Your Viral Dose of Reality 10.02.07: Appraisal of a Carnal Saint? (Part 2)
Posted by Jarrod Westerfeld on 10.02.2007
Stumbling out of a writer’s block, Jarrod Westerfeld continues his look at the devil-side of Paul Heyman’s legacy and his contribution of sex within the American wrestling industry. Also, no stumble through a writer’s block is complete without a few random thoughts.
In a society where music these days are sold on the backs of pretty faces and gorgeous bodies; where celebrity comebacks are based more upon the looks than the health and well being of that individual; where celebrities are made off of a poor digital camera, some random hotel room, and a lot of awkward looking, contorted faces as two or more bodies are locked up like a pretzel; where every bulletin, newspaper, magazine and television commercial ad is skimpier and skimpier looking than the last; where an entire industry looks to sell us more sex than what most of us can or want to consume. Is it any true wonder that the WWE and TNA products try to sell us more on glamorous looking bodies than talent?
It wasn't that long ago when sex in the media was beyond taboo, but it still feels like a complete life time ago. What brought about this sexual revolution within America would be a porn movie that would push the boundaries that would cause an everlasting effect on the way sex would be viewed. No longer would it be the dirty little secret of our society, and that effect rippled throughout all mediums of entertainment, including wrestling. The main contributing entity of this sexual revolution to the wrestling medium was none other than Paul Heyman and ECW.
These days, Vince McMahon is running around like a perverse old man with Viagra and Cialis coursing through his veins 24 hours a day looking to molest everything and everyone under his company's contract. This is a far cry from the mild mannered color commentator of the WWF of old, who would sit next to Jerry Lawler, during the reign through the 90's, put down Lawler's antics as being unprofessional and uncivilized, as well as being unbefitting of a WWE employee and human being for that matter. This is what McMahon molded himself into after the introduction of an attitude never before seen in the wrestling industry, and this is what he's become in the eyes of many fans – a broken down, bitter old man who is trying to compensate for something when he's chasing tail he's old enough to have fathered and grandfathered. This is what the father figure face of this entire industry looks like – a shriveled up porn star running amuck on television with his dick in hand chasing down young toddler girls that happen to work for him. And thus another issue that the media, and its misinformation whorelet's like to harp upon the WWE for in their guised attack against the entire wrestling industry, and have happily complained about for a little over a decade.
It's not just Vince's character that draws in the negative attention towards an over sexed product in the WWE, it's also the Diva search that bases the importance of a woman's role in the wrestling industry solely upon her looks rather than her ability to perform, either as a character or an in-ring performer. It's also the role the women play on-air, from Melina playing the new sex toy of Vince's desires, a role we've seen Trish Stratus and Sable play before in the past, to the competitions they participate in that focus solely upon their looks and sex appeal. These women aren't wrestling, they're involved in bikini contests, lingerie contests, mud wrestling bouts, dance segments and sex shows – okay, that was only Lita, but we've seen the women used in sexual roles along those same lines from Trish and Lita's love story with Christian and Jericho to Dawn Marie readying up to fuck poor Al Wilson's brains out in her ploy to really sleep with Torrie.
But this wasn't always the case for the WWE or the media wrestling products of America. This is the product of Paul Heyman's doing down in Philadelphia as he took over the then Eastern Championship Wrestling, reinventing it in a way no one thought would work – a more risqué and raunchy brand of wrestling entertainment, one that would leave a black eye, as well as reinvent the industry.
His introduction of a highly volatile sexual presence within his product was another way for him to differentiate himself and the company from the ‘big boys' of the media wrestling product. It was what made ECW truly extreme – it's completely anti-establishment, in-your-face attitude that basically spat upon the unwritten rules of what a wrestling product is meant to be. And what better way to spell anti-establishment, anti-corporation than to add sex with some violence. After all Hollywood was making that transition themselves, adding more sexually explicit material with their violent movies. You didn't just get blood, broken bones and mangled spirits, you also got a side order of tits and ass that would keep you drooling for more, and paying out the ass to keep up with it all.
