This is something I've been thinking about for a while now.

There's been a lot of talk of late comparing pornography to wrestling, especially on threads on various boards arguing about the WON HOF where the point has been raised "imagine if there were a porn HOF."

Many posters reject the idea of this comparison out of hand without seriously contemplating it. I ask you to stop and think about it.

Both are morally questionable in regards to abusing your body, thought by some to be a God-given temple to be cherished and not demeaned.

Both are fueled by copious amounts of drugs and run by exploitive sociopaths who will swap out their "Superstars" without a second thought once they are used up (by the drugs, physical wear and tear, psychological trauma, or a combination of the three).

Both occupations are pursued by people who definitely have something wrong with them, psychologically, as nobody in their right mind would want to do what these performers do night in and night out.

Both occupations promote usually body images that are unattainable without medical assistance.

There are easy, specific comparisons to be made, such as comparing ROH to something like bareback gay porn: a very high level of risk, for very little reward, aimed at a small but rabid niche audience.

There are also telling differences that disqualify the typical knee jerk reaction that porn is worse. Indeed, porn policed itself much better during the AIDS scare than pro wrestling has, thus far, in the steroids/concussions/drug crisis it is currently facing.

So we're down to the intangibles that I will leave up to you, the voter, to discuss, and decide what other criteria out there determine, once and for all, which business is more morally bankrupt: pro wrestling or the skin flick industry.

I think that you have to say wrestling is sleazier, if just for the porn business largely shutting down during the AIDS scare and having an organization that does regular testing for STDs while providing inexpensive treatment. Wrestling hasn't been nearly as responsible in its behavior.

Porn certainly pays better on the low end. Your average camwhore makes more than a typical indy worker. But in America, sex is usually seen as being more offensive and harmful to depict in entertainment media, so wrestling is considered to be less sleazy by the general public by default.

They are both sleazy as hell. In porn, it's been said that close to 100% of the performers have Herpes and other Sexual transmited diseases. Both have series Drug and mental problems as you have to be on drugs or have something screwed with your mind to join. And about the AIDS thing, There are still risks about it as companies are doing more and more porn in Brazil where almost everyone has some sort of HIV/AIDS disease. So Overall, I say porn has the edge. Both have people killing kids.

I don't know much about porn but I assume people get roped into it with the lure of easy money.


Thats I think the basic social assumption with porn. The societal assumption is that porn is sleazier because folks get into buisness of degrading themselves based on financial need.

Does anyone really get suckered into porn based on the emotional appeal of the artistry of scat? Is there a girl taking it in the ass today who chose the career based on her aprreciation of Vanessa Del Rio's enthusiastic performances leading her to want to be part of that world.

If Jimmy Swaggart found a way to make money televising Holiness devotees handling snakes and drinking strychnine....I think you'd have a closer approximation of wrestlings level of scum.

Does porn provide better compensation. Yes. Not sure if it makes it any better.

Gotta give the nod to porn. In wrestling, there is no problem in being recognized on the street. How many porn stars use their real names? Many in fact get upset that sites like Wikipedia openly publish their real names. I think if you polled former wrestlers and pornstars, more wrestlers would look fondly upon their past profession.

Pro Wrestling easily. Both are sleazy but the porn industry seems to be getting a little less sleazy while wrestling seems to be getting worse in some ways. Plus porn has a much lower mortality rate. On the PR side of things. Porn has done a much better job of tricking the public into thinking they've cleaned up their act while the WWE has been rather transparent about it.

I believe that's because wrestling is like a big cult for the workers. Once you're in, you get brainwashed to things and suddenly things that would be totally unacceptable to a regular person have justification when you're in that circle of people.

I don't really know what my opinion is on this, but I'm curious if porn fans point to Ron Jeremy, Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords as signs of "mainstream acceptance" the way wrestling fans often point to Steve Austin and Hulk Hogan. (I purposely omitted The Rock, because he's in a different league.)

