My daughter joined her school’s newly formed girls’ wrestling team in the seventh grade. Her first tournament was at a high school in Oak Harbor, Ohio. I drove an hour and a half west, over country roads intermittently buried in snow blown from bordering farms. I went in blind, in all senses. I had never seen amateur wrestling and had no idea what it entailed. The parents’ information session had revealed very little besides the dismal conditions of their basement practice room and the best antibacterial soaps for warding off fungal infections. When the gruff coach asked if there were any questions, I ventured: “Is it dangerous?” “No more than football” was the not particularly reassuring response. When I talked to friends, family and colleagues about my daughter’s choice of sport, they were intrigued, impressed, but often asked with slight concern, “She’s not wrestling boys, right?” I rushed to reassure them: “No way! They actually just started a girls team.” A day or two before the Oak Harbor tournament, my daughter announced to me that in order to increase her number of matches she would be wrestling boys.
The stress of the snowy drive barely covered the dread, terror even, at the thought of her competing in a wrestling tournament. In my ignorance of the sport, I imagined the matches as fights, with winning or losing dependent on inflicting bodily harm. I tried to reason with my fear, reminding myself that wrestling is a sanctioned school sport with a whole institutional apparatus of rules and referees. Surely bodily harm could not be the norm.
Oak Harbor High School was the size of a mall. Turning into the parking lot did not equal reaching my destination, despite what Google Maps repeated. Several wrong turns and dead ends later, I found a parking lot near what I assumed to be the correct door. I entered a cafeteria with gleaming linoleum floors and tables heaped with backpacks and snacks. Several sporting events were taking place at the same time. I found the gym and spotted my daughter and her teammates in the bleachers. She instructed me where to sit—at a distance. In a state of profound disquiet, I read the scene for signs of violence. There were older people in the crowd, probably grandparents and great-grandparents. But the kindly looking elderly can cut both ways: signifiers of a benign reality or its uncanny double, smiling ritual sadism. The same is true of Midwestern niceness. Mainly what I gleaned from the spectators was that I had left the blue bubble of my college town with its population of transplanted faculty, liberal locals and non-regional, largely coastal student body. It was December 2024, about a month after Trump’s reelection. A fair number of men were wearing MAGA hats or distressed American-flag t-shirts. All ages, from grandparents to contestants, were sporting Christian apparel emblazoned with “Jesus won,” “Jesus Trained” and “God. Family. Wrestling. What Else Is There?”
I called my family in France while waiting for her match, needing to share my apprehension. My parents and siblings could not provide much comfort. They were mostly mystified. As my mother remarked in a family group chat, “how could such a feminine mother produce a daughter who wrestles?” Rather than argue against the premise, I sent photos of her long-haired and delicate-looking teammates as proof that you could be a “feminine” wrestler. I then watched some of the matches while waiting, literally seeing the sport for the first time. What I saw surprised me less for its violence than for its intimacy. Without knowing how to read the moves, it looked like two bodies tied in knots and squeezed into compromising postures.
My daughter came back to let me know her lineup. Her first opponent was named Harper, a name ambiguous enough for the coach to assume, or hope, that the first match of her career would be against a girl. But when she reported to the officiant table, she was joined by a tall and very muscular black kid, one of those boys who hits manhood before his peers. Though they were the same weight class, they were obviously not the same muscle mass. She did not look afraid—or maybe she was both resigned and terrified. I moved closer to mat two, where she was competing. They called out her weight and her name and his weight and his name over the loudspeaker. My anxiety spilled over into unapologetic requests for reassurance from the older couple that I sat next to: “It can’t be that dangerous, right?” (They were watching their grandson and were alarmed to learn that girls could wrestle boys.)
My daughter assumed the wrestling stance facing her opponent, with the referee between and slightly behind them: knees bent, heads close, arms outstretched. They shook hands quickly and the ref, whose forearm had been serving as a dividing line, drew it back as he blew the whistle.
The match lasted seventeen seconds. I could barely watch so I had no idea what really happened. It seemed he made a move that “pinned” her (shoulder blades touching the mat for two continuous seconds) almost instantly. The ref blew the whistle and slapped the mat to indicate the end of the match. She got up, took off her red ankle band and placed it on the mat in front of the ref. The ref held up her opponent’s arm to signal the winner. She shook hands with the boy, the ref and the opposing coach. I saw that she was fine physically, but I was looking for the expression on her face. Bemused. She was so obviously outmatched that she could not be angry with herself.
Her second opponent was less muscular—a white kid with blond hair and a softer-looking body, like his weight came more from fat than muscle. They shook hands and the ref blew the whistle. I had moved closer, thinking I could perhaps half-watch. He took the first shot and got her down on her stomach beneath him pretty quickly, but she recovered. She twisted her torso and used her feet to rotate like a pinwheel, eventually gaining enough leverage to get up on all fours, almost bucking him off. Seeing her resist changed my state of mind from incredulous terror (I can’t believe I have to watch my kid get beat up by a boy in the name of a school sporting event) to excitement, from wanting it to end as quickly as possible to wanting it to keep going. I experienced a combination of aggression on her behalf (fight back; reverse his hold), narrative interest in what would happen next, and attraction. The latter was most unexpected. Wrestling is not a pretty sport—I had ample proof of it that day. Yet watching my daughter speak a language of combat she had learned entirely on her own, and speak it with a boy her own age, fascinated and thrilled me. A line from Andrew Marvell’s carpe diem poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” popped into my head: “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness into one ball.”
The line came unbidden, both to help me understand what I was experiencing and because what I was experiencing helped solve the mystery of this line, whose power I felt but whose sense had always escaped me. (From years of teaching literature, I had a file of passages and scenes in my head waiting for life to elucidate their full meaning.) How literally is this meant, and what would a literal rolling into a ball even mean? The ardent seducer and the reluctant virgin dynamic of the poem is not a model of female empowerment. So from that angle, not an apt parallel for coed wrestling. Furthermore, the unspoken rule of wrestling is that the idiom of combat strips it of anything erotic. So from that perspective, too, an inappropriate poem to have conjured at that moment. But at the most basic level, I was in fact watching sweetness and strength combine as my daughter and her opponent locked bodies in ball-like contortions: the eros of equal struggle.
