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| Let's treat women like Sparx better as fans, okay? Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein |
The stock response I get from a small portion of the crowd when I point out misogyny in WWE is "They're never going to change, support people who do." Well, aside from the fact that I do support companies like Chikara, ACW, 2CW, and others who are more progressive in how they treat women, the implication seems like WWE is the only company where women are treated like pieces of meat. I wish it was that easy to diagnose what is an awful problem, but misogyny is a much more widespread problem in pro wrestling - both with companies and with fans - than just at the highest corporate level.
WWE's biggest imitator, TNA, has had well-documented problems with how they deal with women, both on and off-camera. Their treatment of women is only nominally better in the stories in that the women actually have more fleshed-out stories in the company. That's where the improvements end. Sadly, the problems go deeper than in corporate televised wrestling.
Saturday night, Ring of Honor's Border Wars show featured no fewer than three instances where women were treated as if they were disposable automatons rather than human beings. In the Mike Bennett/Roderick Strong match, Bennett's girlfriend/valet Maria Kanellis was accosted by a member of the ring crew named "Cheeseburger." He gave her an open mouthed kiss against her will, causing Bennett to be distracted enough for Strong to defeat him. Bennett is a heel in alignment, but what happened to Kanellis would have gotten her assailant arrested, well, in theory. Let's say it should have gotten him arrested. But the forced oral entry was met with raucous cheers.
The other two incidences occurred during the Television Championship match, both involving the "Hoopla Hotties" of Truth Martini, Scarlett Bordeaux and Seleziya Sparx. The first involved both of them. They hopped on the apron to distract referee Paul Turner from counting a pin attempt by Mark Briscoe on Champion Matt Taven. Their ruse went further in order to distract Briscoe himself, in that they started making out. It's not like either of these characters were fully formed enough that this was part of something deeper in their psyches. Hell, I believe this was Sparx's debut with the company. Their titles say it all, "Hoopla Hotties." They're accouterments to Martini's Svengali character, and their only role is to provide sex appeal. They're basically pieces of meat.
Granted, Briscoe's reaction to it was golden. He didn't do the whole "WOW TWO GIRLS MAKING OUT LET ME DO EVERYTHING SHORT OF WHIPPING MY JUNK OUT AND MASTURBATING IN PUBLIC" reaction that most other wrestlers would have had in the two corporate companies. Him shrieking in an attempt to scare them off the apron was fairly progressive, in that I could see him doing the same to Martini if he was the one causing the distraction. And yeah, any public display of affection would gain notoriety. It's the fact of who the women were and their overall agency. Neither Bordeaux or Sparx are of any real importance to Taven or Martini outside of being arm candy at this point. That alone is pretty sad, especially in a company where we've been waiting for the "Women of Honor" to take off for years now.
After the match was over, Sparx, who is of healthy weight in my opinion but isn't someone I'd exactly call waifish, carried Martini to the back after he was waylaid by Briscoe. Kevin Kelly from the play-by-play chair then went onto remark "That's a lot of woman to love," which is a remark reserved for overweight people. Now, if you haven't seen Kelly since he was shitcanned by WWE, he's still the same body build. He is someone I would call overweight, so for him to throw stones at someone who was in better shape than he was is patently ludicrous. However, this isn't just a matter of hypocrisy, and being overweight really isn't that much of a crime, no matter how much anyone will assert otherwise. Kelly isn't a a bad, bad man because he's fat. He's a bad, bad man because he has bad misogynist opinions on weight (or at least he has them in character, which would reflect more on the company line than him, but either way, it's not good) on top of being a dude who openly undermines his own position in his company and has uninformed xenophobic things to say about other wrestlers. So basically, Sparx-as-a-piece-of-meat is reinforced by being judged seemingly solely on her appearance. Granted, it was her first appearance for the company, but how am I supposed to give them the benefit of the doubt to make her into a fully-formed character with thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and real agency when there were two examples prior on the show that serve as evidence to the contrary?
