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Real Women, Girls and Wrestling

I grew up in the Chicago area and regularly went on field trips to the Art Institute. While I’d like to tell you that my school buddies and I learned from our teachers to appreciate the Institute’s world-class collection, in reality our mission was to find nudity. Ineffectually constrained by our teachers’ barked commands, advance scouts would report back with giddy yelps when they entered a room or rounded a corner unexpectedly coming face to canvas with our quarry. Scurrying forward out of control, we would draw together in paroxysms of giggling and poking like a gaggle of geese watching a predator from a safe distance.

Shocking, I know, and less than you should have expected from a 1950s’ schoolboy, but your outrage may be tempered, your sympathy piqued when you consider that National Geographic and the Museum were to us what Victoria Secret catalogs and MTV are to today’s kids.

Given this early training, you might well understand my discomfort when I visited Arts Benicia’s recent exhibition, "Confronting Identities: New Images of Women and Girls", and walked alone into the room displaying Heidi Struble’s In Perfection: Photographs of Real Women. Each work consisted of three contiguous frames, 16 inches on a side. On the left was a photograph of a woman in her home; in the middle was text in the woman’s handwriting in which she commented on the shifting nature of body image; and on the right was a nude photograph of the woman again in her home. The black-and-white photographs were small, approximately 5 ½ inches square, making it impossible for me to stand at a safe distance: I had to move in embarrassingly close.

A tape played in the background in which various women explained why they had chosen not to pose nude.

"Right on," I said to myself. "No way I would have done what these women did." Personally, I have a hard enough time wearing a bathing suit to the beach.

And perhaps that’s one of Ms. Struble’s points. We are constantly judging our body images against ideals, women historically more so than men, though that may be changing as the media-idealization of men escalates. Many of us, as a result, hide from certain activities or confound our public encounters by anguishing over appearances. Fearing that our body image cannot possibly meet expectations to which we feel others are comparing us – though ironically we rarely apply these perceived standards to others - we subject ourselves, at best, to self-conscious discomfort and, at worst, to a host of psychological and physical diseases as we try in vain to measure up.

As one woman writes: "Some days I’m unbeatable. Other days I’m a raisin, shriveled and ugly."

Ain’t it the truth!

From Ms. Struble’s room, I moved to Kym Hoffschildt’s exhibit done in collaboration with Dennis Gaxiola, Breaking the Plane: Our Youth Look at Gender, and into the world of girls wrestling boys. And, no, I’m not talking about what you might be thinking or about professional wrestling’s bicep-buffo performances. I’m talking about that incredibly grueling sport in which two competitors in the same weight class become entangled for exhausting minutes during three timed periods. Add to this the possibility - judging from this exhibit, frequent occurrence - that boys lose to girls, and you have the makings of gender-breaking encounters at their most extreme.

Ms. Hoffschildt displayed stylized portraits of girls in wrestling clothes next to statements from the athletes, their parents and coaches. A tape of conversations ran in the background while slides were displayed in the center of the room on a piece of white cloth hanging from the ceiling.

While most sports are played at arm’s length or greater, contact between wrestlers would be considered intimate, perhaps even claustrophobic, were it not an intense contest of agility and strength. This feeling was well captured by the dark room and photographs, visible only through a narrow viewing angle when standing directly in front of each picture, and wrestler banter that created a pit-like feeling of tension and closeness.

My mother-in-law was with me on my second visit and asked me if I would have been able to wrestle a girl in high school. "No way," I found myself saying again. As one father said: "…[T]he boys are pretty much in a lose, lose situation here. I mean if they beat a girl, so what, but if they get beat by a girl, well then that’s terrible."

Which reminds me of Polly Gaillard’s exhibit, which I wrote about last week, in which Sarah said: "…I see a change – women are going to take over the world pretty soon."

Though I’m not a betting man, I’d give this prediction pretty good odds.

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STUFF WE LIKE

Issue Date: November 1999

20/20 SETS ITSELF APART
Although most segments of the proliferating network magazine shows seem to have a sameness about them, I keep finding myself unable to turn off ABC’s 20/20 because its topics are often different, important, and have what seems to be original reporting. For example, a few months ago Diane Sawyer did a terrific report about what, if anything, little kids got out of a National Rifle Association program to teach gun safety in the schools. (ABC used hidden cameras, with the parents’ permission, and planted unloaded guns at a day care center to see if the kids would avoid playing with them after watching an NRA video on the subject; they mostly didn’t.) Then there was one night in September where I happened on to a 20/20 hour featuring two previously broadcast segments—one with Sam Donaldson about mistakes in textbooks, the second with John Stossel about high school girls wrestling on previously all-male teams. Both were truly eye-opening. 20/20 clearly has a bunch of producers who are successfully reaching higher than the competition.

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DiCesare pins all foes on the way to title

5/26/1998
Laura DiCesare took care of the 156-and-over weight class for the second straight year to win the girls state wrestling title Saturday at Ann Arbor Pioneer.
DiCesare pinned all three of her opponents in the 2nd Annual Michigan High School Girls Wrestling State Championships.
I've been wrestling for six years," said Laura, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at St. Mary's Catholic School in Monroe. "I wrestle with the Tappan Club and we practice twice a week.
DiCesare's older brother, Brad Haddix, got her and her twin sister Sara interested in the sport. Haddix was third in the state while wrestling for Dundee High in 1993.
"I like the intensity," Laura DiCesare said. "My best move is the headlock. I'm mostly an upperbody wrestler.
"I like wrestling the boys and making them cry. I'm still going to wrestle next year, but not high school, just freestyle or AAU. Boys are too strong in high school, but I might change my mind."
DiCesare plans to compete in the U.S. High School Girls Wrestling National Championships Saturday and Sunday at Ann Arbor Pioneer.
David Goricki

Kettering's Morris a two-time champion

Amber Morris is two-for-two in girls wrestling state championships.
Morris, a senior at Waterford Kettering who represented the Oakland Wrestling Club, earned 12-9 victory over Alaina Berube of Escanaba at 106 pounds to earnthe Co-Most Valuable Wrestler award.
"It's real good to be have competition at your own level," said Morris of the second annual Michigan High School Girls Wrestling State Championship. The event is not sanctioned by the MHSAA. "The competition was a lot stronger than last year. We had 10 girls in our weight class.
"My final match went back and forth. It was real close, but in the end I just had more moves than her. It was real cool to be MVP.
"I'm kind of an aggressive, defensive wrestler. Reversals are my best moves. My quickness is my strength."
Morris was 2-0-8 at 103 pounds during the boys season. She will be competing in the U.S. High School Girls Wrestling National Championships Saturday and Sunday in Ann Arbor.
"If I don't win it, I want to place," Morris said. "The intensity is what I like most about wrestling. It's also like a mind game."
Morris will be featured on MTV's Women in Sports May 12 at 10 p.m.

David Goricki