Marvell’s poem breaks the seducer/seduced power dynamic in a moment of genuine solidarity against the shared enemy of time and death:
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
For my daughter and her opponent, the common enemy was adolescence. I did not know the boy’s story, but I knew hers. Through wrestling she had seized the struggles of daily middle school life—inhabiting a changing body between ten and fourteen, imprisoned by COVID lockdown, pulled between two households in an acrimonious divorce—and converted them into a force. (Her dad and stepmom were sitting in the bleachers on the other side of the gym.) Her strength lay not so much in physical prowess as in her ability to transmute the angst of adolescence into the sport itself. In wrestling she both embraced and displaced her sadness, anger and powerlessness.
When she decided to join wrestling she was seriously out of shape, prone to sedentary activities and hostile to anything that she intuited was related to my own “bougie” ambitions for her. She picked wrestling because she enjoyed play-wrestling with her girlfriends and, she admitted later, because she thought it would help her lose weight. She stuck with it because of the boys on the team, particularly the high school boys. Despite fracturing her ankle the second week, she went to every practice and match, experiencing it less as a school sport than as a cultural immersion in a world very unlike her own: Midwestern, blue-collar, adolescent male. At that stage in her life, I was not sure whether she wanted to be of them or liked by them. She was particularly drawn to their way of teasing each other, including trash-talking that defied every norm and piety of her liberal friend group: it was racist, sizeist, ableist, homophobic. She loved talking to me about the boys on the team, their dynamics and jokes. She had a crush on their way of being with each other. The team banter made a bonding ritual of things that would, in other contexts, be grounds for othering and rejection. She particularly appreciated when they accused each other of being a “fatass” after a large meal or if they needed to cut to make weight for a tournament. What had been a kind of unspeakable shame for her, a source of inner agony, she saw could be brought into the open and become a means of bonding. Her experience with her more liberal friend group had been less jovial. She could sense the constant danger of micro-cancellation, often on the grounds of not being sufficiently sensitive to the needs and preferences of an identity group.
I left the Oak Harbor tournament completely wrung out by the intense emotions, but newly energized. Witnessing her force released me from the sense of powerlessness that stemmed from the idea that I was responsible for “producing” a successful and happy child—that exhausting and exhausted paradigm of bourgeois parenting, in which your child is an expression of a quest for self-improvement that is both endless and goal-oriented, self-focused and culturally imposed, in which their accomplishments reflect your own capacity for sacrifice. With too much focus on being a good parent, the child slips out of view. What gets lost is the humbling and world-expanding capacity to be surprised.
Wrestling changed the “footing” of our relationship, to borrow a term from Charles Taylor. Her engagement in a physically grueling combat sport introduced an asymmetry between us, and her sui generis method of surviving adolescence recalibrated the power dynamic. Our footing became one of collaboration—we were partners in her ethical growth. She stopped holding me at bay as she sensed my support for this new endeavor, my interest in learning about the sport, my eagerness to gossip about her team dynamics and most fundamentally my wonder at her resolve and capacity for physical hardship and discomfort. She had found her own way of fighting off the demons of her adolescence, choosing a sport that swerved away from the leisurely pursuits of her bourgeois families of origin: tennis, soccer, horseback riding, skiing. Our new footing was not just the result of her wrestling, but of her wrestling boys.
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Now a convert to the sport and an aspiring wrestling mom—though I could not compete with the other mothers, who cook team favorites like “nana’s balls,” and despite the fact that my daughter would not let me buy a “wrestling mom” sweatshirt because of her finely calibrated sense of how long you need to do a thing before you get to wear the sweatshirt—I started researching women’s wrestling. I learned that it is the fastest-growing sport both in the U.S. and globally, at least according to Wrestle Like a Girl, an advocacy group promoting access and equal support for female wrestlers. Women’s wrestling, I discovered, was about to gain a new level of legitimacy with its inclusion in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship competition in spring 2026. The NCAA website celebrates this new status for women wrestlers as an advance in gender equity and a landmark decision for the empowerment of women athletes.
My daughter was participating in the sport at a liminal moment in its history. There are not yet enough girls participating between the ages of seven and fifteen to avoid coed practice and tournaments. Summer camps also tend to be mixed. (My daughter spent an exhilarating, sweaty week at a summer training program run by a local wrestling hero where she was just one of four girls among fifty-plus boys.) At every tournament I have attended, most coaches of girls’ teams have been men. The coed reality adds another dimension to the narrative of female empowerment, as does the popularity of the sport in Midwestern red states: in watching my daughter wrestle, I was watching her negotiate the fraught dynamics between genders, and her own complicated relationship to those dynamics, in ways that were at once direct and indirect, literal and metaphorical, and far more creative than my own solutions at her age.
I signed her up for a USA Wrestling membership, which meant she could participate in tournaments and practices after the official school season was over. (She also received an ID badge and a subscription to WIN: Wrestling Insider Newsmagazine.) In March, after the conclusion of the season, I drove my daughter and her teammate to the spring open at a high school in Canton, Ohio.
Wrestling tournaments are very long. Hours of idle waiting punctuated by seconds of intense adrenaline, stress and excitement. While she and her teammate were off warming up or checking out the other contestants, mainly boys, I sat in the stands and took in the scene. A girl with long French braids was wrestling a boy with a buzz cut. Both were around seven years old and scrawny-limbed in their singlets. Neither seemed very strong, but the girl was faster and more aggressive. She got him down on the mat, applying her full weight and all the power in her legs to keep him from twisting out of her hold, eventually pinning him. The ref blew the match-ending whistle and she stood up, flushed and happy. Her opponent remained on the mat, sitting with his back turned to his rival, crying. He could not be persuaded to participate in the closing ritual, which would involve standing next to the girl whose arm was raised by the ref as she was declared the winner. The little girl went to hug her proud dad, who had been cheering loudly on the sidelines. The dad was wearing a MAGA hat.
