Wacky Wrestling Theory 5.08.08: Faking It

Posted by Jake Chambers on 05.08.2008

Is there a connection between some fan perspectives on ‘selling’ in pro-wrestling and sexual experience?

A couple of years ago I was talking to an 18 year old guy who told me that he'd given every girl he'd ever had sex with an orgasm. Now, if you were in my situation you might have a number of reactions, one may be to high five him and say ‘damn right, me too,' or another might be, like me, uncontrollable laughter. I'm certain that most adult men look back at the sexual relationships they were having when they were 18 or younger and realize that they had no idea what they were doing back then. The responses produced by those young girls was likely that of discomfort or boredom and not sexual bliss. Maybe the younger people of today are exposed to more pornography and thus have a greater knowledge of what to do during sex. Well, pornography is obviously just an exaggerated hyper-experience recreation much like pro-wrestling. Someone saying they know how to perform sexually from watching porn would be as ridiculous as saying they could win a fight using the moves from pro-wrestling. Regardless, women are notorious for their ability to seamlessly sell men on the realism of a faked orgasm, and it is only through mature investigation that men are able to discover how to come within the range of providing orgasms more times than not. Thus there is a possibility that those men who believe that every woman they've had sex with had an orgasm are most likely self indulgent and/or delusional. I think a connection can be made between this type of man and the male wrestling fans that have a skewed interpretation of the ‘selling' in pro-wrestling.

‘Selling' is the term used to refer to the act of imitating pain in pro-wrestling. This can also encompass the art of exploiting the memory of that pain in order to show physical weakness to a certain area of the body in order to tease submission or match finishes. Wrestlers can go about ‘selling' in many ways, from facial and oral expressions, to false limps or acting tender towards a certain part of the body. There is a simplistic surface way to understand selling when observed, which is when any blow or hold, such as a punch or a stretch, elicits expressions of extreme pain from the receiving wrestler. There is another more sophisticated way to evaluate selling, which would be to take into account age, health, previous injury, crescendos of response as the match progresses, sense memory, and connecting different amounts of pain to the intensity of the strikes or maneuvers. Much like the situation with the female orgasm, some men might simply think that harder and faster banging equals louder and more intense orgasm, or there are those who take into account the effects of foreplay, pacing, speed variation, consistent clitoral stimulus and (possibly) the targeting of the g-spot, in order to understand how a women truly reaches a climax. I will attempt show that these same men who possess a base understanding of pro-wrestling selling are also the type who do not know how to give a woman an orgasm or at least have been gullibly led to believe that they have done it every time.

This major discrepancy between what indicates, or at least what goes noticed, as good ‘selling' shows just how subjective fan criticism could be. Since everything in pro-wrestling is ultimately staged, rating what is legitimately good or bad is not as simple as in regular professional sports. Online criticism has had a major impact on the direction of pro-wrestling in recent history and therefore when a swell of opinion forms it can soon become the equivalent of a fact in the collective pro-wrestling psyche, and can be used to subjectively destroy a wrestler's credibility when they have done nothing particularly wrong. Thus rather than acknowledging certain unbiased flaws in singular matches, sometimes this kind of criticism can be used to support very biased personal opinion. I would have no problem with someone saying that, "John Cena sucks and the Undertaker rules," if that is their flat out personal belief, but trying to back up that opinion with an even more subjective opinion disguised as fact is when I believe some people can begin to get frustrated with the online wrestling community.

In order to illustrate the misinterpretation some fans may have of appropriate selling I will focus mainly on those who attacked the John Cena knee injury at Wrestlemania 23, particularly in contrast to the main event of Wrestlemania XXIV. After his bout against Shawn Michaels, Cena was highly criticized by some people for his poor ‘selling' of knee/leg damage and how it seemed to disappear during the match. Personally, I saw this match quite differently and feel that the criticism is highly suspect, thus I would like to examine the scenes in question from that match more closely.

