The U.S. women's wrestling team before competing against Japan at Beat the Streets in LA (Tony Rotundo, WrestlersAreWarriors.com)"Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present." -- Midnight in Paris, 2011
Really? All the things going on this week with Mejia, Iowa recruits, and awesome Final X matches, yet half of the posts are about women's events as if anyone cares. I don't even watch the events live on Flo anymore because their matches are intolerable. They shouldn't even be allowed in the sport to begin with, let alone sports in general because it doesn't build anything moderately useful for their practical future. Ever since Title IX was passed, men have been getting screwed (especially wrestling programs). The arts suffer because there are no woman to promote them and society continues its epic descent. Art builds grace, beauty, confidence, and precision in women. Sport only turns them to brutish amazonians. Please, I am begging, respect what these men are doing. Respect their craft, their skill, their athletic prowess. Promoting women only leads to less ladies while depriving good men of the honor they deserve and the support they rightfully need.
This comment, posted by anonymous mailbag commenter "Mustang98" in response to a discussion of the Whitney Conder vs. Victoria Anthony matchup at Final X, drew immediate and sharp criticism by the wrestling community. The comment section of this column was filled with a mixture of debate and dismissal, while men and women on Twitter lambasted the poster for his more regressive thoughts on gender, including this gem by Jason Bryant.
If you're the "fan" wrote this, and you follow me on Twitter, please do me and the rest of the sport of wrestling a favor and unfollow me. #DarkAges via @trfoley's @InterMat mailbaghttps://t.co/CPY3DswsAv pic.twitter.com/Sp1Yrjuorb
�" Jason Bryant 🎙 (@jasonmbryant) June 22, 2018
While giving additional airtime to his ideas seems counterproductive, I was struck by something that wasn't mentioned. Mustang98's comments are no longer considered regressive, they stand as a representation of a re-emergent thought that women should, quite literally, stay in the home, barefoot and pregnant.
Mustang98 isn't just a faux-intellectual. He's the type of impressionable guy who strolls out of a Western walking bowlegged. He's a disciple, a blind follower of any orthodoxy that makes him feel an inch taller in the morning. With Ayn Rand's ideologies proven false, Mustang98 and millions of others have found a new sociopolitical ideologue to follow in lock-step: Jordan Peterson.
If you don't know much about Jordan Peterson, he's a professor who found internet acclaim after launching a fight against "runaway liberal thought" and "PC-culture" from his college campus in Canada. Like with all modern media, the more provocative he became the more famous he became and eventually, because everything is about money, he wrote a self-help book called "12 Rules for Life." It's now an international best seller.
Mustang98 is doing an adequate imitation of Peterson, biting off the controversial author not only in the content of his thoughts but in shared syntax and smug hand-wringing about the dangers of liberal's attempts at social engineering. If this comment section was your first run-in with this line of thought, it can be jarring. But once you hear the words and the Artful Dodger-type begging for "logic" you can't miss the jargon of victimization at the hands of women and modernity.
Commenters like Mustang98 and others are swarming to embrace the regressive culture of gender rights because they are intimidated by the fact women are given equal opportunity to succeed. Now, with women doing well in sports and on-the-job -- often where the men have tried and failed -- they feel forced to blame something, or someone.
Mustang98 (and his ilk) believe that the personal and professional failures of men are due to an unnatural and politically motivated ascension of women in roles outside the home. (And apparently their lack of access to dance halls? Have you ever been to a Zumba class?)
The complaints of the affected male athlete have been mushrooming for the past forty years. Even as women life-boated the sport in 2013, some men blamed Title IX. Why? As one female wrestler recently told me she felt that the discrimination women have felt in wrestling is largely due to men losing the gender-specificity of the pursuit. The justification for failures in the classroom, or personal life, could always be padded with a single-sex athletic experience like wrestling, rugby, or football. A barrier to entry was enough to support a weak ego.
