Ordeal

Blake Hunter vs Aaron Perez, Catalog 12 - The Muscle Boys Get Nasty (MuscleBoy Wrestling)

MuscleBoy has fine-tuned a certain scenario - the jobber giving himself up to the masterful heel - succinctly distilling the essence of man-for-man attraction in its entirety. Biologically men crave a defined pecking order that's arrived at through a series of challenges and conquests - or so certain evolutionary psychologists have theorized. I can't speak for all gay and bi men, let alone a whole species of males, but my own experience mirrors a survival-of-the-fittest pattern of male attraction - especially in the early bonding stages, whether homosexual or merely homosocial. (How all this plays out after the initial jockeying for position - in marriage, home ownership, band tryouts, adoption of a pet or a child, etc. - is much more varied and complex, according to the specific personalities and tastes of those involved.)

In Blake, MuscleBoy has found a perfect alpha male (forget the fact that Derek Bolt made him his bitch in Hunter's December debut). His thick and heavy physique is the stuff of 1960s sword-and-sandal movies and 1990s cable-TV wrestling. One either wants to climb all over all that muscle or to bury oneself beneath it. Aaron, by contrast, stirs other urges - to dominate, to protect, to spoil - all urges in evidence in the various ways Blake approaches Perez through this 36-minute video. In depicting this struggle as wrestling and S&M role play, MuscleBoy ritualizes an important part of my (and, I assume, others') sexuality.

The match is similar to other matches MBW has released over the last year or so, unsurprising since rites are rites because they are true to well established patterns - funerals, weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduations, awards shows. We are drawn to them because they predictably strike certain chords, though we also appreciate the ways they distinguish themselves, so long as they are recognizably what we expect them to be. Hunter and Perez hit their marks and go through their paces extraordinarily well. It's easy to botch this scenario - through skittishness or apathy or excess - but these two do it justice and with considerable heat. 

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