WRESTLING FEES: A CONTINUATION
By Walt Pitt


I'm glad to see that my original piece stimulated more than a little
conversation on this subject of paid private matches. That's good. It's
always healthy to re-examine something once in a while to offset the
inevitable complacency people develop about things. Even when something
is more or less clearly objectionable, human beings have a tendency to just
accept it if it's been in place for a long time. Issues should be examined
on their individual merits and not on whether or not they've become
accepted as a status quo. Just because private matches have cost a lot for
"as long as anyone can remember," doesn't make it right.


A very detailed and well-thought-out rebuttal to what I originally wrote
was posted on the Valkyrie Session Economics message board. I will not
reproduce it here, but I'd like to address the points that it makes.


Let me begin by saying that all the women that responded did so to
basically say that they agreed with me, and that they adhere to the pricing
guidelines I've called for: Jett, Sheila Burgess, Awesome Anne and Miss
Janna. All the voices of dissent (not that there've been many) are male,
which I find very interesting. Their basic argument (and it's a good one)
boils down to, "If you don't like what private wrestling matches cost, quit
whining and don't do them." Fair enough. But that dodges my basic
premise.


Yes, private inter-gender wrestling matches are, shall we say, a "premium
service" that has evolved an elite pricing structure. This is obviously
due to the fact that of the overall female population, only a very, very
small percentage are willing to do this kind of thing; fields such as
plumbing or carpentry have many practitioners, and thus their pricing
structure is more reasonable. A plumber and a carpenter can be found in
every city and town in the U.S., but there are entire states, such as
Wyoming, that have nary a female wrestler. The relative rareness of
practitioners coupled with the "what the market will bear" principle has
spawned the prices that we see today. I did not call for a rollback of
these prices, which I know would be essentially impossible and unacceptable
to all of women. Rather, I called for them to STOP RAISING their prices,
and I suggested a system of common sense discounts which would benefit
provider and client alike. Pre-paying of sessions shields wrestlers from
no-shows, and for that courtesy, a common sense thank you in the form of a
discount could be given by the wrestler. I see nothing unworkable or
fanciful in this. Some lame objections were quickly raised on the grounds
that using credit cards could be embarrassing for men with a significant
other who might question the payment if they saw it on the household's
monthly statement. I clearly stated that money orders would be another
option. Everyone knows that money orders cannot bounce (they're pre-paid).
 Another option would be wiring the money to the wrestler via Western
Union. This would also leave no paper trail.


The author of the rebuttal piece pooh-poohs the idea that price fixing goes
on in this business; he argues that since wrestlers are not organized into
any sort of union or cartel, it would be impossible. I'd like to inform
him that it certainly does go on in New York City with respect to agencies,
with the notable exception of JV Productions. Within the space of a couple
of months, New York City's wrestling agencies bumped their hour fee up by
$50. What they charge isn't posted on their websites. What did they do,
read each other's minds, or just serendipitously all decide to hike their
price at around the same time? Hogwash.


He argues that because some wrestlers travel, this adds another wrinkle or
layer of complexity to the issue of what they should charge. It does not.
Let's use as an example a wrestler who flies to a location at a cost of
$350 roundtrip and stays in a $100 a night hotel, checking in Monday
afternoon and checking out Wednesday morning (she'll be charged for 2
nights, $100 x 2 = $200). Factoring in a taxi to and from the airport and
meals, the trip will cost her about $650. If she's charging $300 an hour,
all she has to book is 2 one hour sessions and she's made up six-sevenths
of her expenditures right there. The rest is pure profit that she puts in
her pocket. Traveling does not justify charging more.