Before, what the media products would present as their women were respectable looking while still holding their own sex appeal, much like Missy Hyatt, or beautifully athletic, talented and gifted women of wrestling such as Alundra Blayze. Now what we get as compensation for that is a gang of Candice Michelle's who happen to keep a job, despite doing other things outside of the WWE from time to time such as shooting GoDaddy.com commercial ads, is because Johnny ‘Ace', in the back, is too busy stroking it to the ladies as a gesture to keep them, rather than evaluating their worth to the company as far as what they can do and how much more marketable they can become thanks to their other talents. After all, who the fuck wants to watch a completely limp and worthless twat that gives you no credible idea she could be good in the sack? Unless you're into necrophilia and like limp and worthless twats – not going to judge how you roll or fuck.
Before the army of Maria's and Kelly Kelly's who got into an industry they honestly cared more about a piece of used toilet paper (or any TNA title) than, we had a slew of women that both the WWE and WCW were trying out thanks to their looks and abilities to entertain in the spotlights. We had the Alundra Blayze's and the Sunny's; we even had the Leilani Kei's and even had Cyndi Lauper involved in items that could always make more sense than the way TNA utilizes their celebrity wrestlers.
But for all of that, Heyman went down a dark path that would lead to the current string of blonde haired, blue eyed bimbo circuit clones to come out of the woodwork and take over as the main female figures of an industry that's never been entirely too nice to the other gender. What was always considered a boys club, wrestling would now demonstrate just how much more male chauvinistic this world would be as it degraded women by selling them only on a sexual point.
It was Heyman's usage of women like Beaulah and Francine, the sexy strip tease from Kimona to help tame and distract a blood thirsty crowd from the fact that the wrestling ring needed repair. Even before all of that we had Peaches and Latigra is a strip match that led to the Latigra going topless. This is what inspired Jackie Moore's nip slips, Sable painting her breasts as her bikini top and Stacy "The Kat" Carter baring all at Armageddon 1999.
ECW's Summer Sizzler 1993 event is the mark where the role of females in the wrestling world would begin to downgrade and look more like a big stage for strippers and porn stars rather than females who loved the business and wanted to be a big part of it. That strip match between Latigra and Peaches was only the start of Heyman's conception of merging sex and violence to sell his vision of wrestling to a underground following of fans wanting something new and more of that newness. It's that mentality that led to angles involving Beaulah becoming pregnant and being a lesbian, as well as Francine proclaiming herself to be the ‘Queen of Extreme' that would lead to an army of fans calling her a whore and porn star for such a title.
That type of attitude would still persist and carry on over to today's generation of fans, even finding a home in the Ring of Honor crowd, who is slowly degrading into a bunch of morons and elitist cocksuckers. Either they're starting up a ‘show your tits' chant or they're basically snoring through the women's matches just because it's an actual wrestling event rather than some crummy strip show they could view at any local strip club off the Jersey turnpike they crawled out from under the buffet bar.
The mentality only tends to get worse as fans try to justify such nonsense as pudding matches and lingerie pillow fights as being "entertainment for the men." That somehow we have to accept the merger of sex and wrestling rather than keep them apart. Sorry, but I don't tolerate half of you wrestling fans out there as it is – to expect me to tolerate hearing you off in the corner stroking yourself to garbage women's wrestling just because you don't know how to access free porn sites without giving your computer a case of AIDS and Hepatitis C is pushing your fucking luck. Sorry but when I watch wrestling I actually much prefer to watch just that – wrestling. Regardless of how many times I may have heard that good wrestling is like porn, always satisfying, I never plan on mixing the two together just because there is a time to orgasm and a time to orgasm (and I hope you catch the drift there).
Some of these items performed by ECW, and then again later by the conglomerate enterprise in the WWE, would end up pulling them off the air from whatever network they may have had a working deal with at the time. Such controversial items of sexually explicit material would be Beaulah's lesbian angle where Kimona kissed her down to the mat, leading to Dreamer exchanging saliva with the two and proclaiming "I'll take em both, I'm hardcore!" This would later be done, to a varying, by the WWE on their RAW program between the trio of Victoria, Candice and Torrie Wilson before splitting Torrie out from the story.