Well one thing you can say is the porn business (for the most part) doesn't have any pretense of what it is. Wrestling, especially WWE strives to be seen as something bigger than it is, when porn pretty much knows people just need something to crank it to on a lonely night. Not to mention the porn business does a lot better taking care of its performers than wrestling does.

Then again, you can say both require performance enhancers to advance. The percentage of male porn stars using Viagra is at least equal to the amount of pro wrestlers on the gas.

Wrestling can be very naive, which makes it lovable. I don't think porn has the upsides wrestling provides, but I don't know anything about the porn industry.

Wrestlers love to tell stories, they are pranksters, share their car/food/apartment with rookies, train others for no money or pay horrible fees to get trained, they travel insane distances and get constantly in trouble with the law and love to fight. And a lot of them do it for the love of it. I am not sure if a sex addict can be compared to a 55 year old wrestler who just wants to wrestle until he drops dead.

Wrestling can be about heroics, the adrenalin rush, the fuzzy feeling when you win a title or wrestle in front of 20 000 people, knowing that you are in the history books for some reason (Shawn Michaels demanding the European title 10 years ago so that he can be the only "Grand Slam" champion), being hated by a whole country, living your desires through a gimmick, earning quick money, spending that money in the next bar, never being at home, knowing too many people to count

How many female porn actors are out there that don't do it for the money? Compare that to the number of wrestlers that don't get paid. Wrestling can be a lot more idealistic and is because of that for me less sleazy. Although that doesn't mean that I don't know my fair share of horror stories about people like Brian Dixon. It's just that whenever I am going to a wrestling show most guys are happy to be there, they are eager to have fun in the ring, backstage or somewhere else after the show and they are not dead inside.
Which by the way does not apply at all to the WWE wrestlers. Whatever I hear from the guys who swarm around them during European tours is mostly depressing. But what else should you expect from that company

When did this modern trend begin of people thinking they're above the con? If people really think wrestling is this incredibly sleazy business then what are they doing lining up their next match to download?

Anyway, I chose porn since it affects a greater number of people's lives.

Who said being sleazy was a bad thing? The Sleazier the better I say.

Cute. Porn has a body count too. Recently there was Inkyo Volt Hwang and Haley Paige, a story where a director probably killed his pornstar girlfriend and himself O.D.'ed on drugs. As far as a body count, check out this page. It's safe for work, just text.

http://www.rame.net/faq/deadporn/

Porn.

I'm a fan of porn, and the cesspool of wrestling has gotten increasingly depressing over the years (or pehaps the other positives lessened to balance against the shit).

But...

Porn is an utter fucking shithole. Perhaps at its higher end it's little different from wrestling. But join any "network" with a load of sites, click through what's available, and you're quickly going to reach low levels. And even there, you're not even reaching the lowest level of shit and exploitation. Internet porn has driven it even harder.

Like I say, I'm a fan of porn... but I have no illusions about what a shithole it is.

As far as the industry shutting down for a while over AIDS, one of the troubling things you'll find these days is just how much unprotected sex is going on in porn sites. It's really fucking numbing.


John

John's got it right. We can all say that wrestling is the sleaziest thing ever till we are blue in the face but it will never reach the levels of Porn. The closest it got was with XPW. I forget who it was, I think it was Donavan Morgan that talked about going to the XPW offices on day and seeing some porn chick in the middle of the ring naked. Then he saw a bunch of dudes doing a gangbang with her and left and never cameback.

Porn doesn't tend to have generations of the same family involved in the business. How many professions outside of wrestling can you have someone have more than one family member die due to conditions that exist only in wrestling and still want to take part in it? Who's the porn version of Harry Smith, someone who's father (allegedly) drugged and raped their mother and ended up dying from the effects of long term drug abuse, then end up suspended for abusing the same drugs?

What does a bunch of people having sex in private have to do with anything?

There's a lot of people who don't really know the porn business posting in this thread. Honestly when you compare the two, the only thing where porn doesn't come out ahead is that it may be the one thing that has a lower public perception than pro wrestling.

