When you watch pro wrestling for the first time, you aren’t sure why you like it, but you know pretty quickly that you want to see more. There is just something exciting and dangerous about the violence, cruelty, and naked flesh on display.
Even if the wrestlers aren’t particularly beautiful or in shape, their rough and tumble actions are more than enough to catch your eye and inspire your excitement. But why is it so appealing?
The reason pro wrestling hooks us, the reason it’s consistently one of the most popular television shows, is that it taps into our primal cravings for violence which modern society represses.
The rules of social order take us away from our natural state, as hunters and warriors, as members of a pack. For eons, we followed the law of the jungle like wild animals — survival of the fittest, kill or be killed. The rise of civilization forced us into a more subdued, less violent, more orderly, less exciting lifestyle.
Now we need to wear clothing, follow the Golden Rule, respect authority, and keep our hands to ourselves. So pro wrestling appeals to men (especially young men who are not yet fully socialized) because it throws out the strait-jacket foisted on us by society and allows us to observe a more natural state which we are still drawn to — as a predator, a savage, a violent animal.
While polite society favors good taste and minding one’s manners (yawn), pro wrestling is all about naked aggression — muscle, flesh, bone, blood, and violence.
The wrestlers’ bodies are blatantly and completed exposed — shirtless under the bright lights. Rather than discuss and debate their differences, they physically attack, grapple, and punish one another.
How refreshing it feels to the young wrestling fan — forced to wear a shirt to the dinner table, to stop horsing around with his brother, and to use his words rather than his fists — to witness another universe dominated by primal, violent, free, proudly shirtless, untamed masters of physicality and punishment!
Do you know of any lucha matches where submissions are used as finishers? I’d love to see some, but I can’t find any good ones.
I’d love to see a video of that triple team one too!