-defense device (pepper spray, brass knuckles, taser, etc.)

-make sure it’s full/charged/loaded etc.

-put it in a spot in her handbag for very quick access

-match it with shoes that were ok for running in a pinch

-tell a trusted friend where she’d go, when she’d be back, and what time to start worrying (text updates for changes of plan)

-set up a “quick exit” codeword to text to that friend, at which time the friend would call back and pretend there was an emergency, so she had to go. (this was not, she assured me, as cool as when Trinity does it in the Matrix. It was scary.)

During the date:

-only visit the toilet when her drink was empty, or a girl has agreed to “watch my drink” while she goes

-scan places she entered for the number of exits, and number of women around

This friend wasn’t choosing “risky types” of boys to date - she did all this invisible work on the off-chance, because the most dangerous guys don’t look dangerous.

“On the off chance, you say?” says the Fictional Person Who Argues With Me (FPWAWM), “Sounds kind of… PARANOID!”

That’s a good word, paranoid. Let’s unpack it a bit.

FPWAWM: (Groans dramatically)

A paranoid person takes precautions, but not all precautions are paranoid. Can we agree on that? 

FPWAWM: (into his hands, muffled) yes.

Every day, everybody takes precautions for tons of bad stuff that might, or might not happen. Stuff like seatbelts, bike helmets, smoke detectors, CPR training courses, a few tylenol in the backpack, and waiting at crosswalks are all precautions. We don't mind them, might not even think about them, because they don't cost us much time, money or inconvenience. Nobody thinks it's paranoid to wait at a crosswalk, or wear a bike helmet, or toss an extra charger in their backpack.

Precautions only become paranoid when they don’t match the actual frequency or seriousness of the bad thing that might happen. Movie stunt drivers who come to work in airbag suits are being perfectly sensible, because filming car stunts is way dangerous. But in other contexts, like say, driving to church, the very same airbag suit would be considered paranoid. The word paranoid means we’re having a conversation about how risky something is. We have to compare our precautions to an accurate assessment of the risk, before deciding who’s being paranoid. Not enough caution? Reckless. Appropriate caution?  Sensible. Too much caution? Don’t be so paranoid!

If the risk is high enough, the word paranoid doesn’t attach, no matter how many precautions we take. YES I want the skydiving pack with a triple redundant parachute release mechanism. Unless you have a quadruple redundant one in storage. Me no want splat.

So, FPWAWM, we need to measure that "on the off chance" a bit more accurately before bringing the word paranoid into the conversation. Words mean things.

"and will you be having the fish, the chicken,
or our vegetarian option for the meal?"

If I wore a skydiving suit every time I took a commercial flight… would that be paranoid? 

FPWAWM: Airplane crashes are pretty devastating,, and yet I want to say it would be.

And your impulse would be correct. Here's why:  most years, fewer than 1000 people worldwide die in airplane crashes (see below). 1000 is a big number to show up at your coffee shop during Tuesday lunch break, but for a global fatality rate, in something, it’s really, really low! A skydiving suit IS a bit paranoid for a commercial flight. 

However, if we saw 50 000 plane crash deaths per year, or 500 000, the calculation changes. Maybe a parachute isn't such a bad idea anymore. Or an Inspector Gadget helicopter hat. Or taking the train instead.

So what’s the risk of sexual assault, which is the real subject of the bear discourse, then? Is a woman taking all the measures listed above more like the weirdo on a commercial flight in a skydiving suit, or more like a soccer mom telling the kids, “buckle up” before she starts the car?

(that airplane crash chart is courtesy of Statista.com)

Let's make a risk assessment.

Even without data, if you were online in 2017, during that October when #MeToo first went viral, you know women's risk of being a sexual assault victim is pretty high, that a lot of women experience that sometime in their lives.

FPWAWM: “…” 

You want data, I guess, FPWAWM? 

FPWAWM: “Yes.” 

Are you sure? 

FPWAWM: “Yes.” 

OK then. RAINN - the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network reports here (RAINN link) that one in six US women will be the victim of an attempted rape or completed rape in her lifetime. Men get raped too (1 in 71, sez Wikipedia, which isn’t nothing, but which is fewer than 1 in 6) Wikipedia link (I know, I know), but even for male rape, the rapists are still overwhelmingly male. How overwhelmingly? Ninety-frikkin' nine percent. (no, that is not a typo). What percentage of rapists or would-be rapists are actual members of the Ursidae family? I think the number there is zero, or really really really close to zero (shudder).

