Repeat After Me: Intergender Wrestling Is Not Domestic Violence

Don't come at Mia Yim with your concern trolling
Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein

Nothing riles random Twitter users up like the topic of intergender wrestling. When it happens on random wrestling shows, whether on television like Lucha Underground or at indies across the world, live crowds and viewers seem to eat it up. However, sexists who refuse to believe that women could hold their own in a fight against men using psuedoscience to back up their "claims" of legitimacy in a worked sport that features undead demons and Braun Strowman (also, especially since gender is an absolute work) and concern trolls who equate any instance of a man fighting a woman to domestic violence just don't know when to let the argument go. The former are annoying, but the latter can be dangerous because usually, they're men who have never experienced anything close to domestic violence trying to play valiant hero in an area where actual survivors may or may not be advocating for the thing they're blasting. It's not to say that irresponsible intergender wrestling that does come off like DV doesn't exist, or that actual DV survivors can't be triggered by even responsible instances of women wrestling men. It's just fans and wrestlers alike who do have histories of suffering abuse tend to be for intergender action.

Mia Yim probably is the most famous example of an abuse survivor in professional wrestling currently speaking. She's not just a survivor, however. She's an activist to make sure no one goes through what she went through. She's also wrestled her share of men in her career and continues to do so. In fact, she'll be facing off against Sage Phillips for Black Label Pro, one of the hottest up-and-coming promotions in indie wrestling. That kicked off some ribald replies from a concern troll who immediately went the Bryan Alvarez-clutching-them-pearls-at-Lucha Underground route and claimed it to be domestic violence, telling Yim that she was a hypocrite and undoing all the work she had completed to date. He then claimed that you wouldn't see this kind of thing in WWE, which once had Chyna as Intercontinental Champion, or Ring of Honor, that at one time had intergender tag team titles. Yim could've ignored the dude, but honestly, while I would have, I also have never experienced DV and don't really have the same impulses that she might have. So she tweeted this:

There is a difference between prof. Intergender wrestling and DV. One is consensual. The other is not. Point blank period. #PutTheNailInIt

— Mia Yim (@MiaYim) October 24, 2017

Important things to take from that tweet. One, consent is still one of the most difficult things for people, especially men with power, to wrap their minds around. As much as rapists have a hard time reconciling that a woman has as much right to reject sex as they have to engage in it, concern trolls have as much of a hard time realizing that the woman in an intergender match can come to conclusions on their own. Automatically labeling a match as DV without regarding the agency of the woman involved is just as sexist as a promoter, agent, or booker insisting on a match to abusive and triggering tropes.

Second, and most importantly, it's someone coming at an actual domestic violence survivor like they know better than she does about what does and doesn't entail domestic violence. People can be so quick to play hero activist that they don't realize the most important thing one can do for a marginalized person is listen to them. The person in question yelling at Yim certainly isn't trying to listen to her. That's not good allyship; it's selfish buffoonery at the very best.

This again is not to say that people cannot be triggered even by responsible intergender wrestling, because every single person is different and unique. Brain chemistry is almost entirely never 100 percent exactly the same between the same person at different ages, let alone two or more different people, so it's important that those who do get triggered sit down and have dialogues with people who enjoy or perform intergender wrestling who don't. Talking and communication are how people get places, especially if they're on the same side. But again, usually, it's people who aren't victims who try and play good liberal soldier lashing out at anything that they imagine to be offensive to their imagined automaton of a demographic minority in their heads. Don't be like those people. Even if you object to intergender wrestling, take the goddamn time to listen to the people who perform it, especially if they're the marginalized party and especially if they've survived DV and are actively trying to Put the Nail In It.