Session Wrestlers engage in Private Matches which are for commerce.  The girls are paid regardless of winning or losing.  No one will know and it will not affect their persona or their ring careers.  And, there are many pro wrestlers who do this….some on the list, some not.  A few are among the biggest names in the sport.  Some of them advertise, and others don’t. Because these are private and discreet matches, Session Wrestlers bring no harm to Pro Wrestling.

A Session Wrestler is a woman who wrestles an opponent for money in a private match out of pubic view.  The operative terms here are “money” and “private.” The location of the Session is usually a place where privacy and discretion can be assured.  This may be in a ring, but is more frequently in an apartment or a hotel suite. The Wrestler can be a professional (ring wrestler) or an amateur wrestler or a bodybuilder. The Match is generally mixed.  Usually there are no observers.

The nature of the match can be fantasy, semi-competitive, or competitive.  This is usually discussed and agreed to in the matchmaking stage.  Also, discussed at this stage is the fee paid to the Session Wrestler, the location, need for privacy and discretion, rules (pins, submissions, holds allowed and not allowed), duration, and attire. As you can see, these matches are engaged in by consenting adults.  The operative word is “consenting.”

You might be surprised to know that a good number of “professional women wrestlers” engage in these matches.  Be careful who you criticize as well as who you don’t criticize. They wrestle in Private Sessions and their privacy is respected.  What they do in private is their business and done for their reasons.  However, most of the women are doing it for the money (much better than what they get for a pro match) and not for any sexual thrill or to test their skill against a man.

Rules: neither wrestler wants to be injured or marked.  Therefore, tactics such as scratching, gouging, kicking, kneeing, punching are forbidden.  Tap outs are permitted.  This is not a matter of physical strength and superiority.  The man is usually, but not always, the stronger of the two.  But he may want to be dominated or wrestle down so that strength is not a determining factor in the match.  Pro moves such as bodyslams, monkeyflips, etc. are usually banned because (a) they must be executed by a trained professional and (b) these moves would be dangerous on a hard surface.

Fantasy match: these tend to be more erotic.  Attire might include topless for the woman but does not include overt sex.  However, face sitting and breast smothering may be preferred tactics.  Pro women wrestlers don’t engage in these matches.  These are reserved for amateurs and bodybuilders.  Many bodybuilders are very free with exploiting their ample physiques and crave the adulation of the male species.  These women might also include “body worship” which is the flexing of their muscles and allowing their opponents to feel those muscles.  Amateurs are in this for the rolling around, contact, and sexual overtone aspects of fantasy sessions.  Also, there is a tendency to include domination in this category.

Semi-competitive match: no nudity or sex.  This is a fun match in which either wrestler may win a pin or a submission.  Who wins the most falls is unimportant.  Most professional women wrestlers fall into this category because strength is not a primary determinant and there is a low risk of injury.  Generally, patrons request the women to wear their ring regalia, i.e. boots, tights, etc.

Competitive: this match requires a definitive winner.  Skill, strength, agility, speed, stamina, etc., are significant factors.  Only the strongest professional women wrestlers  take on competitive matches; and some do quite successfully. More commonly, female bodybuilders gravitate to this type of match.  Holds are applied with such force that submissions are frequent and immediate or opponents can be held and “tortured.”

I hope this clarifies the term “Session Wrestling.”  Again, many pros you don’t think of as session wrestlers are, in fact, session wrestlers.  And, they do it for the money.

Submitted by an interested fan…

One morning early last week, I was awoken at some ungodly hour by a strange noise. It sounded somewhere between the rasping of sandpaper, and a drain being unblocked; after a few minutes lying dazedly in bed, wondering whether it was going to stop, I finally decided to track down the source. It was coming from the floor of the room and after tracking down my glasses, I leaned over the side of the bed to be greeted with the disturbing sight of one of our dogs, Max, enthusiastically slurping away on his own genitals.

This was disturbing for a number of reasons. Max is old – in canine terms, he’s got a few years on the Queen Mother, so it was a bit like seeing said Royal in a split-beaver shot. It was undeniably an impressive feat, given that it takes Max longer to get to his feet than it takes a super-tanker to pull a handbrake turn, but it’s really not something I want to see, least of all first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. The sad part is, Max was thoroughly neutered well over a dozen years ago – it may be simply that he hasn’t actually noticed the absence of his testicles yet.