Both Cena and his opponent Shawn Michaels came into the match completely healthy, a fact that Jim Ross even notes in the opening moments of the Wrestlemania 23 main event. John Cena is younger than Michaels, physically much stronger, and must out weigh him by at least 50 pounds. This opening clean slate of health and lop-sided physical status is very important for understanding the selling that Cena will perform for his knee.

The first knee attack came when Cena was in the ring corner and attempted to kick a charging HBK who then caught his leg and punched his knee. This is followed by a couple of stomps, a ring post curl, some more stomps, and a couple of chop blocks. This is the extent of the assault on Cena's knee. Even though it happens in the first ten minutes of a near thirty-minute match, some people would have had him sell this injury for the entire time. Michaels uses no submission holds or even wear down holds on the leg at all. During the entire sequence Cena was making a visual attempt to turn his leg away from Michaels, a touch of reality rarely shown in WWE matches, and enough of a signal that he was protecting himself from long term side effects of a few light impact strikes.

In the end of the sequence, Cena ducked out of the turnbuckles and Michaels hit the ring post and knocked himself out for a while allowing Cena time to recover in another corner, reasonably selling the pain in his knee while also visually shaking it off. Having gained the advantage Cena used a series of moves that don't require much weight on his bad leg, then goes for his signature 5-Knuckle-Shuffle and even more prominently stumbled and shook off the pain in his knee. The leg pretty much does not play a factor in the match from that point on, and reasonably so. Considering Cena had no previous knee injury, was wearing knee pads, is young and strong, and was only the victim of a few minutes of stomps, his leg injury should be understood as nothing but a stinger that can be plausibly shaken off and should not have been a problem for the rest of the match. By having the sense to show measure and continuity with his selling during this section of the match Cena displayed a truly mature wrestling sense.

Some have even commented that Shawn Michaels looks visually angry as he is leaving the ring after the match and deduced that he was pissed because of Cena's lack of ‘selling.' In fact, the Shawn Michaels character should be upset and angry at that point, having just lost the main event at Wrestlemania, by tapping out, to a wrestler he believed was inferior. HBK refusing to shake Cena's hand fit into the storyline of the two reluctant partners fighting, and the older Michaels refusing to respect the younger Cena. Thus the criticism of Cena was not a thoroughly careful examination of ‘selling' but a transparent device many fans used to continue the false perpetration that John Cena ‘can't wrestle.'

In contrast, the main event of Wrestlemania XXIV between Edge and the Undertaker received almost no criticism for a lack of selling. I don't think this match should have necessarily been criticized, though given last year's backlash against Cena for ‘ruining' his main event by poorly selling, I thought the Undertaker would be subject to some attacks due to his suspect handling of a similar situation. Undertaker is of course much older than Cena and also has had a long career full of injury. In the early going of the match, the younger Edge is causing a lot of unfocused damage to the Undertaker. When a pinpoint attack on the Undertaker's back by Edge begins, Undertaker has already been visually worn down, unlike Cena whose knee attack came at the beginning of his match. Undertaker has the small of his back back-dropped onto the ringside divider and has it followed up by over three minutes of half-Boston crab submission holds. Eventually, the Undertaker begins to fight back and Edge is no longer able to use a purely back focused attack.

The Undertaker visually recognizes his injury by putting his arm behind his back and wincing on a number of occasions, much like how Cena limped and shook off his knee injury. Yet rarely does this sore back seem to play any part in effecting the Undertaker from completing the moves in the match. He is able to get flawless torque on his Last Ride, and has no problem lifting Edge for chokeslams and tombstones in the last half of the match, even after taking numerous back impacting maneuvers, like a superplex, an inverted DDT and two spears. Unlike the Cena/Michaels match where the leg attack was short and was sold properly as a stinger on a young healthy athlete, this match had a sustained back sequence on an older wrestler who needs back strength to administer his main finishing moves. The Undertaker lightly sold any problem to his back and successfully made it through the final ten minutes without so much as acknowledging any side effects from the pain on his way to victory.

