10 Wrestling Moments Everyone Misunderstood As Kids

6. Why Are Good-Looking Men Automatically Bad?

Shawn Michaels, following his early '90s heel turn, started to prance about a bit. He tussled his hair, and acted all sexy. In the immortal words of the best line of Bret Hart's autobiography, Michaels generally "acted like the stripper he must have been in a previous life".

This sort of body language was not exclusive to the Heartbreak Kid. Rick Martel was similarly...flamboyant, and your mother was always suspiciously close to pay attention to this hobby she reluctantly financed when Rick Rude disrobed in the middle of the ring. We were left to infer that good-looking men simply really enjoyed being good-looking, and that this was cause enough to brutalise them. For the early millennial generation, this was our first, insidious introduction to perhaps the ugliest of all pro wrestling sentiment:

Gay panic!

Those acts performed as they did in order to trigger the audience drawn to the simulated combat into a repulsed reaction which, given the young audience the WWF targeted, was a bit unseemly. The Goldust act that followed intensified this sentiment, and as the WWF relinquished the veneer of family-friendly decency, Jerry Lawler called him a "flaming f*g!" on TV.

There wasn't much misunderstanding there.