For, let’s face it, dogs are stupid. Loyal and obedient they may bem, but so are most members of HM Customs and Excise – I rest my case. Here, there’s hardly an hour goes past without another doggie-related sound, best summarised thus:
       WOOF-WOOF-WOOF-WOOF-slide–THUMP!-pause-scrabble-WOOF-WOOF-WOOF-WOOF!
We can break this down into stages. The first barks are in response to any life-threatening occurrence – such as a postman – and are given while Cleo and Cody charge down the corridor as if in fear of their life. The slide-thump-scrabble occurs when they fail to make it through the tricky chicane outside our bedroom; they then forget all about the fractures, and charge off down the straightaway once more.

Even an earthworm is capable of learning the right way through a maze, given enough electrical shocks. Cleo and Cody are clearly lower on the evolutionary scale, having failed to learn that right-angled turns on freshly-cleaned tiles do not work, despite having taken (or rather, failed to take) that curve several thousand times in their short, moist-nosed lives.

One might like to compare and contrast the feline approach – while just as keen on reaching the parts us primates can’t reach, and equally vulnerable to newly-mopped floors (albeit with a greater aversion to water in general), there is a major difference to their approach:First, look around to see if anyone witnessed your humiliationIf they did, look at them with a face which implies “I meant to do that”.Remember: “When in doubt — wash”.Make a furry mental note not to go down that corridor ever again, even if it means starving to death.

For a cat, self-respect is just too important to be forgotten about – the worst thing you can do to is laugh at them. But here, I live in hope that one day, the second set of woofs from Cleo and Cody will be muffled because they have driven their heads clean through the wall. Of course, it could just be that the concussions have taken their toll, and we are now sharing the house with the canine equivalents of Muhammad Ali. Anyone know if he has a fondness for licking his own genitals too?

Never mind Moms and apple-pie, drive-ins are perhaps even more of an American archetype, one that could only ever be accepted in a land where the automobile is king. Of course, there are other reasons why they never became a part of the post-war landscape in Europe – except, bizarrely, in Denmark, which still has at least five operating. Firstly, there’s the issue of land: a drive-in occupied a large chunk of space, and sits more or less redundant during the day, since you can’t start showing films until after dark. Try that in Britain, and you’d find houses being built in screen two by the end of the week. Indeed, in Central London, you’d probably find people prepared to pay admission, merely to find somewhere to park. There’s also the thorny issue of weather, since going to the drive-in is, basically, a fair-weather spectacle – you don’t want to be watching through your windscreen wipers, even if it would add a certain atmosphere to something like Twister.

No: the dry, wide-open frontiers of the United States are the perfect place for drive-ins. The first opened on June 6 1933, in Camden, New Jersey – the price of admission was a quarter per car, plus a further 25c. per occupant, and the opening movie was Wife Beware. From here, their growth was explosive, reaching a peak in 1958, when there were almost five thousand. To put that figure into some kind of context, there were only about 12,000 indoor screens at that time. Some of them were huge – the Troy in Detroit, Michigan and the Panther of Lufkin, Texas could both hold three thousand cars – and all kinds of other gimmicks were incorporated to lure in traffic…and indeed, in at least one case, air-traffic. During the late forties, Asbury Park, New Jersey had a “fly-in” with room for 25 airplanes as well as the more usual methods of transport.

Nowadays, however, they are a dying breed. The rise of the multiplex has meant a steady and almost irrevocable decline in their numbers, and it’s not hard to see why; when compared for things like comfort, sound and vision, the results all weigh heavily against them. Their advantages – such as the ability, shall we say, to make your own entertainment during the film – have largely been equalled or surpassed by home video, and thus drive-ins will likely go the way of tail-fins, malt-shops, bee-hives and many other items of hyphenated pop culture. Arizona may be bigger than Britain, but only has five left, and the number nationwide is only around 800 or so.

But at least I can say I’ve now been to one; the Glendale 9-screen, Arizona’s biggest, located on the upper West Side, on the other side of the railway tracks — but not so far away on the other side, as to prevent the occasional train-horn from punctuating proceedings. You certainly can’t quibble over the price: $5.50 per adult (and however many you can smuggle in the boot) gets you two just-gone features, in our case Valentine and The Pledge. The former had barely arrived in “proper” cinemas two weeks ago, but had already dropped through them faster than a Brick Lane curry, and was languishing at Glendale in front of an audience of precisely two cars. Oddly, the equally lame Dracula 2000 was doing healthy business elsewhere in the complex, suggesting that there is such a thing as a genuine drive-in movie, independent of its success elsewhere.

