It seemed to be fate. For a month, my friend Ellie and I had been practicing a feminist performance art piece in which we shouted rhyming couplets over a series of big-time wrestling moves we'd learned from Hulk Hogan videos. We had recently graduated from college and needed work that didn't tax our artistry. We weren't altogether naive: We knew this might be a vaguely sleazy operation where our shapely legs counted more than our tour jetis. But we believed that the world was a place where little miracles -- in the form of easy, glamorous jobs tailor-made for our bohemian laziness -- could happen. The auditions even took place in a sky-lit studio where we often took modern-dance classes. It seemed only natural that we should go.

But even when we got there, it was as if there were a scrim over all we saw. This was our fantasy job, after all. We would let no ugly realities get in the way.

"We want honest fights," spat Tiger Lilly's proprietor, Edwina, a well-groomed pit bull of a woman, tapping her clipboard and stalking the mats. "Absolutely no biting, you hear me? Twenty-five dollars extra for hair-pulling and scratching."

Ellie and I giggled appreciatively at her sense of humor. The other women stared at us pebble-eyed, failing to get the joke. We pulled at the edges of our cotton leotards and adjusted our little dance belts and glanced over our competition. I guessed that most of the other women had just been released from prison. They too must have been drawn to the easy money but, poor things, they obviously didn't have the skills we had to offer. Their giant bangs, set aflame into glossy cocoons with hair spray and cheap dye, leaped off their foreheads like animals trying to escape. Their eye liner curled wet around their eyes and their vaguely dilated pupils had the fierce indifference of malnourished hyenas. They were tough, raw young women who looked like they'd seen their share of street fighting. I remember feeling concern for them flash across my mind: These young women didn't look sufficiently groomed for a career in entertainment. How on earth would they know how to perform for the camera?

We signed waivers promising we would not sue Tiger Lilly under any circumstances. Then we approached Edwina about our expertise.

"We have a routine perfectly worked out," I began.

"Good girl -- the camera will love you. We don't want nothin' fake, get it? This is real athleticism. Can you give me real?"

"Our routine is very real," said Ellie, beaming. We'd recently taken a fight choreography class and learned hair-pulling, stomping on stomachs and face slaps.

Edwina began pairing the group off according to weight and height. Ellie and I were nearly identical in size but Edwina ignored this, punching her clipboard in our direction. "Friends don't wrestle," she explained. She matched Ellie with a 6-foot redhead named Grace.

I was paired with Venus, a sculpted blond with forearms like pork rounds. She was beautiful as only a serious female bodybuilder can be: carved from stone and tanned to a medium toast, with glinting feral eyes and a quick feminine flutter of a smile. She seemed quite nice, different from the other women. We introduced ourselves, both confessing that this was our first time. But before we could really talk, Edwina called out, "No talking to your opponent. I don't want any fixes. Winners get $225 -- $25 for the loser."

The lights from the video cameras made our skin glisten. Between grunts and gropings I could see the black impenetrable eye of the lens swooping in like a snake mouth to swallow us whole. Edwina, the producer, encircled us like a yipping dog, bending over unnecessarily to offer the camera close-ups on her black and white referee hot-panted ass. Venus was a gracious opponent, though I don't know if she would have gone so far as to make a deal. But each time she slammed me to the ground, she whispered an apology in my ear.

After one or two such apologies, it occurred to me that aside from the blue mats and the shrieking whistle, this "wrestling" bore little resemblance to the sport favored by Bulgarian Olympians and thick-necked high school boys. In addition to the hair-pulling and scratching, which Venus thankfully never resorted to, choke holds were fair game, as were "scissors" and a host of other illegal moves. And though it was primarily made "for gentlemen's entuhtainment," as Edwina put it, it was not a staged athletic spectacle like professional wrestling or roller derby. It was real fighting -- not sport, not theater. Think cock fighting with women instead of roosters. Whoever wanted to watch this wanted to see blood, pain, a real struggle for dominance.

The other young female wrestlers sat by, staring gloomily. Gradually, it dawned on me that they were regulars and, unlike me, they were prepared. They knew this easy money was nothing to giggle or preen over.

