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Hilary E. MacGregor attends an underground girl fight in the downtown warehouse district. If by underground you mean with a publicist, at 11 in the morning, and the fights are being taped for a DVD. The blood, at least that's real. The story is in the L.A. Times Calendar section so you have to be a subscriber, but here's the link.
The underground "scene" is the creation of a 29-year-old woman who will identify herself only as "Marie," but who made herself available for multiple media interviews, from Penthouse to the Los Angeles Times. Marie, a partner in Demolition Pictures, organized these fights, she said, so she could shoot them for a DVD, which she planned to market for $19.95 over the Internet, "Bumfights"-style. She hopes to next spread her "scene" to Detroit, Atlanta and Chicago...That this underground scene exists only because she created it to sell as a commodity to people who want to feel edgy and in the know without ever leaving their living rooms does not bother Marie.
Does anybody else think this article was problematic? I mean, the rumination on faux-undergroundness felt to me like a weird case of flailing against a philosophical straw man. Does anybody think the promoter is really selling "undergroundness" whatever that is? No, she's selling violence and competition, same as the people who promote boxing and Bumfights. I'm not clear on why it was necessary to cite Umberto Eco or present the whole thing with such dripping condescension. As readers, we could probably come to our own conclusions about these fights without any help from the reporter. ... Moreover, the irony of the whole thing is that the LAT is just one more vulture feasting on the corpse. I mean, look at the size of the photographs. Dig the placement in the Calendar section. It's the same kind of voyeurism-disguised-as-moral-outrage that you find in Vanity Fair's treatment of whatever the latest third world human rights catastrophe happens to be.
Posted by: Joe C. at September 30, 2003 04:43 PMI happen to like both cat fights and any form of girls fights as I beleive womens as well as men have the right to fight if they so desire to.I am not into blood, but just a competitive between two equal women wanting to fight.
Posted by: Norman at February 20, 2004 04:40 PMDamn, Joe C hit the nail right on the head. Great comment, man.
Posted by: Friedlander at April 3, 2004 11:11 PMWomen and Wrestling - History
1.
In African tribes, pubescent girls often wrestled as part of their ritual initiation into womanhood. Among the Diola of Gambia, adolescent boys and girls wrestled, but not against one another. The male champion often married the female champion. Men and women wrestled one another
among the Yala of Nigeria and Njabi of Congo.
Ancient inscriptions suggest that Spartan girls wrestled during Roman and Byzantine rule.
In the middle and late Nineteenth Century, Parisian artists sketched local women wrestlers and photographed them in their costumes.
Competing primarily in circus-like demonstrations, at the turn of the century American women wrestled against one another in public bouts for the entertainment of the working class.
Damn, I meant Norman got it right, not Joe C. LOL.
Posted by: Marc at August 2, 2004 02:45 AM
of LA Observed
Pathetic
Posted by: Tiffany at September 30, 2003 12:10 PM