Now, with women achieving in sports where has-beens and never-weres are losing their unearned dominion, men are acting like toddlers being told to share their toy. With balding gender-warrior Stephen Miller (who once joined a women's track meet mid-race to prove he was faster) in the White House the new masculine mantra of "No Girls Allowed" might as well be scribbled in crayon on the $1 bill beneath "In God We Trust."
Mustang98's comment is so oafish that any number of takes have, and were, jotted down in the comments, on Twitter and in text messages. So, for the sake of brevity and clarity, I wanted to take the most backward of Mustang98's comments and provide the reader transparency and texture.
The arts suffer because there are no woman to promote them and society continues its epic descent. Art builds grace, beauty, confidence, and precision in women. Sport only turns them to brutish amazonians.
That "the arts suffer because there are no woman (sic) to promote them" is an unsubstantiated claim. Was I not aware that there a fewer operas or dance recitals? What is true is that there are a historic number of female-led shows on television, female-produced films in Hollywood and the highest-grossing musician in the world is Beyoncé (whose name auto-corrects in Microsoft Word, unlike "Mustang98").
And what about the lack of promotion for the arts (by women) leading to society's "epic descent." By what metric? The president paying off a porn star is the fault of, who, Julia Roberts (?) for choosing to have an acting career? Connecting the dots here is an act of madness.
I'm guessing that the "Art builds grace, beauty, confidence, and precision in women" was meant to read "THE Arts …" which would make the sentence true! But sadly, for Mustang98, "the arts" builds those characteristics in both men and women. Too bad he didn't take enough art classes to be "precise" with his words.
No rant is over until you slip in a cultural or racial slur, and Mustang98 was mindful of his audience and added that "Sport only turns them to brutish amazonians (sic)." Imprecise racial smears notwithstanding, I'm guessing our bold and scrupulous commenter was trying to equate women who have dedicated 20-plus years to the craft of wrestling to nothing more than some type of jungle-dwelling half-humans swinging from vines. Of course, that depiction (and verbiage) has no reflection of people of the Amazon who are intelligent, diverse and creative. Also, ironically, many early humans are known for the egalitarian nature of their male-female hierarchies. Seems relevant.
But let's put that all aside and focus on the most destructive, regressive, oppressive and half-witted idea of this troglodyte manifesto.
Please, I am begging, respect what these men are doing. Respect their craft, their skill, their athletic prowess. Promoting women only leads to less ladies while depriving good men of the honor they deserve and the support they rightfully need.
This idea is known as "enforced celibacy," known colloquially as incels, who are a group or men who are unable to find romantic relationships and think enforced monogamy and the retrenchment of traditional gender roles will increase their likelihood of their having sex with women. By their logic, through their male sex society we will see a reduction in angst and hormonal, which would make men less violent and more productive members of society. By Mustang98's logic: Men = Good and Women = Bad (unless servicing males). To "deprive" men of "honor" is to deprive them of the sex and recognition they "rightfully need."
While Mustang98 is off base it's important to remain hopeful about the next generation of men. Progress is never secured on the first iteration of an idea. The march of men pining for nostalgia will go on, but soon enough it will be in silence, canceled out by the hushing sounds of fellow men who want to watch, enjoy the spectacle and love nothing more than watching these "Amazonian" women display their strength, beauty, grace and precision. A society growing and maturing together.
Helen Maroulis executes a foot sweep in the finals of the World Championships in Paris (Tony Rotundo, WrestlersAreWarriors.com)To Mustang98 and anyone else yelling at their computer screens because women are strong, intelligent and powerful: Take a breath. Go on a walk. Read a novel. Allow some seed of joy to take root in your heart. And if you don't want to do that, use your rational brain to conclude that for all the peacocking done by these repressed beta males, Adeline Gray would stuff you in a mailbox; Victoria Anthony would ankle pick you into a sewer; and Helen Maroulis would foot sweep you through the floor.
I'm not answering questions this week, but I'll be back next week to cover post-Fourth of July hangovers and what could be the best-ever women's (and men's) national teams.
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