In my mid-thirties, I was single after my first long-term relationship. I was on my own, with a lot of questions as to how I had ended up alone and nearing forty. I gradually started to fill my newly-found free time with professional wrestling and hardcore shows. One night, while waiting for wrestling or a hardcore show to start in some small, dark VFW hall in a nondescript New Jersey strip-mall, it dawned on me that as a single, adult, heterosexual man, it was an odd and telling choice to devote my free time to stylized violence perpetrated by nearly naked men for the benefit of mostly other men. I started to look around the room, and it was clear that most of the audience appeared to be not unlike myself, male, not terribly popular in high school and alone.
