Wrestling Women Mixed wrestling Update: 29/04/1998 to misc4 I am wrestling. There's no mistaking it: hold, watch the counter, shoot for the leg, try a takedown. My muscle pressing against the resistant flesh and joints of another. Then my opponent reverses the hold, and I'm the one in danger. My high school coach would be yelling at me to bridge, so I do, arcing my neck to keep my shoulders from touching the mat. It seems like old times, except that today my opponent is Christina, a six-foot-two dominatrix, she's naked, and we aren't wrestling to pin. Then she whips a forearm across my throat for a choke hold. "Submit?" she asks, smiling. Since it's all I can do, I tap the mat twice, signaling that I submit. She releases her hold and helps me up. We shake hands, she laughs in a friendly way, tells me that I did okay and walks off the mat to find her glasses and towel. Then it's another pair's turn: Tony, a thick-set man with a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair breaks off talking with Redd, the de facto hostess of this informal group, and they walk onto the mat and square off. They're both wearing shorts and sport tops -- at least for now. This is how rainy Sunday mornings go for these people, who meet every week for some serious boy-girl grappling. Redd is a professional wrestler, though there is no actual women's league, circuit or governing body. She's made a few wrestling videos (for which there is a huge market), but most of her work is in private sessions with men: an hour of decidedly strenuous wrestling, $150, no sex. At five- foot-four and 130 pounds, she's slim but buff, and is stalemating the heavier Tony, though it's no cakewalk. Their bodies are in a tight knot, their breathing is loud, and their hands shoot into elbow crooks or over wrists, searching like autonomous beings for holds. They never look at each other. You don't, when wrestling; sight will never tell you what touch can. Tony pulls one of Redd's arms off of his chest, straightens it and quickly places his other hand just above the back of her elbow. "Fifteen pounds," he says as he applies that much pressure, and she gasps just a bit and gives. When they're up, she says, "Nice arm bar" appreciatively, and he shows her how he maneuvered into that move and how, if he'd leaned into it more, he could've snapped her arm at the elbow. As Redd told me when I arrived, this is submission-style, competitive wrestling. There are ground rules (no biting, kicking, punching or eye gouging, all of which I appreciate), but otherwise, the match goes until someone gives up. No rounds, no near-falls, no three-seconds-and-you're- pinned. On a far corner of the mat, Christina has already thrown another guy onto his back. He is thin, in loose white shorts, clearly no match for her. She straddles him, holding his arms down as a schoolyard victor would. He struggles a bit, laughingly complaining that she started early, and she tickles him lightly. He laughs harder, says something along the lines of a marriage proposal. "My girlfriend might object," she retorts, and his comeback is muffled in her breasts as she leans over and puts a loose headlock on him. I look at the woman next to me and she says, "They do that all the time. He loves it." He continues to wiggle under her, she smothering him. I can't see if there is a bulge at his crotch or not. These are men who adore strong women. Some seek domination, some wish to role-play a scenario in which their secretary tells them to get their own damn coffee, some wish to relive days as a helpless infant in mommy's arms. Wrestling can call all of these elements into play, along with a Foucaultian discipline and training. One male participant explains that he likes to wrestle women because it is "intensely bonding" -- second only to sex in physical pleasure, and far less complicated. And indeed, there is an air of camaraderie within this group -- most bouts conclude with a friendly hug; advice and comfort are always available for the loser of a match, and if someone tweaks a knee, all activity stops while it is tended to. And thus it all seemed, in a strange way, not only less complicated than sex, but less complicated than wrestling in high school. Though what was going on in this room could ruin professional lives, this male-female wrestling was ultimately less transgressive than what transpired in a sweaty gym decades ago. In the narrow, straight world I grew up in, the barrier prohibiting touch between boys separated us like a kryptonite curtain. My high school was all-male and "faggot" was the harshest opprobrium. Yet there we were, awash in sweat and hormones, boys who would never put an arm over a friend's shoulder, wearing skimpy outfits and groping one another. In unconscious defense we construed the sport as war, a pure expression of primacy and rank. We could never admit that it was more than the thrill of victory and inflicting pain. We could never admit that the feel of another's body, the expression of vital, physical force, whether in cooperation or competition, was joyful. We acknowledged none of this in these moments, not even our common fear of each other, and of ourselves. There's a tap on my shoulder and Redd invites me onto the mat. It's embarrassing, like pairing up for a school science project. She's still in her crop top and shorts, I'm in tights and a T-shirt. The crowd is encouraging us both. We begin on our knees, orbiting around each other. For some reason I again feel shy, not knowing where to look. All those never-hit-a-girl engrams flash, and I move back. What are the rules of engagement? This is almost as bad as asking someone out. But then Redd moves in quickly, grabbing me just below my shoulder to control my arm. On its own my arm rotates around to the outside of hers to regain control. Her muscles are solid, and she puts real strength behind her moves. We have both arms going now in a cat's cradle of potential setups, and then I free one arm and shoot it to her opposite knee, taking her down. I had one girlfriend who liked to be held down in bed. I was particularly bad at that; when she struggled, I'd relent or ask, "Are you okay?" or some such, and she'd roll her eyes and suggest we do something else. At those moments, we were strangers. But wrestling with Redd, with the rules and form of the sport laid out before us and no submerged agendas, none of the flotsam of our personal lives, the intimacy is unmuddled. I have her on her side now, pushing to curl one arm around a leg and the other under her neck. If I can complete the cradle and lock my hands together, I'll have her pinned -- but we're not going for pins. She is fighting it hard, and we are both sweating. My chest is pressed against hers, one arm is deep in her crotch, but though John Donne could most assuredly weave a seduction poem out of this, I don't have time to notice. She says, to general laughter in the room, "This guy is pretty strong," and twists out of my arms. I try to get into position but her legs are already wrapped around my head in a scissors hold. One of my arms and my body are still holding her down, and I arch. For some reason I'm still trying to pin her, as if that would stop the painful pressure on my head. I try to think what it means to be between a strange woman's thighs, the nape of my neck pressing against the mound of her sex, but there seems to be no room for thoughts in my increasingly small head. "I submit." When she opens her legs, the sudden release from pain, the strange roaring in my ears, is like a bad dream of being born. I sit up, a bit dazed, and Redd comes to me, wraps her arms around me softly to thank me for the bout; it's like a good dream of being born. At the end of the morning's session, we all walk away rolling our heads to work out the kinks in our necks, slowly windmilling our arms to loosen landed-upon shoulders. We wipe off our sweaty bodies, bundle up against the cold wind and head downstairs to the city street in a bunch. Before we go our different ways we linger, make plans for the next week and say our goodbyes -- we, who share little beyond the need for the intense grip of bodies.