This isn't to pick on ROH at all, because they're far from the only company with this attitude. They were just the one with the most prominence this past weekend. I mean, do I need to revisit the Resistance Pro match from National Pro Wrestling Day again? Hell, even the companies that do get it right overall can have their bad moments. Look no further than the Chris Dickinson/Addy Starr match from WSU An Ultraviolent Affair, or cherrypick any number of examples from ACW. The company deserves applause for its overall direction and treatment of women within the narrative, but sometimes, the notes that their characters hit make me a bit uncomfortable.
The argument could be made that it's the fans driving the reactions who are more to blame, and to a point, I agree. Does anyone think that Robert Anthony would have even said "Go back to the kitchen!" to D'arcy Dixon if he didn't think he'd get cheers for it? Remember, in indie wrestling, it's hard to be a heel outside of maybe Chikara because you make your big money (selling merch) by being popular with the fans (a point made to me by Brandon Stroud, tip of the hat to him on that). There are still too many fans in indie wrestling with awful attitudes towards women (and minorities and homosexuals and... well, anyone who isn't a white non-religious straight male), but that doesn't mean companies need to play into these tendencies by embracing the low road.
The role of any artistic endeavor, in addition to entertainment, is to raise up the ideal being portrayed. Wrestling is art, so whatever companies and wrestlers embrace as a positive ideal is what's being elevated. Why in any company in 2013 the ideals of having no agency for women to the point where sexual assault is a laudable action would be raised up baffles me. I expect this to happen in WWE - with the rider that expecting it and condoning or tolerating it are wildly different things - but when it happens on a level where we should be expecting better attitudes is troublesome at best. Then again, maybe it's silly of me to expect a business still dominated by men who see themselves as living by an outmoded code of machismo.
We're still a long way from wrestling being a place where gender equity is the norm. This isn't even being about intergender wrestling, even if I don't see the reason to segregate along those lines. We can have true equality even if women never wrestle against men again. It's all about perception. It's all about women being treated as human beings, the same as with men. It's about not accepting sexual assault as a babyface tactic. We as fans cannot hope to change WWE, because progress in wrestling trickles up, not the other way around. The companies that we do have influence over still need help being shown the light. We have to start on a more local scale, then work up to Ring of Honor, then move to WWE and TNA. Until then, it's not going to a whole lick of good to complain about "The Divas," when women in the companies without the media reach of WWE get similar or worse treatment.
WWE's biggest imitator, TNA, has had well-documented problems with how they deal with women, both on and off-camera. Their treatment of women is only nominally better in the stories in that the women actually have more fleshed-out stories in the company. That's where the improvements end. Sadly, the problems go deeper than in corporate televised wrestling.
Saturday night, Ring of Honor's Border Wars show featured no fewer than three instances where women were treated as if they were disposable automatons rather than human beings. In the Mike Bennett/Roderick Strong match, Bennett's girlfriend/valet Maria Kanellis was accosted by a member of the ring crew named "Cheeseburger." He gave her an open mouthed kiss against her will, causing Bennett to be distracted enough for Strong to defeat him. Bennett is a heel in alignment, but what happened to Kanellis would have gotten her assailant arrested, well, in theory. Let's say it should have gotten him arrested. But the forced oral entry was met with raucous cheers.
The other two incidences occurred during the Television Championship match, both involving the "Hoopla Hotties" of Truth Martini, Scarlett Bordeaux and Seleziya Sparx. The first involved both of them. They hopped on the apron to distract referee Paul Turner from counting a pin attempt by Mark Briscoe on Champion Matt Taven. Their ruse went further in order to distract Briscoe himself, in that they started making out. It's not like either of these characters were fully formed enough that this was part of something deeper in their psyches. Hell, I believe this was Sparx's debut with the company. Their titles say it all, "Hoopla Hotties." They're accouterments to Martini's Svengali character, and their only role is to provide sex appeal. They're basically pieces of meat.