"Let's go girls," Edwina hissed. "All the way, now. To submission."

In her brand of wrestling, the object was not to press your opponent's two shoulders firmly against the mat, but throttle her until she whimpered, "I submit!" Venus and I fought for a gruesome 10 full minutes -- the designated length of the first half. By then my body was surging with a nausea I'd never know before. As black amoeba-like stuff closed off my vision, I realized I was in over my head. We were nouveau gladiators performing for men with wrestling fetishes - which I have since learned is relatively popular. A short trip into cyberspace will yield a myriad of Web sites devoted to wrestling, cat fights and other gore for the violently horny. For these men, it's the sight of women really hurting one another that turns them on. Edwina's claim that the work was "non-sexual" had put me at ease. But just because it wasn't sexual for us didn't mean that it wouldn't become a turn-on for the video's eventual consumers, their greasy faces flickering in the blue glow from the TV screen. That was an image that grew more vivid each time I felt myself splayed in a new position of humiliation. Someday unzipped sleaze balls on couches would eat up this spectacle like vultures on carrion.

Had the listing actually used the word "sexual" I probably never would have had the nerve to try it. And if for some strange reason I had arrived to find real sexual interaction, I doubt I could have ventured onto the mats. But I didn't really think subjecting myself to a little violence would traumatize me. In fact, I didn't really recognize it as violence at all until I was sick with it. Like much of our society, I apply a different set of criteria to the taboos of sex and violence. After all, I engage in sex but feel less comfortable talking about it to a child than I would about violence, which I do not engage in. Violence is bad; sex is good. But somehow a job that involved a little head-bashing put up fewer red flags for me than one that might involve the lighter kind of touching.

My failed career as cat fighter forced me to confront the ways in which I bought into all the strange contradictions of our culture's twin obsessions. Despite the yoking of "sex and violence" in the debates around censorship, V-chips, TV and movie ratings, I realized they rarely figure in the same political struggles. By bringing them together, uttering them as a single phrase, they taint and distort each other. Sex becomes scarier; violence a little less real. Whether it involves Larry Flynt's latest fight over a filthy cartoon or Tipper Gore's mission to institute labeling for the recording industry, sex is usually the source of the most consternation. Yet football and boxing -- which both cause real brain damage -- are prime-time sports, and the nightly news lingers over the details of murders in far more detail and with far less hand-wringing than all the recent chatter about cigars, stained dresses and blow jobs. Even the rating systems often overlook the obvious: The video label for the recent Joaquin Phoenix picture "Return to Paradise" offers warnings about nudity and profane language but suggests nothing of the graphic and harrowing execution at the end of the movie.

After my "submission," I sat on the sidelines, watching Ellie eagerly strut her stuff against Grace, a 6-foot bodybuilder who had been in Edwina's stable for some time. Neither woman wanted to submit. They tore at each others' faces, swore, pulled hair, until finally Grace, bleeding from a gash along her neck, gave out under pressure. Ellie walked away with $225, thrilled with her newfound employment. She returned the next month only to rip a knee ligament and sue Edwina for unsafe working conditions.

Although Ellie had a little more cat-fight mettle than I did, neither of us really understood "violence work" as well as we might have understood "sex work." After all we were both happily sexually active. But violence was an unknown world to us, except for movies and TV. Unlike the hard-luck women who found nothing to giggle at in Edwina's lectures, we didn't have any firsthand experience beating people up. America hasn't seen a war on its own soil in this century. Increasingly, with the advent of high-tech weaponry, even our soldiers barely know what it feels like to hurt someone. We may have grown inured to violence as much for the ubiquity of its images as our own ignorance about it.

I also learned how much longer a shelf life violence has in our consciousness. Soon after our fights, Ellie discovered that Grace, despite her bodybuilding thighs and sharp long nails, had been like us, a feminist performance artist slumming for a cheap thrill and a quick rent check. My husband ended up befriending Grace, and I am still friends with Ellie. But the two women -- despite their shared community -- continue to hate one another 12 years later, as if their scratches had never healed. Had they been locked in a deep-throat kiss instead of a choke hold, somehow I doubt their feelings would be quite so raw.