But clearly a double standard exists as one situation, while raunchier, ended up being a reason for the promotion being pulled off the air, as claimed by Tommy Dreamer on the Rise and Fall of ECW DVD, while the other didn't lead to any disciplinary actions taken against the much larger WWE company.
And speaking of double standards, how about we skip on over back to my favorite target – the ‘wrestling' fans. You know, most of those idiots who loved McMahon during the Attitude Era because of his feud with Steve Austin, but now hate his guts because his character is exactly the same it was then, only now it's not as cool to like it for God knows what stupid fucking reason these half wits can conjure up. It's the same character they grew up loving to hate, but now they hate to love him as they love hating on him – if any of that could make fucking sense.
While McMahon is harped upon for his perverse character ways, almost no one will harp on how Heyman sold us sex without watering it down and without regrets. The man that basically established the foundation of pudding matches and bikini contests in our wrestling all under the guise of ‘professional women's wrestling' as he had his ladies roll around on top of each other while Joey Styles, in a fit from a stroke and aneurysm as his eight ball kicks in, screams at the top of his lungs, as if he were being murdered, ‘cat fight'. We all loved it then, and now we're getting more and more of it and suddenly, we seem to be growing more mixed as time goes on. Oh the tangled web we weaved as we cheered on the ladies who did nothing but roll around on the mat pulling at hair – now we get them in bunches who can only do that much, if we're lucky they even paid attention to Finlay's training sessions.
This is what we accepted when we opened up to ECW, and this is what we get to keep thanks to ECW. We don't just get the attitude, the shift in wrestling styles, the presence of more screw jobs than the WWE knows how to write out, and more than TNA knows how to stop fucking writing into every God damned match. We got the sex, we got the violence, and we got the drugs.
And with that, I'll wrap up this one a little shorter than the previous entry, as I want to devote the drugs portion as being its own article. So to fill up the rest of my allotted time, I'm going to squeeze in a bit more random thoughts, which I like to call brain queefs – just because it's funnier than brain farts.
Feedback Central
I'd actually copy and paste some of the feedback I got on my previous entry about Heyman being more devil than saint or martyr, but I'm too lazy to try and get any of it, fix it up so it reads a little clearer in this format, and accredit who sent what. So half-assing it away, I did receive a solitary e-mail that pretty much pointed out that I was mostly right about the blood thirsty fans being the reason many press on during injury in a match, but also wrong in that it seems to be a age old tradition for guys to want to finish out a match for the good of the company, the industry, the roster and its fans.
Citing examples from not just Triple H and his magic trick of pulling both quads in the most ridiculous fashion that could only be topple by Kevin Nash's fragile paper knee crumbling upon itself; he went on to name Curt Henning's performance against Bret Hart at a SummerSlam – heaven help me, without looking it up I honestly can't remember which fucking year that was, but I'll go out on the limb and think it was 1992…through 94. There, we all win and go on living happy, vapid fucking lives.
And it's true, this is an old school mentality to give the fans what they paid for, but it's also gotten so much more extreme. So injuries are just so damaging that putting more stress on them for the sake of a single show could not only shorten careers, they could flat out shorten life spans. I didn't mean to actually put all of the blame there on Heyman and the ECW crew who did more for their fans than most companies, or football teams like the New York Giants, but they do have to share in some of that blame as they created this mentality in the fans that if someone can't finish out because of injury they're a pussy – that they're less of an entertainer than others. Some have criticized Joey Matthews for his bailing out of the ladder match at Armageddon 2006, but half of those brain dead idiots wouldn't even think to try what he does for a living without trying to short cut their way by trying to imitate what Mick Foley did and now regrets – diving off his fucking mother's garage on video tape.
At some point, we're going to have to lay off of these workers – just a bit.
Juice for all, and juice for none
Which brings me to another point I wanted to make – and yes, I fucking know I didn't really go into my feedback box, but fuck you, I'm THE Moral Virus, I'll fucking jump around like the scattered brain chimpanzee that I really am…CRAVAT.