Granted, Briscoe's reaction to it was golden. He didn't do the whole "WOW TWO GIRLS MAKING OUT LET ME DO EVERYTHING SHORT OF WHIPPING MY JUNK OUT AND MASTURBATING IN PUBLIC" reaction that most other wrestlers would have had in the two corporate companies. Him shrieking in an attempt to scare them off the apron was fairly progressive, in that I could see him doing the same to Martini if he was the one causing the distraction. And yeah, any public display of affection would gain notoriety. It's the fact of who the women were and their overall agency. Neither Bordeaux or Sparx are of any real importance to Taven or Martini outside of being arm candy at this point. That alone is pretty sad, especially in a company where we've been waiting for the "Women of Honor" to take off for years now.
After the match was over, Sparx, who is of healthy weight in my opinion but isn't someone I'd exactly call waifish, carried Martini to the back after he was waylaid by Briscoe. Kevin Kelly from the play-by-play chair then went onto remark "That's a lot of woman to love," which is a remark reserved for overweight people. Now, if you haven't seen Kelly since he was shitcanned by WWE, he's still the same body build. He is someone I would call overweight, so for him to throw stones at someone who was in better shape than he was is patently ludicrous. However, this isn't just a matter of hypocrisy, and being overweight really isn't that much of a crime, no matter how much anyone will assert otherwise. Kelly isn't a a bad, bad man because he's fat. He's a bad, bad man because he has bad misogynist opinions on weight (or at least he has them in character, which would reflect more on the company line than him, but either way, it's not good) on top of being a dude who openly undermines his own position in his company and has uninformed xenophobic things to say about other wrestlers. So basically, Sparx-as-a-piece-of-meat is reinforced by being judged seemingly solely on her appearance. Granted, it was her first appearance for the company, but how am I supposed to give them the benefit of the doubt to make her into a fully-formed character with thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and real agency when there were two examples prior on the show that serve as evidence to the contrary?
This isn't to pick on ROH at all, because they're far from the only company with this attitude. They were just the one with the most prominence this past weekend. I mean, do I need to revisit the Resistance Pro match from National Pro Wrestling Day again? Hell, even the companies that do get it right overall can have their bad moments. Look no further than the Chris Dickinson/Addy Starr match from WSU An Ultraviolent Affair, or cherrypick any number of examples from ACW. The company deserves applause for its overall direction and treatment of women within the narrative, but sometimes, the notes that their characters hit make me a bit uncomfortable.
The argument could be made that it's the fans driving the reactions who are more to blame, and to a point, I agree. Does anyone think that Robert Anthony would have even said "Go back to the kitchen!" to D'arcy Dixon if he didn't think he'd get cheers for it? Remember, in indie wrestling, it's hard to be a heel outside of maybe Chikara because you make your big money (selling merch) by being popular with the fans (a point made to me by Brandon Stroud, tip of the hat to him on that). There are still too many fans in indie wrestling with awful attitudes towards women (and minorities and homosexuals and... well, anyone who isn't a white non-religious straight male), but that doesn't mean companies need to play into these tendencies by embracing the low road.
The role of any artistic endeavor, in addition to entertainment, is to raise up the ideal being portrayed. Wrestling is art, so whatever companies and wrestlers embrace as a positive ideal is what's being elevated. Why in any company in 2013 the ideals of having no agency for women to the point where sexual assault is a laudable action would be raised up baffles me. I expect this to happen in WWE - with the rider that expecting it and condoning or tolerating it are wildly different things - but when it happens on a level where we should be expecting better attitudes is troublesome at best. Then again, maybe it's silly of me to expect a business still dominated by men who see themselves as living by an outmoded code of machismo.
We're still a long way from wrestling being a place where gender equity is the norm. This isn't even being about intergender wrestling, even if I don't see the reason to segregate along those lines. We can have true equality even if women never wrestle against men again. It's all about perception. It's all about women being treated as human beings, the same as with men. It's about not accepting sexual assault as a babyface tactic. We as fans cannot hope to change WWE, because progress in wrestling trickles up, not the other way around. The companies that we do have influence over still need help being shown the light. We have to start on a more local scale, then work up to Ring of Honor, then move to WWE and TNA. Until then, it's not going to a whole lick of good to complain about "The Divas," when women in the companies without the media reach of WWE get similar or worse treatment.