The Wrestling Party | 
 enlarge | Author: Bett Williams
Publisher: Alyson Books
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $2.00
You Save: $10.95 (85%)
New (14) Used (11) from $0.77
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1148567
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 148
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5 x 0.5
ISBN: 1555837859
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781555837853
ASIN: 1555837859
Publication Date: December 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"When does desire turn into exploitation?" Bett Williams asks, reflecting on a relationship she had with a seventeen-year-old girl when she was thirty. This is the question that hums beneath The Wrestling Party, whether Bett is exploring the youth-worshiping tendencies of a riot grrrl music -festival or telling the tale of a disabled boy's passion for Tara Lapinsky or giving advice to "stalker chicks." Bett's life becomes unhinged in an attempt to finally get it right when she has a crush on Anikka, a nightclub regular with a Swiss/German accent who is sexually submissive (as in TheVillage Voice personals-submissive). Bett's crush lands her half naked and covered in oil while wrestling a dozen women in her garage. Still unable to win over Anikka, she enlists the help of David, an obnoxious Scottish writer who assists in bringing the relationship with Anikka to its hilarious and startling finale. The Wrestling Party is a raucous mixture of cultural criticism, erotic tell-all, and in-the-field journalism that reads like a novel you can't put down. In an era marked by social isolation and paint-by-numbers politics, Bett's stories offer us a glimpse of who we are beyond the constraints of cool correctness. Like wrestling, conflict in Bett's -nimble hands is transformed into beauty and violence, into something altogether more complicated and tender. Bett Williams is the author of Girl Walking Backwards. Her writing has appeared in Out and extensively on LesbiaNation.com.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Hilarious, honest, true to life, sadly underappreciated August 22, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I was doing random subject searches at the library and came across this. Although early on it is full of passages that seem completely "lesbian only", it quickly turns into the reminiscences of a slacker 30something Angeleno doing rather funny and mundane things.
Williams has some startlingly spot on points, and the sexiness of the title will drown out some of the more intimate, quiet moments. Some good lines are:
It seems odd then, at age thirty-one, after years of hiding out in dark bars where guys named Jimmy tell stories of `Nam, and after deprogramming myself from using words like "energy," I chose to move back to my hometown of Santa Barbara, California.
The New Age, just another unseemly `80s subculture, had disappeared, along with diagonal zippers and Milli Vanilli.
I recently saw a documentary on dolphins. It turns out they're not the loving, spiritual creatures we thought they were. They are violent territorial animals driven by sex who will fight each other sometimes to the death and even kill their young. I was quite happy that these symbols of Californian New Age culture were not, after all, the cute baby golden retrievers of the marine world but in fact a bunch of seething hussies and wife-beaters.
I watched the show religiously until I began having a series of dreams about Angela Chase. In one of them, she was washing her hair...in the school cafeteria. She began pulling scrolls of words out of her ears that she read out loud and every word was Ultimate Truth, more powerful than music.
Thank you for carrying it, for carrying me. You never said to my face that you understood love mattered in just this way. But you showed up.
Buy this book, and her other work too.
 knock-down, drag-out fodder for your brain December 24, 2003
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Wrestling Party will most likely be touted as a salacious lesbian extravaganza or pop culture commentary, but it's much more than that. Williams expertly pulls the reader in and drags us through her physical and mental worlds. Like all great writers, she remains vulnerable throughout. Whatever your gender, sexual orientation or body identity politics, this book is witty, tender and heartbreakingly romantic.
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