Taking a brief break from the heavy diet of reviews I’ve been dishing out, today I’m lingering a bit on that supremely homoerotic wrestling hold, face-to-crotch headscissors.
I’m sure I’ve mused about this hold before, but I’m too lazy to look it up. So I’ll probably repeat myself when I say that my heart pumps harder in my chest when a straight forward pro wrestling story suddenly introduces face-to-crotch scissors. If you buy that all of pro wrestling can easily be read as an extended homoerotic innuendo, face-to-crotch sort of slaps down the implied erotic subtext and steps at least one toe over the line into straight up homoerotic text.
How wrestlers carry it off, of course, can significantly add to eroticism. I suppose it’s possible to snap your thighs around another man’s head with that up close look at your balls in his face and it be solely about punishment and wrestling victory. But I love watching a wrestler snap shut that bear trap and then enjoy it, openly, luxuriantly, expansively. When someone on the delivery side of this hold pumps his glutes and shoves his hips forward with a little enthusiasm, when he milks the moment with pulsing flexed muscles beating out a morse code of agony from the gasping grunts of his opponent, when he stares down his own hot body and smiles at the sight of his opponent owned and getting primed for sucking cock, when he closes his eyes and leans his head way, way back and that look of an impending orgasm washes across his face, there’s nothing coded about this. This is hot, homoerotic wrestling gold.
The catcher can certainly connect the dots as well. Regardless of who ends up on top after all is said and done, I love it when a captured hunk’s eyes roam hungrily up and down his captors body above him. He doesn’t need to, but if he stretches his hands up and strokes those crushing thighs, the rippling abs, stretching so far as to palm the bulging pecs of his tormentor, it conveys what I’m silently thinking deep inside at that moment. A smothered grappler doesn’t have to, but if he’s man enough to nuzzle the balls bearing down on his face, fuck, maybe even open wide and give the trickster’s treats a hearty lick, it just puts the exclamation point on what this hold conveys from the start: wrestling persistently implies homoerotic intimacy.
When the camera angles and storytelling are just right, face-to-crotch headscissors shine a spotlight on one man’s bulging package, bringing his entire, tasty physique into the mix, making even that swelling muscle of passion a part of the corporal domination of another man. For me, it isn’t even so much about the oral sexual implications, as much as it signals that every magnificent inch of a wrestler’s hot body is engaged in dominating his opponent. Hell, when wrestling companies choose to transition from explicit wrestling to explicit sex, I typically push rewind. Because what’s getting me off is the homoeroticism of the wrestling, not the wrestling as foreplay for sex.
I suppose it isn’t such a far distance between why I’m such a fan of face-to-crotch headscissors as I am a fanatic for my favorite pro wrestling hold, the over-the-knee backbreaker. Both draw my eye to one wrestler’s bulging package. Both center the frame on the outline of a bulging cock and the ballast of balls. Both seem ripe with the erotic potential marrying gay sensibilities and a pro wrestling kink. Both make my pulse pound in anticipation of what happens next to, or with, or on behalf of one wrestler’s swollen pipe.
I sometimes find it ironic that this blog attracts so many visitors thanks to the still frames I include, because it’s the story in and around any one captured slice of time in a wrestling match that tantalizes and titillates me. It’s not any one frozen image that becomes the perfect muse to my erotic imagination, but the drama played out in motion, the slow contraction of muscles, the arching agony in a lower back, the quivering pouch, the writhing feet futilely kicking the mat. I’ve lately talked in terms of “the moneyshot,” meaning that moment in a match at which point I’m likely to climax, but that moment is about the 1,600 seconds before that led up to that moment, the deepening jeopardy of one man, the swelling confidence of another, the bodies growing wet with sweat over time, the veins swelling and pumping harder with blood from the effort and the adrenaline of competition. I get off plenty to face-to-crotch headscissors, but I’m never just getting off to face-to-crotch headscissors.
If there is one valuable analog of face-to-crotch headscissors, I think its the comfort a wrestling company has with the homoerotic eye of their gay audience. In scanning for face-to-crotch headscissors images across several platforms for this post, I found them concentrated in just a couple producers’ catalogs. And I think they play a part in direct proportion to how explicitly companies market to those of us in the audience tuning in and ponying up because we are sexually turned on by wrestling. Of course, face-to-crotch headscissors aren’t the only way of crossing the line from homoerotic subtext to homoerotic text. Hell, they probably aren’t even the best way. But from a strictly correlational perspective, I think they show up in proportion to how much I (at least) perceive of a producer as appreciative of and comfortable with me, as a gay man, watching their wrestling products as a means of sexual gratification.
So probably a close second as my favorite wrestling hold is face-to-crotch headscissors, because when they’re done wrong, they can reveal a whole host of troubled self-hatred bubbling beneath a veneer of nohomo bravado, but when they’re done right, I feel respected as a gay wrestling fan, drawn into the intimacy of homoerotic combat, and turned on hard.
Sidelineland 