[SF weekly.com]- It’s one thing to watch four porn stars in bikinis wrestle from the comfort of your own computer chair. It’s another to sit in a crowd of 40 odd people and listen to the visceral smack of curvaceous flesh hit a giant gym mat for two hours.

Once a month, Kink.com, the alternative pornography giants who call the Armory their home, hold a match for the pay site Ultimate Surrender. On the nights in question – like this Tuesday – a crowd of invitees files into the bleachers of a large, padded arena.

Then, in three rounds, two teams of Kink performers go head to head, earning points for less-than-traditional wrestling moves, such as pinning their opponents and then smothering them with their breasts. Needless to say, the whole thing is filmed, photographed, and streamed live online. Attendees sign a release form so their faces can appear in porn…

The spectators for this month’s Ultimate Surrender are mostly of nervous hipsters, with a few industry veterans and middle-aged regulars thrown. While we wait to head inside, the women of Team Red and Team Purple work the crowd in their thongs, asking for fan support, their bare asses dotting the Kink lounge.

Once inside, a male referee with a serious expression (not to be confused with the hot female ref, who will eventually join in on the action) tells us how things will go down: three rounds of wrestling, then a fourth round. That’s when the winners fuck the losers. “Basically, this is rape site under the guise of wrestling,” he offers by way of explanation. Cheering is okay, but WWF-themed shouting is out. “If you think it’s funny, it’s not,” he says.

Things get started as two women face off. To earn points for their forced sex acts, the wrestlers first need to gain “control,” holding their opponent down or locking her between their thighs. Quickly the bikinis come off and the nude wrestling begins. Red pins purple, purple pins red. From the stands, we watch as one woman’s flushed face seems to disappear underneath another’s ass. The ref shouts out “Fingers in pussy!” The scoreboard shows us a tie. No longer nervous, spectators can be heard shouting, “Lick her nipple! Lick her nipple!”

In the end, watching Ultimate Surrender live seems like watching any other sport: kind of tedious. There’s only so long you can stare at nude porn stars twisting around each other’s bodies before you go numb to the sight.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a bizarrely amazing experience, one you can’t get everywhere. Still, even the infamous fourth round, during which the red team got to wear red strap-ons and tag team the losers, eventually got old. Here were four women, writhing in front of us onlookers, tied up and energetically sucking off dildos. Above the arena, a TV showed us a live camera feed. Somehow it was easier to watch on the screen. There the whole thing looked less absurd, less staged, as these athletes of sex gave us spectators one last thing to cheer about.