The Fight For Gender Equality Inside The WWE Ring

At the world’s biggest wrestling event, some kickass women hope to steal the male-centric show

By Aaron Taube

World Wrestling Entertainment isn’t exactly known for pushing the boundaries of social progress. Still, last year’s WrestleMania event was a jarring example of how far behind the company has fallen when it comes to its portrayal of female wrestlers.

Women’s champion Nikki Bella emerged from backstage accompanied by her twin sister Brie and presented herself to the swelling crowd of 67,000 people with her signature entrance dance, a slow-motion twirl with her hips swiveling three times to the beat of the lyrics, “You can look, but you can’t touch.”

Commentator Jerry Lawler observed: “I’m glad these two aren’t mind-readers…I’d get my face slapped a lot!”

The Bella Twins during a 2015 live event/ Photography by Miguel Discart via Wiki Commons

The Bellas were about to compete in the only women’s match on the biggest wrestling show of the year, and not coincidentally, it was also the shortest. There were no titles on the line, few discernible consequences at stake, and the audience reacted with middling enthusiasm.

It could have been instantly forgettable had it not been for a guest appearance by the mixed martial arts champion Ronda Rousey later in the evening.

Rousey wasn’t there to be looked at — compared to many of the WWE “Diva” female wrestlers. She was there to kick someone’s ass (or at least to pantomime doing so). When she helped Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson dispatch with a pair of villainous authority figures, the crowd lost its mind. In the span of about seven minutes, a woman who had never before appeared on WWE programming was proved to be a bigger star to the company’s audience than just about anyone — male or female — who appears on its weekly television shows.

Pro wrestling’s foremost journalist, Dave Meltzer, wrote in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter later that week that Rousey was “20 times more [popular] than any of the women in the WWE. …It’s not like there isn’t talent there or that the women aren’t marketable, it’s the presentation that doesn’t allow for you to take them seriously.”

The Rock and UFC champ Ronda Rousey in the ring at WrestleMania 31 in March 2015 Photography by Bill via Wiki Commons

The disparity between Rousey’s superstardom and the relative irrelevance of the WWE’s Diva wrestlers helped push the company to promote an on-screen narrative in July called “The Divas Revolution” on the WWE’s two weekly cable television shows. It promises to portray the company’s women as the kind of serious, competitive athletes you observe at Wimbledon or the World Cup. But thus far the WWE has yet to come close to making its female wrestlers seem as important as their male counterparts.

“They just want beautiful women in scantily clad outfits bouncing around the ring a little bit,” said Annette Boyer, who first started watching the WWE as a girl growing up near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1970s. “That kind of stuff boils my blood. It’s horrible.”

In a world where people are increasingly ready to see strong, independent women like Rousey in more prominent roles, what becomes of a cultural product that has spent decades idealizing — and creating an audience for — an exclusionary brand of masculinity?

To understand the WWE’s challenge, it’s useful to consider what pro wrestling is and whom it is meant to appeal to. Data published by the Sports Business Journal in 2013 suggests the WWE’s core audience is nearly 63 percent male and both poorer and less educated than the average American. American media scholar Henry Jenkins has noted that the WWE’s episodic TV shows constitute a soap opera for working-class men, one that provides an outlet for emotions they’ve been socialized to repress without threatening their sense of masculinity.

While men are typically thought to be more comfortable than women expressing the anger pervasive on WWE programming, the psychological research doesn’t entirely support this assumption. A 2004 analysis of data from the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey found that women are more expressive of their emotions even though both genders are equally likely to report feeling angry. A review of past studies done on emotional expression in children, published by the American Psychological Association in 2012, found that boys were more expressive of their anger through middle school, but by adolescence girls wound up being likelier to express this emotion.

As Jenkins writes, the WWE creates “a realm of male action which is primarily an excuse for the display of masculine emotion (and even for homoerotic contact) while ensuring that nothing which occurs there can raise any questions about the participant’s ‘manhood.’” One way WWE television alleviates such concerns is by presenting a clear gender binary that frames manliness as something to aspire to, and any traits associated with being a woman as cause for shame. Inside the WWE universe, male characters affirm their strength by declaring themselves “a real man” and peppering rivals with insults that insinuate they have female genitalia. Most often, wrestlers are clearly defined as either good guys (“baby faces”) or bad guys (“heels”), with the baby faces using emotional control and physical strength to triumph over the cowardice and rule-breaking of their opponents.

By contrast, female wrestlers are presented as so emotionally volatile that their true intentions are inscrutable. Characters are good one week and evil the next, with no explanation beyond a commentator acknowledging that “women naturally hate each other.” Former WWE creative team member Kevin Eck has written that he was instructed that there were to be no baby faces or heels in the Divas division. Rather, “it was strongly implied that the Divas are all just a bunch of catty chicks, most of whom are mentally unstable.” The WWE did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Alexa Bliss, Dana Brooke, and Becky Lynch inside the ring at WrestleMania Axxess 2015 in San Jose, California Photography by Miguel Discart via Wiki Commons

“If you’re explicitly saying that being a woman is bad, that being feminine is bad, over and over again, then how is that going to have a knock-on effect on the female performers?” said Ru Gunn, a wrestling critic for the website Voices of Wrestling. “It’s been very, very rare to have genuinely likable female personalities in WWE.”

