“ If I’ve learned anything in my time writing at a wrestling website, it is that the majority of wrestling fans are embarrassingly normal. They have jobs. They have wives and kids. They enjoy sports, literature, and the arts. They attend social functions with their peers. They might own a wrestling t-shirt, but they’ll generally only wear it when working in the garage. If they have wrestling tapes, they tend to collect dust in a cardboard box. That’s not to say they aren’t enjoying wrestling. The sheer number of people subscribing to WWE’s on demand channel, mixed with the ratings numbers of the four weekly pro wrestling shows on television prove that the average wrestling fan is still very much tuned in. Generally, their fandom in wrestling is not unlike their addiction to the internet; underlying and omnipresent, but rarely placed on a list of favorite activities on their Facebook profile. „

International Object, from the chapter about wrestling fans.  (via footnotesofwrestling)


This is the one time where I feel like I have to be the other voice to a Footnotes entry… in an initial draft of this, I stated that I disagreed with his point, but he is right: people don’t talk about wrestling.  K Sawyer Paul and I got into this in the podcast we did together, but I figured I would interject the point I made on that episode in writing and elaborate: 

Myself and most of my friends talk about wrestling a lot.  My girlfriend watches wrestling with me and she and I will talk about it together at social functions.  It was one of the first things I talked about with her when we first met… SERIOUSLY! I bragged, as if it were the coolest thing you could do on a monday, that me and two or three other friends would get together, watch Raw, and play Wrestlemania 2000 on N64. It comes up in texts, I have friends without a tumblr that I link to the Footnotes blog and we talk about Paul’s points of discussion at length when we see each other, wherever we are.

I think it’s about how you wear it.  People are afraid they will be the nerdy kid that everyone shuns at the party if they bring it up.  It’s a fringe interest, sure… but I went through roughly 19 years of the bullshit of being the nerdy, uncomfortable kid at the party who tries to feign interest in other people’s equally boring interests.  TALK ABOUT WRESTLING!  Seriously.  If the people you associate with are actually your friends, and you aren’t obnoxious about it, they will listen!  There is so much interesting stuff that goes on in wrestling!

My dad, who used to threaten to smash my wrestling tapes with a sledgehammer (my dad is not a violent man but that is not an exaggeration, that was an actual threat when I was in middle school), and I had a discussion at a bar a couple weeks ago based on the things we here on tumblr talk about (TUMBLR IS AN AMAZING RESOURCE).  We talked at length about how someone like Chris Jerhico or the Miz as heels will present themselves in a very GQ manner, whereas faces such as John Cena or Randy Orton will dress like children or someone at a pajama party in their undies (based on an older Footnotes article I read).  I brought up my theory that wrestling is similar to certain opera.  He reciprocated by bringing up how raunchy many opera stories are, and that people want to believe that opera is this high class form of expression, but in reality while they are beautiful pieces of expression, many are tragic, horrific stories about the worst that can come of people.  Wrestling can be similar, he conceded. These are passionate stories of revenge which only have a few degrees of separation from the great, respected, tragic art stories of history.

Probably part of my passion for making sure I actually talk about wrestling in public is fueled by my disdain for how much people talk about nonsense like American Idol, reality shows, or really even scripted shows like How I met Your Mother which is just a terrible, terrible show. The idea, to me, that talking about a show like HIMYM, let alone any of the other shows listed above, or ones like it, is somehow MORE socially acceptable than talking about ANY wrestling program makes me genuinely angry.  Television is television, and as long as people will watch and discuss in public something as terrible as The Bachelor, TALK ABOUT WRESTLING!

(Source: internationalobject)

Quote posted at 4:13 AM (2 years ago) | Permalink