The following is excerpted from Brian Pronger’s The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.
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One man told me that, as a boy, wrestling brought him to his first awareness of homoeroticism and has remained a source of erotic fascination for him. . . . As a legitimate activity for boys, wrestling allowed him the opportunity to explore, unwittingly, the homoerotic potential of masculine physical contact.. . . Another man remembered how his fascination with men’s muscles evolved into a desire for wrestling contact.
Boys and teenagers are intuitively aware of this kind of fun and wrestle with their friends. Some are content with the subtle non-genital expression of the paradox; others use it as a mutual masculine ruse or prolegomenon to a more transparent homoerotic seduction. As Gregory Woods said, “Wrestling . . . is the heterosexually acceptable form of homosexual foreplay.”
Often boys will wrestle with each other hoping for a more explicit homosexual action. Describing an ultimately frustrating teenage relationship with another boy who turned out to be more interested in orthodoxy, one man told me that he and his friend, “were very physical, we were always wresting, doing everything but having sex, and I think I just got tired of waiting for something to happen.”
Afraid of the homoerotic paradox, its power to undermine masculinity and the estrangement that may follow the pleasure of the paradox, some boys and men nevertheless manage to immerse themselves in the experience by disguising it as “orthodox” athletic combat.On the other hand, in The City and the Pillar, a novel by Gore Vidal, boys wrestle their way to sex: “Somehow the violence released Jim from certain emotions and he wrestled furiously with Bob, made free, for the time, by violence.” In this story, the wrestling eventually gives way to genital sex, leaving Bob feeling uncomfortable and Jim feeling that he has found himself.
A man I interviewed remembered the problems that competitive wrestling in high school caused him. He said he found wrestling:
Very sexual. I’d often get hard. I’d often come. It was difficult to deal with: “How did you get hard-on off me?” That became a problem in high school so that I ended up, grade twelve . . . I stopped wresting. I was too afraid that I was going to get hard and someone would notice. Actually, it rarely happens when you are really wresting – it can’t physiologically because the blood is going to the muscles and it’s certainly not engorging the penis. So it has to be in a fooling-around sense, but still, it’s happened to me, so you tend to become really cautious about coming out in grade ten in front of the gym class, it’s not cool.
The homoerotic appeal of wrestling needn’t always result in erections. As the wrestler above pointed out, when one wrestles intensely the muscles get precedence over the penis for the supply of blood. That physical economy, however, may have little to do with the erotic focus of the athletic activity. The lack of an erection does not signify a paucity of homoerotic attraction. As Neil Marks said, “There is a unique excitement in being aware of your physical attraction to a man and sublimating it into an athletic maneuver.”
– Excerpted from Pronger, B. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 183-185.
3 comments:
The Classical Athens, male wrestling was expressly done naked for the purposes of arousal. In my sophomore year in high school, during a Half Nelsom, I had one of those epiphanies (see, http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2008/05/tagged-1-coming-attractions.html Even love-making incorporates facets of wrestling into the act, as winner takes the prize.
I generally could care less for gym in high school -- EXCEPT wrestling, swimming, tennis, and dancing -- yes, dancing, which remains great fun between men and women (lead/and/led) or hot disco instead (everyone leads, no one is led). I was good a football, okay at soccer, detested baseball and basketball, but each taught a talent and skill I use today.
Too often we regard gym, bands, glee clubs, etc., as "perks" or extraneous, but even the Greeks knew a proper education required physical dexterity -- especially if they expected virtuosity in the bedrooms. We don't have to perfect any skills, but developing coordination, dexterity, spontaneous decision making, and other athletic gems has significance far beyond sport of recreation.
I began wrestling when I was twelve. I was a small, whimpy, asthmatic kid and my doctor thought the training would be good for me. It changed my life. The training, the combo of strength and cardio, was intense. My asthma all but disappeared. I went from weak to wiry. My muscles grew, my chest expanded. My penis and testicles grew significantly, too. Within six months I went from hairless to having a thick bush of pubic hair. I began to get spontaneous erections (not on the mat), and had my first orgasms. All the while I was in regular close physical contact with other guys, often with my head near their crotches, taking in the intense smell of their loins. I'm not going to say that these changes wouldn't have happened had I not been wrestling, but I think the activity both accelerated and amplified them.
I never really appreciated the homoerotic nature of what I was doing, but neither did I think of girls all that much. Sometimes after an intense practice or a match my balls would ache.
When I was 15 and horsing around with a friend and teammate I had my first real sexual experience. We were grabbing each others' crotches and felt our erections. Then we stuck our hands inside each others' pants and stroked each other off. We didn't kiss but we locked gazes. When it was over we said nothing, as though it had never happened.
I was raised in the 50's and 60's. My brother, who is now dead, used to bully me. He was a wrestler, older and bigger than me. He held me for long periods, confined in wrestling holds. I was always mad about this and he always told me I was exaggerating and didn't want to hear or talk it. I have been studying boys wrestling, photos and video. It is amazing to me, to realize, that my brother was expressing his love and affection to me. It was unmanly and really impossible for him to express this in words or other actions. Our culture does men a disservice, to hamstring the expression of emotion. If it were not for some other manly things, like hunting and fishing, I would never have known that my brother wanted to be around me. The value is, that most of these manly enterprises need no words, no expression of feelings. They, yet, give excuse for being close and time for non verbal communication. While experiencing this I had no idea at all what this meant. I can say now, that both my father (who is also dead) and brother loved me. They never said this in words. There were more punches than hugs. Someone should tell the boys about this. They always tell the little girls that the boys who tease them probably like them a lot. Boys need to be appreciated, who they are and what they do. Some of us expect this overtly. We needed or need to know that we should look for it covertly. As fathers and brothers maybe we should "get over it" and talk a bit more and not be afraid to hug a bit more.
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