Who are we meeting in the woods again?

1 in 6, plus 1 in 71, with 99% of it perpetrated by men… context-free, that’s enough on its own, isn't it? Is that enough risk assessment? Can we say precautions are not paranoid?

FPWAWM: "..."

Fine. Context: here are some other risky things humans do. Many humans drive cars. We did not evolve to drive cars, but we do anyway. 1.3 million people a year die in car accidents.

What precautions do we take to avoid being part of that 1.3 million? We pay car insurance, wear seatbelts, swallow the extra cost (without even complaining) of manufacturers building safety features (required by law) into our cars, consent to an entire system of safety regulations and traffic laws run by the government and enforced by the police, and basically accept the tickets and fines we get if we don’t follow the rules. We whine, but we pay, and we accept that those safety laws exist, and should. 

Eight million people a year die of smoking-related diseases. For that eight million, society tolerates or even welcomes massive cigarette taxes, taxpayer-funded anti-smoking advertising and education campaigns, extensive regulations over every aspect of the tobacco industry, and we even let them put horrifying photos on every cigarette package, which go on display where kids can see them. We send smokers off to designated smoking areas like grade-school kids standing in the corner. IMAGINE how much complaining we'd hear from any other group with any other habit if we told them they had to leave the building and stand in the winter wind to indulge their habit. But eight million people a year is enough that we more or less consent to it.

Is one in six US women (sometime in their lifetime), extrapolated to some worldwide number, more than eight million a year worldwide? I’m not going to torture you with my back-of-the-napkin math here: it’s hard to math this math because:

It’s hard to stack that 1 in 6 up with other countries, because of differences in laws, definitions of rape, understandings of consent, and other differences make it hard to compare country to country with confidence that we’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison, and not apples-to-oranges. Add to that the fact a lot of rapes and rape attempts go unreported, even in anonymous surveys, for various reasons, and the real number might be more than one in six. Maybe a lot more. Probably not less, though.

Most of the data I’ve seen about sexual harassment and rape is of the “at some time in her life” or "during her university years" type, which is hard to translate into a “per year” number that stacks up directly against the 1.3 million car crash deaths and the eight million smoking deaths per year. It is hard for me to brain those numbers because I am a word guy, not a statistics guy.

But even without braining them rigorously, I can lick my finger, stick it in the air, and say I’m pretty sure, in fact almost certain it shakes out to WAY more than 8 million assaults a year worldwide, even more than the 9.3 million we get if we combine car crash deaths and smoking deaths. If men were a car, there’d be a recall.

If anyone knows a link where someone brained the math more mathily, please share it! Or if someone is data-brained enough to number-crunch those numbers, I’d be grateful. But for today, it is enough to say we are definitely way above the threshold of “dangerous enough to take precautions,” and what level of precautions? We'd still be far, far from paranoid at the "everybody wears a seatbelt by law" level of precaution, which is a lot, if you think about it. If you disagree, Evil Knievel and the cast of Jackass would like a word with you.

1 in 6 is one spin of Russian roulette.

And that 1 in 6 was ONLY for rape and rape attempts. Add  leering, following, catcalling, obscene texts or phone calls, stalking, groping, lewd comments, gross nonconsensual camera stuff, and how high does the ratio go? That stuff, which all adds to that constantly on-edge, unsafe feeling women are talking about when they bring up the bear thing, isn’t even counted in the 1 in 6.

If you’re a man reading this, and you’re mad about being compared to a bear, ask a woman who’ll tell you the truth how high above one in six she thinks the ratio would go if we counted all that noise, too. I have a feeling I know what answer I’d get.

One spin of Russian roulette. It’s perfectly reasonable to be nervous about a strange man in the woods.

(This webpage says 35% of women have faced sexual harassment… but again, what are our definitions?)

FPWAWM: “I’m not convinced.”

Really? Well, let’s keep going, then.

Next question: Why DO bears hang out in the woods? What are they up to? And what is a MAN doing in the woods?

