Chyna, And The Amazonian Fetish
Chyna, lifting wrestler Trish Stratus above her head with ease
When I was around 8 - 16 years old, wrestling seemed to be permanently on the television. Wrestling was on the television, nu-metal and pop punk on the airwaves, skater jeans, DC trainers and the band T-shirt, the popular fashion trend. This was the early 2000s indie culture. I think wrestling had got tied in a strange way to it, because it seemed to ‘belong’ with modern American rock music (and attendant features) through ideas about ‘garage’ culture. The wrestlers were mythologically connected to the boys in the rock bands because they grew up learning their hardy tricks in dusty garages in non-entity, mid-west suburban towns and moved out to California to secure their fortunes.
And probably a side of America that I could identify with. I grew up in a small, rural town that was ‘neither here nor there’. There wasn’t much crime other than the depressions of occasional drug use and the usual domestic stuff. But nor was it fashionable or socially noteworthy. It was pleasant enough. Nice countryside, no culture. And boys (and girls for that matter) did tumble in to church halls on the weekends in wide jeans to play Greenday covers on cheap guitars. The vicar’s wife pottering about with earplugs in her ear and rolling her eyes kindly at us, and our noise. And we play fought, in fields. I still have a dicky ankle because of leg lock from a drummer from Ponty.
I was also in a band. We played the same two rattly Courtney Love songs over again and we called ourselves Virgins Go Pop, until someone’s Mum got involved. Huh, "‘Someone’s mum! Someone’s mum!” we fomented wildly. But of course ‘someone’s mum’ was right. We changed it to Puppy Fat as a compromise. Then some “straight bitch” became the singer and she started including a No Doubt track which was tolerable, but then she - arbitrarily I might add - changed the name of the band to Daisy Chain. She went too far. It wasn't the same. The revolutionary fervour had dissipated. We went our separate ways.
I wanted to talk about wrestling. It was around this time that the then WWF (now WWE) started taking its female talent a tad more seriously. There were still, if I remember correctly, the ‘bra and panties’ contests and the ‘valet’ system, which meant, beautiful (usually blonde) women following their buxom boyfriends to the side of the ring, to function as gorgeous mascots. I remember being vexed by this, even as a kid. I was at a friend’s house and said I thought it a ‘dated’ way of having women show up in combat sports and entertainment. I watch boxing these days, rather than wrestling, and always find it faintly silly when the leggy, gazelle-esque women come out to show the cards mid-round when Clarissa Shields or Katie Taylor are fighting. I get it when the men are fighting, the pretty girls are their symbolic ‘prize’. But what sense does it make when the women fight? Why don’t they get blokes in white Y fronts shimmying across the ring ‘delightfully’ for the women’s bouts?
I remember my friend’s Mum rolled her eyes self-satisfyingly at me when I talked about this. She said, enthusiastically, “don’t be a bore!” as though taking such a position would have saved her from the invisibility and sexlessness that Welsh slippers, plastic marigolds and Richmond Superkings had endowed her with. My friend, a boy, ‘corrected’ his mother; he said women like Trish Stratus were actually very athletic and could do more than just be eye candy if they let them. Her whole face changed and she nodded fervently; “Of course, of course, women can do anything men can do!”
I learned a few key things about life that day.
To be honest, I never took that much interest in wrestling. Until I discovered Chyna, of course. Chyna changed everything. She appeared on the TV screen for an event in an emerald green bikini, with a tumble of black waves and a vast peacock collar behind her head like she was Catherine Medici. Tall. Muscular back, long, strong legs. Her entrance song, “Don’t treat me like a woman, don’t treat me like a man”. Seeing her was like a shot of sugar, straight into my young, tender veins. My template for womanhood until that point had been twofold; women were either Zoo magazine centrefolds or they were repressed housewives who either scuttled at their husband’s feet like frightened puppies, or alternated hated them. Smashed plates, slammed doors, puffed smoke.
I was too young to have yet discovered Simone de Beauvoir or Joni Mitchell or Veronica Franco or even Emily Bronte. Women who, even when it wasn’t easy to do so, rejected the stultifying limits of bourgeois femininity. All that came at University. Funnily enough, also when at university, I found myself in some cavern club with a gaggle of political nerds, listening to a grunge-punk band with an extremely dynamic, copper haired singer. She turned out to be Lita Dumas, the very woman Chyna was ‘fighting’ the night she donned her Peacock crown. Lita was also a bit of trail blazer in American trash culture, because of her impressive high-wire antics. She reminded me then, as now, of some Renaissance circus performer. Liminal. Outside of the ‘ordinary’. Living life on the dangerous never-never.
Lita Dumas somersaulting off the ropes
But Chyna got under my skin because of the impressiveness of her physicality. I didn’t know then, but I do now, that there were a great many submissive men for whom she was an early wet dream. The Amazonian fantasy.
