How To

Wrestling manuals were an early form of porn for me. Nowadays the stiff, expressionless figures look merely quaint to me, "calm as Hindu cows," to quote Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Still there's something about the solemn, didactic imagery of these manuals (and instructional films) that strikes me as a little hot. Clean-cut, square-jawed athletes, frozen in place, icons of every boy's ideal big brothers, inspiring me to learn to fight fair. And for some reason, at one point in advertising history, Boy Scouts in various wrestling poses were used to market cigarettes. Go figure. So much for Scouts keeping "body and mind fit and clean." Even though I have ridiculed tableau-vivant posing in gay wrestling soft porn of the past, there's something about a couple of fresh-faced and red-blooded American youth's earnest and deadpan embrace, while the cameraman focuses or the illustrator dips his pen into ink, that gets my rocks off a bit--not as much as it once did, yet I do feel a definite tug.