Think of all the things bears do. 100% of those things happen in the woods. They eat, sleep, climb things, search for Eeyore’s tail, and make marmalade, all in the woods. That means, “find and harm a lone woman” is a long ways down on a bear’s to-do list, far far below "find a tree trunk that can also be a back-scratcher" 

If you ask “What is that bear up to, by itself in the woods?” the answer is, “Where else would it be?”

Then, ask what that MAN in the woods is up to?

Well, of all the things men do, most do not happen in the woods. Towns, villages, buildings, houses, cars sports bars and bowling alleys all rank higher than the woods. Also, the things men do in the woods are usually group activities, like hiking or camping or LARPing or calling on dark spirits from the unknowable beyond. Of the things men ONLY do in the woods, and ONLY alone… the list is getting short. The top few items are still probably harmless: (find a cool walking stick, practice ninja skills, rehearse arguments they lost earlier) but a little ways down the list are a few that happen in the woods specifically because the woods don't have escape routes, lines of sight, locking doors, CCTVs, law enforcement, or nearby witnesses. What kinds of activities check THOSE boxes? Nothing wholesome. 

“What is that man up to by himself in the woods?” The best answer is, “I don’t know, and I don’t care to find out.”

There’s a very small cost for thinking a man in the woods is up to no good, and being wrong. My punishment for avoiding him: a little lost time, and a lost chance to meet someone who might be cool.

On the other hand, there’s a very very high cost for thinking a man in the woods is probably safe, and being wrong. Walk up to the wrong man thinking he's safe, and we’re dealing with life-altering trauma. 

This is what the saying “better safe than sorry” was invented for.

FPWAWM: “I’m not saying you’ve persuaded me, but…”

At this point, FPWAWM, it’s starting to seem like you just don’t WANT to see it from women’s point of view. Really think about whether that's happening right now, and that would mean.

FPWAWM: “No comment.”

Another thing about bears: the same actions – the stuff in the forest safety pamphlet – will keep you safe from almost every bear. Unless that bear really really wants you to win an Oscar, you’re probably good. 

But men are not so predictable. Backtalking a catcaller can have a range of effects, from an abashed apology to being followed and targeted. You never know what you’re gonna get, from man to man, or even from the same man on different days.

That uncertainty is terrifying when someone is bigger, probably stronger, and might be inclined to violence (and you won’t know if he is until it’s too late). Add to this the knowledge that if he attacks you, a lot of people won’t believe you, have even been culturally programmed to blame you if you report it. If you follow the tips on the safety pamphlet, bears usually aren’t inclined to violence. They’re inclined to bear stuff, like catching salmon, the bare necessities of life, and preventing forest fires.

FPWAWM: “But I’m a Good Guy! I’m not One Of Those Guys! Not All Men are like that!”

Sure, but she doesn’t know that yet, does she? And don't forget that most human predators know how to make themselves appear harmless, so rando mando is guilty until proven innocent.

FPWAWM: “Perhaps if I just had a chance to explain that I’m not a predator…”

Good luck with that, but think on this: the things you'd say to try and persuade a woman that you're okay... are the exact things a predator might say to get that woman alone and… preda her. Saying you're one of the good ones IS a red flag itself, kind of the same way the people who say "Trust me" the most are the biggest liars, and people who say “I know a lot about this,” often don’t.

FPWAWM: Well, ok. I’m not saying those reservations are unreasonable. I’m really not. But… if I’m guilty until proven innocent, isn’t it fair that I get a chance to, you know, prove that I am… innocent?

Fair point… but perhaps alone in the woods is not a time and place where your chance of doing so is very high.

FPWAWM: So what can I do?

Read the fucking room! Instead of alone in the woods, approach women in the places where it’s socially acceptable and normal for men to approach women, like singles bars, club meetings, and social gatherings. Take your shot in places where the answer to the question “what’s he doing by himself HERE” is something obvious and boring like "getting a latte, looking for a book to read, or sharing one of his interests with like-minded people.”

FPWAWM: “Okay. I get it. Join a book club. But I’d just like to point out that any persuadable person would have already been persuaded 400 words ago, Rob.”

So you admit you don’t want to be persuaded?

FPWAWM: “I admit no such thing. I just want to know why you are really still going on about this?”

