Too Painful to Watch (Joshi Pro Wrestling)

I think Japan has some of the most talented athletes male and female in the wrestling business. But what they go through, the women in particular, makes my blood run cold. Yes, UFC contains real heavy body contact but there are rules and regulations in place to help prevent any serious life threatening injuries from happening. Here your neck, your spine, your ribs, your guts are on the line. The vertebreaker is one of many dangerous manoevres they still use on each other which last I checked was banned in the WWE. This seems almost like free-for-all, where the ref's duties is delegated to simply deciding the outcome.

People enjoy it too. As much as I like wrestling, I'm not desensitised to the point where I will endorse something that puts women's lives at risk for the sake of a perverse form of entertainment.

**********************************************************************************************************************************

Japanese women in female wrestling promotions aka joshi puroresu are responsible for some of the most brutal matches in all of pro wrestling. The outcomes are predetermined, and the performers/fighters do their best to keep each other safe, but scripted or not, getting kicked in the face is still getting kicked in the face.

"Joshi is even more hard-hitting than a lot of men's wrestling," says Enuhito, a Japanese reporter and blogger who's been covering the industry since 1998. "Being cute or beautiful is not as important as being strong. The women who compete are physically small, so they can receive violent moves with no severe damage. A lot of male wrestlers say, 'If we did they same thing, we'd be dead.'"

Over the past few years, America's WWE has worked hard to modernize and legitimize their women's division—the mud wrestling and bra-and-panties matches are relics of a distant era—but work in the ring is still handled carefully. If you tune into an episode of Monday Night Raw, you'll never see a female superstar take an unprotected roundhouse punch to the face, or get dumped on the back of their neck. The violent physical freedoms reserved for joshi are hard to find anywhere else in the world.

Source: broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/jpyy83/violent-femmes-japanese-womens-wrestling-is-even-terrifying-to-male-wrestlers