The first task though, is finding your screen. After going past the one of the toll-style admission booths, you are confronted by an almost totally dark maze of fences and bollards, surround the central projection and concession buildings, with little in the way of signs to direct you to which part of the field you’re meant to park. After patiently queuing for a while behind some other cars, waiting in front of a blocked-off opening, we took a detour through two other screens (doubtless to the annoyance of their occupants – it’s bad enough in a normal cinema, imagine if people came in making engine noises and shining bright lights around) and finally found our spot.

In early versions of the drive-in, sound was provided by speaker posts mounted outside the car which you pulled into your vehicle to hear the movie. These were notorious for their low-fi-ness, and were perpetually having to be replaced because people tended to drive away, forgetting they still had the speakers inside. Nowadays, technology has moved on, and you now tune your radio to a different low-powered FM station for each sceen (105.1 in our case), broadcasting from the centre, and can therefore enjoy all the quality your car stereo can deliver. At least, that’s the theory: the reality at Glendale was crackly, scratchy and teetered on the edge of inaudibility, turning even the best Blaupunkt into a fading battery portable, located in the middle of the Himalayas. Perhaps it was just a touching tribute to earlier efforts.

The visual qualities also left more than a little bit to be desired. Going to see a horror movie, while sitting in the middle of an almost-deserted parking-lot certainly adds to the ambience, the large amount of creeping around in the darkness doesn’t come across well, particularly when seen through a tinted windscreen (not really an optional extra in Arizona). The illustration below shows the sort of thing you can expect, so you would do well to choose your movie with caution – pick a film which takes place either during broad daylight, or in an operating theatre.

There was something kinda cool about being able to set your seat to its most laid-back position, and if the film wasn’t up to much, you could talk without disturbing anyone else. Well, within reason – our co-habitants had their young children sitting on the roof of their vehicle, and they were not exactly stunned into silence by the qualities of Valentine. It would have been amusing to be a fly on the windscreen of that car for the journey home, and hear the explanation of the scene where Denise Richards poured candle wax onto a guy’s genitals. Young minds are just so inquisitive.

The interval between movies provided an opportunity to head for the concession stand, which was even more deserted than the screen we’d left; after a few minutes of steadily increasing straw-rattling, I was just about to climb over the counter and help myself, when a salesperson appeared, in a manner reminiscent of the shopkeeper in Mr. Benn. According to Chris, at weekends, when business is likely to be much brisker, this is a focal point of the whole event, with the actual movies reduced to a secondary role to socialising, hanging out, gossiping and other traditional teenage pursuits – such as gang warfare. Even if, admittedly, the usual refrain of “this film’s crap, let’s slash the seats!” becomes rather self-destructive when you’re in your own car.

And it is these facets which will decide whether the drive-in has any future. The advance of technology, in areas such as LCD screens, could provide a means of matching indoor cinemas for quality, but the crux of the matter is, for them to survive, they need to attract a new generation of attendees who can already watch movies in any number of other ways. Their success in doing so will determine whether their viability extends into the 21st century.

Hooray! Finally, a mere six weeks after my ship came in, my possessions did. Rather than a SWAT team descending, it was a removal firm, who piled the 49 boxes (“I counted them all out…and I counted them all back”) neatly up in the corner of the garage. From there I have been gradually picking my way through them, although at the current rate, it’ll take another six weeks or so to finish the job, assuming room can be found for everything! I’ve started with the more fragile items, and so far the mortality rate has been pleasingly low – my DVD of Poison Ivy 3 was rather crushed, but if that’s the limit of the destruction, I’ll cope. [It almost as if supernatural forces are at work here – my LD of the film got laser rot] Even my beer glasses seem to have made the trip unscathed. Thus, for the moment, Fleet Shipping, who did all the packing, equals top bunch of blokes.

My parents are still here (hence the severe lack of movie reviews this week – the only thing seen has been Bye Bye Birdie with Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke, as well as the bloke who did the voice of Dick Dastardly), though tomorrow they head off to the somewhat-chillier climes of Indiana. By then, it’ll be virtually two weeks they’ve been here, which is the longest time I’ve lived with them since graduation. I love my parents dearly ‘n’ all, but it does serve as a good reminder of why I moved out.

I am, basically, an intolerant bastard, and there are very few people whose company I can stand every hour of the waking day. [Indeed, the count stops at one…hi, Chris!] So far, I have just about managed to bite my tongue, but I confess to some sarcasm slipping out when, while unpacking some of my boxes, my mother said, “So, you’re unpacking some of your boxes, are you?”. No, I’m emptying them in order to construct a cardboard glider, in a daring yet likely futile attempt to escape from Nazi-occupied territory. What made you think otherwise?