Some might suggest that the Undertaker's ‘dead man' character ‘no-sells' moves and injury. This is not necessarily true, especially in the more realistic phase of his later career. In fact, I saw the Undertaker defeat Kurt Angle at a house show where he sold his ankle pain masterfully throughout the final moments of the match, and continued to limp during his entire walk to the backstage curtain. So either the Undertaker got a pass from the pro-wrestling critics for his performance at Wrestlemania XXIV, or those same people put too much weight on a biased evaluation of John Cena's performance at Wrestlemania 23.

As a separate example, I even think criticism of the Great Khali shows subjective interpretation of ‘selling.' Khali is a giant and has only a hand full of physical equals in the wrestling world. Pro-wreslting would look increasingly phony if much smaller wrestlers who ‘can' wrestle, I suppose like Carlito or Mr. Kennedy, could somehow hurt Khali in anyway. By maintaining a consistent un-beatability and also not selling moves when the traditional wrestling logic is to sell everything, Khali is in fact ‘wrestling' quite well. The role of the giant wrestler must require a different set of selling and working rules in order to maintain the consistent realism of the overall show, yet in some cases the fans and critics want these giants to display a skill level that is very vague in definition. It is almost as if they want Khali to reverse hammerlocks and scream in pain from a toe-hold.

Some fans seem to want to see only the most extreme displays pain and pleasure in ‘good' wrestlers, similar to the presentations of physical emotion in pornography. Porn knows no subtlety, matching every rough double penetration, deep throat gag, bukkakae, cream pie and stiff face slap, with the happy moans and bright faces of orgasmic women. These unrealistically extreme exaggerations are made for fun, but they most likely appeal to many guys who feel their own satisfaction is of utmost importance. Thus I would argue that the recent epidemic of "You Can't Wrestle!" chants thrown the Great Khali's way is the equivalent of a guy dropping a load on a smiling girl's face in porn. To think that the powerful and healthy John Cena should have yelled louder when he got kicked in the knee in few times and then should remember to limp for twenty minutes afterwards seems kind of silly, but then again maybe not to those who believe that anal gang bangs are a realistic interpretation of sexual play.

The majority of both pro-wrestling and pornography are male-centric fantasy realms where base physical reaction is exploited and exaggerated for stimulating purposes. Watching modern pornography may lead some men to believe that the loudest and most carnal reactions to physical stimulus are appropriate. The extreme acts displayed and the pleasurable reactions of the women are definitely the minority when it comes to the real sexual activity that takes place in the personal lives of those watching. Unfortunately, those young men who become prematurely sexually active, with porn as their only education, may think that the fulfillment of their own orgasm and ejaculation is also leads to the pure satisfaction of a woman. This type of self-indulgence makes these men susceptible, in the future, to believing women's fake orgasms. ‘Selling' is obviously one of the most delicate skills a wrestler must possess, therefore quick evaluations of ‘selling' by fans that try to unfairly expose the poor skills of the wrestler, rather than using careful investigation, could reveal that the personality of these fans is the gullible and self-absorbed type that can take for granted the intricacies of experience. In the best case scenario, hoping to elevate the art of pro-wrestling and its fans above pornography, there should be more to the prolonged working and selling of an injury in a wrestling match than just grunting and facial squirming to match every move.

Instead of accepting John Cena's subtle and reasonable portrayal of his knee pain, in the example previously given, because it might force them to admit that John Cena has some pro-wrestling skill, the critics of this performance are showing that they cannot accept Cena unless he does exactly what they want him to do, and that's ‘suck.' Just as these, most likely, male fans do not want to concede that the world is exactly how they imagine it, it is believable that they are also the type of people who take their own sexual gratification for granted. To satisfy their narcissism, these fans would believe the standard moaning and facial expressions used by women to fake orgasms. Rather than being the type to adjust, as is the mentality needed to mature and learn the subtleties of giving a woman a real orgasm, these fans take the stereotypical reaction as justification of their own self-indulgent view of the world. In some ways, this theory makes it easy to see, historically, how all the detractors of wrestlers like John Cena, Shawn Michaels, The Rock, or Hulk Hogan, are often frustratingly irrational, young men. But maybe this is all just one of my really wacky theories.