* Insider Joke Note: You won't get that random CRAVAT insertion unless your name is Tyminski, so don't fucking bother asking where that came from.
I brought up, in a previous entry here, about how I feel it's okay for wrestlers to be on the juice – and I don't mean O.J. I want to do a full article devoted to that, but I figured I'd jump on that a bit here, just to fill up some space and time – and lord knows I need to stall for a good 3 pages now.
I'm of the mind that if a wrestler feels they need steroids to maintain their image [that] I don't see what the big problem is. Like I pointed out previously, these people work ridiculous schedules and have a demanding request placed upon them about their looks and what they should look like to be a big time player within this industry. We're all guilty of judging a talent upon their looks at some point or another to varying degrees – that's not to state we all think that a guy who is completely out of shape is automatically a shit wrestler or going to be an automatic bathroom break type worker, but rather that we all think some guys should look a certain way from their current look to spice them up some.
We've all criticized Austin's beer gut, Triple H's paunch, Kane's bulging gut, Kane's hair cut – or losing fight with a pair of hair clippers whichever is more realistic to believe – Taker's hair cut for all of a coffee break, Mordecai's stupid bleach blonde everything – we've all been there for someone on something. And don't think we haven't done it for TNA either, eh Monty ‘Kip' Sopp?
The thing I don't get is how people can be so anti-steroids and for the most part not know how it works, why its prescribed, why it's illegal, what it's real harmful side effects are and all of that important information you'd have to research upon to really grasp an understanding of this drug. Maybe that's why many of you don't like to see wrestlers on it, because now you'd have to do some fucking research to actually understand what makes them being on it a bad thing. Maybe it's the fact that the media paints it to be an evil and ugly thing that you, like little flocks of poorly dressed, oddly coordinated, and foul smelling sheep have to take on their word alone, because if you had to think for yourselves your poor little heads might implode into a gushy spray of beautiful confetti.
And another thing – this is wrestling. No records will be broken if, all of a sudden, Jimmy Yang, juiced up to look like a 5'2" version of Bobby Lashley, started doing triple flip Phoenix splashes off the top rope. It's not like baseball where statistics are vital and important parts of the game in telling it's skewed and tainted history. It's not like we actually care how many times someone holds a world title because, and this is the bigger joke, not many of those so-called world titles are that - WORLD championships.
A world within their own?
And that's another one of those topics that I planned to make their own article upon, but feel I'd like to touch up upon, now – the world titles out there, for the most part, are fucking jokes!
Just because TNA slapped the word ‘world' on their title, they figure they can get away with that nonsense? You know, the nonsense of their indy promotion continuing this illusion of grandeur that will never become theirs. It's a piece of poorly constructed gold in a decent UFC title rip-off design stapled to a fucking Calvin Klein belt! A Hershey kiss has more allure, luster and legacy behind it than that world title that is, for about 9 months out of the year, defended in Orlando's back-lot alley studio that once served as a crack house for Michael Isner when he was slumming it with Minnie Mouse and doing lines off the ass-crack of Pluto and Daisy Duck!
Fucking spare me of this ‘world' title – especially you, WWE. A ‘world' title actually includes anything outside of the United States of America! How about you do a few more shows in Canada at the very fucking least?
And that's a title that has no lineage to speak of despite it looking like the same mound of shit that WCW pawned off as their illustrious poundage of gold. That's a title that basically was created to stroke the ego of a cocksucking ass-hat that decided banging the boss's daughter, who owns a chin the same size and consistency of Patrick Stewart's head, wasn't enough for him to ‘earn' his spot as the most deserving guy for a main event run in the company, it's also more important than any other living being and as such must be extended to those he feels are worthy of holding it. That pretty much narrows the field down to a select few wearing his knee pads, and I don't mean for knee support when working in that ring in front of a live audience.