By then I was used to seeing conservative gear at wrestling tournaments, but had never witnessed such striking dissonance before. The project to Make America Great Again includes a revitalization of patriarchal structures—traditional family life with breadwinning dads and stay-at-home moms. From my vantage point, this dad seemed to be cheering the defeat of his own principles, shouting encouragement for what appeared to be a spectacle of gender-norm reversal: the girl won the fight and the boy was crying. Was this just a normal, everyday inconsistency typical of the way people live out of conformity with their political ideologies? Or is girls’ wrestling a Trojan horse, smuggling in ideas of gender equality and female empowerment into parts of the country nostalgic for the order of traditional gender roles?
In her well-known discussion of gendered play in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir defends her fundamental claim that one is not born but becomes a woman by contrasting how girls and boys play. With dolls and other forms of domestic make-believe, girls not only practice for their future roles as wives and mothers, they learn to see themselves as objects. Boys, on the other hand, engage in play that develops their sense of being a subject. They play games and fight (“lutte” is the same word in French for wrestling). They develop and measure their strength while learning a contempt for pain and how to fight back tears. The boy experiments and dares; the girl learns to please and charm.
Beauvoir also discusses the role of mothers in shaping daughters to be dutiful wives. With deep ambivalence, a combination of love and hatred, they teach them the same subjection they themselves endure. The mother of the victorious girl wrestler was sitting on the bleachers not far from me; I had noticed her earlier, braiding her daughter’s hair while also tending to a younger son. While the mother was in the stands looking passive, the father, mat-side in his MAGA hat, was cheering on his daughter as she dealt a crushing blow to the ego of her male opponent. The officialdom of amateur wrestling had sanctioned her right to win, regardless of how it made the boy feel, and her father’s obvious joy in her victory affirmed her freedom from worrying about her male partner’s feelings.
The MAGA dad was, arguably, doing a better job sending a message of female empowerment than I was. In the bracket for her weight class in Canton, my daughter had only one opponent, and they were scheduled to wrestle three times. We tried to pick him out before the match among the many guys there. She was nervous about how strong he might be and perhaps how mean. To help manage her anxiety and my own, I joked that maybe she would meet the love of her life and pointed out a particularly good-looking, well-built guy with bleach-blond wavy hair and dark roots. (Bleached hair, she informed me, is a sign that he had “made it to state.”) He was wearing a custom singlet with his last name emblazoned on the back. The idea of wrestling a guy who was strong and hot and obviously experienced enough to be able to pull off wearing a singlet with his last name on it made this a particularly satisfying joke. It grew alarming, however, when they both checked in at the scoring table for their first match.
It was evident that he was going to let her try to score some points and not pin her straightaway. Was this gentlemanly or sadistic? I spotted the father on the sidelines. I wanted to get a sense of the son’s values by chatting with him. Perhaps I was trying to influence the situation by humanizing his son’s opponent, or maybe I was just paying homage to male sentiments, balancing out my daughter’s attempt to meet the boy on equal terms with a charm offensive. We struck up a conversation. He was barrel-chested like the son, with a reddish-tan complexion, a black beard and a fixed, warm gaze. He was wearing a baseball cap with a construction-company logo. He asked how long she had been wrestling and expressed admiration for her pursuing the sport. I asked him how his son felt about wrestling girls, if he had ever lost to a girl and if he found that hard. He said he had lost to a girl who eventually made it to the state championships; rather than resent her he respected her as the superior wrestler. The dad started giving my daughter pointers from the sidelines and explaining to me, since I was still wrestling illiterate, the openings his son was giving for her to score points. At the end of their three different matches, she was head over heels, while also being embarrassed at having wrestled so badly or, more accurately, for having not even wrestled. I could tell she was on new ground and confused about whether she would impress him most by trying to win or by acting coolly disengaged.
I had bought my daughter and her teammate t-shirts from a vendor in the lobby offering a library of different decals, which he then pressed on the garment with a machine that looked like a waffle maker. Her friend picked one that read, “I don’t chase boys I pin them”; my daughter, still very drawn to an adolescent-male brand of humor, chose something ribald about wrestling’s superiority because of how many balls it required. Sporting these t-shirts at the conclusion of the tournament, they went in pursuit of phone numbers or social media connections.
Marveling at these new modes of flirting, my mind turned back to the moment her teammate wrestled a boy I had already scoped out in looking for potentially alarming contestants. His singlet was literally covered in Jesus, the most baroque I had seen yet: a riot of font styles and clashing perspectives, a sign perhaps that it was custom-designed by its wearer. There was a close-up of suffering Jesus wearing the crown of thorns on his left pectoral; a realistic portrayal of Mount Calvary and the three crosses (Jesus in the middle) on his left lower pelvic area and thigh; “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens Me (Philippians 4:13)” on his right pectoral; down his right side, in thick swirling cursive, JESUS; on his right thigh “Jesus Christ” was written in a box in a style similar to Marvel branding. His headgear, meanwhile, was patriotic: one side had stars and the other stripes. My daughter’s teammate is black and was wearing her Oberlin Phoenix team singlet as she approached the mat. I was nervous for her, not knowing if she was entering into a contest of strength with a teenage boy with radical views about restoring white male privilege. A talented wrestler, she held her own, but ultimately lost the match four minutes in. When I asked how it went, she reported in a matter-of-fact way that he was prone to strong leg holds but not a mean wrestler.
As with the MAGA dad cheering on his daughter as she humiliated a male opponent, a black teenage girl wearing a singlet from a famously progressive town (last stop on the Underground Railroad) wrestling a white male teen decked out in Christian-nationalist signifiers presented a striking image. Watching them was like seeing both a literal and a symbolic representation of “wrestling with difference.”
