Vince McMahon lives in my Masjid

by HijabMan :: posted 10 November 06

Warning: This Post Contains Graphic Images That Your Kids Probably Already Watch On TV.

“Suck it.”
Did he really just say that?
“Suck it.” This time he held his hands high, crossed them and smacked them against his thighs, gesturing to his crotch.
That was, uhh, unexpected.

After shaking off the reality that is a 9 year old South Asian Muslim kid telling me to suck his private parts, I reflected [again] upon what it means that our kids (and adults) find it “fun” to watch women getting stripped and spanked (after he licks his hand: See Photo). It isn’t just “those other kids,” either. It is our kids. Our kids who we let sit in front of the television without speaking to them about what they are watching, and then make them go to the mosque where we tell them to memorize verses that they don’t understand. You may be wondering what I’m writing about…

Allow me introduce you to World Wrestling entertainment, or WWE. It used to be known as WWF for those of you 80’s kids out there. The first responses I receive when asking aunties and uncles about this usually consist of, “Oh, it’s just fake wrestling.” or “It’s just fun, just entertainment.”

If they actually sat down and watched they’d see repeated images of things like women being beaten, being forced to get on all fours and bark like dogs, being spanked, and sexually harassed. Not to mention having men’s faces being shoved into another man’s behind. Really, do I need to go on? Okay, maybe just one more. They’d also see women-only wrestling matches titled “bra and panty matches.” First woman to strip the other woman of her clothes wins.

Just a few weeks ago, I walked in to the Islamic Society of Central Jersey intending to pray. While I was making the motions, however, I was listening intently to the conversations of kids who arrived early to recite the Qur’an.

Needless to say, they weren’t reciting the Qur’an, they were discussing Vince McMahon and the latest story lines of the WWE. I hear those discussions in mosques all the time. Again, you may try to brush this aside with statements like these shows don’t affect my kids, these shows are just for fun.

But if advertising wasn’t effective, these corporations and media conglomerates wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on marketing. And our kids wouldn’t be discussing Vince McMahon and his latest conquests right before Friday prayer. Every week, 4.5 million teens watch WWE, and that was back in 2002. Four years later, I’m sure that number has gone way up.

Before you start thinking that I’m nuts, let me qualify this post by stating that I am not arguing a simple, cause-and-effect type relationship between our kids’ behavior and something they watch. However, to quote Jackson Katz, (See the Media Education Foundation’s Documentary, Wrestling with Manhood ): “Beyond simplistic notions of cause-and-effect, we need to examine how something watched so frequently by so many boys and young men might cultivate, legitimate and glamorize certain ideas about what it means to be a man, and therefore certain behaviors that conform to these ideas.”

We laugh at this kind of “entertainment”—what does that say about us? Well, according to Media Ed’s Study Guide for the Documentary (PDF) linked above (and common sense), here are just a few things it means:

“»The normalization, not to mention glamorization, of men hitting women is especially troubling given that men’s violence against women in the real world remains at epidemic levels.
» The issue here is this:While wrestling doesn’t simply cause men to be abusive to women, there can be little question that it contributes to an atmosphere in which men’s violence against women is not taken seriously.
» The fact that millions of boys and men are entertained weekly by men’s violence against women is further complicated by the deliberate sexualization of this violence – creating a situation in which boys and young men are aroused as they watch women being beaten.
»Violence against women is also commonly presented within a larger pattern and storyline that presents the violence as deserved – a pattern that mirrors similar justifications of men’s abuse of women in the real world.
»Rather than focusing on whether wrestling causes violence in a simple way, we need to ask instead what it means that stadiums around the country are full of young men cheering,applauding and laughing at the staged humiliation and abuse of women._
»The video points out that the WWE seems to have a special obsession with making entertainment out of sexual harassment. Vince McMahon,the real-life owner of the WWE, is also one of its central fictional characters: he portrays himself in exaggerated form as the owner of the WWE – as a boss who expects and demands titillation and submission from the women wrestlers who work for him.What do you think of these on-screen plot lines given that Vince McMahon is the actual boss of these women in the real world and that these women actually work for him? In light of the very real and persistent problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, does it seem to you that the line between fiction and reality might get blurred here in troubling ways? If not, why not? If so, troubling for whom?”

Not only are we having trouble with our boys and men in the West. Just check out what happened in Cairo a few days ago. Crowds of young men surrounding women and ripping off their clothes and groping them in public. And this type of thing isn’t uncommon.

Besides all of that, what does this all mean to me and other people of my generation? Well, from the perspective of a young man who hopes to be married and possibly raise a family someday, the whole question of media education for our children plagues me. I wonder, am I really capable of helping my children understand these wild messages that they will be receiving? How can I protect my kid from thinking that because they are a little bit insecure they need some sort of anti-anxiety medication? Or having my sons treat and think of women as the sexual, superficial objects they appear to be in television wrestling? Or my daughters having serious complexes, striving hard to reach a standard of beauty that is nothing less than disgusting. Will my boy(s) make good men despite all of this? Will my girl(s) make good women who are able to filter out the crap?

