When asked to rank different forms of popular entertainment, modern culture critics might put professional wrestling somewhere between amateur pornography and dogfighting. Enjoyment of this grand tradition is liable to get you marked as a hopeless rube or even a symptom of malignant cultural pathologies. Right now, this takes the form of the analysis that professional wrestling is shot through with, and also a feature of, “toxic masculinity.” It has indeed been a bad few months for the image of professional wrestling. I would have said that it has been the worst few months were it not for the time when an active World Wrestling Entertainment star killed his wife, his child, and himself.
Here’s the quick catchup: Vince McMahon, the longtime boss of WWE, has been accused of sexual assault and sex trafficking, which follows revelations about millions of dollars being paid out to various women as part of a series of nondisclosure agreements. This is especially bad for WWE because McMahon was not just the actual boss behind the scenes but played the boss in the storyline. Thus, old footage of him being a nasty old lech on live TV is now racking up countless views online.
Meanwhile, The Iron Claw, starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, has hit cinemas. It tells the true story of the Von Erich brothers — five of whom died, three by their own hand. Critics have emphasized the theme of “toxic masculinity,” with Kerry Von Erich committing suicide after working through the secret amputation of his foot and Mike and Chris Von Erich, the latter of whom is not featured in the film, killing themselves after years of struggling to be as big and athletic as their brothers.
For those of us who remain huge fans of professional wrestling — melodrama, stage fighting, and all — yet who tend to be allergic to terms like “toxic masculinity,” it’s a bit of a bind. Frankly, and as much as admitting that there is any truth in such a “woke” cliche feels like sinking one’s teeth into a cat litter sandwich, if the charge applies anywhere, it’s here. The product itself, which features endless amounts of gratuitous violence, as well as various humiliation rituals and a generous helping of sexual debauchery, obviously plays into the basest parts of the male psyche. (That’s part of why we like it, though perhaps not as uncomplicatedly as some may imagine.) If someone looks at you the wrong way, in a professional wrestling context, then you might be more than justified in attempting to turn their brains into a fine mush.
Still, this is fiction — and it is not meant to be fiction that closely reflects real life. It is wildly excessive and theatrical. When “Stone Cold” Steve Austin infiltrated the evil Mr. McMahon’s hospital room dressed as a male nurse and clonked him viciously across the dome with a bedpan, it was not intended to be realistic. Yet the accusation that professional wrestling embodies some of the worst excesses of masculine traits also applies to how the fictional product has been created — less so today, perhaps, but certainly in the past. Bullying was rampant, from young wrestlers getting the crap beaten out of them (for real) to beloved commentators being fired on live TV. Sexual harassment was commonplace. The pressure to work through pain and illness was such that wrestlers would take dozens of painkillers a day to be able to perform. The world of professional wrestling could almost have been dreamed up by a second-wave feminist as a scathing satire of what’s wrong with men.
Allow me, then, to make a few points in defense of this grand, muscular entertainment tradition. For me, the argument in support of suplexes and sleeper holds is more personal. When I was a teenager, I was about as far from being traditionally masculine as a teenage boy could be — long-haired, hypersensitive, and anorexic. I wrote poems about how miserable it was to be alive and gradually withdrew from any kind of social or productive existence. The further I sank into depression and eating disorders, the less that personal choice had anything to do with it. But I think when I first walked toward that dangerous yawning drop, it was in last in part because I associated that which was “masculine” with thuggishness and stupidity.
As I recovered — limp, frail, and a little shamefaced — I didn’t have much to do but watch TV. One thing I began to watch was professional wrestling. When I had been younger, I had thought that it was stupid — somehow believing that my knowledge that it was “fake” made me intelligent, as if the knowledge that Marlon Brando was not in the mafia and Harrison Ford is not an archaeologist makes you more sophisticated than film buffs. Now, though, I began to like the bruising, fast-paced action, the theatrical narratives, and the sheer eccentricity of the blurring of the lines between what was fantastical and what was genuine.
It would be excessive, and more than a bit embarrassing, to say that it appealed to me because of its association with traditionally masculine traits. I enjoyed it on its own terms. But there was at least some extent to which that enjoyment helped me to appreciate them. Here was physical intensity — bold, exhilarating, and not mindless, for all of its violent bombast — allied to discipline and skill. The body and the brain were not opposed but complementary aspects of one powerful machine. (Granted, the excesses of the product — chair shots to the head, anyone? — could be destructive for both.)
What I lacked the age and the critical distance to know as a younger viewer of wrestling and culture as a whole then is something I can treasure in wrestling now. There is nonetheless a point in it, if one especially a young man such as my former self is likelier to miss: Namely, that if it is better to be strong than to be weak, it is still better to be weak than to be cruel, and that the manly virtue of being strong is to be able to tolerate pain and prevent it, not to be able to inflict it wantonly.
Eating disorders can be driven, at least to the point at which they effectively drive themselves, by a desire for self-control. Self-denial becomes a cheap and pernicious form of self-mastery. But here was self-control, mental and physical, aimed toward something productive and not just existing for its own sake. Sacrifice and risk were not just a means of challenging oneself but of entertaining others and supporting those one loves.
You can kid yourself, in the early stages of an eating disorder, into believing that consumption entails weakness. You internalize the nasty attitude that to consume is to be a slave to your appetites. Yet here were vivid examples of it being a precondition of strength — and, in being so, of resilience. An appetite is not essentially an invitation to excess, one realizes, but a reminder of one’s needs.
Of course, there are lots of sad examples of professional wrestlers taking an obsession with physical scale to the opposite extreme of the anorexic’s. But this illustrates that the opposite of a “toxic” trait is not necessarily a healthy one but just a different toxicity. To avoid the worst implications of traditionally masculine traits is not to reject those attributes but to channel them, to seek a healthy balance.
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Aristotle, like Buddhism’s Middle Path, emphasized the value of the “golden mean,” according to which our virtues live between possible vices, when taken to excess and when adopted insufficiently. For example, to have too much emotional restraint could make one cold and self-destructive. But to have too little could make one helpless and overwhelmed. Excessive consumption can be self-indulgent and unhealthy. But excessive asceticism can be self-indulgent and unhealthy as well. Somewhere around the golden mean, at the risk of being glib, is the potential for the golden man.
Is it a bit embarrassing to have learned that more from professional wrestling than from Greek philosophy? A better question: What, ultimately, could it possibly matter what it takes to make a man come out the other side stronger?
Ben Sixsmith is online editor at the Critic.