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Norbert Elias, a longue durée sociologist best known for his work on manners and the civilizing process, also pioneered the sociology of sport. The development of modern sport—which he dates to eighteenth-century England and the rise of rules and regulations controlling levels of permitted violence (contra the usual method of tracing it back to ancient Greece and Olympic games, the only moment in the long history of physical contest when wrestling was reserved for the elite)—provides insight into the social changes that fascinated him, namely the level of individual self-restraint required for violence to be monopolized by the state and the development of outlets for experiencing the excitement of combat without the shame of seeming bloodthirsty.
At a more theoretical level, sport provided Elias with a model that he hoped would help sociology break from the classic Weberian mode of seeing the individual and society as distinct, often oppositional, entities. Sensing that language was itself part of the problem, he created what we now refer to as process sociology. Watching a match, he argues, would not make sense if we only focused on one team. Although we may fixate on a given side in hopes that they win or lose, the game itself requires that there be more than one team or player. And the two sides coming together creates a new thing that in turn creates other new things.
Inspired by Elias, I zoomed out from my hyperfocus on my daughter’s physical safety in the matches, and considered what new thing was coming to be from the encounter of both sides. One result, I realized, was a surprising respite from the exhausted paradigms and binaries that characterize so much of our public discourse and politics, making communication between individuals and groups at best unproductive and depressingly predictable, and at worst violent and destructive.
My other thought took me back to Charles Taylor’s concept of “footing.” Taylor wants to capture the fragility and malleability of our social connections. When we open a conversation with someone, we are doing something that “is not just for me, and for you, but for us undivided.” But the nature of this “we” can vary quite dramatically:
In the way we exchange, talk to one another, treat one another, we establish and then continue or alter the terms of our relationship, what we might call the “footing” on which we stand to each other. We do this through our rhetoric, our tone of voice, the kind of remark I permit myself and you don’t challenge, and on through an infinity of nuances.
Wrestling dramatizes in literal terms Taylor’s account of conversational exchange. Once the referee blows the whistle, there is a period of circling in which the contestants determine how to make the first move. Arms outstretched, they might be holding hands until one person figures out a way to leverage their speed or weight or strength to knock the opponent off balance by means of shoulders or legs. The wrestling bout is a kind of dialogue, then—moves provoke reactions. While there is an official language of permitted holds, each match is unscripted and improvisational.
Rather than think of common ground in terms of shared but static values, the “footings” model of ethical engagement allows us to see it as always shifting and renegotiated, the conflict between two sides continually producing new and unexpected ways of relating to one another. Taylor points out that social space always contains a “multiplicity of already codified footings” specifying which kinds of people can play which kinds of roles. But you can always challenge a footing “by enacting an alternative.” Coed wrestling challenges the established footing between men and women, girls and boys. Each match begins with the opponents shaking hands, a sign of consent that separates the sport from its uncouth cousin, simple roughhousing. However unequally matched in strength and ability, the contestants are equally subject to the rules and rituals of the game.
Wrestling as sport makes strange wrestling in the familiar metaphorical sense, as in “wrestling” with a decision. “Grappling,” as in grappling with a complex question, is also a technical term in wrestling. Grappling with a problem, wrestling with a decision—both suggest openness to dialectical synthesis or reversal. In this troubled moment, wrestling seems to allow for a figuration of conflict without conflagration.
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I returned to Oak Harbor a year later for my daughter’s high school tournament. It was a girls-only event, as is the norm at the high school level. After having attended camps, won some matches (against girls) and scored her first pin—an important rite of passage for wrestlers that she marked by keeping her bout number on a scrap of paper in her phone case—she felt more legitimately like a wrestler. She looked the part, “jacked” as she would say, the result of weight lifting twice a week before school with the head coach, a third-generation Ohio farmer who teaches machine repair at the local vocational high school. I had picked up basic wrestling and knew the words to shout from the sidelines, like “shoot” or “sprawl.” Observing the general scene of the tournament, I was fascinated by shifts in the female wrestlers’ body language, from combative, tensed postures during their matches to more traditionally feminine rhetorical modes at other moments: swiveling their hips to the Macarena during the ritual mid-tournament dance break, when the wrestling mats become a dance floor and blasting music replaces the announcement of match winners; walking arm in arm with each other in the hallways; or, as I saw one wrestler do while on bended knee to attach her ankle strap before her match, bowing one’s head and clasping one’s hands in prayer. Wrestling expands the range of body languages girls can speak.
Despite my growing knowledge of the sport and delight in the scene of girls’ wrestling, I was no less tense watching my daughter wrestle that day than I was a year before during her first tournament. Instead of just praying that she’d escape the matches unscathed, I desperately wanted her to win. And when she did win, defying her own timidity by taking a shot and quickly pinning an opponent, or reversing a seemingly hopeless situation with an unexpected show of strength or agility, I felt like she challenged a whispered conviction both in herself and in me that we can’t or musn’t beat someone else.
On my way somewhere in the building, I found myself walking behind a blonde female wrestler wearing a pink t-shirt with “Wrestle like Jacob” written on the back. A riposte to the pink “Wrestle Like a Girl” t-shirts, I assumed. This is no simple substitution, however. At the level of warring mottos, it replaces a progressive stance with a conservative one, providing an origin story for female wrestling based in religion rather than feminism. But tracing female wrestling to an Old Testament patriarch is arguably a bolder move than introducing pink into the singlet color palette. If “Wrestle Like a Girl” asserts the ability of women and girls to engage in a traditionally male sport, “Wrestle like Jacob” lays claim to a male inheritance: the direct relationship with God that has profound personal and social implications. Jacob wrestles an angel and emerges with a newfound faith and humility, as well as a limp. His name is changed to Israel, one who wrestles with God.
At this point, I knew enough about the rigors of the sport and the limitations of my liberal parenting to read Christian wrestling swag as expressing more than merely cultural allegiance to a value system. It was also, I suspected, a prayerful plea for sufficient strength to meet the demands of the moment, a prayer that invites a solution as yet unimagined.