Fortunately, there’s reason to believe this status quo won’t be tenable for much longer. According to research from the Cassandra Report, millennials represent the most open-minded generation of our time in regard to gender: 85 percent of U.S. youth say they’re accepting of nontraditional gender roles, and 77 percent of global youth report they don’t have a problem with women being the primary earner in a household. Although studies have found that lower socioeconomic status is often correlated with more traditional ideas about gender, Cassandra Report Senior Editorial Director Melanie Shreffler believes that members of WWE’s audience are likely following other demographics toward an endpoint where they are perfectly fine seeing female wrestlers given the same opportunities as men.

Inside the WWE universe, male characters affirm their strength by declaring themselves “a real man” and peppering rivals with insults that insinuate they have female genitalia

“Based on what we see in terms of trendsetters with this shift in culture, it’s only a matter of time before [the WWE’s] demographics are just as likely as trendsetter demographics to say that they are open-minded, that they are accepting of nontraditional gender roles, and that they wouldn’t mind seeing this in their entertainment,” Shreffler said.

As it stands, this shift is already being reflected across the entertainment landscape, and not only in pop culture for educated coastal elites. Across the board, we are living in something of a golden age for mainstream female action heroes. In addition to Rousey’s success, TV series like Netflix’s Jessica Jones and massively successful film franchises such as The Hunger Games and Star Wars have placed women in protagonist roles previously reserved for men. The progress has not come without resistance from male fans, but the box office numbers have spoken louder than any distressed fanboy ever could.

“Even in the last decade, women have made huge, huge strides in what’s acceptable for [women] to be and do,” Shreffler said. “If society is increasingly moving in this direction, and WWE doesn’t go along with it, they will be alienating a larger and larger portion of a potential audience.”

A blueprint for creating an equivalent female wrestling star may be sitting right under the WWE’s nose. In NXT, the company’s minor-league, talent-development brand, women have been given the chance to produce the deeply moving storytelling that makes pro wrestling worth watching. Although NXT is broadcast to a niche audience on the WWE’s subscription video service, an incredible women’s match between Sasha Banks and Bayley helped the brand sell more than 13,000 tickets at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn this past August.

When Ryan Bartlett, a 38-year-old fan who lives in Jacksonville, Illinois, was asked whether he wanted to see women in the main event of a major WWE show, he said it would have to be natural. “You can’t just stick a women’s match as the main event just because you can,” Bartlett said. “It would have to be something like Sasha Banks and Bayley was, where you knew they were going to perform and tear the house down, and it would have to be a good story.”

Greg Frontiero, a 31-year-old Brooklyn resident and WWE fan, had his own take. “You’re talking to a dude who doesn’t really give a shit about a lot of things,” Frontiero said. “So [the portrayal of women in WWE] was low on my list of things that kept me up at night. But I will tell you that being in the crowd when Bayley won the [NXT women’s championship] belt from Sasha Banks in Brooklyn, me and my friends teared up.”

Eight months into the Divas Revolution, the women have consistently been given more time to perform, but storyline development has lagged at times, and the division still has a few clumsy former models appearing alongside its top-tier athletes. The WWE still insists on calling its women Divas and its men Superstars, which is a far cry from equality.

Yet, there is promise for change. The trio of talented and athletic women who were called up from NXT at the movement’s onset have finally been pushed to the forefront of the division. All three seem to be settling into more pronounced characters whose depth matches that of male wrestlers: Charlotte, the gifted yet entitled daughter of a wrestling legend; Becky Lynch, the fiery and relatable grappling technician; and Sasha Banks, a trash-talking egotist with magnetic charisma.

Sasha Banks and Charlotte wrestle during a 2015 NXT Live event/ Photography by Miguel Discart via Wiki Commons

The women will wrestle a three-way match for Charlotte’s Divas Championship that will take place at this year’s WrestleMania on April 3. If the bout is given enough time and presented the right way, critics such as LaToya Ferguson expect the women to steal the show.

“I think that when you have three people as individually talented as Becky, Sasha, and Charlotte, if you don’t interfere, really, there’s no way you can ruin it,” said Ferguson, who reviews WWE shows for The A.V. Club. “I think this is the moment where [Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks, and Charlotte] go from being the future of the division to being the lynchpins of the division.”

But for a longtime observer and fan like Annette Boyer it’s all speculation until the bell rings. While she’s rooting for the women to have an excellent match, 40 years of history has led her to believe the Divas Revolution will culminate in nothing more than five minutes of filler between longer, more heavily promoted men’s bouts.

“Until they make a conscious effort, right now all the Divas Revolution is, is window dressing,” Boyer said. “It looks nice in the display window, but then you go into the store and you realize most of the merchandise is overpriced crap.”

Aaron Taube is a freelance writer and reporter based in New York City. His favorite things to think about are pro wrestling, labor, and media.

Featured image by Megan Elice Meadows via Wiki Commons