Is It Ethically Impossible To Watch Pro Wrestling?

For the benefit of those who do interpret the law ruthlessly when engaging in the dialogue of #SpeakingOut and other such movements, there is actually no law in the United Kingdom for the abused young women of wrestling to invoke and bring to the attention of the authorities. Under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, only certain job roles are specified as positions of trust prosecutable in the event of their being used to groom young adults into sexual relationships. Youth justice workers and teachers fall under its remit, but staff in faith organisations and sports clubs do not. The pro wrestling coach is not legally accountable for doing that for which a high school teacher would be rightfully jailed. This appallingly shortsighted loophole is, mercifully, the subject of recent online activism.

That in itself is ethically irreconcilable; even in the wildly improbable event that BritWres is not systemically appalling, there is no stopping it from being systemically appalling. For years, and in multitudinous examples, wrestling has "gotten away with it" by virtue of the fact that it is acceptably lame, dumb, niche - even wrong - through mainstream optics. Wrestling is almost calcified by its own awfulness.

Such behaviour prevails because, at present, it can.

There is no union in place for this behaviour to be formally reported; as slivers of catharsis go, while it was nice to read reports of locker room leaders kicking alleged abusers out of the shower, that's not a remotely tenable way of policing professional wrestling. It is entirely reliant on situational fortune and the physical strength of those with any scruples. There is also no recognised international governing body in place to impose a consistent code of conduct enforceable by procedural reviews and sudden inspections. Wrestling - an industry in which its workers are expressly trained to deceive in intimate physical proximity to their peers - is self-policed.

CONT'D...(2 of 5)