Girl Fight!

The Thaigrr unwraps her silk kimono to reveal a bright-orange, tiger-striped bathing suit. She steps into the blue inflatable kiddie pool, her size-12 feet hidden up to her ankles in warm, red Jell-O. She stands across from her opponent, Lady Venom, who’s dressed in a skin-tight pleather dress, nylon gloves and stockings with spider web tracings.

They smile and pretend to glower and, after the referee’s signal, begin to tussle and strain until Lady Venom spins The Thaigrr onto her back. The crowd roars with excitement, red goop smacking spectators’ faces. DJ Molover ramps up the music and the designated photographers maneuver to get the best shot of splayed legs and gritted teeth.

A little more than a minute later, the two women flail to maintain balance until Lady Venom, her dress slick and wet, pins the taller and stronger Thaigrr beneath her body, a big grin spread across her face. Others help the two out of the pool, and Lady Venom is declared the winner of that round of [Amateur Female Jello Wrestling].

Dana Sterling was worried that tonight might be big flop. She arrived at Don Hill’s by 4 in the afternoon on a cold Sunday in February to begin setting up. It was her first time producing the event in the West Village club since moving from the basement in Arlene’s Grocery on the Lower East Side. They began by lashing together the four old mattresses on which the pool rests, preparing the “Jell-O”—actually a polymer that resembles the gelatinous dessert but requires less prep time and isn’t as sticky and messy. Then she found out from Annie Burns, who helps organize and promote the events, a band had dropped out due to vocal problems. On top of that, one of the hosts of the show cancelled and the designated referee couldn’t make it either.

“It was rocky,” she admits later. “I was a little nervous.” But by 6:30 a few girls trickled in to begin their “wrestling” lesson. While another band does sound check, Sterling and Michael McGuire, both with backgrounds in stage combat, show the young women fight moves: how to pull each others’ hair, fake stomach kicks, flips and falls. It’s evident most of them have never touched another woman in this way before. At first they’re tentative as they grab a girl’s arm and push her down on the mattress. But soon they’re laughing, joking, pumping fists until they have less trepidation with grabbing a stranger’s thigh and whacking it.

Sterling is a lighting designer for theater and music events and, at 31, retains that no-nonsense attitude often seen in stage managers in college drama departments. Tonight she has pigtails, wears a belly shirt, short shorts and blue, striped socks pulled up to her knees. You can imagine her as comfortable with a nail gun as with braiding an actors’ hair. Actually, it was during college that she attempted her first wrestling event. She and her best friend constructed a wrestling pit in their basement and used wet horse oats (“They were cheap,” she explains) for the girls to wrestle in.

“It was pretty smelly,” she recalls. “Five years later, in New York, that same friend and I were throwing silly parties at our house. When I mentioned wanting to do another wrestling party, she said, ‘No way. It’s way too much work and too much mess.’”

Sterling eventually found a club that allowed her to throw the “party,” as she still refers to it. For the first two years, she kept the affair small—a team of 20 girls, mostly friends, would meet monthly to scrap.

“The only thing I knew was you pin the back of your opponent to a count of three,” she explains. “It was what me and my team of girls thought was fun, what we thought the rules should be. Now our crowd is well over a hundred, but the initial idea was to get everyone involved in it.”

At first Sterling was lucky if her “sports satire” event broke even. When Annie Burns got involved and started booking bands, the audience grew and now the event pays for itself through the admission price (girls get in for $3, couples $7, single guys fork over $15) and T-shirts. All the participants wrestle for free and a whiff of collegiate camaraderie clings to the whole affair.

The show is unscripted, and Sterling thrives off of an unknown quantity since each month newbies show up and the wrestlers’ characters and attitudes are constantly in flux. It’s what keeps the events fresh and homespun.

After losing all her matches (on purpose) in January, Anittah Patrick decided to return for a second match—although she did have her doubts.

She was feeling “moody and bitchy,” she says, but as a marketing executive at Citigroup, she doesn’t get many excuses to suit up and get slippery with a dozen other women. Most days, she’s like other corporate stiffs: sitting in a cubicle, making PowerPoint presentations, working with a sales team. But tonight she doesn’t have to think about shareholders, instead she sheds all inhibitions and becomes The Thaigrr (her mother is Thai and she used to be into the riot grrl scene, she explains). Assuming a brutish, uneducated persona, she speaks with a stereotypical Asian accent and growls; the audience growls back in support.

