Wrestling Beast's blog

How long should a good match be? One hour is usually given as the minimum time for two guys to meet and wrassle.

Generally, I say that if you are going to have to travel to meet up with someone, the encounter should last as long as the time it takes to get there and back, but I am willing to make exceptions for a truly great opponent. So if it takes me an hour to get there and back, I should have two hours with my opponent. If I have other business or can find other stuff to do in the area, maybe an hour will suffice. But splitting the cost of a hotel room, if that is a factor, should be taken into consideration. $50 is a lot of money to spend on an hour's worth of entertainment.

Some people can wrestle for a full hour non-stop. Some people can also run marathons too, but I cannot do either. In my matches, there are always breaks. Sometimes after a painful submission, one guy needs to get his bearings. Othertimes after several submissions. My general rule of thumb is that 10 to 15 minutes of wrestling between breaks is appropriate. But the match itself can go on for hours, until the opponents are too sore or bored to continue.

How long should a break be? Most opponents can find a comfortable time. Most people enjoy talking to each other during breaks about things in common or interesting to them, past opponents, the weather. In a hotel room, they may turn on the TV. With one guy, we watched MMA in between wrestling. If you are recording your wrestling, it would be a good time to review it. Just keep an eye on your watch.

There is nothing more obnoxious than, when you are in a chat room, getting a private message from someone you have never messaged before and reads "im so horny tonight", "dude ya wanna cockfight", "j/o on cam?" or "MAN AM I GONNA MAKE YOU MY BITCH". (Note the absolute lack of capitalization, punctuation, proper language, etc.) First of all, I am tempted to reply, "What on my profile thinks that I am going to respond favorably? Please let me know so I can take it down immediately!" Usually I just ignore the person. One of these days, I will lose my patience and respond with some very unfriendly language. Or I may share a link to this blog post.

It is a sad commentary on our shared interests when someone should expect to receive this from a total stranger. Consider this analogy : You are hanging out in gay or fetish bar. How likely is it that a total stranger is going to come up to you and the first thing out of his mouth is "You do anal?" or "You like paddling?" While that kind of greeting may be appropriate in a porno or fetish video, it rarely, if ever works in real life. The person saying that usually would wise up after a few dirty looks or "buzz off"s.

I understand that some people like to chat dirty and go into the chat rooms on these sites to do that. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is the assumption that everybody else wants to chat dirty as well.

But someone may remember my prior blog entry where I discuss the issues surrounding nude wrestling. That obviously must mean that its no holds barred in chat with me, right? Well, I never said that I wrestled nude in that post or, even if I did, that I would wrestle nude with just anybody. An annoying person is unlikely to get the time of day from me, never mind an invitation to meet. It is wrong to assume that being open to nude wrestling means that crotch grabs, mutual masturbation, frottage or oral sex is okay. Those kind of assumptions can turn an otherwise fine match into an incident of {removed} .

When I private message somebody for the first time or the tenth time, I usually start out with "Hi, how are you?". Other appropriate greetings include "I loved your profile", "Do you want to wrestle sometime?", "Great photos", "I dig your blog", "You seem like my kind of opponent". Our conversations do not have to rise to the level in My Dinner with Andre', but it is not too much to ask to keep conversations out of the gutter until the other person indicates that he is willing to go there.

While there are non-sexual stakes, I assume that when someone mentions stakes, they assume some kind of sexual activity is in play. Don't ask a person unless they have indicated they are open to the erotic. And I am not going to view your cam just so you can show me that you can and are masturbating. Its safe to assume that if you have found your way here, you have mastered that particular activity.

Oh, some people like to pretend that their Caps Lock key is stuck permanently on when they chat. This is the Internet equivalent of shouting at somebody. I know people to this to show how intense they are or to intimidate. It just looks sad and its really annoying, so stop already.

Once upon a time, I met my first opponent in a hotel room for a wrestling match. I had a good time and was safe, but I was not careful because I told no one where I was going or whom I was meeting. What if I had not come back from that match?

In situations where you are meeting an opponent for the first time, there is no substitute for safety. This is especially true if your opponent has no confirmed prior matches. Of course, everyone has to start from scratch, so a lack of confirmed matches should not raise a huge red flag. Be suspicious if this wrestler has been on the site for years without confirmed opponents, could be a fake or worse.

Ideally, I should appear as an prior opponent on the profile of every person whom I have designated as an opponent. Some of my opponents do not check all three sites that often, so there may be discrepancies. However, just about every opponent should have indicated me as a past opponent on one site or another. Check your opponent across all three mainstream sites.

I do not think you need be apprehensive of every potential opponent on these sites. If your potential opponent has lots of confirmed prior opponents and recommendations, you should be safe. But if feel you may not be with any opponent, especially when you meet an opponent for the first time, you should inform somebody of where you are going and who you are going to meet. This is your buddy (gender neutral).

Everybody these days should have a cell phone. You should have your opponent's and he should have yours. Your buddy should also have your cell and you should have his. You should call or text your buddy when you arrive at the meeting place. Tell him to call you in one hour and keep calling. If he does not get an answer or a text wherein you say you are fine, he should call the police.

If you are wrestling in a hotel room, do not forget to tell your buddy your room number. If you do not know the number when you arrive, text it to your buddy as soon as you know. Excuse yourself to the men's room if you need to.

