confessions of a high school wrestler

I've mentioned my coworker Simba before. He's the "player" at work -- kinda dopey, kinda simple, but sexy enough, with his tight body, his shoulder-length dreads and his amber eyes. He always ends up sleeping with the women he meets, whether he meets them in bars, at music festivals or (lucky him) at work where each newly hired woman might be the next woman who hears his fateful come-on: "hey, we should go get a beer sometime."

Anyway, for some reason, when I work with Simba and things get quiet, he starts talking. He's like a curious squirrel, if I just sit still long enough and don't say anything, he crawls over and starts chattering to me. I've heard completely unprompted explanations of his sexual exploits with different women I work with on three separate occasions, among many other little thoughts and meanderings of his. Personally, I find most of it boring, but he's so affable (and also kinda dumb), I don't want to hurt his feelings by shutting him down. While he's talking, I try and imagine the glazed over look he would get if *I* were to suddenly start talking so much. I doubt the listening would be reciprocated, but maybe I'm just being cynical.

Last night he started talking about high school wrestling. I can't remember what prompted it, but he spent about 45 minutes describing to me the bizarre and dangerous things he did to maintain his target weight as a wrestler. His target weight was about 15 pounds under his normal weight -- and he was already a very lean guy. He described a lifestyle taken directly from an after-school-special on eating disorders: he would sleep wrapped in garbage bags to sweat out water-weight, he would jog wearing lots and lots of warm clothes, he would hardly eat and he'd be hungry all the time, he would sometimes take dieretics and he'd spend between 6-8 hours a *day* working out in the gym. If he wanted to eat something substantial, he would weigh it first, then jog long enough to lose exactly the same amount of weight so he could eat it without actually putting any weight on.

Of course, he often found himself dizzy and headachey, hungry and dehydrated -- he couldn't concentrate in school and in some of his wrestling matches he'd be too exhausted to wrestle. And he wasn't the only one in this boat -- it was common among the other wrestlers. And they weren't dreaming up all this pressure on their own. He described the emotional ass-whooping and public shaming they would get from their coach if they didn't "make weight." If you didn't make weight, you let your whole team down and you were a disgrace. How fucked up is all that??? He told me that, even after he stopped wrestling, he was terrified he'd get fat if he stopped treating his body in such a fucked up way, so several of the behaviors persisted for years.

I was shocked as I listened to all that. Now I won't be so surprised when I hear about the next 16 year old kid who drops dead during football practice because his heart exploded. Why isn't anyone talking about this kind of eating disorder? The kind that *boys* have, the kind that's encouraged by coaches and the atmosphere of competetive sports? It's dangerous and damaging, physically and emotionally, and ignoring it just keeps that gap wide open between the way we treat men and women in this society. Women are targetted for caretaking, but men are expected to be hard no matter what. It's depressing.