When I was depressed in my 20s, I used to fantasize about getting in a bar fight. I would imagine myself leaving my apartment in the middle of the night, going to one of Chicago’s many corner bars, finding some loud asshole and actively provoking him until it came to blows. It would be quick, and painful, and triumphant, and real. To this day, I’m still trying to understand why that was the fantasy I had. Especially because all the available evidence suggests I would have lost that fight badly.

I’ve trained in several martial arts: American Kenpo when I was a kid, Chinese Kenpo and Judo in college, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu briefly after grad school, and Capoeira even more briefly last year. In theory, I should at least be somewhat prepared for a bar fight. In practice, the only actual physical altercation I’ve ever been in was when I traded sucker punches with another seventh grader after PE.

According to the videos my YouTube algorithm has been serving me lately, though, none of my martial arts training would have mattered in a bar fight anyway. Accounts like Karate by Jesse and Martial Arts Journey with Rokas continually hammer home one critical point: martial arts learned in a gym in no way prepares a person for a real street fight. The martial arts I learned — from the practiced forms of karate, to the impressive throws of judo, to the stylized dance moves of capoeira — have nothing to do with the swift, chaotic, and bloody reality of an actual combat situation. Even at the jiu jitsu school where I briefly studied, the general opinion seemed to be that if you wanted to learn real fighting, you needed to study mixed martial arts.

Mixed Martial Arts — MMA — is a relatively modern term for an ancient practice. Since ancient Greece, dudes have been getting into the ring with other dudes and trying to beat the shit out of each other with minimal rules governing the fight. MMA fights are full contact, and are generally decided by either knockout or submission. Mixed martial artists combine elements from many different combat arts to create a style that is optimized for “real” fighting.

But how real is it, really? Certainly, a trained MMA fighter would have better luck than I would in a bar fight, but MMA fights still have rules. Nobody ever pulls a knife or a gun. Nobody gets ganged up on by three guys. Everybody wears special equipment, and everybody shows up to the ring knowing exactly when and where the fight will happen. Basically, MMA is bullshit for babies. It’s not true self-defense. What we need is a competition that tests competitors in realistic self-defense scenarios. What we need… is the Ultimate Self Defense Championship.

The USDC is a mid-budget YouTube series published by Martial Arts Journey with Rokas, which recently sucked me in after appearing on my feed. The premise is simple: six contestants from different fighting backgrounds compete in a series of reality-show-style challenges meant to simulate actual street-fighting conditions. Players are asked to survive for thirty seconds while trapped in a small room with a knife attacker, for example, or serve as bouncers at an extremely chaotic night club. Each participant is assigned points based on their performance in each challenge, and the person with the most points at the end wins, just like in a real street fight.

The series is pretty goofy, and fun to watch. I particularly enjoyed the good-natured and totally incompetent Shaolin monk, Ranton, and the eminently practical “regular guy” contestant, Craig. But it wasn’t until Episode 5 when I finally understood what the show was doing.

Episode 5 takes place on a moving bus. The idea is to simulate combat in a more realistic setting, rather than the clean open floor plan of a martial arts dojo. Combat’s not the only thing that’s being simulated, though. The twenty minute episode is packed to the brim with basically every male fear.

To begin, a junkie sits down next to the contestant and starts openly shooting heroin on the bus. He eventually gets belligerent and needs to be beaten into submission. Then, the contestant is unexpectedly jumped by two guys at once. After fighting off those attackers, a man sits down next to him and starts sexually harassing him, kissing him and grabbing at his penis until the contestant threatens or fights him. Next, a couple sits down in front of the contestant, and the man starts hitting the woman. If the contestant interferes, the woman turns on him. Finally, the contestant is mugged by a guy with a knife. Bottom line, this is the worst bus imaginable, and the creators of USDC spent a long time imagining it.

Now, I realized while writing this that I’ve experienced versions of nearly all of these scenarios, and written about most of them on this website. I used to spend a lot of time with junkies in the park by my house. I was propositioned for sex by a man on a train. My first week in Chicago, I was mugged. And one time, on a train in Germany, I watched a man brutally beat his girlfriend in an argument over a case of beer. That’s the only one I never wrote a full post about, because it’s the only one I’m ashamed of. After a man rushed past me to break up the fight, and the attacker fled, the one who intervened walked back to me and asked: “Why didn’t you do something?”

The answer to that question is the same as it was in all the other scenarios I wrote about: when these things happen, I don’t fight. I talk, or concede, or freeze, or try to leave. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if I fight. And I’m ashamed of that fear.

That’s the fantasy of “real” self defense — freedom from the shame of fear. In a video on USDC contestant Jesse Enkamp’s YouTube channel, during a discussion with a knife defense coach, both Jesse and the instructor admit that they’ve never been in a real fight. These men aren’t learning self-defense because their lifestyles demand it. They’re learning self-defense to reassure themselves that if a man did grab their penis in public, they would have the strength to hurt him, rather than endure it.

The knife instructor in Enkamp’s video primarily teaches self defense to police officers. Of all the civilian professions, police officer is probably the one which most directly contends with fear and the shame that accompanies it. The news is full of police officers who would rather kill than be afraid. In the season of USDC that I watched, the winner was an MMA fighter from Israel, who spoke numerous times about the fear and paranoia he experienced at home. I trust that the parallel here is obvious.

This finally answers the question of why I used to fantasize about winning a bar fight. In the struggle to escape fear and shame and helplessness, the core symptoms of depression, there is no quicker expedient than justified violence. And violence, we know, is only ever justified as “self defense.”