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It's now officially too depressing to have an entire entry about my murder of the mommy spider as the most recent.
So I shall write about another really depressing thing: the Jackson Katz documentary "Wrestling With Manhood," about the WWF (now the WWE). It was a very frightening movie. AAR hosted it, so it was mostly AAR people in the audience, with a few scattered others. The movie was about the skewed perspective of "manliness" given by the WWE shows and about the homophobia they cause and the intense psychological and physical degradation of women present in these programs. It freaked me out. I've never gotten into wrestling and I don't really have friends who like it (at least, none who have watched it around me), so I'd only been exposed to tiny snippets of the wrestling shows. It all looked fake and silly, and I knew it had a huge following, but I'd never really paid attention to the thousands of people in this country (male and female, toddlers to old people) who like to get off on a woman being forced to apologize for something by taking off her clothes, getting on her hands and knees, and barking like a dog. Or a big guy yelling "Bitch!" and picking somebody up and throwing her across the room. Or the two "gay wrestlers" getting mimicked and taunted and brutalized as if they were subhuman. It's sick. Or a 20-something pretending she really liked the forced, aggressive kiss from a man who looked 40 years her senior. Or a guy pouching on another guy for the sake of breaking a huge table, or a piece of wood, or for the sake of making "blood" gush everywhere.
I don't really understand how a woman would decide she was willing to become one of the Divas, or female wrestling characters. I don't know how you make the transition from regular woman to breast-implanted, jaw-reformated (in the case of Chyna), slut-for-everybody-to-toss-around, objectified gladiator toy. Maybe there's some rush involved, or a lot of money, or something. Definitely not worth it.
After one depiction of faked (yet realistic) abuse between two married characters after the supposed infidelity of the wife (who happens to be the actual, real-life daughter of Vince McMahon, the sick man who runs the WWE), fans were interviewed saying "She had it coming," "She deserved it," etc. It was sad to see teenage boys saying this stuff, but even worse were the women and girls who looked to be about my age. Were they just so glad that they were on the sidelines, so glad they weren't the ones being called sluts, that they honestly couldn't see that the woman out there was one of "them" (meaning one of their own gender)?
Yes, we love our big fake boobs and our fake blood and our fake pain in this great nation. Especially since there are lots of impressionable (stupid?) people out there willing to replicate the entire experience in a horrifyingly real way. I don't think these people on these shows realize how much of a backward impact they are having on society. Or else they do realize it and enjoy the power it gives them.
So I shall write about another really depressing thing: the Jackson Katz documentary "Wrestling With Manhood," about the WWF (now the WWE). It was a very frightening movie. AAR hosted it, so it was mostly AAR people in the audience, with a few scattered others. The movie was about the skewed perspective of "manliness" given by the WWE shows and about the homophobia they cause and the intense psychological and physical degradation of women present in these programs. It freaked me out. I've never gotten into wrestling and I don't really have friends who like it (at least, none who have watched it around me), so I'd only been exposed to tiny snippets of the wrestling shows. It all looked fake and silly, and I knew it had a huge following, but I'd never really paid attention to the thousands of people in this country (male and female, toddlers to old people) who like to get off on a woman being forced to apologize for something by taking off her clothes, getting on her hands and knees, and barking like a dog. Or a big guy yelling "Bitch!" and picking somebody up and throwing her across the room. Or the two "gay wrestlers" getting mimicked and taunted and brutalized as if they were subhuman. It's sick. Or a 20-something pretending she really liked the forced, aggressive kiss from a man who looked 40 years her senior. Or a guy pouching on another guy for the sake of breaking a huge table, or a piece of wood, or for the sake of making "blood" gush everywhere.
I don't really understand how a woman would decide she was willing to become one of the Divas, or female wrestling characters. I don't know how you make the transition from regular woman to breast-implanted, jaw-reformated (in the case of Chyna), slut-for-everybody-to-toss-around, objectified gladiator toy. Maybe there's some rush involved, or a lot of money, or something. Definitely not worth it.
After one depiction of faked (yet realistic) abuse between two married characters after the supposed infidelity of the wife (who happens to be the actual, real-life daughter of Vince McMahon, the sick man who runs the WWE), fans were interviewed saying "She had it coming," "She deserved it," etc. It was sad to see teenage boys saying this stuff, but even worse were the women and girls who looked to be about my age. Were they just so glad that they were on the sidelines, so glad they weren't the ones being called sluts, that they honestly couldn't see that the woman out there was one of "them" (meaning one of their own gender)?
Yes, we love our big fake boobs and our fake blood and our fake pain in this great nation. Especially since there are lots of impressionable (stupid?) people out there willing to replicate the entire experience in a horrifyingly real way. I don't think these people on these shows realize how much of a backward impact they are having on society. Or else they do realize it and enjoy the power it gives them.