In terms of actual sleaze factor, you'd never hear the kind of stories about porn stars that you hear about wrestlers. Also, most of porn's big stars end up running their own companies and are comfortably well off, while most of wrestling's big stars end up offering handjobs for crack outside of state fairs.

They were taping for a movie in the ring that was used for the shows.

When people leave porn, they either turn born again christian, becomes bigger drug addicts, get clean and lead successful lives or die. In reality, I guess it's kinda like wrestling now that I think of it.

I don't think i've ever seen Ric Flair or Bret hart offer handjobs on the street. Of course I don't go to Bert Prentice shows so who knows?

Well Ric Flair runs around on airplanes with his dick waving around under his robe, so YMMV if that's better or worse.

Perhaps if this were PornOnly.com we'd know more stories about porn actors and actresses. Porn is a much bigger industry than pro-wrestling, so in that sense the number of premature deaths in wrestling is ridiculous, but in terms of sleaze pro-wrestling doesn't compare. Porn is porn -- it's always existed and always will -- but it affects not only the lives of the people who star in it but often the people who watch it. It simply has a greater social impact than wrestling. And porn doesn't just imply some Adut Video production company out in California. That side of the business may or may not be relatively clean. When you factor in internet porn, underground porn, hardcore porn from other countries, all the different types of fetishs, illegal porn... John is right, the exploitation in porn is far worse.

And please, the entertainment and sports industries are riddled with people who became fuck ups once their career was over.

You could make the same comparison with WWE and various indy groups in the US and other countries. Some have "fetishes" of their own, if you weeeeell.

I'm just saying that there's a lot of kneejerk reaction because porn = sex and a lot of people have hangups about anything sexual. Porn as an industry is probably a more healthy profession to break into than pro wrestling, not that's setting the bar especially high or anything.

Wrestling has less social impact? How about instead of just throwing that out there, explain what you mean? What is porn's social impact? Boners? Okay, I'm being facetious. I assume, by porn's "social impact," you mean that it attracts many, many fans who have little social skills and gives them worse views of women than they already have. Notice I didn't say anything about causality. Sorry, but I will never buy the argument that any type of entertainment causes negative behavior. Violent films might give fucked up people better ideas, but that's it. Watching porn will not make me go rape anyone. So yeah, I'm really, really hoping by "societal impact," you just mean that it gives weirdos more shitty ideas, rather than some sort of causality between watching it and going out and raping women or anything like that. The people who would rape, molest, etc would do that without porn.

So all that being said, I'd say societal impact is equal. Porn might give weirdos bad ideas and ammo for crime, and normal people a hard-on, and maybe some strategies for getting anal that don't involve orange juice. Wrestling attracts just as many social misfits and gives weirdos ideas to wrestle in their back yards, chokeslam each other on Christmas tree bulbs, piledrive their little sisters, and jump off rooftops. I'd say "societal impact" is a push.

Sex is wholesome, porn is not. The problem is that your typical pornstar is not Jenna Haze or Belladonna or some otherwise successful young lady. It's a girl who answers an ad and sees an easy way to make $300 or so. They're thrown into a scene where the director gets as much as he can out of the performer, and usually she's done after 1-3 scenes. What follows is a stigma that may follow them the rest of their lives. In regards to specific examples of sleaze, the stories ARE out there in the porn industry. Abuse, rape, drugs, you name it.

Porn can have an impact on people's marriages and relationships. It can cost people their jobs. Look, I'm not against porn. People can regularly view porn and have normal relationships and lead normal lives, but pornography addiction (and particularly online pornography addiction) are bigger social problems than a guy who downloads wrestling all day. A wrestling fan might look for more obscure matches. Heavy porn viewers are looking for harder stuff and more stimulus. Given the amount of illegal pornography that exists, I don't think wrestling is in quite that territory. Porn has a far darker underbelly. Child pornography is a bigger social problem than wrestlers taking drugs and carking.