Art credit: Alessandra Bergamin, High school wrestler Artemisia Matera is held in a headlock as the referee calls points from the side of the mat, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
My daughter joined her school’s newly formed girls’ wrestling team in the seventh grade. Her first tournament was at a high school in Oak Harbor, Ohio. I drove an hour and a half west, over country roads intermittently buried in snow blown from bordering farms. I went in blind, in all senses. I had never seen amateur wrestling and had no idea what it entailed. The parents’ information session had revealed very little besides the dismal conditions of their basement practice room and the best antibacterial soaps for warding off fungal infections. When the gruff coach asked if there were any questions, I ventured: “Is it dangerous?” “No more than football” was the not particularly reassuring response. When I talked to friends, family and colleagues about my daughter’s choice of sport, they were intrigued, impressed, but often asked with slight concern, “She’s not wrestling boys, right?” I rushed to reassure them: “No way! They actually just started a girls team.” A day or two before the Oak Harbor tournament, my daughter announced to me that in order to increase her number of matches she would be wrestling boys.
The stress of the snowy drive barely covered the dread, terror even, at the thought of her competing in a wrestling tournament. In my ignorance of the sport, I imagined the matches as fights, with winning or losing dependent on inflicting bodily harm. I tried to reason with my fear, reminding myself that wrestling is a sanctioned school sport with a whole institutional apparatus of rules and referees. Surely bodily harm could not be the norm.
Oak Harbor High School was the size of a mall. Turning into the parking lot did not equal reaching my destination, despite what Google Maps repeated. Several wrong turns and dead ends later, I found a parking lot near what I assumed to be the correct door. I entered a cafeteria with gleaming linoleum floors and tables heaped with backpacks and snacks. Several sporting events were taking place at the same time. I found the gym and spotted my daughter and her teammates in the bleachers. She instructed me where to sit—at a distance. In a state of profound disquiet, I read the scene for signs of violence. There were older people in the crowd, probably grandparents and great-grandparents. But the kindly looking elderly can cut both ways: signifiers of a benign reality or its uncanny double, smiling ritual sadism. The same is true of Midwestern niceness. Mainly what I gleaned from the spectators was that I had left the blue bubble of my college town with its population of transplanted faculty, liberal locals and non-regional, largely coastal student body. It was December 2024, about a month after Trump’s reelection. A fair number of men were wearing MAGA hats or distressed American-flag t-shirts. All ages, from grandparents to contestants, were sporting Christian apparel emblazoned with “Jesus won,” “Jesus Trained” and “God. Family. Wrestling. What Else Is There?”
I called my family in France while waiting for her match, needing to share my apprehension. My parents and siblings could not provide much comfort. They were mostly mystified. As my mother remarked in a family group chat, “how could such a feminine mother produce a daughter who wrestles?” Rather than argue against the premise, I sent photos of her long-haired and delicate-looking teammates as proof that you could be a “feminine” wrestler. I then watched some of the matches while waiting, literally seeing the sport for the first time. What I saw surprised me less for its violence than for its intimacy. Without knowing how to read the moves, it looked like two bodies tied in knots and squeezed into compromising postures.
My daughter came back to let me know her lineup. Her first opponent was named Harper, a name ambiguous enough for the coach to assume, or hope, that the first match of her career would be against a girl. But when she reported to the officiant table, she was joined by a tall and very muscular black kid, one of those boys who hits manhood before his peers. Though they were the same weight class, they were obviously not the same muscle mass. She did not look afraid—or maybe she was both resigned and terrified. I moved closer to mat two, where she was competing. They called out her weight and her name and his weight and his name over the loudspeaker. My anxiety spilled over into unapologetic requests for reassurance from the older couple that I sat next to: “It can’t be that dangerous, right?” (They were watching their grandson and were alarmed to learn that girls could wrestle boys.)
My daughter assumed the wrestling stance facing her opponent, with the referee between and slightly behind them: knees bent, heads close, arms outstretched. They shook hands quickly and the ref, whose forearm had been serving as a dividing line, drew it back as he blew the whistle.
The match lasted seventeen seconds. I could barely watch so I had no idea what really happened. It seemed he made a move that “pinned” her (shoulder blades touching the mat for two continuous seconds) almost instantly. The ref blew the whistle and slapped the mat to indicate the end of the match. She got up, took off her red ankle band and placed it on the mat in front of the ref. The ref held up her opponent’s arm to signal the winner. She shook hands with the boy, the ref and the opposing coach. I saw that she was fine physically, but I was looking for the expression on her face. Bemused. She was so obviously outmatched that she could not be angry with herself.
Her second opponent was less muscular—a white kid with blond hair and a softer-looking body, like his weight came more from fat than muscle. They shook hands and the ref blew the whistle. I had moved closer, thinking I could perhaps half-watch. He took the first shot and got her down on her stomach beneath him pretty quickly, but she recovered. She twisted her torso and used her feet to rotate like a pinwheel, eventually gaining enough leverage to get up on all fours, almost bucking him off. Seeing her resist changed my state of mind from incredulous terror (I can’t believe I have to watch my kid get beat up by a boy in the name of a school sporting event) to excitement, from wanting it to end as quickly as possible to wanting it to keep going. I experienced a combination of aggression on her behalf (fight back; reverse his hold), narrative interest in what would happen next, and attraction. The latter was most unexpected. Wrestling is not a pretty sport—I had ample proof of it that day. Yet watching my daughter speak a language of combat she had learned entirely on her own, and speak it with a boy her own age, fascinated and thrilled me. A line from Andrew Marvell’s carpe diem poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” popped into my head: “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness into one ball.”
