Watching Men Wrestle: Sport and the Female Gaze

While male athletic achievement is an aesthetic ideal immortalised in the Hellenistic visions of Greek sculpture up to the fake-tanned contorted bodies of bodybuilders, female athleticism is an object of horror.”

Image credits: Mia Retallack

I don’t watch sport. I have never especially cared for sport. Not weaned in a household where sports viewing was configured into the family ritual, it’s never possessed any nostalgic significance, nor connoted any broader social marker that felt substantial to my identity. Perhaps more significantly, the world of sport-viewing is one from which I am ontologically closed from –– beers and banter with the boys simply the reserve of men. Sport is a space where the male gaze in some form is projected onto itself. Any representation of the feminine is inevitably a projection of male fantasy: a busty ring girl or cheerleader, providing brief entertainment during halftime while the men get down to business.

Historically speaking, sport has been an institution of patriarchy; a male ritual that sanctions the homo-erotic competition of man against man in a charged battle of supreme virility. In the western imagination, the athletic events of fourth century Athens or Roman tournaments have been configured into a fetishised mythos of the creation of western democracy. Guided by the Protestant work ethic, the athletic body, moulded to both aesthetic and functional excellence, becomes a symbol of perfection. On the field, the battle of man against man for supremacy hypothesises the tenets of ideal masculinity: strength, grit, strategy. The apotheosis of nature and civilisation: a proto-Ubermensch.

But sport is also play. It is a hobby; simultaneously liberation and orthodox. Johan Huizinga theorises ‘play’ as a voluntary ritual spatially separate from ordinary life that, while governed by rules, possesses a palpable liberatory quality. We make civilisation through play, Huizinga thus proposes. In this sense, Christopher Lasch has argued sports harks upon ‘the freedom, the remembered perfection of childhood, and marks it off from ordinary life with artificial boundaries.’ For men, the enjoyment of sports harks back to boyhood; playing as a child with peers, with fathers. To both watch and participate in sport is to revel in the play element of culture, operating within a matrix of rules and guidelines without any substantial consequences outside the parameters of the game itself.

Play has never represented quite the same thing for women. If liberal feminism’s cinematic opus Barbie (2023) had one substantial thesis it was that play symbolises not simply a release for women, but one in which our life aspirations are cemented for perpetuity. From dolls houses to plastic kitchens, play grooms women for their future as predestined by patriarchy. Of course, sport for men poses the same challenges as a pedagogical tool of development. Sport is at the heart of patriarchal socialisation. You only need to look to American pop culture’s obsession with high school to know that the apex of the social hierarchy is the Quarterback of the football team. Sporting success in youth is an investment that continues to pay dividends throughout adulthood.

While the FIFA 2023 women’s world cup showed to the world that women are actually not bad at sport, sport can never possess the same cultural cachet to women. Women cannot benefit from the cultural capital of being a ‘Senior A Footballer’ at seventeen well into adulthood as men can, uttering wistful what-if’s at a long gone professional career well into their thirties. Instead, despite the success of Matildas, Baby Boomers everywhere could hardly contain their disappointment that our girls in green and gold were “l-e-s-b-i-a-n-s”. 

Rather than celebrated as beacons of achievement, the athletic female body is an object of grotesque fascination. While male athletic achievement is an aesthetic ideal immortalised in the Hellenistic visions of Greek sculpture up to the fake-tanned contorted bodies of bodybuilders, female athleticism is an object of horror. From Serena Williams to Simone Biles, the media can’t seem to contain their disgust when female bodies that dedicate their lives to reach athletic optimisation don’t fit the warped and emaciated ideal of Western beauty standards.

This role of the gendered body in sport inevitably extends to the debate of inclusion. While armchair pundits such as Joe Rogan love to cry hysterically at the degradation of sport through the inclusion of transgender athletes, what is implicit here is that non-cis, male bodies can never function within the same social paradigm that phallo-centric sport exists in. It’s not that women aren’t as interesting or that there is a hoard of transgender women scheming to undermine women’s sport, the fundamental issue is that inclusion of the non-male destabilises the distinct social relations that are at play in sport. Women’s sport can never play the same role socially as it can for men.

Yet, no matter how far I feel removed from the world of sport, this critical theory loving, man-hating feminist can’t help but find quiet pleasure in watching the bordering erotic visions of beefy men fighting for the win on the field. My gateway drug was ‘RugbyTok’ (as Senior Editor of this publication, Kate Saap has coined it): intoxicating visions of striating quadriceps, broad shoulders, and unreasonably short shorts gracing my screen. From there, it was a series of prolonged glances at the NRL game on at the pub before taking it all the way and watching a live AFL game. Local pro wrestling seemed like the next logical conclusion. And it certainly exceeded all expectations.

Some might describe wrestling as ‘fake’ sport; that wrestling, choreographed and predetermined, defeats the point of sport as an actualisation of the liberal work ethic. But for both its participants and the viewer, deep gratification originates from the very nature of the spectacle itself (and no, I am not just talking about just their muscles). As Roland Barthes makes the case in his 1952 essay The World of Wrestling, ‘the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.’

The climax of the night was the heavy weight showdown between Otis ‘The Grub’ and reigning champion Tyson ‘The Kingmaker’ Gibbs. A much awaited rematch between the two rivals. In a promo video for the showdown, Gibbs appears on camera, wiping stage blood off his hands from an unnamed opponent to give Otis a message: “I said I wasn’t going to negotiate with terrorists, and showing up on Saturday night means that I’m not negotiating with terrorists: it means I am doing what terrorists need, and that is to be wiped off the face of the earth”. 

Despite the fascinating ideological implications this has for the Australian Wrestling Superstars (AWS) universe, Gibbs effectively set the tone for the calamity that would ensue. Indeed, tensions started high and only got higher, when previous tag team competitors Kings of KO (Gatt and Abott) who had earlier defeated The Australian Mega Powers (Lee Morrows and the Bachelor), tried to get involved from the sidelines, much to Otis’ chagrin. 

Undermining the very rules of its operation, the event’s meta-awareness of its own role as spectacle granted it warrant to push the event out of  the bounds of the form. Sportsmanship was forgotten as the ring descended into Dionysian revelry. As referees and security attempted to intervene as competitors pushed the bounds of regulation, Ashfield Polish Club descended into orgiastic bliss. The Australian Mega Powers entered the ring to even the score with a six man tag team fight. Brawling in every corner of the ring, this was more than a series of staged punches and percussive slaps, but body was posed against body in a physical comedy that rivalled that of Looney Tunes.

As the dust began to clear, the night ended with Otis delivering a formidable ‘go to sleep’ move on Gibbs –– launching Gibbs’ body from a fireman’s carry on his shoulder over onto his knee. Far from the heroic wrestling described by Homer or the Bible, AWS at Ashfield Polish Club was a true act of decadence. Admittedly, I was unsure of what to expect; would it be another sausage party of cultural references deliberately alien to me? Instead, I was met with a diverse crowd ranging from seven to seventy, Inner West creative types to local families. Perhaps in part of this extreme extravagance, the show’s camp refusal of taking itself too seriously meant it could exist outside of the institutional demands that I have felt has excluded me from true sports enjoyment. Among the crowd, Kate and I were not alone in our very open appreciation of beefcake against beefcake, fighting it out for supremacy. 

Don’t take sports too seriously. Look at beefy, sweaty men.