There is a neat but sturdy niche of men for whom strong, curvaceous or lavish ladies, woman-handling them, is a piquant predilection. It has sub-genres and ancillary popular medias. I loosely separate them as thus:
Tall Woman/Tiny Tim: I’m starting with a niche within a niche. This is the erotic notion of a very tall woman ‘playing with’ a small man toy. It could be a natural tall/small difference (a small guy booking a session with a very tall dominatrix for example) or it could be a fantasy version of a skyscraper woman picking up a guy like a little ant. I’ve done this. Not actually become the size of a skyscraper, but, on a video screen, ‘dangled’ a little guy between my fingers. The most apposite cultural representation of this is the Hollywood B Movie, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Her classic Goddess might be Skaði, the Norse Goddess of the mountains.
Trampling Queen: She is attached to the Tall Woman in many ways (although all these niches connect together). Here, submissive men lay down and use their bodies to pay homage to a tall/powerful woman by letting her trample them. Sometimes this is a light trampling, the Dominatrix sits on a chair and presses her bare feet into his flesh, all the way up to ‘final boss’ trampling, which is her wearing heels and walking across his body, usually using something for balance. In pop culture, there is a moment in the 90s Batman staring Michael Keaton, where Michelle Pfeiffer’s Domme-coded Catwoman briefly tramples, then ‘pins’ Batman. In myth, Hindu Goddess Kali ‘tramples’ Shiva after he throws himself under her feet.
A Rubens’ Muse Smothering: This is the ample woman/BBW who uses her lavish breasts, thighs and bottom to smother or Queen (sit on his face, facing his feet) a submissive male. This is a very popular genre, and its refers to men who have become hungrily addicted to the gormandizing of the secondary sex characteristics associated with femininity, which are more generously portioned in large women. As well as the aforementioned art by Rubens, there are also the Palaeolithic curvaceous statues - often considered odes to fertility but I’ve often wondered if they were early advertisements for caveman courtesans - most famously the Venus of Willendorf. Her Goddess is Venus/Aphrodite; sensual, erotic, thirsty. Her classic form is slender, delicate and classically beautiful, but she has an alternate form in Aphrodite Pandemos, who is earthier, more voluptuous and more explicitly erotic.
Lady Vengeance: The Dominatrix who punishes a man for his sins against women, and brings him to heel. An offshoot, perhaps, of the Amazonian fantasy genre, because she isn’t necessarily big, curvy, strong. But she is always tough, lacking clemency. And there is often a ‘raw’ physicality to these sessions; face slapping, trampling and the like. In pop culture there is a lot of Her in Tarantino’s oeuvre (if that guy isn’t into Dominatrixes I’d eat my stetson), Beatrix Kiddo, Jackie Brown and the ladies from Death Proof. Hera, the mother Goddess was very vengeful, but she mainly went after Zeus’s mistresses rather than Zeus himself (vengeance is messy and best kept to fantasy). But there is also Nemesis, The Furies and Medusa to call upon. .
The Classic Amazonian: The tall, either muscular, ‘stocky’ or athletic dominatrix who submissive men body-worship. This is often attached to supplementary exercises, like lift and carry sessions, wrestling sessions, ‘boxing bag’ sessions, arm wrestling or being placed in ‘holds’ (like The Boston Crab). Often Amazonian dominatrixes will dress in either modern day ‘wrestling’ gear or fitness model clothing, or alternatively in classical style dress (Greek Goddesses etc). Culturally, I think this best veers back to the Spartan Women, oft desired by repressed Athenian men and most likely the inspiration for the Amazon myth, which itself in modern trash culture, became Wonder Woman. This one’s Goddess is Diana/Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, or perhaps Morrigan in Celtic myth, the Goddess of Battle.
The Athletic Spartan Woman
Postscript
Sadly, Chyna, real name Joan Laurer, died in 2016 from a drug overdose. Many fans have long speculated that she was pushed over the edge by the cynical treatment she received from the wrestling federation after her long-term lover, Paul ‘HHH’ Levesque, left her for Stephanie McMahon, the daughter of the federation’s owner, Vince. It was speculated (and speculations are what they are) that Levesque loved Chyna, but married McMahon because that gave him status and longevity in the company. Added McMahon fitted the precepts of predictable, aspirational, bourgeois femininity in a way that the magnificent, one-of-a-kind Chyna didn’t. And so, to keep things ‘simple’, Chyna had to go.
She was fired, and was not allowed to use her working name for subsequent entertainment jobs because it was branded by the company. She also seemed to have had a troubled childhood, body image issues and there were questions about whether she, like many combat sport entertainers, suffered from CTE. Indeed, her brain was recovered after her death to study this, but it was already too decomposed.
As a side note; Chyna’s treatment was mirrored by Dumas’s. After Lita had a private affair behind boyfriend Matt Hardy’s back, the federation subjected her to a series of seedy storylines about her ‘sluttishness’, culminating in a bad taste episode where she simulated sex with wrestler Edge, under the covers, in the ring. Her previous popularity was trashed. She was turned her into a heel, but the actress never seemed comfortable with the role, one imagines because it functioned as a cruel and distasteful punishment, of her real life mistakes. There was something very ‘bear pit’ about it all, and indicative of how slender sexist culture’s patience can be of female transgression, power and dynamism. That Welsh Mum, sucking her cheap cigarettes in her slippers and scowling at women she found threatening, would I’m sure be temporarily pleased. A Pyrrhic victory indeed.
KISSES, CORA LEIGH
LEEDS & LONDON, UK INDEPENDENT ESCORT, DOMINATRIX & COMPANION
