Wrestling and Hypermasculinity

Wrestling and Hypermasculinity Patrice A. Opphger. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2004. Many Americans - especially the boys among us -know wrestling from school days as a sport of speed, agility, and strength among comparably sized rivals. Such competitions are generally supervised by rule-minded referees who seek to prevent injuries. During the Olympic competitions, television coverage reinforces this version of wrestling. Patrice Oppliger's book documents how little commercial potential lies in this relatively decorous sports activity, which can be a slow, quiet struggle of endurance. The very different entertainment wrestling has moved since the early twentieth century toward melodramatic scripts with idiosyncratic, anarchic personae. The violence and sex absent from those character-building gym classes can be scripted as revenge tales spiced with homoeroticism and humiliating heterosexuality. Kicking, punching, weapons, and steady contempt for the referee add physical excitement. This newer wrestling has been called "soap opera for working-class men," but that carries a misleadingly conservative sound. Like raucous talk shows or socially defiant music formats, professional wrestling has evolved toward ritual norm demolitions that search for new taboos to breach. Unlike the screened soap opera, it works steadily at erasing the fantasy, encouraging audiences to believe that they are seeing real feuds among wrestlers. The weekly viewers for these spectacles number in the millions, including many children, and the franchise licenses are used in video games, action figures, magazines, and other commercial wares. Oppliger, a communications professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia, admits an earlyformed fascination for professional wrestling. However, she felt aversions that prevented her from becoming a screaming fan. Her reservations prompt an agenda of critique and reform that accompanies her careful descriptions. Her scholarly methods include historical summary, attitude surveys, ethnographic observation at live wrestling events, and a critical overview of theories about spectatorship and imitative behavior. She is ultimately interested in the social effects of the audience pleasures in this sort of violence. If this reviewer could dispense a medal of scholarly valor on the American Culture Association's behalf, Patrice Oppliger "would receive it. Serving the more timid among us, she attended repellent events, staying to witness blood-soaked contests where children, accompanied by parents, witnessed rituals of revenge, humiliation, and sexual domination while hearing vulgar taunts. Yet even Oppliger reports withdrawing on occasion when her sensibilities could no longer bear the grisly mayhem. Oppliger approaches professional wrestling from several informative angles. Although she does not aim at a history, she quickly sketches the business from the 1920s to the present, highlighting innovations by notable performers and promoters. She also describes the influences from Japanese (not Sumo) and Mexican wrestling. "Progress" has meant moving the players into a smaller number of larger organizations with greater marketing power that comes through televised spectacle. The major figure in the transition to focused corporate franchising is Vmce McMahon, Jr., whose efforts at consolidation are currently seen in the venues of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) such as Wrestlemania, Smackdown!, and Armageddon. Although his franchise acquired the corporate respectability of becoming a publicly traded company (market capitalization of nearly a billion dollars and regular stockholder dividends), McMahon smashed taboos to become the wrestling world's King Croesus. This fearlessness is expressed by the scripting of his daughter Stephanie for scenes of sexual violation and affairs with wrestlers that become televised humiliations in the ring. He also acted out the public mistreatment of his wife Linda, giving a famous declamation in 2000 in which he told her, "I want a divorce. …