Bind Ambition








When I had the chance to speak with him a couple of years ago, Nick Diesel told me he had come to wrestling by way of his earlier interest in S&M bondage. When I asked him what connected the two kinks for him, he said he liked "using [his] body as ropes to bind and dominate somebody else." The idea of a body lithe and strong enough to immobilize another body stirs my imagination. Nick's words suggested that bondage affects him in the same way wrestling affects me.

His followup remarks about his experiences in binding clients with ropes intrigued me too: "It's what it's like being the snake or the rat in a snake tank. The feeling of overpowering, it's more intense than regular sex. And it involves characters. You become someone else, whether you're doing the binding or you're the one that's bound." I think of wrestling, too, as something akin to the savage but titillating survivalism one witnesses on Animal Planet or during feeding time at the pet shop. Roleplaying ("characters") lessens the life-and-death risks of such violence and puts it in the realm of consensual make-believe--or the rules of sport. It fascinated me that substantive connections exist between his fantasies and mine and that he had found a way to use my fantasies to serve his own ends.

In UCW-Wrestling's latest video [#359] we see Nick use his body to bind and dominate Oliver Wood. Only his body, at first. Oliver struggles like a snared animal. Meticulously, dispassionately, Nick commandeers Oliver's body and restrains it, thus submitting the man to his own will, using the speed and strength of his arms and legs. Oliver of course fights back, using his body as a tool to subjugate Nick in turn.  When two-thirds through the match the body alone is not enough of a restraint, Nick appropriates Oliver's bandana and uses it to choke him, weakening him almost to a point of nonresistance. Later Nick finds his ropes. He and Oliver struggle over possession of them, and the match's final five minutes is a race to see which man will succeed first in hogtying his opponent.

Other elements are at work in the fight, too: punching, ball grabbing, body slamming, and the like. Admittedly I have reduced the match to the pinpoint of Nick's and my mirror-image obsessions. Watching this struggle my eye is drawn to Nick's body, which is both a person and a lasso ... then a harness ... still later a cudgel: the "body as ropes." Nick's focus is on the moment when one body at last succeeds in transfixing and submitting the other, using ropes. Mine is on all the fleshy twists, thrusts, squeezes, and stretches that it takes to reach that moment. For me friction, body heat, strain, and sudden impacts of skin on skin are better than ropes or gags. Whatever your preference, though, we get it all in this match.


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