Event #2 - Wrestling With Manhood

Wrestling With Manhood: Boys, Bullying and Battering

The movie was about how the world of professional wrestling creates a culture of men being dominant. It’s about violence and power and more. Young men watch these shows and are influenced by it. Shows like WWF, RAW and Smackdown are some of the most popular shows on cable TV. What young boys and others don’t understand is that wrestling is fake and constructed to fit what the viewer wants. The wrestlers create their character and it becomes a soap opera for guys. Girls watch it too, but it’s geared toward males.

The movie was broken down into parts. The first section was Happy and Escalating Violence. Violence is the made question in wrestling. It gets young boys all into the fighting and sometimes boys apply what they see the wrestlers doing to real life. In the movie it shares how young boys have hurt and even killed other imitating wrestling moves. This is awful because these moves are actually fake. This relates to Kimmel’s “What Little Boys are Made of” when he says “Virtually all the books cite the same statistics: boys are four to five times more likely to kill themselves than girls, four times more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and 15 times more likely to be victims of violent crime”. Why would we show them more violence then? Or is this the reason why boys are more violent because they watching programs like wrestling? In the segment it continues to say how wrestling is like cartoon violence because no one really gets hurt, but the problem is, is that it all looks real.

The next segment is Glamorizing Men: Bullying. In the section it explains how to be a “man.” Wrestling models how men should be and everything is done through violence. The wrestling use violence, mentally subjugate, and verbally torture their opponents to win. And the person who wins is the “man.” What kind of message is this sending to young boys? That the only way to be a man is to be a jerk. Wrestling glorifies the bully. This reminds me on the Croteau piece on media. These are ideologies created by the media, and boys follow them.

Homophobia is a big topic in the film. Wrestling is very sexualized because the wrestlers wear very little clothing and are always in close contact with each other, but to be gay is looked down upon. The wrestlers use sexual moves and things to prove their masculinity to others. They insult other wrestlers masculinity and so on. They act as the police of masculinity. This relates to the other film that I went to The Bro Code, and how people in your life police masculinity as well.  There is a pair, Chuck and Billy, who are used to pick on as the “gay” wrestlers because they are a team. Their role asserts heterosexuality in the show.

Divas: Sex and Male Fantasy is also another piece of the film. The role of women in wrestling helps demonstrate heterosexuality. Before the 1990’s there really weren’t any females in wrestling, but now there are many Divas. They are used for entertainment, not so much of a role model to people. Their fights are different from the men’s, and usually the winner is always the woman who gets all the clothes off of the other. This is a really good way to show how women are equals. The way that these women show they have power is by getting men to look at them, and having large breast.

Finally the film talks about Normalizing Gender Violence. In society gender violence is a big problem, but wrestling just takes it to another level. In wrestling women are just there for men. This is all written into the scripts. The guy wrestlers force themselves onto the women and talk down to them. They say to the crowds that this is what the women deserve. In one scene of the movie one wrestler makes the women wrestler get down on the ring floor and act like a dog. But this is one of the most watched cable TV shows, I don’t get it. All these images show men controlling women and dominating them, and this is not the way it should be.