This week’s Friday wrestling conversation question is a big one, and psychologically telling: What’s the most embarrassed you’ve ever been watching a pro wrestling show?
It can be a personal experience, a social situation, whatever. If you felt deep shame for being a wrestling fan, I want to hear about it. My own experiences are spread out over 30+ years of watching, but the big one is the Trish Stratus barking like a dog moment. It was a turning point for me as a fan. As a teenager, I wasn’t the SJW white knight pussy douchebag you know and love on the Internet. As a teenager I was an uptight, hyper-religious, sorta-racist, super homophobic and into “get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich” jokes kind of guy. I was quick to tell you that women’s matches on a WWE show were the bathroom break. It was pretty awful. One of the reasons I’m the way I am now is because I grew up, and subsequently grew out of it.
I also grew up watching wrestling with my parents. This was the 80s NWA, so we were used to blood and violence, but the only real female content was some bad matches, the occasional man in a wig (or wearing women’s underwear for heel heat) and the babyface kissing the heel’s girlfriend for a pop. When the Attitude Era was in full swing, I’d gone off to college, and thankfully my parents missed a lot of those shows. My opinion on how WWE (and pro wrestling) treated women was slowly evolving, but hadn’t hit a breaking point.
In 2001, I went home to visit my parents, and we decided to watch Raw. Guess which show it was?
I don’t think I’d ever been so mortified to be watching a wrestling show with my parents. My brain went, “oh my God, what are you watching? Why do you watch this? Why is this okay?” I’d already grown out of some of my worse habits, but the image of Trish being berated by a heel who was booed, but still more or less beloved by the WWE audience and seen as a genius, made me feel awful. That’s really the end of it. It just made me feel bad. My parents stopped watching almost cold turkey, and it’s been a struggle to get them into the good stuff ever since. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten over that shared embarrassment. It was like walking in on someone masturbating.
What’s your most embarrassing experience? Let us know in the comments section below.
