Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying and Battering Review: Weak

Professional wrestling, in one form or another, has been around for over a century. It has been a stable and even an influence in many people’s lives. Also in that time it has been the target of criticism for being too violent and having a bad influence on young people. ”Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying and Battering” is a documentary in a long line of criticism geared towards professional wrestling.

Directors Sut Jhally and Jackson Katz look at the WWE, the biggest target in the wrestling is bad for you debate. Here they show how the WWE glorifies violence, bullying, sex, abuse towards women because “they deserve it” and anti-homosexual sentiments. To prove their case, they specifically target Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Divas others.

Some of the points they bring up, such as how Stone Cold is nothing more than a bully and heel thus the crowd should hate him, but instead, they love him. To them this shows that people identify more with the bully than with the victim and that the WWE clearly condones this kind of behavior. Also, all the divas are overly-sexualized and that in order for Chyna to survive she needed to become more appealing to men.

Jhally and Katz do show some statistics to back up their claims, but in the end they’re just statistics that don’t really prove that professional wrestling causes people to become like those they see on the show. There are clips of backyard wrestling which they use to prove their points. It’s still not enough.

In essence, this is just another educational tool used to attack professional wrestling with very little proof that it causes any harm on people. In fact, all the people interviewed in the documentary even said that they knew this was entertainment and should not be taken seriously. Jhally and Katz should do a little more research on the subject and find more solid proof that professional wrestling does cause harm to people than they may have an argument.

One good thing about this documentary is that it does show some good highlights of old WWF/E angles and matches. Although some of them are the angles we would all like to forget like the whole Chuck and Billy tag team and anything to do with the Divas. There’s a reason Wrestlecrap.com exists and these are right at home on the website.

Another day, another attack on professional wrestling with little solid research that shows that it causes people to copy it. “Wrestling with Manhood” is only worth watching for the WWF/E highlights and nothing else. Its message is weak and does not hold any water.