Brian Oliu is a writer and teacher whose latest book, Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling, takes an intensely personal, often brutal approach to analyzing wrestling's weird place in American culture. In this conversation, we talk about the wages of violence, gender, and capitalism in the sport itself, and in the giant corporations that control it. What's "fake"? What's "real"? Wrestling knows that it ain't so simple.

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