Initially this was just supposed to be a puff piece: one of those image-centric, easy to write-easy to read listicles that everybody says they hate but just can’t stop themselves from reading. But, you know, I’m me, and I’m really truly terrible when it comes to distilling things I’m passionate about into tiny blurbs. The thing is, it’s very easy to fantasy book existing rosters, especially if you’re me and you just want everything to turn into wacky road trip adventures and eighties-style teen movie-meets-Rodney Dangerfield shenanigans without the misogyny and unfortunate racist bents. Everybody has their ideas about what would ‘fix’ what they see as being wrong with any wrestling company, and you’re lying if you say you don’t have an opinion on what you wish wrestling could do to be better. All of these things lead to a very sad truth when it comes to women in WWE: we’re not going to get what we want.
If you’ve been paying attention to recent signings, or Brandon’s Best and Worst of NXT columns (you should, they’re great), you can see a growing trend in the kind of future we’re to have, and it’s covered in glitter and the canonical height of Hello Kitty (three apples, for those of us who aren’t my friend Chris Sims). When you start to realistically think about women who could potentially work in NXT and eventually go on to graduate to the hellscape that is the main roster, it mutates your brain into this unexpectedly hypercritical monster. Looking at women through the WWE lens proves more than anything just how flawed that view is.
Go ahead and try it. Think long and hard about the women you love to watch wrestle, and then put them into the context of televised wrestling. Ignore, for a moment, their actual wrestling talent; I think we’ve seen beyond a shadow of a doubt that’s not what gets you there. It’s easier when you realize just how irrelevant that is, whether it’s because of the track record of women not being given a chance to really wrestle, or the very real examples of women starting out slow, then working hard and forcing themselves into the NXT spotlight. Starting green and training and improving isn’t a bad thing – quite the opposite, in fact. But you really have to think long and hard about where they’re training to go.