The scene taking place in the back room of Chicago’s Mystic Celt bar has all the trappings of a fetish film. A twenty something blonde wearing brown furry bear ears and leggings dances with a modern-style geisha to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” They’re soon joined by a pink Strawberry Shortcake and a pregnant Angelina Jolie impersonator. It’s an almost innocent scene, until the bearish femme growls and rips a baby doll from between the legs of the would-be Angie. Too bad no one else is even paying attention.
Instead, 150-plus pairs of eyes are glued to Karie Miller as the mistress of ceremonies stomps onto the red-and black-streaked plywood platform that serves as a stage. The 28-year-old–a towering glamazon in fish nets and a black tutu, breasts straining against her deep V-neck tank top–yells, “Shut the fuck up!” She bats her silver-lined eyelashes in flirtatious frustration before adding, in a naughty Russian accent, “This is when I tell you who the wrestlers are, so shut the fuck up!”
As Miller rattles off a comical list of names, the bizarrely erotic charade of moments earlier begins to make sense. The bearish babe is introduced Grizzelda Mange (Sabrina Pratt, 26). The others are Strawberry Shivcake (Ellen Wohlberg, 27), Armjolina Jolie (Nicki James, 28), and Molly Emmons, 29; and they’re four of the nine feisty competitors taking part in the night’s bout of the Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers (otherwise known as CLLAW).
That’s right: A new age of female domination is upon us. Megan Smith, the 26 year-old responsible for the event, a bimonthly fund-raiser for the Sideshow Theatre, sums it up: “There’s something edgy, sexy, and dangerous about a bunch of women arm wrestling.” Tonight Smith is zipping around in a golden-flecked leotard and roller skates as the Cutting Edge.
“There are strong, powerful women onstage,” Smith continues. “There’s something very attractive about that.”
No kidding. This throwdown is only CLLAW’s fifth tournament, but fans of these heady heroines aren’t alone when it comes to getting their rocks off via knuckle-baring contests. Ladies’ arm-wrestling leagues from Taos, New Mexico, to the Hudson Valley in New York have divas of all shapes, ages, and professions embracing fisty feats of strength–and men and women clamoring for their next voyeuristic fix.
If you had told that to Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell a few years ago, she would have been more likely to challenge you to an arm-wrestling match than to take you seriously. The single mother dreamed up a women’s arm-wrestling league while lifting weights at a Charlottesville, Virginia, gym, teasingly asking the ladies around her if they’d ever consider joining. Turns out the joke was on her, says Hoyt Tidwell: “Everyone was seriously saying, ‘Yes, I want to do this!’ ”
A few months later, in February 2008, the inaugural Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers (CLAW) event took place in the back room of the Blue Moon Diner. Instead of the bodybuilder broads one might expect, the fierce female competitors were the kind of nonthreatening women you might encounter in everyday life, from hairstylists to newspaper editors. Yet when paraded in front of the audience by their boisterous managers–whose sole responsibility was to cajole the audience to bet paper CLAWbucks (two for a dollar) on their fighters–they transformed into rough ’n’ tough alter egos. There were vixens in clingy bodysuits, like Stiletto Southpaw and the Punctuator, and a Mohawked predator named Pit Bull. The matches between the wrestlers, in which they had to win two out of three, didn’t take long, leaving plenty of time between sets for the house band, aptly called Straight Punch to the Crotch, to keep the freewheelin’ vibe flowing with ditties like “I Love My CLAW.” The event quickly became a party for all ages: What began as a crowd of 50 curious onlookers had, by July 2009, evolved into a throng of 700-plus swarming the diner’s parking lot.
Hoyt Tidwell had hit a nerve, and since then she’s helped other leagues get off the ground. Chicago’s Karie Miller brought the concept home after finishing graduate school at the University of Virginia. She had been asked to moonlight as a manager for Stiletto Southpaw (Bree Luck) a month before she left for the Windy City; after moving, she mentioned the concept during a fund-raising brainstorming session for Sideshow. CLLAW was born in February 2009.
For Susan Nuss, the creator of Taos BRAWL, in Taos, New Mexico, the inspiration for her local league was more serendipitous. She was eating pancakes at a Sautee, Georgia, bed-and-breakfast in August 2008 when another guest, Hoyt Tidwell, sat across from her in a CLAW T-shirt. “She told us about the league,” recalls the 44-year-old Nuss, “and I thought, What a fantastic thing.” Nuss launched her league last November.
Nina Feldman participated in the Hudson Valley, New York, league, and the 22-year-old couldn’t resist starting up her own when she relocated to New Orleans in August 2009. The first match, this past January, was an overwhelmingly rowdy success. “People were just getting crazy,” Feldman says. “It’s almost chaotic–more like a party, less like a show.”
The concept has slight variations in each city–the Charlottesville champion wins a creepy set of fake fingernails, while the Taos victor dons a WWE-style belt–but all share one core mission: giving back to their com munities. Proceeds from each wrestling event benefit a different local charity, from women’s prisons to children’s music programs.
The leagues also all have a pretty strict adherence to the four pages of rules written by the official CLAW referee, Charlottesville lawyer Jude Silveira. The 41-year-old explains his referee persona as “a stickler for the rules,” then adds, “he will also speak in an argot that is unique to him alone, with fairly precise terms that are also asinine. The platform is the floor machine. The chair is the antigravitational device. These words change over time with whatever I come up with.” Additional stipulations include bans on kicking the underthe-table umpire (yes, someone sits down there to make sure the chicks’ asses stay in place) and laughing at one’s own jokes, a foul that earns the competitor a bag over her head.
Still, those refs and rules are not just for saucy entertainment value. Watching these ladies grunt and grimace under the forceful pressure of their forms makes it pretty clear that the sporting event is potentially dangerous. “We train the girls beforehand,” says Nuss. “There’s a certain grip where you could snap your forearm. It’s happened in professional arm-wrestling competitions. We don’t want that to happen. You have to keep your face and arm in front of you. As soon as you’re turning away from your arm, you can snap it.” The Godmother herself, Hoyt Tidwell, admits that she’s gripped an opponent so tightly that she broke capillaries in her hand–“It looked nasty,” she says–but so far that’s as far as it’s gone.
If anything, though, the mix of empowerment and risk makes it even more attractive. To date, there are nine leagues in various stages of development, from Nachadoges, Texas, to Lafayette, Louisiana. And since the leagues stay in touch with one another, another playful jest of Hoyt Tidwell’s is becoming a reality: The ladies of CLAW are planning to host the first national tournament. “It’s going to have a street-fair vibe,” says Hoyt Tidwell. “We’re hoping to block off the street in front of the Blue Moon Diner and have the local restaurants set up food stands. Maybe have one of the local breweries or distributors sponsor it. We’d love to create our own beer label.” Cheers to that. If this event in Chicago is any indication of what to expect, when the evening’s champ, Killer Bee (Bess McGeorge, 29), taunted losers by whipping the CLAW sash between her legs, it will be one hell of a show. After all, all these women like to be on top.