He argues, rightly, that the session business doesn't have ".one big
market, but a multitude of little niches." Some men want competitive
sessions, some men want sensual sessions; some men want hyper-muscular
wrestlers, some want slender ones; some want the woman to totally dominate
them, some want to fight back; etc., etc. I must therefore limit the
following criticism to only one type of wrestler/session. There are MANY
women on the wb270 list that are more accurately described as something
other than wrestlers. Some are pure escorts who have as much interest in
actually wrestling you as I have in wrestling a grizzly. Others are
competitive bodybuilders, who also generally do not like to really wrestle.
 Others are pure dominatrixes who again, for the most part, leave something
to be desired in the grappling skill/desire department. All of this is
perfectly fine. I cast no aspersions on any of these types of sessions,
and I make no moral judgments of them. BUT MANY OF THESE TYPES OF WOMEN
PRETEND TO BE SKILLED WRESTLERS WHEN THEY IN FACT ARE NOT. I'd be ashamed
to tell you how many times I've done matches with women who led me to
believe one way or another that they were decent competitive wrestlers (the
kind of match I enjoy) and they wound up wrestling about as skillfully as
10-year olds. I wrestled a woman from Washington state (now retired,
thankfully) whose website said that she was a student at a pro wrestling
school and that she was taking instruction in submission style fighting
from a professional male NHB fighter. At one point during our "match" (ha,
ha) I asked her if she could show me how to do an ankle lock. She looked
at me like I'd asked her to flap her arms and fly to the moon. She had no
clue what I was talking about.


I generally like the way the wb270 site is run and handled, and it's a good
resource, but it exacerbates this problem by posting alleged "favorable
match reviews" for every wrestler. These "reviews" give the unwary the
impression that every single woman listed on the site, including the
aforementioned sex kitten who had no clue what an ankle lock was, is a
worldbeater. These glowing reviews are probably bogus at least half of the
time; the woman can get friends to send them in or do so herself through e-
mail accounts other than her own. This practice should cease because
there's no way to verify these "reviews". Many, many, many men who partake
of this service have been swindled by women who profess to be skilled
competitive grapplers but aren't. I therefore question why women in the 3
categories I mentioned above (escorts, non-wrestling bodybuilders and doms)
are listed on a site that calls itself a wrestling info site. This is
about nothing more than truth in advertising. A site that lists full
service escorts wouldn't have pages devoted to Ziggy or Mayra, so why
should a wrestling site that lists grapplers have pages devoted to women
who want to do nothing more strenuous than flex their biceps in front of
you or spank you with a paddle? There should be separate umbrella websites
for escorts, non-wrestling bodybuilders, doms, and wrestlers, so there'd be
no confusion.


I'd like to touch on one final point, that of guys getting shorted on time
because some women sandwich sessions so close together. If I pay a
wrestler's asking fee, I'm entitled to not one second less than the amount
of time I paid for. The phenomenon known as "clock watching" goes hand-in-
hand with this. If my session is scheduled for 2:00 pm and I arrive
exactly on time, the session cannot end at 3:00 pm without me being
cheated. Picture the scene: I enter, there's a few minutes of polite "How
are you?" chit-chat, I have to change into whatever I wrestle in, and I
might like to go to the bathroom first. THE WRESTLING CLOCK SHOULD START
RUNNING WHEN WE ACTUALLY BEGIN TO WRESTLE, NOT WHEN I ENTER THE ROOM! When
the wrestling ends, I have to get dressed and there'll be more chit-chat.
If I arrive at 2:00 and get shoved out the door to make room for her next
client at 3:00, I obviously wasn't wrestling for a full hour; it would be
something more along the lines of 45 minutes. This is wrong, and it
exemplifies the kind of greed I was talking about in the first piece. I
suppose "clock watching" is more akin to stinginess than greed. I've
actually had women set a timer to go off at the exact moment that 30 or 60
minutes is up. God forbid she should go a few minutes over for the,
perhaps, week's pay I've forked over.


I suggest that guys should begin to start sharing information about their
bad experiences, in e-mails between each other and in public forums like
this one. Telling me who you've wrestled that sucked would be far more
useful to me than glowing "accounts of matches" like wb270 and TomNine
post. Again, this is a premium service. I accept that. But if I go to a
4-star hotel or restaurant, which also charge premium rates, I'll be
treated decently. I have every right to expect the same from a wrestler.