Blood Taboos

Um, Ew

Confession time: when I can’t find something more compelling to watch, I watch pro wrestling. When it’s good, if a particular performer is involved (Bryan Danielson and CM Punk, mostly because the former is a genius physically, and the latter is a genius verbally), it’s fun. It’s more fun knowing that you are not putting money in the pocket of people who were Trump donators and officials (that’d be the WWE). Now that AEW is in ascendance, I watch that promotion.

Which led to the recent experience of cringe-watching a tag team match between four women, where the stipulation was “street fight”. That means it is a car crash match where the performers will beat on each other with weapons, and probably bleed, because there is only so much one can do to not make matches like this, well, a car crash.

I’m not a fan of this sort of thing. Blood is a taboo for a reason, and we are still in a pandemic, for heaven’s sake. (Yes, not a blood-based one, but still.)

But when guys do this, it does not provoke the same reaction. Guys, I mostly just shrug and go, well, garbage wrestlers are going to garbage wrestle. If it’s not a garbage match and there is still blood, it’s queasy but mostly something I can ignore.

But these four women, all of them in the prime of their lives, all of them athletically and esthetically appealing?

I just don’t want to see it. It takes me out of the sense of where is this going (um, to the place where the tables break and someone is picking thumb tacks out of their butt), and into the place of why does anyone want to see this, let alone me. It goes from wow, these performers can really “go” to wow, these are desperate human beings that are doing a degrading thing for money. And equating the reaction of those at ringside as caring anything about them as individual performers, and everything to the reaction of hey lookie that somebody almost really got hurt for serious.

Whether that’s patriarchal, patronizing, infantilizing, chivalrous or chauvinistic is entirely in the eyes of the beholder.

Mostly, I just think I’m old and squeamish.

And unapologetic about either condition.