Is It Ethically Impossible To Watch Pro Wrestling?
The tipping point has arrived.
You might roll your eyes at the title. It's a rhetorical question.
But you still engage, right?
Under the most ruthless interpretation of the law, the extent to which professional wrestling is an institutionally rotten and immoral enterprise is debatable. That it is rotten is exponentially less so. For obvious reasons, this written media must be crafted carefully; hopefully, that is not read as tentative, ignorant, nor insensitive.
Several professional wrestlers in the United Kingdom and beyond have been accused of deplorable sexual misconduct over the past week. That is a fact. Many of the wrestling promotions that contracted the services of many of these performers have subsequently severed ties with them. That is also a fact. There is evidence - not proof, but evidence captured via screenshots and acknowledged via statements - that several of those accused have admitted to inappropriate and abusive behaviour, the played-down counter claims in which, ironically, are consistent with the gaslighting behaviour of which many are accused.
We know that, in some of these harrowing cases, adult males over the age of 30 have abused the power afforded by their position to groom far younger women - of objective age to consent legally, but vulnerable to the manipulative behaviour which they without experience of adult relationships receive as normal - into sexual relationships.
"Consent legally," an extremely iffy area of morality in the first instance, is barely even technically accurate.
CONT'D...(1 of 5)