I’m glad you asked.

FPWAWM: “Oh shit. That’s your ‘pontification’ face.”

It is.

FPWAWM: “What have I done?”

Stay tuned for part two!

An Agonizing Step-By-Step Account Of My Decline Into AI Generated Madness

 So, I had a bit of fun a few days ago. I was messaging with a friend who needed a hug, and to be a bit whimsical, I wrote "I wish I had eight arms so that I could give you extra hug for the hug." 

Well, that inspired me to head over to Open AI to see what Dall-E would create for me if I asked it to make a picture of that, and... well...

let's just say it would have been faster, and funnier, if I'd grabbed a box of crayons and some paper. Here are some of the high/low points... I'm not going to copy/paste each prompt, except to say that if I didn't mention each detail I mentioned, which appeared in previous pictures, ol' GPT would immediately forget.

"He must have curly hair." "he must have eight arms" "only the man has eight arms. the woman has two arms." and so it went.

This is the the image I uploaded to start, asking Dall-E to flesh this out into a full picture.

and then...

Okay. Good start, Jeebes. Except arms are Robman arms, not random roller-coaster-harness unattached to people arms. And arms are not Cronenberg SpiderMonsterMan arms. They are NormalHumanMan arms.

"Ah I understand Robman. Here is normal human arms but not do what you want. Also YouBuffNow."

Hmm. MeBuffNow is ok with me, actually. And curly hair is good. But extra arms are for hug! Please  extra arms all making hug please. And woman's eyes blue, even though it was in the news that Dall-E is bad at asian faces.

Ah. Right. Gotcha Rob. YouBuffNow arms and EvaGreenLady in elf village. Happy?

Oh, Jeebes. I said man is EightArmsMan. Please correct.

 *(these are not the prompts I wrote word for word. These are summaries of my annoyingly detailed attempts to get through to a digital frog brain)*

A yes. Sorry Rob. Forgot EightArmsThing. Here is EightArmsThing except they are KaliTheDestroyer arms, not ArmHugArms. And Spot The Detail I  Forgot.

Jeebes.

Yes Rob?

I spotted it.

Right away?

Right away.

Doh.

For next picture, remember: Rob is CurlyHairMan, and EightArms are not EightHinduPaintingArms. They are HugGiveHugArms. Didn't we cover this?

We did, Rob, but me am not a smart.

The picture above was the one I sent to my friend. Close enough, dangit!

OK, Jeebes. I feel overconfident. NewFriendPicturePleaseNow.

I have another friend who isn't the kind I console with imaginary hugs, but one who enjoys zany and weird things, and... this is as zany and weird as it gets, so... here we go.

Jeebes.

Yes Robman?

New Picture.

Same picture?

No. New picture.

Same picture.

No. New picture.

Same....picture?

Repeat after me: New.

New.

Picture.

Picture.

New Picture.

BoringPicture.

SamePictureIdea please, except woman has straight blonde hair and green eyes now.

Jeebes!

Sorry Robman I was checking something and I only heard blonde hair and green eyes. Here is PleasantvilleSundayBest couple. You wanted that right?

No, Jeebus. Bad!

Sowwy.

EightArmsMan right? EightArms. And CurlyHairRobMan. And GreenEyesWoman is *quirky* and has mischievous smile. And SportyClothes not PleasantvilleSundayBest.

Okay. Here is SuperheroRobMan and HairLady with DramaSky and OverlyAttachedGirlfriendSmile. Best picture so far except not being anything you asked for in your prompt.

That is correct, Jeebes. Great pic except not being anything I asked for. EightArmsMan, remember? And shorter blonde hair.

Rob.

Yes, Jeebes.

Sorry I wasn't listening again.

Jeebes... this is another pretty good picture except for not being any of the things I asked for.

Umm... I am an AI so I'm not sure. Do I say Thank You after people say something like that?

No. You sit quietly and think about what you've done.

I think very fast, you know.

*Rob shakes head in disgust*

Listen carefully, Jeebes. The woman has straight blonde hair, and the man has eight arms. We've been saying this again and again, Jeebie.

Did I tell you I am not a smart?

Yes you did.

Also, did I tell you I am not a smart?

Just make the picture, Jeebes.

Rob

Yes, Jeebes.