Admittedly, I am asking myself the wrong questions. I cannot possibly protect them. What I can do is speak with them, engage them in conversation, and help them understand this false reality that we are all presented with. Finally, I can ask the only One who can protect them, God, to do just that…

Oh God, please grant me a partner and children who will be the comfort of my eyes and make us guides to those who guard against evil.

Important Links:

Media Education Foundation (Get your school/library to buy these videos)
Media Literacy and Activism Websites
Crisis in Masculinity by Sut Jhally and Jackson Katz

sabrina at 10 November 06 :: #

JazakAllah khair for writing this. I thought the same stuff when I first watched one of these things a couple of years ago. It scarred my heart even though I was a 20yr old adult woman (we didn’t have cable TV when I was younger in Bangladesh).

I am linking this post! ;)
slit at 11 November 06 :: #

Thank you for this. After reading the “does the Qur’an allow wife-beating?” debate for the 98798798234th time, it’s nice to see a discussion of (what I feel to be) the real source of misogyny in our culture. The WW_F_ (yes I’m a child of the ’80s :)) is just one of many examples.
Feroz at 11 November 06 :: #

Saalaam alaikum wa rahmatullah,
All our senses are are in-roads to our heart and the kids are especially vulnerable to being influenced by what they hear or see. We take all care to make sure that our kids dont hang out with the wrong crowd, dont use explicits etc, but we leave the most important influence in the house, the ‘tv’ unchecked.
JazakAllah khair for yet another reminder to wake up to the reality of television being used for so called “entertainment”. We have enough diversions in our life to keep us away from the dhikr of Allah(swt), we really dont need to add another one.
As for adults if they think that they are immune to skin being bared on tv or all the other subtle ideas that sensitize us to homosexuality or pre-marital sex or free mixing of the opposite sex, think again. There is a famous story of Imam Malik, which goes something like this. He had a photographic memory and never forgot anything that he had ever read or seen, but once he started to forget things and he was very troubled by it and started to think about what sins he has done and he remembered that once by accident he had looked upon an ankle of a woman passing by.
Now, I am not saying that if we stop looking at women in way which is haraam, it will give us photogenic abilities, LOL. But there is a lesson to be learnt here, our heart is a vessel, we choose what to fill it with.
May Allah(swt) Guide us and cleanse our hearts and make us His(swt) obedient slaves.
arafat at 11 November 06 :: #

you were right, i loved the post! this is an extremely disturbing issue that has often bothered me too. and i’ve asked the same questions you do.

when i grew up in saudi arabia, a few of my friends were really into wrestling (heh, yes, wwF!). i never really liked it that much although of course i’d keep up with the hype. and then when i started school in dhaka from 6th grade, i was quite taken aback because EVERYONE in the class was into wrestling. they watched it on TV everyday, talked about it at school all the time, bought and shared magazines, posters and stickers about it, it was like crazy! and now i realize that for a whole group of kids of my generation, our greatest source of masculine social ideals was really this whole wrestling thing. i mean, small wonder, really. of course this world is so misogynistic!

BTW, the khateeb at the harvard jum’a yesterday mentioned the disturbing cairo incident, and he also pointed out that this kinda stuff happens ALL the time. i hadn’t come across it in the news, so thanks for sharing the link.
desiwoman at 11 November 06 :: #

What happened to wrestling??? Thanks for bringing this up-I already think that TV is too much for children. When we have children, inshallah, I’m definitely going to be a very strict mother when it comes to TV and computers.
bruce at 11 November 06 :: #

salams

jazakAllah khayrun for bringing this to light.

however, on a tangent, even though the WWF / WWE (whatever it is) showcases such objectionable material, it doesnt give you the the right to post the same material (i’m referring to the photos) on your blog. whether or not the kids already watch this on TV is irrelevant, because you’re introducing it to a peop[le hwo may not.
HijabMan at 11 November 06 :: #

Bruce,

You bring up a good point. Unfortunately when you speak of this without evidences, without photos. People tend to brush you off. To present the images with commentary about the state of affairs is one of the only ways to get a message across sometimes. I made a judgement call based on my experience working at the Media Education Foundation and working on some of their videos.

Peace
HM
arafat at 12 November 06 :: #

I agree with HM. Since I haven’t seen wrestling on TV in a long time, I found the images really disturbing, which of course reinforced the points that he is making in the post.
yusef at 16 November 06 :: #

Thanks for the post. This might be interesting to you. Peace.
http://www.sutjhally.com/onlinepubs/onlinepubs_frame.html

Welcome! This site serves two main purposes: to entertain and educate the Believing and curious community, and to generate a bit of cash—God willing. But there’s a lot more about HijabMan.

Vince McMahon lives in my Masjid

Recent Articles

Featured Articles

Regular Guests

Photographs

Worthy Matter

HijabMan Shop

Archive By Tag

Latest Comments

Favorite Links