Whatever way you look at it, porn affects a far greater number of people's lives, since porn exists in nearly every country around the world. Wrestling is a tiny subculture that in the last 20 years in America has gotten out of hand. My real contention with this type of talk is that people will say wrestling is this, wrestling is that and then sign up for WWF 24-7. That's not an attack on anybody, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Counting illegal porn as part of the porn industry is like counting dogfighting as part of the pro wrestling industry.

Not going to argue the sleaziness of dogfighting, but wouldn't backyarders be more comparable to illegal porn?

Backyard wrestling isn't really illegal and has much closer ties to the wrestling industry than illegal porn has to the porn industry.

I voted for wrestling, but really, I see arguments for both.

Two comparisons here that really stand out to me:

1. Mindset of wrestlers vs. mindset of porn stars

TomK and Sek69 hit on this already. To the best of my knowledge, no one's getting into porn for strictly artistic purposes, at least, not on the level that happens in wrestling. I'd consider that something in wrestling's favor were wrestling not so fucked up. As it is, killing yourself for art is pretty deeply fucked up.

2. Immediacy of sleaze in wrestling vs. immediacy of sleaze in porn

Obviously, it's A LOT more immediate in porn. That's why it's porn. That said, not sure immediacy of sleaze necessarily trumps consequences of sleaze. Not sure the immediacy of being anally fisted by Max Hardcore beats the consequences of taking an unprotected chairshot to the back of the head. Not that every example would be in porn's favor, mind you, I'm just not certain that the immediacy of sleaze makes it more sleazy when considering the consequences.

A normal person can enjoy something while still understanding that it has an abnormal, unseemly side to it. I can watch and enjoy "Collateral" while, at the same time, understanding that it's star is a crazy person who believes we are spirits imprisoned by alien overlords, and not have that diminish my enjoyment of it.

Since you said that, what's your personal view of wrestling? That it's not pretty scummy? How about wrestling in Japan, while we're at it? Is only American wrestling sleazy, while Japan is a magical land where 60 minutes of guys dropping each other on their heads = Citizen Kane and you refer to matches only by their dates with reverence?

I'd like to know your views, since you picked on the apparent hypocrisy of people who think wrestling is pretty sleazy but still enjoy it.

I think a lot of the shit that happens in the wrestling business is scummy, but if I felt strongly about it I wouldn't watch it. The reason I mentioned America is pretty obvious. No matter how sleazy the business may be elsewhere, things aren't as bad as they are in American wrestling right now.

Mistico not being allowed time off despite being broken in a million pieces says hello. Also all the stories of training in the New Japan dojo and the extent of what the new trainees' job fully entails.

The dojo training is normal in Japan, though it sometimes leads to deaths like in sumo recently. Mistico being banged up is the same thing that's happening in the US, only in the US it's leading to more deaths.

If severe physical and emotional abuse is "normal," then that is one terrifying status quo.

I'm not even sure how to categorize the practice of having the trainees wash the scrotums of the top guys.

I don't have an opinion on it one way or another, but they've been training people like that in Japan since God knows how long. It didn't start with the wrestling business.

A kohai washing a senpai's balls is nothing. Sumo wrestlers get their ass wiped for them.

Mainstream Japanese porn, at least the stuff they show at Love Hotels, is much less sleazy than mainstream North American porn. In the Japanese porn I've seen, it's generally one-on-one vanilla sex and they blur out the genitalia.

I'm sure that there is underground Japanese porn that's purely horrrific... I've seen some cartoon stuff that's stomach-churning... but all of the stuff I've seen with actual human beings involved (not much, but some) has been a gentle step beyond US soft-core.

And, yeah, wrestling has its scummy side... but does Porn have anything like the family atmosphere at Osaka Pro shows to balance that out? Does wrestling have anything remotely as bad as child porn or snuff films?

