Observations…

Let’s talk… CPR? Because apparently women aren’t being saved often enough via CPR. And the blame is… not using female mannequins for CPR training, apparently…

In the comments to the above short, a LOT of men pointed out that the problem isn’t that.

For starters, most men likely were trained for CPR on a female mannequin. Specifically the Rescuci Anne mannequin. I was. In high schools in two different parts of the country. This is where the “Annie, are you okay?” line comes from. And this was pretty much the standard for CPR training mannequins for decades, at least through the end of the 20th century.

And a female mannequin is perfect for CPR training anyway. Simply because a woman’s breasts when she’s laying down tell you exactly where to place the heel of your wrist for performing chest compressions: right between them toward the lowest part of the sternum. So why would female mannequins not be used for CPR training? Well apparently that’s the case currently.

But is that really a problem? Not really, and I don’t see why anyone would think it to be one. A woman’s chest anatomy isn’t so different from a man’s that training on a male mannequin cannot transfer.

So something else is afoot. And it’s quite simply… women aren’t receiving CPR nearly as often as men because men aren’t nearly as willing to perform it on a woman. So why is that? Are men afraid of boobs? Hardly. Instead it might have something to do with headlines like this: Chinese Teacher, 42, Faces Groping Allegations For Performing CPR On Woman.

And that was pointed out to Dr Gabrielle. Who then… completely lost the plot.

And as one commenter pointed out in very striking fashion in response, Dr Gabrielle was completely missing the point:

This response misses the asymmetry in how people evaluate risk.

The issue isn’t whether false accusations are statistically common. Fear doesn’t operate on base rates. It operates on perceived downside. No man is doing probability calculations in that moment. The thought process is simply: if this goes wrong, it could ruin my life. Whether that outcome is rare is beside the point — the cost is unbounded from the individual’s perspective.

So evidence about rarity doesn’t actually address the fear. You’re responding to the middle of the equation, but the decision happens upstream, at the level of threat perception, not rational risk assessment.

That’s why this is largely a social trust problem, not an information problem. When people feel they can’t rely on others to act in good faith, they avoid actions where the downside is personal and severe, even if the probability is low. CPR falls into that category for some men.

You can disagree with that behavior morally, but explaining it requires understanding how fear under asymmetric risk actually works.

This is similar to flying versus driving. Everyone knows flying is statistically safer than driving, yet fear of flying is common while fear of driving is not. That’s because people don’t evaluate risk by frequency alone. They evaluate it by the severity of the outcome if something goes wrong. Driving has a wide range of outcomes — many accidents are minor or survivable — whereas a plane crash has a narrow outcome distribution that is almost always catastrophic. When failure implies near-certain death, probability matters less than consequence. Fear tracks the worst-case scenario, not the average one.

That any men are accused of sexual assault for performing CPR on a woman is enough to deter men from performing CPR on women. We just don’t want to take the risk.

You’ve probably seen this comic panel floating around:

That came out in 2013. MeToo had yet to launch and leave behind it’s dinosaur-ending blast crater. But what was in full-swing at that time was online feminism giving us plenty of ideas like… Schrodinger’s Rapist… (I wish I was making that up…) And “if she’s drunk, she can’t consent“. And “believe all women” was coming around the bend.

So it’s unsurprising that we now have women going to TikTok and other platforms saying “Why don’t men approach us anymore?” or “Why are men oblivious to our attempts at flirting?” Because the cost of guessing wrong on subtle hints is a hell of a lot higher today than when I was in college.

So now it has become… “Why won’t men perform CPR on us?”

You’ve probably heard of Good Samaritan laws. These exist to shield someone from civil and criminal liability for any adverse outcomes (e.g., additional or severe injury) when they are acting reasonably and in good faith to save someone’s life or otherwise remove them from danger . If you pull someone from a burning building or… catch someone jumping to their death like in The Incredibles, you can’t be held liable for any injuries or other adverse consequences that result from those reasonable good faith actions.

But that only stops actions within Courts of Law, not the court of public opinion. As another commenter pointed out:

Also, a bystander with a camera phone can video you while screaming nonsense “You don’t have to touch her like that!” Or other comments that would create doubt in the rest of the people later on. I’ve heard some people’s biggest fear is becoming a meme online. Add that on top of the perceived false allegations. You’re probably better off aiming for women to get training in CPR in this age of ignorance.

And I’ll go one step further.

Remember where I said that Good Samaritan laws only protect someone acting “in good faith”. It would not surprise me if there are women out there who feel that no man can “in good faith” perform CPR on a woman. Because even a willingness to do so is rooted purely in his desire to touch women, their breasts in particular, especially a woman who can’t fight back against him.

And let’s not even go down the rabbit hole of “rescue breathing”…

Crew58 seems to have grasped the concept as well in declaring that “Administering CPR and using an AED is not assault. It’s time to change our way of thinking”. And bringing up AEDs is apt here since administering one does require removing clothing since the pads must be applied to skin.

Others taking advantage of good Samaritans is why Good Samaritan laws exist to begin with. There are outcomes, though, that laws cannot prevent. Such as a Good Samaritan’s actions and motivations for carrying them out being litigated in the court of public opinion.

And the second-guessing of a man’s motivations or actions in performing CPR on a woman.

You’ve likely heard stories of found wallets being “UNO reversed” (or is it “reverse UNO’d”?) into accusations of theft. You find a wallet, take it to the rightful owner, and they turn around and say “There was $500 in cash in here. Where is it?” or something like that accompanied with a threat to call the police if you don’t front the cash on the spot. It’s a common scam tactic, unfortunately.

And knowing that such could be pulled on us, my wife and I didn’t hesitate in turning a wallet we found in our apartment parking lot over to the police. Not the apartment manager. Not back to the rightful owner. The Lenexa Police Department. (We lived just down the road from a precinct.) With our contact details attached. And our fingerprints on the wallet, too. Which, I’ve pointed out before, both our fingerprints are on file since we both had concealed carry permits.

Plus it sets up an instant check had the wallet’s owner tried to pull a “reverse UNO” and accuse us of theft, since the officer could instantly reverse that back on them, “Why would they steal from the wallet before turning it in to us with their identification details attached to it?” You know… why would we set ourselves up for an instant arrest and criminal charges? Sure plenty of people are likely dumb enough to do that, but most of us are not.

As the first commenter I quoted above said, “When people feel they can’t rely on others to act in good faith, they avoid actions where the downside is personal and severe, even if the probability is low.” Such as handing the wallet back to its rightful owner instead of taking it straight to the police. And I believe we mentioned the probability of that to the officer as our reasoning for giving it over to the police.

But the fallout from that lack of good faith is people avoiding being Good Samaritans to begin with. People leaving wallets where they fell to be picked up with someone with genuinely nefarious interests or motives. And men, specifically, avoiding performing CPR and rescue breathing on women to avoid the likelihood, however small, of being accused of sexual assault.