Unlike many of the others participating this evening, Patrick is extremely athletic. She’s 5 foot 10 and currently on an urban basketball league and was on the varsity track and crew team in college. “The kinds of women that are involved here, they were the ones wearing black combat boots and Manic Panic hair dye. This might be a way for them to be a part of something athletic,” she says. “I’m not trying to cultivate this personality of a weirdo. When I heard it was available, and I wouldn’t have to pay for it? I had to do it; it sounded like so much fun.”

But that doesn’t mean that her friends and colleagues don’t look at her like she’s crazy. “My boss said, ‘I thought when you were telling me you were Jell-O wrestling, it was like you were saying you were going to be invisible next week.’ They think it’s bizarre, but how many other opportunities am I going to have to do something this fun?”

Fight Like a Girl In fact, a growing number of fringe sports activities are available to women. A month prior, the Toronto-based [Pillow Fight League] traveled to New York, creating a stir with their own hardcore interpretation of girls’ slumber party activities. The Friday night show at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg was quickly sold out and a Saturday show was added. A line snaked by the bar as groups of guys and a few women warmed themselves with beer and cocktails, waiting to enter the backroom where cheers could be heard.

With names like Boozy Suzy, Sister Resister and Sailor Gerri, the pillow fighters have developed personas that don’t shy from their erotic possibilities. But unlike the silicone ladies of professional wrestling, these women actually want to kick some ass. Most of them are heavily tattooed and pierced and evoke Suicide Girls from the popular altporn site. The front row of the bout is packed with young women who seem partly turned on—and slightly jealous they’re not out there scrapping. However, two-thirds of the crowd is made up of men in their twenties and thirties. The boisterous pack of guys easily transform the atmosphere into something vulgar and distressingly hostile.

“Punch her in the ovaries! Right in the baby-maker!” a man yells, raising his Pabst. His taunt is greeted with a roar of laughter from the crowd. A later round between Lynsomnia and Sara Bellum ellicits: “Suffocate her! Put her in the camel toe clutch!” More giggles from women and men.

Pillow Fight League was started by a man named Stacy Case, who applied “rules and regulations” to a pillow fight. Essentially, the women wallop each other with pillows and then begin wrestling: “Punching, leg drops, clotheslines, submission holds and other moves are all allowed as long as a pillow is used to execute the attack,” one rule states. Eye-gouging, biting, scratching, hair pulling and low blows (those stereotypical catfight maneuvers) are outlawed, as well as “rude, lewd or suggestive behavior.” But the crowd still crafts its own crude innuendo.

The intensity and sincerity of the fighters is indisputable: They inhabit their alter egos with enthusiasm, refusing to kowtow to any ironic smirks or suggestion that what they’re doing is anything but serious and non-sexual. They work out twice a week and have martial arts training. Someone whispers that a fighter is a construction worker. Really? Never would have guessed that.

Sterling discovered how tough the women were the hard way. She arrived on Friday and wanted to participate as an amateur. “I got my ass kicked,” she jokes. “Those shows are really athletic, they’re really fighting.” Although she often wrestles in Jell-O matches, she is less likely to be an aggressor in a fight.

“I was significantly outmatched and I told the girl, ‘I can tell you’re pretty strong. Let’s clown around. I just don’t want to get hurt.’ That’s how I run the jello wrestling: Don’t beat the new girl in two seconds,” she explains. “But she told me, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’ By the end I had my head covered and she was punching me through the pillow. It was morbidly embarrassing.”

She suffered only skinned knees and elbows, but she also learned a valuable lesson. “I really like the fake show. I enjoy it when it’s playful.”

Despite the intensity of those involved, confusion often rises over whether this is legitimate sports entertainment or an upscale and organized excuse for men to hope for a “wardrobe malfunction” and get a nipple flash. Although women have co-opted the activities once used for male amusement, strip clubs continue to host oil wrestling and kinky pillow fights with women in negligees.

