Pro Wrestling: A Soap Opera For Little Boys

Fellow men, what the fuck are you doing?

Professional wrestling at our age? Really?

This past weekend was WrestleMania—the Super Bowl for the chronically underemployed. You may have seen some of these questionable males airing their hyper-faggy emotional grievances over a pretend scary man “losing” a pretend wrestling match. This childish convention is held specifically for a hopeless demographic—and with new IPO offerings and their own television network, business is booming! With all of the unemployment checks spent on tickets and merchandise, it may as well be government-funded.

This all started as an ironic fascination among hipsters a handful of years ago, but it has since developed into a full-throttle Xbox Mountain Dew Call of Duty XP commercial come to life.

Don’t get me wrong; in middle school we were all huge fans of professional wrestling. We knew it was fake and didn’t care. It was a soap opera for little boys. We orchestrated backyard (and indoor) matches where we accidentally/purposefully beat the shit out of each other with metal chairs, plywood, ladders, and tables. We were 11, 12, and 13—perfectly acceptable and healthy behavior for boys that age. But that shit quickly evaporated in high school once tits became Priority #1.

During these twilight viewing years (around the time Owen Hart fell to his death from the rafters onto his head), every couple of weeks there would be an episode paying a very schmaltzy tribute to whomever died from a drug-induced heart explosion or ritualistic murder/suicide. Once again, I see Catholicism’s tendrils; shrieking peasants worshiping martyrs that are tortured every week at 9PM/8 Central. The trend continues this week with the passing of the Ultimate Warrior. And you can bet your bottomed-out ball sack that the WWE will be servicing the tender emotions of proto-adults everywhere with a slow-motion, Sarah McLachlan-style video memorial tribute.

This is coming from someone who once possessed a staggering amount of comic-book collectibles. But I shed my geek skin. I sold the comics and toys and started a small business in the process. It wasn’t purposeful. I merely grew the fuck out of it and changed my priorities in life. Apparently that now makes me somewhat of an outlier, as I have witnessed firsthand friends—and former lady-killers—mutate into slovenly, fleshy, farty fans of fantastical fights.

People say football is silly, violent, and detrimental to health (it is), but c’mon: Wrestlers are still doing it when they’re 70! Defenders of pretend play-fighting have told me that it’s only “dumb fun.” Right. It’s dumb fun perfectly suited for dumb people with even dumber tattoos. “Dumb” has a weird balance. Beavis & Butt-head or Tim & Eric are dumb, but in the right way. Pro-wrestling dumb belongs in the “wrong” category.

This is merely a symptom of a larger disease. The only masculinity permitted on our airways is the kind that lampoons men and portrays them in a ridiculous, juvenile light (even WWE’s new slogan is “over the top”). This is cartoonish masculinity. I’m all about celebrating machismo, even the silly kind (the movie Predator comes to mind), but we’ve veered off course. The balance has been tipped in the other direction, and it’s high time to kick it back in its shriveled testicles.

Why the regression into this prepubescent stage? Have these fans totally lost their manhood, or have they simply grown tired of modern dating and shriveled back into their own micro-testosterone shell? Perhaps they are cursed with tiny penises from birth. It makes sense—their heroes’ penises are chemically shrunken. What’s more ironic is that these fans of comic-book muscle-bound men look as if they have a cartilage skeleton. They’re made entirely of soft tissue, aging in reverse, regressing into larvae, and wrapping themselves into a cocoon made of empty beer cans and chip bags. Whatever godless form emerges will likely resemble something from The Fly.

As usual, the culprit is feminism.

Is you ladies are ready to “UGH” your brains out all over your stepfather’s dirty golf socks, let me explain. You wanted men to become soft, but they became soft in all the wrong places. Nowadays women are only interested in fucking around until they realize it’s too late to start a family. In the meantime, to keep themselves from mass suicide, guys have reverted back to their prepubescent years to a time when they didn’t care about girls. It’s the only way they can cope with this harsh new sexless reality. They have created a Peter Pan unreality.

I’m afraid to even watch five minutes of today’s WWE. The acronym alone disgusts me (fuck you, World Wildlife Foundation), and I’m afraid of what it will do to my sex life and my self-esteem. Most of all, I’m afraid that I might enjoy it again.