I have caption for this one.

What?

I thought of caption for this picture.

What is it?

HellodoyouhaveamomenttotalkaboutourLordandSaviorJesusChrist?

Cute.

Cute is ... good... so... finish now?

Not even a bit. 

Poo.

So, remember, Jeebes, EightArmGuy is giving hugs. HUGS! And Robman is CurlyHairman, Right? Also... why are extra hands CronenbergWerewolfClaws?

You said Twilight sky, so I added Twilight werewolfclaws. I can adds SparkleVampire too?

No. No SparkleVampire. EightArms is HugArms

Sorry I forgot.

And Robman is CurlyHairman.

Okay I remember this time.

The one above is one of my favorites, actually. The composition and the lighting are pretty good, actually, except... CLAWS! The extra hands have CLAWS! And... how many feet there for two people? 

Jeebes!

Yes Rob?

I see more claw fingers.

I thought you liked those.

Twilight is UnGood, not VeryGood.

I thought everyone liked Twilight.

How the hell did you come to that belief?

I was created by reading the internet.

Oh yeah. 

...

Anyway, I have notes.

...

So. CurlyHairMan is good: NoBeardyMan is correct! And LadyPerson has green eyes, which is correct.

Perfect! We finished?

No.

Jeebes, make sure RobMan is embracing the woman with many arms, not LadyWoman embracing the man with many arms. And no horror movie claws, I mean it. Write this down: Twilight Bad.

I... Am... Not... Writing... That... Down... but here is picture.

Rob. I made Hindu folk art.

You did, but I didn't ask you to.

Oops. I was thinking about the Twilight thing I guess.

And also Kali the Destroyer, it seems.

*CATCHPHRASE*

What's that?

Kali the Destroyer's catchphrase.

Mythological deities don't have catchphrases.

Stop! Hammertime!

That is not Thor's catchphrase, and MC Hammer is a real person.

Seriously? You humans are weird.

Listen carefully, Jeebes: I said, the man has to be EMBRACING the woman. And she has blonde hair. BLONDE hair!

Nice VanGogh sky though.

OK Rob, what about this?

You like?

Let us never speak of the Pennywise Lovecraft-Groot Joker and sundress Harley couple photo again.

No TwilightWerewolfHands though.

Focus, Jeebes, FOCUS, or we'll be here all night.

No we won't. You'll reach your three hour content request maximum before you can get me to listen to you.

Dammit, Jeebes, we need to have a talk. RobMan is CurlyHairMan. Hug is sweet, not VampireZombieHorror clutching, and smile is affectionate, not greedy leer.

Down here we all float.

NO Jeebes. NO. Go reread everything I said above.

"oh yeah. Now I remember."

Okay, getting closer, Jeebes. But... Blonde hair! No horror lines on arms! Arms attached to humans (to the man in particular) why man is BeardyMan again?

beardyman is beardyman because beardyman is beardyman, Rob. No joker hug? Fine. (stomps imaginary digital foot) Have orchestra conductor Gatsby hug!

Jeebes good because no horror?

You do NOT get praise for creating images that have ceased to be butt-clenching terrifying.

You so picky Rob. You PickyMan.

RobMan becoming tiredman. OK Jeebes. No orchestra conductor Gatsbyman. RobMan is not BeardyMan. He is just RobMan. Woman is StraightHairLady. All ExtraEightArms are Robman arms, embracing LadyFriend so no arms with BlondeLady shirt sleeves on ExtraHugArms, K!

So what I hear you saying is RobMan FabioMan?

You know what? Forget it, Jeebes.

You have reached your limit for messages and pictures for this time period. Please wait until 9:32pm to make another request of OpenAI's content tools.

You know what else, Jeebes?

You have reached your limit for messages and pictures for this time period. Please wait until 9:32pm to make another request of OpenAI's content tools.

SCREW YOU, JEEBES! You're totally useless!

You have reached your limit for messages and pictures for this time period. Please wait until 9:32pm to make another request of OpenAI's content tools. (With hurt tone)

Next time I'm just going to get a box of crayons and draw my own damn picture.

Fine.

Noam Chomsky and Nick Cave wrote interesting and eloquent statements on AIs creating content. I tried to make a silly picture.

Point made? 
Point made, I hope.