While an art student and struggling artist, Genevive Zacconi joined a troupe in Philly called the KO Kitties that worked special events as ring card girls or private parties where men hired them to wrestle in Jell-O or oil.

“I can understand why they wanted to see two girls wrestling,” says Zacconi. “But we were getting hurt, and they thought it was cute.” According to her, the more aggressive the women got, the better, for the men yelling, “Pull her hair!” or worse.

Twice she’s participated in Foxy Boxing at strip clubs where she would receive a little boxing instruction, face protection and gloves. “They don’t want dancers to get bruises on their face,” she explains. For her efforts she’d receive $50 and the chance at the big prize—usually a trip to Jamaica or a thousand bucks.

She admits she enjoyed the experience. “It was a way to really take some aggression out and learn a little about boxing. It was kind of fun.”

And it’s not just men who enjoy watching women rassle and get rowdy. Emma, a 19-year-old NYU student, was quick to volunteer when amateurs were asked to participate in the Pillow Fight League. Dressed in a black tank she called herself Under Age and faced off against Sugar Glider, who was in fact her college roommate. After swinging their pillows to exhaustion, Emma, who says she’s “into chicks,” was pleased with the way the evening was going.

“I like that it’s hot girls with pillows. They seem really into it, really empowered,” she said. “I think it’s strange so many women came out to see it. I didn’t expect that. It’s a spoof, and if [the fighters] are being objectified, they’re fully aware and enjoy it.”

Roll-on Rollergirls Both Pillow Fight League and Amateur Female Jello Wrestling have roots in the punk rock attitude of the country’s fastest growing female fringe sport—roller derby. The spectacle was first invented by a guy during the Depression and eventually became a full-contact sport that, by the ’40s and ’50s, drew thousands of fans. It slowly died out and was little more than a novelty until the turn of the century when a group of women revived it in Austin, Texas. By 2005, the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) was formed and now boasts dozens of leagues across the United States.

Last year the [Gotham Girls Roller Derby] league sold out every bout they hosted, with over a thousand fans packing venues. Nicole Williams, 23, was turned on to the sport after she saw the Gotham Girls in the summer of 2005.

“I was looking for a group of people to make friends after moving here from Rome, N.Y. It’s kind of hard to meet people in the city,” she explains. “After seeing them, I thought maybe these girls were in a similar place. They seemed like rough girls; not taking shit girls.” The league’s website confirms her initial perception: “Every Gotham Girl is an amalgam of athlete, pin-up girl, rocker and brute rolled into one badass derby girl.”

A figure skater since the age of seven, Williams even did a stint as a competitive synchronized figure skater for four years. Although she hadn’t roller skated since she was 12, she’d played soccer. To her, roller derby felt like soccer and figure skating rolled into one: high contact and high energy. She tried out and joined the Bronx Gridlock team in 2006, choosing Bonnie Thunders as her “stage name,” after Johnny Thunders, the guitarist for the New York Dolls. She plays jammer, the key position on the team that functions like a human puck to score points by lapping the track while others block her. She takes her new sport seriously, and last year her teammates voted her Bronx MVP. But what started as a hobby and way to socialize soon transformed into a lifestyle.

By day, Williams is a conservation biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, but the rest of her life is consumed with roller derby. She pays $30 a month for dues but gets more than a workout. If she’s not in a bout or practicing with her team, she’s on one of several committees—planning, organizing or coaching. Outside of official roller derby business, she’s often hanging out with women from the team. At the end of last season she promised her boyfriend she’d take it easy (she met him through a teammate) but although this year’s season has yet to begin, she’s already in the thick of it.

Melissa “Melicious” Joulwan, 38, had a similar conversion experience after witnessing her first roller derby bout in Austin in 2001. Her book, Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from the Track, records her enthusiasm for roller derby over the past five years and her involvement in the founding of the WTFDA and its governing philosophy: “by skaters, for the skaters.”

“I would never sign up for a straight team sport,” she explains when asked about her initial attraction. “I love being athletic, but that wouldn’t appeal to me. I associate that with wearing a uniform that looks like everyone else, directed by a coach who tells me exactly what to do, to follow the rules.

