Stars on plastic

The oil wrestling was lacking only one thing: wrestling

By Tanya Whiton

BEYOND THE MAT: female “oil wrestlers” go through the motions at the Asylum.

It’s not often that an event like Female Oil Wrestling is juxtaposed with a wholesome affair like Stars on Ice, but this past Friday night, families could be seen streaming out of the Civic Center, all sugared up on Nancy Kerrigan, while “wrestlers” from the New Hampshire-based Captain Chris Entertainment company performed lap dances on male patrons at the Asylum.

My first question: When did the Asylum become such a dump? I hadn’t been to the club in years, since it first opened, when it was an ambitious urban-style hangout — hey, no firearms gangsta — with a dress code and a fleet of bouncers. Now it looks like a construction site, with a mysteriously high-tech set of stage lights left over and a cheesy new mural. On the continuum from swank to interestingly seedy to frightening, the place seems to have landed squarely at gross. Part of the lighting system was working; the rest of the club was dark. In the middle of what used to be the dance floor, in front of the stage, was an inflatable black plastic “ring” which looked like some kind of lurid kiddie pool drizzled with baby oil.

A perceptible wave of dismay swept over the men assembled ringside when my photographer friend and I stepped up to the front row and took our seats. Obviously, we were there to wreck the fun. We were spies from the outside world of girlfriends and wives and mothers and daughters, staging a protest simply by being present without a male escort. Or maybe we wanted to get in on the act? Several people asked us this as the evening progressed.

The guy next to me, who introduced himself as Jason, said, “You don’t expect to see that.”

“What?”

“Women.”

“We’re doing a story,” I said.

“For who?”

“The Phoenix.”

“Well at least you’re not from WMTW or something. My mother watches that. As far as she’s concerned, I’m at Stars on Ice.”

Out comes The Captain himself, dressed in a baseball hat, striped referee shirt, baggie pants, and basketball sneakers. He revs up the audience with some salacious stage patter — newsflash for all the patrons who might want to pay extra for a visit to the club basement — “Most of the time, if you go downstairs with a belt on, you’re gonna get spanked by it.” Hoots and hollers, guys bouncing in their chairs. Jason pulls a wad of pre-folded dollar bills from his pocket.

“You fold them in advance?” I ask.

“It makes it harder for them to get,” he replies.

lC/DC’s song “I Wanna Cover You in Oil,” kicks up, and the audience is on their feet, testosterone surging.

“Well, I guess its time to bring up the girls,” announces the Captain. “Who’s gonna be our King of the Ring? Who wants to rub oil all over their bodies? Who wants to rub ’em down? Oh, shit. Does anybody have a Band-Aid? My hand’s bleeding.”

Up from the basement marches a string of young ladies between the ages of 18 and 25, in thongs and bikini tops.

“I’ve got morals, you know,” Jason says in my ear.

My second question: Why is the presence of two women making a herd of men feel uncomfortable?

“It makes them feel degraded,” Jason said. “Cause you’re there watching them, and they’re watching women undress.” I asked him if it occurred to the male audience members that maybe we were there to see the show, too — I mean, who doesn’t want to see hot chicks wrestling in oil? Come on! CAT FIGHT!

Eager to degrade himself further (or maybe get away from my note taking), Jason purchased a hundred dollars worth of tickets to ensure his “King of the Ring” oil rubbing status and a seat on the beat-up couches situated on stage. The girls began to fan out around the ring, their backsides to the audience, and on cue from the Captain, shimmied their exposed butts in the air suggestively. The ladies began their pre-wrestling warm-up: stumbling through the audience in high-heeled shoes, looking for lap dance customers. The Captain exhorted them to “Break it up, girls, split it up — you look like a herd of turtles out there! What is this, follow the leader?”

Finally, after some lubricious lubricating, “Star” and “Angel” got in for the grapple.

My third question: Doesn’t WRESTLING imply some degree of physical combat? I asked some male friends about this afterward, and they laughed at me. I guess my first clue that there was no sport in this sporting event was that all the athletes were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. But honestly (and naively, apparently), I thought the women would really wrestle. I thought there would be some exertion, some struggle, at least some hair pulling. Nope. This is how round one went:

After ever so gently dropping each other to the mat, Star and Angel rolled around for about ten minutes in the most tedious bout of pseudo-lesbo sex ever witnessed. Forget holds and submissions — this was all about simulated cunnilingus.

Now, when my friend and I did a story on grappling (type “Grapplers” in the search engine on portlandphoenix.com) it was impossible not to consider the erotic elements of the sport. But somehow, Captain Chris’ version of female oil wrestling was utterly devoid of eroticism — in spite of the fact that at the end of the first match, the victor and the defeated made out, their tongue rings clacking.

Why? At first I couldn’t figure it out. Bored after seeing several rounds of the same mechanized movements, the same desultory rolling around on the greased up inner tube, I started watching the audience, and got my answer.

Had the women actually been engaged in a physical struggle, they would have been engaged with each other, and with their own bodies. Boxing and grappling are entertainment, and part of every match rests on how the audience responds. But ultimately, it is one body in contest with another, and the focus and determination to win or at least defend is what makes those sports fascinating to watch. It’s what makes them sexy.

But this “wrestling” was only about the audience. It was like seeing a boxing match in which the opponents are so busy grand standing they forget to hit each other. So, after a while, there was nothing to see, and the audience began to dissipate. Briefly, joyfully, the wrestler known as Mercedes ripped off her bikini top and flashed her tits, and the crowd went bananas. But the Captain insisted that she replace her top, and, grudgingly, she did.

So what makes the difference between raunchy/interesting and raunchy/uninteresting? I think it’s a degree of showmanship, a bit of style. Captain Chris Entertainment was putting on a show, after all. If anyone in the entire outfit had pretended for even a moment that there was something other than the commerce of lewd suggestion going on, it would have worked. All the sleazy details would have lent themselves to an atmosphere, a mood, a story. Instead, the whole thing seemed random, arbitrary, and badly organized, the players confused and the audience befuddled. Even the worst porn has some scenario, some script, which attempts to attach a narrative to the nitty gritty organ-grinding part of the spectacle.

I’d rather have gone to Stars on Ice.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.