From our security briefings prior to overseas travel for the company:
“Believe me…you are no more attractive to beautiful single women hanging around bars and hotel lobbies thousands of mile from home than you are in the bar down your street.”
… you’re also apt to start fiddling with it at some point out of sheer boredom, thereby setting the stage for something that will not end well.
Being bopped over the head and rendered temporarily unconscious with no further medical issue is also common in movies and television.
I will point out that if you are not some sort of Crime professional, and you get involved, the Police will consider you a suspect, and they will also make sure you cant even get a sniff of anything the police find.
Yes, a CSI or a PI might be tolerated without becoming a suspect, but that nosy old lady or Mystery writer or amateur, etc- all with be treated with suspicion.
Unless the super-hot woman is Mystique, trying to break Magneto out of plastic prison. Bopped on the head? You should be so lucky!
It helps if the PI is a retired police detective who still has friends in the department.
Or just one friend that owes the retiree an infinite number of favors.
Hey, that’s how Ajex (James Remar) got busted, trying to pick up the policewoman ( Mercedes Rueh) in Union Square.
Same thing happened in last week’s episode of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Lived. Rick and Michone are trying to egress a high rise that’s coming down around them after a helicopter strike, and yet they make time for sex. Maybe get your freak on AFTER you’re clear of the structure?
Yeah, sure, that does help.
I hate to make this one of those kinds of threads, but it’s also a way to make the audience unsympathetic to the security guards.
I mean, for a lot of fiction you need security to be jerks, so that the heroes can beat them up and still be heroes (although there’s also a lot of movie and TV that just don’t bother…the protagonist can cripple people who are just doing their jobs because, well, (s)he’s the protagonist).
A 40-something man believing for a second that a young woman is interested in him is somewhat creepy, ergo, now he can be beaten up.
How “young” is young? 29? a 40 yo and a 29 yo is not creepy. Now if you’re talking 19 and 49, sure.
And even then, vanity isn’t really something that makes me think less of the security guard. I mean, I’ve surely entertained the idea that a younger lady has found me interesting enough to talk to more than once (I’m not gonna do them either way, I’m married, and I sure as hell don’t need that complexity.) A complete lack of situational awareness, sure they have that in spades (what the hell is this woman even doing here?). Even that doesn’t really make me lose sympathy for them, but I do immediately know where this story is going.
Yes, to be clear, age differences can be fine in real life. Heck, with how blockbuster movies need to have recognized actors now, often the male leads will themselves be in their 40s at least.
I’m just saying, that in TV land, as well as the age difference between hot woman and dumb guard, there are other cues that the woman is way out of the league of the security guard, and then that makes it ok to beat him up. 
I’ve beaten up security guards for way less.
When women take baths they do so by filling a sponge full of soap/water and then holding the sponge above their head and slowly drizzling it on their face and chest.
And feet.
Thousands of videoed real-life fights (both inside and outside a ring) tell this is nowhere near the level of “not totally impossible”. People do get knocked unconscious from a single punch quite often.
Now, a trained fighter hits something like 100% harder than a random slob in a fit of rage. But the trained opponent taking the hit also is highly conditioned to taking a fist to the face. Yet, nap time in a split second, time and again.
I’ll bow to your better knowledge of this!
As depicted in TV/movies, though, most of the time what you see seems highly unlikely to be a knockout. The Indiana Jones scene was pretty egregious: he was at an odd angle, reaching in through a car window, and it looked like the reaction would have been “dude, what the hell?” rather than unconsciousness.
I also wonder how many “knock outs” in professional fighting are full unconsciousness versus the knockee simply being too dazed, dizzy and in pain to stand up. The latter one can “shake off” whereas the former is a medical emergency.
And Captain Kirk could just karate chop someone on the side of the neck and they’d instantly be incapacitated. There’s a lot more to anatomy than I’ll ever know but it just looks like it would hurt.