The line came unbidden, both to help me understand what I was experiencing and because what I was experiencing helped solve the mystery of this line, whose power I felt but whose sense had always escaped me. (From years of teaching literature, I had a file of passages and scenes in my head waiting for life to elucidate their full meaning.) How literally is this meant, and what would a literal rolling into a ball even mean? The ardent seducer and the reluctant virgin dynamic of the poem is not a model of female empowerment. So from that angle, not an apt parallel for coed wrestling. Furthermore, the unspoken rule of wrestling is that the idiom of combat strips it of anything erotic. So from that perspective, too, an inappropriate poem to have conjured at that moment. But at the most basic level, I was in fact watching sweetness and strength combine as my daughter and her opponent locked bodies in ball-like contortions: the eros of equal struggle.
Marvell’s poem breaks the seducer/seduced power dynamic in a moment of genuine solidarity against the shared enemy of time and death:
For my daughter and her opponent, the common enemy was adolescence. I did not know the boy’s story, but I knew hers. Through wrestling she had seized the struggles of daily middle school life—inhabiting a changing body between ten and fourteen, imprisoned by COVID lockdown, pulled between two households in an acrimonious divorce—and converted them into a force. (Her dad and stepmom were sitting in the bleachers on the other side of the gym.) Her strength lay not so much in physical prowess as in her ability to transmute the angst of adolescence into the sport itself. In wrestling she both embraced and displaced her sadness, anger and powerlessness.
When she decided to join wrestling she was seriously out of shape, prone to sedentary activities and hostile to anything that she intuited was related to my own “bougie” ambitions for her. She picked wrestling because she enjoyed play-wrestling with her girlfriends and, she admitted later, because she thought it would help her lose weight. She stuck with it because of the boys on the team, particularly the high school boys. Despite fracturing her ankle the second week, she went to every practice and match, experiencing it less as a school sport than as a cultural immersion in a world very unlike her own: Midwestern, blue-collar, adolescent male. At that stage in her life, I was not sure whether she wanted to be of them or liked by them. She was particularly drawn to their way of teasing each other, including trash-talking that defied every norm and piety of her liberal friend group: it was racist, sizeist, ableist, homophobic. She loved talking to me about the boys on the team, their dynamics and jokes. She had a crush on their way of being with each other. The team banter made a bonding ritual of things that would, in other contexts, be grounds for othering and rejection. She particularly appreciated when they accused each other of being a “fatass” after a large meal or if they needed to cut to make weight for a tournament. What had been a kind of unspeakable shame for her, a source of inner agony, she saw could be brought into the open and become a means of bonding. Her experience with her more liberal friend group had been less jovial. She could sense the constant danger of micro-cancellation, often on the grounds of not being sufficiently sensitive to the needs and preferences of an identity group.
I left the Oak Harbor tournament completely wrung out by the intense emotions, but newly energized. Witnessing her force released me from the sense of powerlessness that stemmed from the idea that I was responsible for “producing” a successful and happy child—that exhausting and exhausted paradigm of bourgeois parenting, in which your child is an expression of a quest for self-improvement that is both endless and goal-oriented, self-focused and culturally imposed, in which their accomplishments reflect your own capacity for sacrifice. With too much focus on being a good parent, the child slips out of view. What gets lost is the humbling and world-expanding capacity to be surprised.
Wrestling changed the “footing” of our relationship, to borrow a term from Charles Taylor. Her engagement in a physically grueling combat sport introduced an asymmetry between us, and her sui generis method of surviving adolescence recalibrated the power dynamic. Our footing became one of collaboration—we were partners in her ethical growth. She stopped holding me at bay as she sensed my support for this new endeavor, my interest in learning about the sport, my eagerness to gossip about her team dynamics and most fundamentally my wonder at her resolve and capacity for physical hardship and discomfort. She had found her own way of fighting off the demons of her adolescence, choosing a sport that swerved away from the leisurely pursuits of her bourgeois families of origin: tennis, soccer, horseback riding, skiing. Our new footing was not just the result of her wrestling, but of her wrestling boys.
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Now a convert to the sport and an aspiring wrestling mom—though I could not compete with the other mothers, who cook team favorites like “nana’s balls,” and despite the fact that my daughter would not let me buy a “wrestling mom” sweatshirt because of her finely calibrated sense of how long you need to do a thing before you get to wear the sweatshirt—I started researching women’s wrestling. I learned that it is the fastest-growing sport both in the U.S. and globally, at least according to Wrestle Like a Girl, an advocacy group promoting access and equal support for female wrestlers. Women’s wrestling, I discovered, was about to gain a new level of legitimacy with its inclusion in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship competition in spring 2026. The NCAA website celebrates this new status for women wrestlers as an advance in gender equity and a landmark decision for the empowerment of women athletes.
My daughter was participating in the sport at a liminal moment in its history. There are not yet enough girls participating between the ages of seven and fifteen to avoid coed practice and tournaments. Summer camps also tend to be mixed. (My daughter spent an exhilarating, sweaty week at a summer training program run by a local wrestling hero where she was just one of four girls among fifty-plus boys.) At every tournament I have attended, most coaches of girls’ teams have been men. The coed reality adds another dimension to the narrative of female empowerment, as does the popularity of the sport in Midwestern red states: in watching my daughter wrestle, I was watching her negotiate the fraught dynamics between genders, and her own complicated relationship to those dynamics, in ways that were at once direct and indirect, literal and metaphorical, and far more creative than my own solutions at her age.
I signed her up for a USA Wrestling membership, which meant she could participate in tournaments and practices after the official school season was over. (She also received an ID badge and a subscription to WIN: Wrestling Insider Newsmagazine.) In March, after the conclusion of the season, I drove my daughter and her teammate to the spring open at a high school in Canton, Ohio.
Wrestling tournaments are very long. Hours of idle waiting punctuated by seconds of intense adrenaline, stress and excitement. While she and her teammate were off warming up or checking out the other contestants, mainly boys, I sat in the stands and took in the scene. A girl with long French braids was wrestling a boy with a buzz cut. Both were around seven years old and scrawny-limbed in their singlets. Neither seemed very strong, but the girl was faster and more aggressive. She got him down on the mat, applying her full weight and all the power in her legs to keep him from twisting out of her hold, eventually pinning him. The ref blew the match-ending whistle and she stood up, flushed and happy. Her opponent remained on the mat, sitting with his back turned to his rival, crying. He could not be persuaded to participate in the closing ritual, which would involve standing next to the girl whose arm was raised by the ref as she was declared the winner. The little girl went to hug her proud dad, who had been cheering loudly on the sidelines. The dad was wearing a MAGA hat.