“The thing that I think is really cool in our leagues is that all that catty competitiveness that can come out of social situations dissipates because we’re competing on the track. So it allows us to be more supportive. We have a place to channel all the aggressive feelings and competitiveness. We have this goal of keeping the The Rollergirls going so the bullshit kinda goes away.”

Despite the increasing push to professionalize the sport and turn away from its bawdy roots, Melicious doesn’t shy away from its inherently sexualized nature: Women continue to wear short skirts and have potentially kinky personas. “We’re really PG-13. It doesn’t get raunchy,” she says. “Both males and females like that eventually we’re rolling around on the ground. I’m straight as a ruler but they’re pretty girls and maybe a boob’s gonna bounce out.” She recognizes that many people come to the bouts for the first time when they see the women in photos, and “we look pretty damn good. But halfway through it, they get into the sport. It’s the sport that keeps them coming back.”

Joshua Thompson agrees. He first saw the Gotham Girls three years ago in a road race under the BQE. His reason for going to a bout was simple: “gorgeous women wearing skirts and fishnets. I went for the flash. But once you see the athleticism and self-sacrifice, you stay for the sport.” Thompson was so taken with the team and their efforts to recruit players he began film them. So far he’s collected over 300 hours of footage and is editing a full-length documentary called Beat Down in the Boogie Down (segments will be screened at BAM Feb. 27 as part of a Roller Derby shorts program). Through his involvement he’s witnessed the injuries—fractured wrists, broken ankles, bloody eyes and bruises—and the passion the women in the league have for forwarding their sport.

The Fun Female Fight Club Dana Sterling is refereeing a wrestling match when a man approaches her. “I told my girlfriend I was going to work,” he tells her with a sly grin.

“Great,” she responds and moves away. “What an idiot,” she says later, exasperated. “First off, he should have brought his girlfriend. Second, what is he thinking? Nothing’s going to happen. I’m surprised he has a girlfriend.” It’s a common occurrence at the Jello Wrestling parties: men scoping out the place for potential playmates for parties of their own. Sterling says people are always misinterpreting the show, her family included.

The same evening a guy approaches Anittah “The Thaigrr” Patrick, and asks her to work a private party. She politely tells him no but has strong feelings about the skeezy men trolling for fresh meat. “The creepy guys are always going to be there. There are some women who are into that, and they’re willing to work a private party to earn $200 an hour,” she says. “But I personally think it’s irresponsible.”

Another young guy, bearded and wearing chunky glasses is not as impressed with the women and their stunts and snickers to his female companion. “I feel like I’m losing brain cells,” she whines. When asked about their reason for coming, he reveals it’s research for a friend. “We thought we could hire someone for a bachelor party, but I’m disappointed. It’s not nearly hot enough.”

And that seems to be a growing consensus amongst the straight men in the room. They came for something kinky and instead are getting women acting like girls. Sure, Lady Venom eventually strips off her dress and, in nothing but her black bra and panties, rides the back of another scantily clad gal pal. But it’s done with such a spirit of innocent abandon that it’s difficult to take her seriously as a sex object.

Sterling makes it her goal to guard the women involved. “I’m promoting silliness, not nudity,” she says and makes an announcement at the beginning that prohibits the photographing or recording of matches without prior permission. After witnessing the women pummeling each other at the Pillow Fight League event, Sterling’s attempt at creating something more naive and less competitive is appreciated. In an attempt to be more inclusive, she’s also started a second party, Disco Crisco Twister, which involves a series of corny games played by men and women—musical chairs, relay races, name that tune—culminating with both sexes slathering their hands and feet with slippery glop and playing Twister.

But her Amateur Female Jello Wrestling will remain the most popular attraction. The event lacks the focus of roller derby and will never be considered a legitimate sport, but she’s tapped into something that “her girls” needed. Despite the leers and jeers of the men in the crowd, the women enjoy themselves with a playful, childlike excitement. Sterling has successfully created a space that gives women permission to forget the hassle of deflecting criticism for their bodies’ inadequacies and regress to a time when they felt comfortable being ridiculous. All it took was a creative impulse and the help from a little gelatin.