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| Some men may never learn, not even at behest of their daughters Photo Credit: WWE.com |
That's what makes, as a character, Triple H's continued implications that being womanly is bad so grotesquely heinous to me.
The gist of that final showdown between Triple H and Brock Lesnar last night was that Trips didn't want to wait six days to brawl with Lesnar. Forget the fact that there was really no new business between the two since Mania, when Triple H beat Lesnar at his own game. I mean, what did Lesnar do since then, beat up 3MB and wreck Trips' office? Trips has pedigreed Heath Slater more times during commercial breaks at Smackdown tapings than I can count on both hands, and he even admitted that he didn't give a shit about his Stamford office because his REAL OFFICE WAS INSIDE THE RING HA HA HA I AM SO COOL BROCK LOOK AT MY SHIRT WITH LATIN ON IT AND MY SICK MOTORHEAD THEME. It's maddening enough when I realize that the closing segment of RAW was Trips sating some kind of bloodlust and carrying it out like a spoiled baby.
But the tone of it is what got me. Basically, Lesnar came out with his mouthpiece Paul Heyman saying that he doesn't fight for free. That makes sense, seeing that Lesnar has been on the other side. He's been in the "legit" world (hell, that was his character for his first month back in the company). He may not be smart, but he's smart enough to have a guy who knows how the world really works in his ear. Everything Trips laid at his feet could not get him to budge until he implied that he was a "bitch" and not a man for refusing to fight him. I'm not stupid, and neither are you. "Bitch" isn't just synonymous with "coward" in today's lexicon. A "bitch" is a woman. You're either a real man, or you're a bitch. The former is good, and the latter is bad, and in the hyper-masculine world of sport, whether legitimate or feigned like pro wrestling, no one will hear any arguments to the contrary. That is what compelled Lesnar to fight. He didn't want to be a woman.
If I'm a father of three girls, is it wise that the message my character on television, my HEROIC character who is seen as a guy to look up to by the narrative, is telling them that they are worthless because of the gender that nature gave them? Seriously, it's highly destructive to send that message to any female viewer of WWE programming (and need I remind you that 35% of the audience is female). This would be wrong if Triple H, in real life, gave birth to all boys or all hermaphrodites or all armored space alien bugs with hatchets for arms and jetpacks for legs.
Sometimes though, a lesson has to be learned the hard way through personal experience. It's like the Republican congressmen who are only compelled to come out for gay rights when their own children come out of the closet. It sucks they couldn't be enlightened on their own, but hey, at least they saw the light. But this is a business that forces the idea that testicles are the real currency. If you have them, you are a rockstar. If not, lol, back of the line, and only come up front if you want to show your tits to the audience. Even if one of his daughters comes home with horror stories about how she was mistreated because she was a girl, will Trips change his attitudes?
The argument here is that we don't know what Paul Levesque, the man, thinks, and that Triple H, the character, is just some fictional creation. Yeah, that's nominally true, but how many auteurs create art that doesn't in some way reflect their personal beliefs? Would Mel Gibson have made Schindler's List the same way Stephen Spielberg made it? Fuck, would Gibson have made Inglorious Basterds the same way Quentin Tarantino would? Make no mistake about it, Triple H is in complete creative control of his own stories in WWE. The only way he could possibly redeem himself is if he ends up learning a lesson or facing consequences, which if he did, would be a first. If Triple H loses, it's because "Wrestling is fake, lol." He doesn't learn. He doesn't face the music. He either wins because he's King Shit of Fuck Mountain, or he loses because well it's not his fault.
Well, part of the reason why the culture of hostility towards women exists in wrestling is definitely his fault, and last night was another piece of evidence against him. That attitude is why Austin Aries thinks it's okay to forcefully teabag Christy Hemme, or why Vince McMahon thinks that using his considerable wealth, even at a time when it wasn't as considerable as it is today, to cover up the fact that Jimmy Snuka may have murdered Nancy Argentino, or any other example of misogyny in wrestling is allowed to go nearly unchecked. The worst is that it's an attitude that will permeate into the minds of his daughters, the way it's seemingly permeated into the mind of his wife, another child born into the wrestling business herself.
Again, I don't know how Paul Levesque feels about his daughters. I'm sure he loves them with all his heart, like any parent loves his or her child or children. But this mindset that he thinks is normal does his daughters such a disservice, not only in the business that he may or may not imagine them all getting into, but in real life. We really, as a society, need to get to the point where womanhood is not a pejorative, but really, the arts should be at the vanguard, not lagging behind. Wrestling is art. The fact that so many wrestling promotions lag so far behind the other arts (which, by the way, are only feminist by comparison to wrestling... misogyny is still way too goddamn pervasive) is troubling. The most troubling thing of them all is that the one leading the charge to push backwards is portraying this image to his own daughters. That is something I just can't wrap my mind around at all.