Be upfront and honest with your opponent. Tell him that you expect a safety call in about an hour which you have to take. Ensure you can hear your phone and it has a charge. When you hear the ring, break off whatever you are doing and take it.

But I don't have a buddy I am comfortable sharing this stuff with, you say? I realize that many fighters keep this sort of thing a secret from their friends, family and their significant others. I would suggest asking a good person from one of these personals sites who lives near to the meeting place to act as your buddy. The buddy should be near because 911 is a service intended to be local, so a buddy from another state may not be as helpful. The buddy should have the telephone numbers for police and fire/emt at his command.

You should set up a panic signal with your buddy if you feel unsafe in an encounter and do not feel strong enough to break it off without assistance. I would advise against shouting "Help" into your phone. Instead, when your buddy calls, ask him something that would make sense to anyone other than him. For example, if your buddy is unmarried, ask him "How's the wife?" If he has no children, no living parents, etc. Just in case he may forget the specific panic phrase, he will should still remember the panic phrase is not supposed to make sense and act accordingly.

There are people out there who would love nothing more than to wear your skin or kick your skull around like a soccer ball. They will give out fake information, have fake IDs and mask their internet history by using proxy servers in third world countries. They will slip a ruffie into your water, whack you over the head with a crowbar, or not let up on that rear naked choke. There is no guarantee that the police will be able to bring your murderer to justice, so use the buddy system and it will go a long way to making sure they will not have to.

The big three wrestling personals sites all allow a member to designate other members as favorites. When someone would designate me as their favorite, I usually responded in kind. Then I thought, what is the point of designating a favorite on a wrestling personals site? My interest is in real matches, so how can I possibly call someone a favorite whom I have not wrestled? I am a reasonably friendly person and have had many pleasant and sometimes unusual yet interesting conversations. But you cannot really know a wrestler until you have met him in the flesh. So, I do not think I can designate someone as a "favorite [wrestler]" until I have met them.

Of course, I want to wrestle as many people as possible, and would like the lists of people I have previously wrestled to increase. So, for those sites with a "previously wrestled" category, those wrestlers are my favorites and I do not need to double list them in a "favorites" category. Consider that an endorsement if you will. If I have wrestled a person and did not enjoy the experience, then I would not list them in my previously wrestled category. Unless the site requires confirmation before listing a member as previously wrestled, if they list me there is nothing I can do about it. Of course, if I list someone and that person does not list me, check other sites as some people do not often log into all three sites. I would not maintain a link with someone who would prefer not to be associated with me in any way, shape or form.

I know that this site has a "fans" category and another site has an "admirers" category, and I interpret this to mean "I would like to wrestle this person someday." There are many people whom I would like to wrestle someday, but I would wait for them to contact me if they are going to be in my area.

For a particular site that does not have a previously wrestled category, at least for the non-premium members, then my favorites are those whom I have previously wrestled and would recommend to others for a match.

I have always looked down upon staged wrestling. Pro wrestling entertained me when I was 12, but since then I have not looked back with a great deal of nostalgia. When I discovered personals sites devoted to wrestling, I thought that the attention devoted to people wanting to "pro" wrestle weird. To me, engaging in an athletic "performance" with a predetermined outcome and improvised holds and moves is boring. However, I understand that other people find greater appeal in that, and each to his own.

So there is a divide between competitive wrestling and "pro" wrestling, whether you call the former freestyle, MMA, rough action, submission, etc. The former can range from pro fantasy to "stiff" pro, but it does not matter to me what you call it, its not competitive. I think it is important to state clearly what you do up front. If I see a guy who talks about pro all over his profile, I would not assume that he would be into competitive. But if he is, he should be explicit. And vice versa. These days, even some people into "submission" wrestling may only be interested in those submissions that are prearranged.

But there are these terms "jobber" and "heel" that get thrown around in both spheres. In pro wrestling, the terms are well-understood. A "heel" is the bad guy and a "jobber" is there to take a staged beating. Some competitive wrestlers have also taken to the term. A "heel" is someone who expects to dominate and a "jobber" is someone who expects to be dominated, ideally. Some competitive heels tend to take matches with obviously smaller, weaker, less experienced wrestlers. I admit to being guilty of this, although its mostly by circumstances than design because there are few opponents in my area who are as big as I am. A "jobber" may seek out a bigger, stronger wrestler, acknowledging that he will most likely lose to that wrestler. In this sense, he is a submissive. In an encounter between opponents where the matches are one-sided, the "heel" and the "jobber" become apparent. But in my matches which fall into this dynamic, the heel has to earn a submission and sometimes the jobber can turn the tables, at least for a tap.

But many people enjoy switching, taking on heels when they can get them and jobbers otherwise. In one of my previous posts, I stated that I let the jobber get some of his own back by letting him engage in one-sided gut punching, with me being on the receiving end. I do not consider this pro or staged because each and every one of those punches are real and my opponent never knows when I may pounce to try and take him down. Since I am testing my physical and mental limits, as well as my opponent's, this is still competitive in a different way.

What most irks me is this "please don't hurt me attitude" I read in some profiles. I tend to view this as a kind of "bait and switch", a wrestler who says he will engage in "light" submission but the encounter will seem much like a series of pro matches. There is always a risk of injury in real competitive wrestling, even without body punches. If that is the kind of wrestling you are into, then we will not meet.