Is It Ethically Impossible To Watch Pro Wrestling?
Everything about that sentence is so harrowing - of course pro wrestling is the most fertile monster breeding ground - that it makes your writer feeling profoundly uneasy for engaging with it. Anecdotally, this has become a theme in recent days. It just feels like the entertainment arm that expressly hides things from its audience has reached a grimly natural conclusion.
A thick cloud of smoke has lingered over the BritWres scene for several years, much like in the social clubs to which it was once confined, and the raging, destructive damage of the fire has burned down the perception of this industry forever.
The wrestling fandom is also complicit in this unchecked behaviour; after all, how many times have you read about or engaged with the 2002 'Plane Ride from Hell' as a wild, perversely entertaining "boys will be boys" mile-high adventure? When it was, in fact, the venue of multiple disturbing sexual assault allegations at which several contractors with known and severe issues with alcohol had access to a full, open bar? We are guilty of romanticising this behaviour. Wrestling is lame?
Wrestlers party harder than rock stars, man!
A not inconsiderable number of wrestlers from the '80s and '90s that are revered through the deeply felt lens of nostalgia have openly confessed to reprehensible and illegal behaviour on the 2000s shoot interview circuit. On some level, we have known about and ignored or tacitly accepted this, reconciling it perhaps by embracing this new generation as the wholesome video gamers the old school derides them for being.
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