What happened to the ‘world' titles of the ‘world' being defended in the God damned ‘world'? Did I miss a fucking memo here about ‘world' titles not having to be defended anywhere outside of where the company wants them to [be defended]? And does anyone else fucking find it hilarious that the only real World title that not only has a great amount of allure behind it, still, and actually has the dignity to be defended around the world, thus far, is Ring of Honor's? And before I get some dumb e-mails, I didn't include the NWA's World title simply because they just got it back from TNA's grubby Orlando/Nashville hands and are starting to have it tour the world again, despite having too many branch promotions and a shit load of other NWA titles that make their ‘world' title seem kind of fucking redundant.
Milk yourself dry on a mango?!?
And to round out these random thoughts, I figured I'd go out on a Halo 3 type bang – pretty much limp, unsatisfying, vulgar, and obscene and constantly whining in your ear like a 12 year old prepubescent child reminding you of how much worse you are then him as a human being.
Lately I've been playing a lot of that game, just utilizing it as a way to get a lot of stress out of my system and to help fight this nasty writer's block. The one thing I can't help but think about, though, as I'm busy trying to no-scope about 5 different heads in a game of Shotty Snipers on every poorly designed and conceivable map the bloody game has to offer is how WWE in their infinitely dense wisdom didn't try and work something out there to munch off of the Bungie gamer core. It just seems like a no-brainer – the WWE loves money and Bungie is making a shit load of it thanks to a game that has more flaws within it than a thrown together TNA showing.
The game easily nets over 500,000 players on at any single given point in time, and that's a lot of wallets the WWE either has, or could get a grip upon if they were promoted at one of their shit pay-per-views by this proverbial gold mine of misfits and losers (myself included).
But aside from that, I just have to wonder at what point the WWE will come crashing down on the internet again – namely to shut down live streams and all other illegal feeds of their pay-per-views on the intrabutts. You know, so they don't lose money to use greedy and cheap bastard wrestling fans who want it all but don't want to pay dick for it, much like a certain faction of anime freaks and morons who think that the artists of their beloved shows get paid when they steal their works for free and plaster it all over YouTube.
Something about it all just strikes me as peculiar. After all, this is the same company that came crashing down on the head of the internet tape trading circuits like the 2 bed studio apartment sized ass smashing itself upon the head of a poor, defenseless, but very evil fucking squirrel. This is the same WWE that bares its hatred for us on the internet at every waking moment and reminds us at every chance we get that we're all wrong about anything we'd like to talk about as they continue to turn a profit that was once never there, twice.
This is what they do – this is how the WWE pretty much covers the wrestling industry – by making it impossible for us all to watch wrestling without having to pay them large amounts of money to do so, even if it's not their product we'd like to pay and see.
Oh, and could someone poke the WWE about not owning the ECW library and how they should hound Rob Feinstein to give up those fucking rights already? It can't be that fucking hard to flag him down for that type of conversation. Just get him on AIM tell him you're a 12 year old boy from Stanford – don't worry, he'll pretend you said 18 – who'd like to meet up with him for some milk and cookies and a rousing game of Halo 3 on your parents bed as you jump around in Captain Planet undaroo's. Shit, you probably can get him at the headquarters already greased down in Vaseline and sporting a very revealing speedo with whip cream dripping out of the sides before you could finish handing him the location.
Honestly, I'm tired of seeing the only way I can get some of these older ECW events on tape is through his shit site that never takes care of their exclusive ECW tapes. I hate that ordering tapes from their ECW library is basically asking they send you a recording of their attempt to watch scrambled porn on an old analog cable box that just happens to have a loose enough wire to get enough of the sound of said porn, and some of the fuzzy flakes that come along with it. If I'm paying good, hard earned money for this shit, shouldn't I at least get something semi watchable, or at least something that even the decaying blind corpse of Ray Charles could watch without having to stop and ask "what the fuck is this shit?"
WWE, spend a little money in some areas to make money before you come looking to squash out my hopes and dreams of being able to get certain events on tape somewhere, somehow. After all, you're practically giving shit out that has Hogan's orange goblin mug on the fucking thing, how about you give a little more back to the Internet Wrestling Community by NOT trying to kill off any and all access points to tapes from NJPW and AJPW, or even the more dreadful Zero-One Max stuff. I'm begging you.
And like that, I'm out of time, and room. I bid you all a farewell and a healthy CRAVAT for your troubles.
