The initial assumption

On a lazy Friday afternoon, Lukas sends me a message. "This would be right up your alley," he says, before sending me a link. Naturally, I assume he's found some sort of Doctor Who trans-species pornographic fan fiction and wants to heckle me about it, but I'm bored enough that I click the link anyway. 

What I see is this. Initially, I really have no idea what to make of it: it's about wrestling, okay, but what else? What the hell is a "jobber," or "jobbing"? Is this Geocities site just a weird subculture of fan club for a particular type of wrestler? And why are there so many pictures of wrestlers face down on the canvas, writhing around in pain?

And then it hits me.

This is a fetish site. 

The fetish 

The word "jobber" is slang in the pro-wrestling world, used to identify a character whose sole purpose is to lose miserably to a more popular character, thus making the more popular character seem interesting and powerful. When The Rock gets in the ring with a guy whose name you've never heard, you can bet that guy is probably a jobber. He gets his ass kicked, The Rock looks even cooler, and Joe Jobber gets to nurse the wounds to his pride with the money he gets for losing. "Jobber" has also become an insult used to imply total failure in one's wrestling career; the jobber will be destined to live out the rest of his career losing, because he could not make it on his own.

For God knows what reason, the guys who created this site -- and make no mistake, they are guys -- get off, sexually, on jobbers and jobbing. The guys who founded this Geocities site have a fetish not just for pro-wrestlers, but for those specific, obscure pro-wrestlers whose only job is to get their ass totally kicked in the ring. 

Just know that the next time you watch a really one-sided pro-wrestling match, someone, somewhere in America, is vigorously masturbating as Diamond Dallas Page piledrives his nameless, babyfaced opponent. 

The psychological reasoning

Most fetishes are, in part or in whole, derived from some sort of subconscious desire or anxiety on the part of the fetishist. Masochists secretly have low self-esteem, poop fetishists have some weird Freudian stuff from early on in their lives, and so on. Given the relative rarity of jobber fetishism, I don't really have any problem psych studies I can point at in order to explain this most weird of sexual proclivities... but I can definitely take a wild guess.

Jobber fetishists personally relate to the jobbers. They've failed in some important aspects of their lives, and see those failures reflected in the plight of the jobbers. Nothing but puppets whose strings are pulled by the Vince McMahons of the world, the jobber's fate is decided before he even steps into the ring: no matter what, he must lose. The wrestling world is made moderately more enjoyable by the jobber's sacrifice, but the jobber himself must suffer constant humiliation at very turn. The jobber can only win by disqualification designed to make the superstar look more powerful or dangerous -- for instance, when Eddie Guerrero beat Jimmy Jacobs with a chair, Jacobs (the jobber) "won" but was still out a significant amount of dignity.

Perhaps the jobber fetishists see aspects of these losses in their own lives. Forces beyond their control, neverending failure... maybe by becoming sexually aroused by these professional losers, the fetishists simultaneously commiserate with, and prove themselves to be superior to, the jobbers.

That, or they're just really fucking weird. 

The horror

The following are unedited passages from the "contact" page of the jobber fetishism website. I'd post the accompanying pictures, but they range from harmless-but-hilarious to horrifying.

“Looking for someone to punish me with headlocks nipplr torture,legsplits. Central Mass.”

“love being dominated leg scissored hedlocked .looking for a heels to make me submit to his strength.lift me carry me around pin me down victory pose let me caress u .then grab me from hair for another round.You shrug off my feeble attempts to figth you back .u pull me back one handed.”

“I like long slow paced punishing and humiliating holds. I like holds you can feel. Sleepers and chokes are A+. I like all holds, even piledrivers.”

“22yo 5'11 156lbs. love being bearhugged & bodyscissored as intensely as possible. looking to be squeezed with full force in a bearhug or bodyscissor to total KO or a prolonged, torturous squeeze. no mercy whatsoever. seeking guys 18-35yo who love to squeeze...”

I honestly don't know what to say. It's like you've been living in a basement for your whole life, so you can't even conceive of the outside world. Then suddenly, the door out of the basement opens, and your consciousness is just completely blown because there's this whole world you never knew about just a few feet away from you.

This is just like that, if the world you walked into was full of nothing but half-naked guys who wanted to put each other in headlocks while they have sex.

The offshoots

In case you thought jobber fetishism was the weirdest it could get, don't forget about belly punching fetishism. Sort of like jobber fetishism, but restricted to one specific area of the body, belly punching fetishism is exactly what it fucking sounds like.

Whether it's one guy being restrained and being repeatedly punched in the belly, or two dudes gut-punching each other alternately, belly punching fetishism is just further proof that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

I do not begrudge jobbers or belly-punchers -- that belly punching site actually has a really sweet picture of an AIDS awareness day gathering (right beneath a picture of a guy standing over a KO'd boxer with the caption, "now he needs to tear off his opponent's trunks and have his reward"). These are people, and we're not condemning them, or saying they shouldn't be allowed to indulge in their fetishes, or that they're bad human beings for getting off on pro-wrestlers who don't win.

We just think it's really, really, really weird.