Mind you, they have pleasantly surprised me in other ways: Mum’s interest in baseball was gratifying, while Dad has bitten the bullet and used the Internet for the first time. Admittedly, this has so far been limited to scrolling up and down the home page for their local newspaper, the Forres Gazette [top story this week: Tesco get the go-ahead for their new store], but this represents a major step forward. I don’t think he’ll ever quite turn into a cyberpunk though.

At least they managed to get our here without needing to get dunked in tanks of disinfectant, which I believe is the fate of most British tourists departing my former green, pleasand and foot-and-mouth infected land. Well, I suppose it makes a change from BSE. I do have to wonder what is going on back there; in the short time since I left, the whole place seems to have gone completely to pot. I mean, as if Railtrack don’t cause enough accidents, we now have people turning the tracks into a multi-storey Landrover-park. And that’s disregarding the tube strikes and the weather.

Okay, with regard to the last, the past week here has not exactly been anything to write home about (even if my parents no doubt did, at length, on their postcards); the trip to gaze into the Grand Canyon ended up being a trip to gaze into five thousand feet of fog. Pity the poor mule riders who had booked, a year in advance, for their scenic trip down. On the plus side, I did get to make my first snowman in a good decade or so (hey – snow here is white!), though later on, I was brought back to earth when I had to drive through a blizzard of the damn stuff, with big rigs whizzing inches past me.

The main revelation for this week is thus: snow is something best viewed as a pedestrian, or better still, from a warm living-room, accompanied by a steaming cup of hot chocolate…

28 working days…no word from Customs… [Sigh]

As mentioned last week, my parents are here, and this weekend was largely spent in a range of cultural pursuits – at least, in comparison to the next few days, when the eventual destination will be the anti-culture capital of the world, Las Vegas. We got to contrast two cultures on Saturday and Sunday: the first day of the weekend saw us at the Arizona Scottish Highland Games; on the second we stumbled, more or less by accident, across a Matsuri or Japanese festival, in downtown Phoenix.

Despite the vastly different backgrounds from which these two sprang, there were some interesting cultural similarities, not least in the way in which both celebrated – or perhaps “wallowed” might be closer to the truth – in history. In Scotland’s case, this is somewhat understandable, given that the country ceased to exist as a sovereign nation the best part of three hundred years ago. While the sons and daughters of the country have done much to be proud of since (and quite a few things we’d rather not broadcast – Sheena Easton comes to mind there), it’s best not mentioned that these have been as the junior partner in a supposedly united kingdom.

For Japan, the situation is different, yet perhaps not so much as you’d expect. For hundreds of years, it was a nation which practiced isolationism to a degree which would be utterly impossible today, and the savage Westernisation which has followed its defeat in World War II is not going to be welcomed by all, leading to a strong sense of nostalgia for older i.e. better times. In both Japan and Scotland, it’s probably true to say that icons such as whisky or bonsai are wrapped up as a significant part of national identity, to a degree which may not be apparent to outsiders.

It would, however, have been nice if either event had made some effort to introduce a contemporary feel to proceedings. Okay, this’d be a bit difficult for Scotland, given their last worthwhile contribution to shared world popular culture was probably the pneumatic bicycle. But Japan’s three biggest post-war cultural exports are perhaps Godzilla, Hello Kitty and anime, and all three were virtually absent from the matsuri. One Hello Kitty book and two wall-hangings, depicting the big G and Sailor Moon, was about the sum total, which is a shame, because they would have brought in a whole new generation for whom the noble arts of flower-arranging aren’t much of a draw. I must confess to having thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition of drumming, performed with rather more enthusiasm and energy than the martial arts nearby! This was hugely refreshing, in comparison to the po-faced and almost dreary nature of some of the items: you could certainly admire them, but they didn’t really spark much enthusiasm in me.

I have to admit though, I don’t think I ever realised before what big buggers koi carp are; they had entire plastic swimming pools filled with them, though my enquiry of whether they were also selling chips to accompany them didn’t go down too well… You need to show relevance to people; you bring nations together by showing that the Japanese have the same sick and twisted interests as we do. Thus, I have visions of a pop matsuri, in which Godzilla would wrestle a barbed-wire death-match against Mima Shimoda, accompanied by a rendition of the Sailor Moon theme played via a cheap, plastic alarm clock. The food would be McSushi, and all the stalls would be manned by over-sized robots and doe-eyed schoolgirls, with the odd tentacle flicking casually in and out of proceedings (if not the schoolgirls). Doesn’t that sound rather more fun?