By then I was used to seeing conservative gear at wrestling tournaments, but had never witnessed such striking dissonance before. The project to Make America Great Again includes a revitalization of patriarchal structures—traditional family life with breadwinning dads and stay-at-home moms. From my vantage point, this dad seemed to be cheering the defeat of his own principles, shouting encouragement for what appeared to be a spectacle of gender-norm reversal: the girl won the fight and the boy was crying. Was this just a normal, everyday inconsistency typical of the way people live out of conformity with their political ideologies? Or is girls’ wrestling a Trojan horse, smuggling in ideas of gender equality and female empowerment into parts of the country nostalgic for the order of traditional gender roles?
In her well-known discussion of gendered play in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir defends her fundamental claim that one is not born but becomes a woman by contrasting how girls and boys play. With dolls and other forms of domestic make-believe, girls not only practice for their future roles as wives and mothers, they learn to see themselves as objects. Boys, on the other hand, engage in play that develops their sense of being a subject. They play games and fight (“lutte” is the same word in French for wrestling). They develop and measure their strength while learning a contempt for pain and how to fight back tears. The boy experiments and dares; the girl learns to please and charm.
Beauvoir also discusses the role of mothers in shaping daughters to be dutiful wives. With deep ambivalence, a combination of love and hatred, they teach them the same subjection they themselves endure. The mother of the victorious girl wrestler was sitting on the bleachers not far from me; I had noticed her earlier, braiding her daughter’s hair while also tending to a younger son. While the mother was in the stands looking passive, the father, mat-side in his MAGA hat, was cheering on his daughter as she dealt a crushing blow to the ego of her male opponent. The officialdom of amateur wrestling had sanctioned her right to win, regardless of how it made the boy feel, and her father’s obvious joy in her victory affirmed her freedom from worrying about her male partner’s feelings.
The MAGA dad was, arguably, doing a better job sending a message of female empowerment than I was. In the bracket for her weight class in Canton, my daughter had only one opponent, and they were scheduled to wrestle three times. We tried to pick him out before the match among the many guys there. She was nervous about how strong he might be and perhaps how mean. To help manage her anxiety and my own, I joked that maybe she would meet the love of her life and pointed out a particularly good-looking, well-built guy with bleach-blond wavy hair and dark roots. (Bleached hair, she informed me, is a sign that he had “made it to state.”) He was wearing a custom singlet with his last name emblazoned on the back. The idea of wrestling a guy who was strong and hot and obviously experienced enough to be able to pull off wearing a singlet with his last name on it made this a particularly satisfying joke. It grew alarming, however, when they both checked in at the scoring table for their first match.
It was evident that he was going to let her try to score some points and not pin her straightaway. Was this gentlemanly or sadistic? I spotted the father on the sidelines. I wanted to get a sense of the son’s values by chatting with him. Perhaps I was trying to influence the situation by humanizing his son’s opponent, or maybe I was just paying homage to male sentiments, balancing out my daughter’s attempt to meet the boy on equal terms with a charm offensive. We struck up a conversation. He was barrel-chested like the son, with a reddish-tan complexion, a black beard and a fixed, warm gaze. He was wearing a baseball cap with a construction-company logo. He asked how long she had been wrestling and expressed admiration for her pursuing the sport. I asked him how his son felt about wrestling girls, if he had ever lost to a girl and if he found that hard. He said he had lost to a girl who eventually made it to the state championships; rather than resent her he respected her as the superior wrestler. The dad started giving my daughter pointers from the sidelines and explaining to me, since I was still wrestling illiterate, the openings his son was giving for her to score points. At the end of their three different matches, she was head over heels, while also being embarrassed at having wrestled so badly or, more accurately, for having not even wrestled. I could tell she was on new ground and confused about whether she would impress him most by trying to win or by acting coolly disengaged.
I had bought my daughter and her teammate t-shirts from a vendor in the lobby offering a library of different decals, which he then pressed on the garment with a machine that looked like a waffle maker. Her friend picked one that read, “I don’t chase boys I pin them”; my daughter, still very drawn to an adolescent-male brand of humor, chose something ribald about wrestling’s superiority because of how many balls it required. Sporting these t-shirts at the conclusion of the tournament, they went in pursuit of phone numbers or social media connections.
Marveling at these new modes of flirting, my mind turned back to the moment her teammate wrestled a boy I had already scoped out in looking for potentially alarming contestants. His singlet was literally covered in Jesus, the most baroque I had seen yet: a riot of font styles and clashing perspectives, a sign perhaps that it was custom-designed by its wearer. There was a close-up of suffering Jesus wearing the crown of thorns on his left pectoral; a realistic portrayal of Mount Calvary and the three crosses (Jesus in the middle) on his left lower pelvic area and thigh; “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens Me (Philippians 4:13)” on his right pectoral; down his right side, in thick swirling cursive, JESUS; on his right thigh “Jesus Christ” was written in a box in a style similar to Marvel branding. His headgear, meanwhile, was patriotic: one side had stars and the other stripes. My daughter’s teammate is black and was wearing her Oberlin Phoenix team singlet as she approached the mat. I was nervous for her, not knowing if she was entering into a contest of strength with a teenage boy with radical views about restoring white male privilege. A talented wrestler, she held her own, but ultimately lost the match four minutes in. When I asked how it went, she reported in a matter-of-fact way that he was prone to strong leg holds but not a mean wrestler.
As with the MAGA dad cheering on his daughter as she humiliated a male opponent, a black teenage girl wearing a singlet from a famously progressive town (last stop on the Underground Railroad) wrestling a white male teen decked out in Christian-nationalist signifiers presented a striking image. Watching them was like seeing both a literal and a symbolic representation of “wrestling with difference.”