I gotta disagree with you gordi. Japanese mainstream porn is fucked up beyond belief, even the stuff they show on satellite or cable. The stuff you can walk off the street and buy in a normal bookstore is unbelievable. I won't go into details, but I've seen some insane shit in Japan. The sleaze in the wrestling business -- and I can't differentiate between good sleaze and bad sleaze in these type of threads -- is mostly its connections with the underworld. But yakuza are cool guys if you don't owe them money.

I must have gone to a pretty tame Love Hotel, then. Just as well, I'm not really interested in seeing twisted porn from any culture.

Sitting near Yakuza-looking guys at a wrestling show is a blast. They always seem to get into it and yell and joke a lot...

Jesus Christ ohtani, you're so willfully obtuse it's ridiculous. If Randy Orton were forcing Cody Rhodes to wash his nuts, we'd never hear the end of it. Creepy Japanophiles who bury their heads in the sand regarding how fucked up things are there are laughable.

By your logic, we should just say that how scummy pro wrestling is is a cultural issue and we should just no longer consider it a problem.

Freaking out about some dude washing another dude's balls is stupid when you're trying to compare wrestling with porn. What am I supposed to say? I don't know what the guy thinks about washing another guy's balls. It's been that way forever. You think Kobashi didn't wash Baba's balls? Baba got the shit beaten out of him by Rikidozan with bamboo canes. Rikidozan ended up fucking dead. Look, pro-wrestling has its seedy side. A lot of famous Japanese wrestlers came from broken homes, were abused or left junior highschool to make money for their families. And I have no idea what some of these people would be doing if they weren't wrestlers. But I think porn is worse. The sex industry is worse too if you want to make that point.

And what's with that creepy Japanophile shit? That type of smarkish bullshit is why I even bothered to give my opinion, which you asked people for.

I think we strayed from the porn discussion a little when you said



And then you got called out for it. You were called a "creepy Japanophile" for being an apologist for the weirdness that is one guy forcing another guy to wash his balls during what is supposed to be wrestling training, among other things. I bet you were indignant when Bob Holly stiffed Matt Cappotelli on Tough Enough. Also, you threw out Japanese terminology which, if you're not Japanese, is kinda smug and also creepy. Regardless, there is this sick double standard that holier than thou fans of Japanese wrestling have, and you never realize that you're throwing stones from inside a glass pagoda (see what I did there?). The Japanese wrestling (I won't be smug and say "puro") scene is just as bad, it's just a different flavor of sleaziness. Hint: that flavor is testicles (among other things).

oh jesus tmi

See JBL forcibly soaping the ass of Edge and simulating anal rape on Duke "The Dumpster" Droese and or Brian Christopher.

So...is the solution pretending this stuff isn't fucked up, or is the solution pretending it doesn't matter for whatever reason? Because those both seem way less healthy and practical than *FH*'s solution.

For the people who dislike the Japanese system - was Akira Maeda better of as a wrestler or should he have stayed in the yakuza?

1. "Professional wrestling is better than organized crime, and therefore okay" isn't a very compelling point.

2. Pro wrestling in Japan has a pretty long history of being tied up with the yakuza anyway, thus rendering this question even less potent.

He LIVES in Japan, FH. There's nothing "creepy" about some of their saying making their way into how oj communicates. I live in Canada, but (as I never get tired of saying) I'm getting married to a Japanese woman, and just through spending time with her, her friends, and her family, some Japanese phrases have worked their way into the tools I use to cope with life. It's OK if those come out sometime.

The thought of it being cool for Aoki to wash Akiyama's balls because Akiyama had to wash Misawa's had to wash Jumbo's had to wash Baba's balls balls which is cool because Baba washed Rikidozan's balls, though... maybe some traditions are outside of what I can comfortably comprehend. At least we can reast comfortably knowing that our AJPW heroes were clean down there much of the time. Nothing like those filthy-balled American Sleaze merchants. They are disgustingly dirty-balled,　for the most part.

Still, ball-washing doesn't come close to the kind of sleaze that is taken for granted in the porn industry. Being the dude who shines up the genetalia is probably a pretty prime job for soemone breaking into pornography.