When I found out that Chyna (real name Joanie Laurer), former WWE wrestler, had died on Wednesday night, I was in the midst of something of a personal pro wrestling renaissance. I’ve started watching WWE full-time again in these last few months. I’d always check in for WrestleMania, WWE’s biggest event, but I’d rarely watch Raw and SmackDown, their weekly cable shows. It might be that I’m pining for my youth, or that I’m preparing for the idea of having a child of my own who might want to watch wrestling. I had watched as a young child, enthralled by colorful characters like Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart. At that time, wrestling was akin to a comic book come to life, a clear-cut battle between good and evil that any child could follow. I stuck with it through puberty and my high school years as the product got riskier, more violent, and hyper-sexualized. What was subtextual about wrestling — the inherent eroticism of highly toned men in Speedos and the female valets in evening gowns employed to titillate the audience — became explicit. WWE would routinely set people on fire or throw them off of cages. It was not uncommon for someone to be hit squarely in the head with a solid metal folding chair without any sort of protection. It was ideal programming for a snotty little teenager who’d never had sex before.

Chyna worked during that latter period, wearing a barely-there S&M-inspired leather outfit with gigantic fake breasts tenuously restrained by her attire. She was, as is often the case with women in wrestling, an object of sexual desire. At the same time, she was unique in that the writers would have her regularly beating up men. Her impressive physique and sheer size made her intimidating and credible in that role. To this day, she’s the only woman to ever hold the WWE Intercontinental Championship. This was going on before Ronda Rousey became a pop culture phenomenon due to her proficiency as a fighter. WWE turned her character into an inspirational feminist figure, even while they sent her to pose for Playboy to satisfy the male gaze.

Chyna, 1990s wrestling pioneer, dies aged 46 Read more

It all ended in 2001 and she was released by WWE. Without the financial support and the marketing prowess of WWE behind her, Chyna lost much of her relevance. According to a video interview with Vice Sports, she was not allowed to use the name Chyna, nor anything related to that character, which was her entire career. WWE owned the character of Chyna the same way Marvel Comics owns Spider-Man, even if Spider-Man isn’t technically just a person in a latex outfit. From there, Chyna fell into substance abuse, appeared on reality shows clearly intoxicated, and ended up doing adult films for Vivid Entertainment.

In a sense, Joanie Laurer lost the legal right to be herself. Of course, she wasn’t actually Chyna, but she worked around 350 days out of the year in that persona. Wrestlers are also encouraged not to break character in public. In her first Playboy appearance, she was billed as Chyna, not Joanie Laurer. Unlike an actor who appears in multiple films and TV shows, playing different characters, a successful wrestler plays the same character every single day for years. It’s as though your job was to be a mall Santa year-round, but you couldn’t take the costume off to get almond milk at the grocery store. Every thing that she had become, her entire identity, was taken from her in an instant.

Joanie Laurer might have passed away, but WWE still owns Chyna, who will live on via WWE Network, a Netflix-style streaming service that offers a seemingly infinite repository of wrestling history. Vince McMahon has staked the future of his company on the Network, hoping fans will pay $9.99 a month to watch original programming, plus historical content from the vast WWE video library. The Network is a major source of growth for WWE, but most ex-employees don’t see a dime of royalties from their work. A lawsuit was filed against WWE by Rene Goguen, better known as the character Rene Dupree, in an attempt to force them to pay up, but Goguen soon found out that he had signed a contract that contained a clause whereby he unwittingly forfeited all his rights to back-end streaming royalties. Unlike countless other professional sports, WWE has no union, and therefore no protection for its employees (who are deemed independent contractors). NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA players receive compensation when one of their jerseys is sold or if they appear in a video game through their players’ unions. They receive pensions and health benefits. None of those protections exist for wrestlers. To WWE’s credit, they offer assistance to any wrestler who needs to kick a substance abuse issue, but they have yet to address whether intense working conditions contribute to these problems.

Earlier this week, I logged on to WWE Network and put on Starrcade 1991, a pay-per-view extravaganza from the now-defunct World Championship Wrestling, or WCW. Starrcade ‘91 was a truly awful program, which featured a convoluted tournament called the Lethal Lottery and something called a BattleBowl, which sounds like an especially aggressive, high in fiber breakfast cereal. What I did enjoy was seeing that almost every person on camera had a mullet, from the wrestlers to the referees to the crowd. It was a kitschy, laughable experience, until I started to wonder what happened to all of these people.

Every time I looked someone up, I prayed they weren’t dead, but more often than not, they were. Ravishing Rick Rude died at age 40 due to heart failure. Brian Pillman died at age 35 from heart disease. El Gigante died from complications related to diabetes at age 44. How much of the heart issues were related to drug use (both cocaine and steroids) is not a question I am qualified to answer, but it stands to reason that it was related. When wrestlers die, especially from ailments related to their extraordinarily taxing profession, watching their work takes on a macabre tone. Seeing Chris Benoit get hit in the head with a chair is even harder to watch when you realize that all that brain trauma must have played a role in the murder-suicide that ended his life and those of his entire family.

When watching these programs, it’s almost as if you are seeing them die in slow motion. The non-stop travel, the physical pain that must be endured to continue earning money, and the psychological pressure of never quite being sure your next paycheck is coming because you have no one looking out for your best interests. Wrestling is hyper-competitive and there is a near-monopoly on the industry thanks to WWE’s dominance. If you can’t work there, your options are to make very little from regional, independent promotions or go overseas, if you are lucky. Even if you do make it to WWE, there’s no guarantee you will survive in the business. The NFL is an equally shaky career path — the NFL Players’ Association says that the average football career is 3.2 years — but again, they have a union. As long as there is no counterbalance to the hegemony of WWE, stories such as Chyna’s will continue to come out with startling regularity.