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Norbert Elias, a longue durée sociologist best known for his work on manners and the civilizing process, also pioneered the sociology of sport. The development of modern sport—which he dates to eighteenth-century England and the rise of rules and regulations controlling levels of permitted violence (contra the usual method of tracing it back to ancient Greece and Olympic games, the only moment in the long history of physical contest when wrestling was reserved for the elite)—provides insight into the social changes that fascinated him, namely the level of individual self-restraint required for violence to be monopolized by the state and the development of outlets for experiencing the excitement of combat without the shame of seeming bloodthirsty.
At a more theoretical level, sport provided Elias with a model that he hoped would help sociology break from the classic Weberian mode of seeing the individual and society as distinct, often oppositional, entities. Sensing that language was itself part of the problem, he created what we now refer to as process sociology. Watching a match, he argues, would not make sense if we only focused on one team. Although we may fixate on a given side in hopes that they win or lose, the game itself requires that there be more than one team or player. And the two sides coming together creates a new thing that in turn creates other new things.
Inspired by Elias, I zoomed out from my hyperfocus on my daughter’s physical safety in the matches, and considered what new thing was coming to be from the encounter of both sides. One result, I realized, was a surprising respite from the exhausted paradigms and binaries that characterize so much of our public discourse and politics, making communication between individuals and groups at best unproductive and depressingly predictable, and at worst violent and destructive.
My other thought took me back to Charles Taylor’s concept of “footing.” Taylor wants to capture the fragility and malleability of our social connections. When we open a conversation with someone, we are doing something that “is not just for me, and for you, but for us undivided.” But the nature of this “we” can vary quite dramatically:
Wrestling dramatizes in literal terms Taylor’s account of conversational exchange. Once the referee blows the whistle, there is a period of circling in which the contestants determine how to make the first move. Arms outstretched, they might be holding hands until one person figures out a way to leverage their speed or weight or strength to knock the opponent off balance by means of shoulders or legs. The wrestling bout is a kind of dialogue, then—moves provoke reactions. While there is an official language of permitted holds, each match is unscripted and improvisational.
Rather than think of common ground in terms of shared but static values, the “footings” model of ethical engagement allows us to see it as always shifting and renegotiated, the conflict between two sides continually producing new and unexpected ways of relating to one another. Taylor points out that social space always contains a “multiplicity of already codified footings” specifying which kinds of people can play which kinds of roles. But you can always challenge a footing “by enacting an alternative.” Coed wrestling challenges the established footing between men and women, girls and boys. Each match begins with the opponents shaking hands, a sign of consent that separates the sport from its uncouth cousin, simple roughhousing. However unequally matched in strength and ability, the contestants are equally subject to the rules and rituals of the game.
Wrestling as sport makes strange wrestling in the familiar metaphorical sense, as in “wrestling” with a decision. “Grappling,” as in grappling with a complex question, is also a technical term in wrestling. Grappling with a problem, wrestling with a decision—both suggest openness to dialectical synthesis or reversal. In this troubled moment, wrestling seems to allow for a figuration of conflict without conflagration.
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I returned to Oak Harbor a year later for my daughter’s high school tournament. It was a girls-only event, as is the norm at the high school level. After having attended camps, won some matches (against girls) and scored her first pin—an important rite of passage for wrestlers that she marked by keeping her bout number on a scrap of paper in her phone case—she felt more legitimately like a wrestler. She looked the part, “jacked” as she would say, the result of weight lifting twice a week before school with the head coach, a third-generation Ohio farmer who teaches machine repair at the local vocational high school. I had picked up basic wrestling and knew the words to shout from the sidelines, like “shoot” or “sprawl.” Observing the general scene of the tournament, I was fascinated by shifts in the female wrestlers’ body language, from combative, tensed postures during their matches to more traditionally feminine rhetorical modes at other moments: swiveling their hips to the Macarena during the ritual mid-tournament dance break, when the wrestling mats become a dance floor and blasting music replaces the announcement of match winners; walking arm in arm with each other in the hallways; or, as I saw one wrestler do while on bended knee to attach her ankle strap before her match, bowing one’s head and clasping one’s hands in prayer. Wrestling expands the range of body languages girls can speak.
Despite my growing knowledge of the sport and delight in the scene of girls’ wrestling, I was no less tense watching my daughter wrestle that day than I was a year before during her first tournament. Instead of just praying that she’d escape the matches unscathed, I desperately wanted her to win. And when she did win, defying her own timidity by taking a shot and quickly pinning an opponent, or reversing a seemingly hopeless situation with an unexpected show of strength or agility, I felt like she challenged a whispered conviction both in herself and in me that we can’t or musn’t beat someone else.
On my way somewhere in the building, I found myself walking behind a blonde female wrestler wearing a pink t-shirt with “Wrestle like Jacob” written on the back. A riposte to the pink “Wrestle Like a Girl” t-shirts, I assumed. This is no simple substitution, however. At the level of warring mottos, it replaces a progressive stance with a conservative one, providing an origin story for female wrestling based in religion rather than feminism. But tracing female wrestling to an Old Testament patriarch is arguably a bolder move than introducing pink into the singlet color palette. If “Wrestle Like a Girl” asserts the ability of women and girls to engage in a traditionally male sport, “Wrestle like Jacob” lays claim to a male inheritance: the direct relationship with God that has profound personal and social implications. Jacob wrestles an angel and emerges with a newfound faith and humility, as well as a limp. His name is changed to Israel, one who wrestles with God.
At this point, I knew enough about the rigors of the sport and the limitations of my liberal parenting to read Christian wrestling swag as expressing more than merely cultural allegiance to a value system. It was also, I suspected, a prayerful plea for sufficient strength to meet the demands of the moment, a prayer that invites a solution as yet unimagined.
Art credit: Alessandra Bergamin, High school wrestler Artemisia Matera is held in a headlock as the referee calls points from the side of the mat, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.