by Rhodes Murphy

In his 1954 essay “The World of Wrestling,” French essayist Roland Barthes writes that “wrestling is not a sport,” but rather “a spectacle.” For the spectator, Barthes observes, the winner of a wrestling match matters less than the image of primal struggle itself as a pantomime of universal concepts of “Suffering, Defeat and Justice” by masculine displays of strength. The joy of a wrestling match emerges equally from its aesthetic presentation as the athletic skill of its participants. And yet sport is even more powerful in its classical form, with both athletes stripped down to their birthday suits.   

As Barthes notes, “the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment,” using the body to arrange “comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes, and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious.” Nowhere is this more clear than in the tradition of nude wrestling, where every aspect of the body, and all its brutal and sexual glory, may be viewed to the full extent. 

According to the International Olympics Committee, “wrestling is recognized as the world’s oldest competitive sport. Indeed, cave drawings of wrestlers have been found dating as far back as 3,000 BC.” Placing aside the cultural legacy of contemporary wrestling organizations like the WWE (more on them later,) few sports have been as consequential to the course of human history, particularly for ideas about masculinity and the male body that permeate the culture today. 

All images are edited versions of photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge. “Animal locomotion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements. 1872-1885.”

By abandoning their clothes and showing off their chiseled bodies in a show of brute force, Greek athletes used nudity to show how men could in fact resemble the gods. Of course, it was not lost on the Greeks that the image of two men in peak physical condition, baring it all in a show of strength, carried an erotic charge.

The fusion of violence and eroticism has always been intrinsic to wrestling as a sport, and to subsequent ideals of masculinity. As societies that glorified masculinity like the Greeks and Romans, the erotic components of wrestling – and of sports in general – make sense. Sports historian Allen Guttmann has proposed that even the earliest incarnations of wrestling have been “inherently erotic.” The spectacle of wrestling, nude or not, is the intermingling of athleticism and homoeroticism. 

This tension persists in the reflexive homophobia of modern wrestling organizations like the WWE. But for others, wrestling has presented an opportunity for erotic liberation.

Bob Mizer, founder of the “Athletic Model Guild,” a male modeling agency he ran out of his California home. In 1945, Mizer pioneered what became lovingly known as the “beefcake” magazine, a new kind of men’s publication that mixed fitness with fantasy. Taking advantage of a post-WWII fitness culture, his flagship publication, Physique Pictorial, served as a catalog of young, well-built, oiled-up male models, body-builders, and athletes. The mixture of all-American earnestness and erotic exposition proved incredibly appealing to straight and gay men alike.    

Physique Pictorial inspired a wave of publications devoted to the male body, self-improvement, and a new masculine ideal. Not unlike ancient depictions of Greco-roman athletes, images of macho males beamed like gods from the pages of Physique Pictorial. As its popularity grew, the magazine served as the inspiration for Official Wrestling, a wrestling focused beefcake magazine which launched in 1951. 

Toward the end of 1950s, American Model Guild began producing a series of silent films featuring Physique Pictorial models in various scenarios that often culminate in a rout of nude wrestling. A typical early video saw models awkwardly arrive on screen, usually in some kind of strange costume, compare each other’s muscles and taunt one another before inevitably disrobing and wrestling one another to the ground. 

There is also a playful quality that sometimes flickers on the screen as the wrestlers ham up their characters and special care is given to the exuberance of the violence they perform for the camera. The human element between the fighters shines through the act they put on for the screen and this transparency only works to heighten their allure as idols on screen.

Mizer’s wrestling work is notable in how it portrays wrestling as a celebration of masculinity that is at once violent and tender, serious and playful, admirable and repellant. The films are also important for wrestling as a whole, as they portray the sport less than a serious competition than a social interaction. Often the films conclude with the violence of its actors dissolving into dance or playful exhaustion. Mizer’s films take full advantage of wrestling’s inherent homoeroticism and the spectacle of the male form. The real “exposure” or draw to Mizer’s pornography isn’t simply the nudity, but the idea of masculinity that it puts forth, one that mixes sexual desire and innocuous horseplay. 

Mizer’s skin-flicks share the same basic elements of professional wrestling as entertainment built around the spectacle of muscle-bound men locked in a chest-to-chest, groin-to-groin struggle. To the viewer, neither the outcome nor the legitimacy of the contest matter as much as the “virtue of the spectacle” itself, as Barthes would say, and the “image of certain passions” expressed as one man attempts to dominate the other in violent play.   

Despite its history of homophobia, professional wrestling’s fetishization of masculinity connects it more deeply to the proto-gay porn produced by the American Model Guild than to the wrestling hosted by the Olympic committee. Both use wrestling as a foundation to fantasize a particular ideal of manhood and masculinity that prioritize physical perfection and strength and in which violence lives in harmony with homoerotic camaraderie. 

The homosocial “bonding” that nude wrestling occasions is one reason that naturist groups still find value in the activity. Groups like even Active Naturists hold an annual nude wrestling and “gymnasium” event at Burning Man. According to Active Naturist, “we think that by doing athletic and fun activities naked, participants will experience bonding aspect of such events stronger. We believe that nudity will make physical activities more fun and will be important in bringing across our message about body acceptance.”  

In its participants down to their basic elements, nude wrestling invites participants and spectators to engage with its thousand-year-old history. Whether as an object of erotic titillation, a show of athletic strength, or a fantasy of the male ideal, the sport engages with a millennia of male social bonding and gives us the opportunity to question the foundations of masculinity itself.